Research Proposal

This week I turned in my proposal for my research project that I will be working on for this class. I plan to write about how music is my “home” and how it has helped me through difficult times or times when I have felt alone, such as when I moved to Japan and had a difficult time for the first few months of living there. I also want to talk about my interest in Japanese music specifically, and how American music and Japanese music have influenced each other. In addition, I want to explore the similarities and differences between music culture in the United States and Japan. My favorite genres of music are metal, punk and rock music. I want to look at how these genres that were largely born in America and Europe have fused with Japanese music and led to some of my favorite music. Japanese bands like Envy, Mono, Dir en grey, Heaven in Her Arms, Maximum the Hormone and more have put their own Japanese spin on the American styles of music that I love. This combination of Eastern and Western musical aesthetics is very appealing to me.