A 10-piece Tokyo band that reimagines Japanese folk songs through Colombian cumbia, Afrobeat, and salsa is releasing their third album on June 26, and remarkably, the North American release is coming through Blue Note Records, the legendary jazz label founded in 1939. A Japanese act getting a new release on Blue Note is extraordinarily rare. Here's how a band built around forgotten village songs ended up on jazz's most iconic imprint.

Why Blue Note Matters

Before we dig into the album, it's worth pausing on what Blue Note Records actually represents, because if you don't already know, the significance of this signing is hard to overstate.

Blue Note was founded in New York in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, two German-Jewish refugees who had escaped Nazi Germany. The label became home to some of the most important records in modern jazz history: John Coltrane's Blue Train, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Sonny Rollins, and countless others. Reid Miles' graphic design and Francis Wolff's session photographs created the most iconic album cover aesthetic in jazz, instantly recognizable to this day.

In the modern era, Blue Note signed Norah Jones (whose Come Away With Me became a cultural phenomenon), Robert Glasper, Gregory Porter, and continues to be the gold standard for jazz and adjacent genres. For serious music fans, the white-on-blue logo is shorthand for "this has been vetted by the people who know."

That a 10-piece Japanese folk-music band gets to release a record under that logo says something. It says someone at Blue Note heard From Japan with Love and decided it belonged in the same conversation as their archive, that it earned its place on the shelf next to A Love Supreme.

Who Are the Minyo Crusaders?

Minyo Crusaders formed in 2011 in Fussa, a city in western Tokyo that sits next to the Yokota Air Base, a postwar nexus where American culture quietly seeped into Japanese life. The band was co-founded by guitarist Katsumi Tanaka and lead vocalist Freddie Tsukamoto.

Tanaka's path to minyō (traditional Japanese folk music) was shaped by tragedy. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, the same one that triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster, pushed him to reflect on his identity as a Japanese person. A longtime fan of world music, he started searching for Japanese roots music he could connect to and discovered mid-20th century artists like Hibari Misora, Chiemi Eri, and the Tokyo Cuban Boys, who had already mixed Japanese folk with Latin and jazz arrangements decades earlier. That was the seed.

Tsukamoto's story is different. He had been pursuing a career as a jazz singer but felt awkward singing in English. One day in a restaurant, he heard a folk song from his hometown playing on a televised competition, and it shifted everything. The restaurant owner told him a minyō teacher lived next door. The two eventually met, and a folk-music vocalist was born.

The pair started hosting jam sessions at the "Banana House," an old building on the former US military base, gathering musicians who specialized in Afro-Latin and Caribbean rhythms. The current 10-piece lineup includes a self-described "collector of bizarre Japanese guitars" (Tanaka), a "Caribbean music freak" on bass, a "comic-book-collecting synth head" on keyboards, and a percussion section that sounds like it could play a Cuban dancehall on Saturday and a Japanese summer festival on Sunday.

What Is "Minyō," Anyway?

For non-Japanese readers, a quick primer: minyō are traditional folk songs, passed down through generations of working people across Japan, fishermen, coal miners, sumo wrestlers, farmers, geisha. Each region has its own. Songs like "Hokkai Bon Uta" come from Hokkaido in the north, "Hanagasa Ondo" from Yamagata, "Shimotsui Bushi" from Okayama, "Iyo Manzai" from Ehime. Many take their name from the place that birthed them.

Originally, minyō was popular music, songs ordinary people sang while working or celebrating. Postwar, it calcified into a "traditional art form" taught by stern instructors, drifting away from younger Japanese listeners. By the 21st century, most Japanese people associated minyō with elderly Bon Odori festival dancing, culturally important but personally distant.

What Minyo Crusaders do is collapse that distance violently. As Tanaka put it: "Min'yō used to be music for the common people; popular music. But it doesn't work like that anymore. It's regarded as a forgotten, out-of-date music. By comparison, reggae, cumbia, and ska are very well accepted. By combining the two, I believe traditional Japanese song min'yō could be revived, bringing back its own charm as a music for the people."

A Track Record That Earned the Blue Note Signing

Minyo Crusaders' debut album Echoes of Japan (2017, P-Vine; 2019 international release on UK's Mais Um) detonated quietly across the world music scene. The album reworked classics like "Kushimoto Bushi" as cumbia, "Hohai Bushi" as Afrobeat, "Otemoyan" as reggae, and somehow, every fusion felt natural rather than gimmicky. It topped the Transglobal World Music Chart in June 2019 and earned praise from American outlet PopMatters, which credited the band with avoiding the "novelty act" trap and creating "exciting new meeting points between different cultural aesthetics."

