After a brief stay in Tokyo, where he worked as a movie special effects artist Oki moved to Hokkaido and began to study the music, culture and heritage of his father's tribe. Due to the Japanese government's assimi-lation programs Oki discovered that only a handful of recordings existed of traditional Ainu music.
"Recordings were made of Ainu music 40 years ago, but the quality was pretty bad and finding people who actually had first-hand knowledge of the music was difficult," he says. "I visited the elders and learned about the history of the tonkori, and forms of Ainu music. It a long process as with the exception of the 40-year-old recordings nothing existed on tape."
Styles of Ainu music have traditionally revolved around the yukar, which is a form of epic poetry and the upopo, which is a vocalized form of contrapuntal, or polyphonic music based around chanting. In addition to vocalized harmonies the Ainu have relied on only two instruments -- the bamboo Jew's harp known as the mukkuri and the tonkori.
Developed by the Ainu who lived on the northern part of Sakhalin, the tonkori is the only stringed Ainu instrument. Although Oki now uses a tonkori manufactured out of Canadian spruce, the instrument was customarily made of pine. Long and flat the tonkori can produce a myriad of haunting tones due to the narrow area in which the tones are forced to reverberate.
"When I first picked [a tonkori] up I didn't really know what to make of it. It was hard to get a tune out of it and I had to spend hours listening to old records in order to get a feel for what it and I were capable of doing," Oki says.
Within four years Oki had managed to master the odd-looking instrument and teamed up with renowned Ainu mukkuri and upopo performer Umeko Ando to release an album. Some of the material hadn't been heard in public for over 50 years.
The material on Oki's debut Taiwan album contains traditional tonkori tunes and other world music.
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