Tanimura Shinji: Connecting Asia with Music

His students were enthusiastic about all his lessons. Sometimes he would hang out with his students to have dinner on a Friday night, after a week of lessons. "Those were very pleasant days, and I made a lot of friends in Shanghai through concerts and my teaching career. Shanghai is just like my second hometown and a place special to me."

Deng Xiaoping stood up, clapping out the rhythm to our song

1981 was the starting point of Tanimura's relations with China. In that year, Tanimura performed on a stage in China for the first time. He participated in the Hand in Hand Beijing concert with a lot of Chinese singers at the Workers'Stadium. He recalled that Deng Xiaoping was sitting in the middle of the audience. The singers went up to Deng Xiaoping and sang before him, and he stood up, clapping out the rhythm to their song. Then the 10,000 audience all stood up. He felt deeply at that moment that music is borderless.

Significant changes had happened to the whole Chinese society by 1981, only three years after the launch of the reform and opening up policy. More and more foreign singers like Tanimura Shinji were able to hold their concerts in China. That was one of the most important changes in cultural life.

Tanimura said that after Deng Xiaoping launched China's reform and opening up policy, people in China began to freely access foreign culture. As far as pop music is concerned, foreign singers from all over the world came to China to perform. Though many young Chinese did not understand the foreign songs, they did feel impressed and inspired. China’s pop music thus enjoyed great development in such an open environment.

 

Tanimura's best wishes for China's further reform and opening up

"Thanks to these opening up policies, Chinese and Japanese people could finally socialize with each other and became friends. The two countries have developed close ties with each other due to those opportunities provided by that era," Tanimura said.