European tours followed. Then US dates. Then South America. Their second album, Tour of Japan (2025, Light in the Attic), continued the project, exploring songs from sumo wrestlers, fishermen, and coal miners, connecting hardworking everyday Japanese voices to global rhythms.

By the time From Japan with Love was being recorded, Minyo Crusaders had already played venues like Berlin's Gretchen, toured the United States, and become one of the most credible Japanese exports in the contemporary world music conversation. Blue Note, sensing this was the moment to commit, took them on for the North American release.

Inside the Album

From Japan with Love contains eight reimagined folk songs from across Japan:

  1. Hokkai Bon Uta (Hokkaido)
  2. Kokiriko Bushi feat. Frente Cumbiero (Toyama)
  3. Hanagasa Ondo feat. Frente Cumbiero (Yamagata)
  4. Shimotsui Bushi (Okayama)
  5. Shigesa Bushi feat. Saya Asakura (Shimane)
  6. Kiyama Ondo (Ehime)
  7. Wide Bushi feat. Chitose Hajime (Kagoshima)
  8. Iyo Manzai (Ehime)

The lead single "Hanagasa Ondo," released April 24, draws inspiration from the cumbia standard "Cumbia en Do Menor", and somehow a Bon Odori festival song from Yamagata Prefecture syncs perfectly with the breath of a Colombian dance floor. It's one of those rare moments when two musical traditions discover they were always related and just hadn't been introduced.

This is also the first time Minyo Crusaders have invited guest artists onto a full studio album, a notable shift for a band that has functioned as a tight 10-piece unit since founding.

The Guest Vocalists Carry Significance

Chitose Hajime (元ちとせ), guesting on "Wide Bushi," is from Amami Ōshima, an island in southern Kagoshima Prefecture with its own distinct musical tradition. She's known for her use of guin, a kind of intense vocal vibrato unique to Amami island singing, and broke through nationally with the haunting 2002 hit "Wadatsumi no Ki." The Amami and Okinawan island singing tradition is melodically distinct from mainland Japanese folk, having Chitose sing a Kagoshima folk song layers two regional sensibilities into one performance.

Saya Asakura (朝倉さや), on "Shigesa Bushi," is a Yamagata-born vocalist who won national minyō championships as a child and has spent her career bridging traditional folk and contemporary J-Pop. Her voice on a Shimane Prefecture folk song creates a quiet dialogue between the snowy Tōhoku north and the mountainous San'in coast.

Frente Cumbiero, the Colombian band who appears on two tracks, are longtime Minyo Crusaders collaborators. The two groups previously released a joint EP titled Minyo Cumbiero (From Tokyo to Bogota), a glorious mashup album whose title perfectly summarizes what the project is trying to do.

Why the World Is Discovering Japanese Roots Music Right Now

For the past several years, Japanese roots and retro music has been having a moment overseas. Reissues of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono, and Midori Takada became cult successes. City pop became a TikTok genre. J-fusion guitarist Masayoshi Takanaka is now selling out venues in Los Angeles to twenty-somethings who weren't born when the songs were recorded.

Minyo Crusaders sit one layer deeper than even that. If city pop represents urban, consumerist 1980s Japan, minyō represents agrarian, working-class, regional Japan, the country before the bullet trains, before the bubble economy, before karaoke. International listeners are now reaching for both ends of Japan's musical spectrum: the most cosmopolitan and the most local.

In his statement accompanying the Blue Note announcement, Tanaka wrote: "We hope this music can travel beyond language and borders, opening new doors and bringing a sense of richness to listeners around the world." From a different label, that might sound like a press-release platitude. From Blue Note, with this band, it reads like a thesis statement.

Release Details

From Japan with Love drops on CD on June 26 and on vinyl LP on July 17. North American release is via Blue Note Records. International streaming via Frente Cumbiero's "Hanagasa Ondo" lead single is already live on YouTube and major platforms. Pricing has not been announced, but expect roughly $25 for CD and $30–$40 for vinyl based on Blue Note's typical international rates.

What About Where You Live?

In Japan, minyō has long been treated as music for older generations, something heard at summer festivals and Bon Odori dances, respected but not really listened to. It took a Tokyo band, a Colombian collaborator, and a New York jazz label to make Japanese folk songs feel new again to many Japanese people themselves.

What about your country? Do you have folk traditions, songs from working people, fishing villages, mountain valleys, harvest festivals, that have drifted to the cultural margins? Are they coming back, or fading further? And how does Japanese folk music sound to you when it's wrapped in cumbia, Afrobeat, or salsa? Drop a comment and tell us about the music in your country.

References