On Tuesday, September 8th, musician Hanz (Hanzaburō) Araki will be giving a lecture and demonstration of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese vertical end-blown bamboo flute, at Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum. Araki is a sixth-generation shakuhachi player with deep familial ties to the centuries-old musical tradition.
While the bamboo flute as an instrument first came to Japan from China via the Korean Peninsula during the 8th century, the story of shakuhachi in its modern-day form is intimately linked to Araki’s familial lineage. It dates back to the mid-18th century, when an itinerant Zen Buddhist monk named Kurosawa Kinko founded the Kinko-ryū school of shakuhachi, secularizing an instrument previously used as a spiritual tool for meditation.
Then, as the Meiji Restoration of 1868 prompted Japan to aggressively westernize, shakuhachi came under fire and was ultimately banned. Araki’s great-great-grandfather, Hanzaburō Araki (Araki’s namesake), successfully petitioned the Meiji government to lift the ban, ensuring the tradition’s survival in the modern era. Araki stresses that, without Hanzaburō’s work, shakuhachi would not exist as we know it today.
Araki’s own father, Tatsuya, started playing shakuhachi when he was 8 years old and made his professional debut at the age of 12. After immigrating to the U.S. from Japan in 1964, Tatsuya continued to travel back and forth to Japan to perform. Forced to professionalize at such a young age, Tatsuya vowed to never force his own children to play, and to only teach them if they themselves showed interest.
While Araki himself did not ask his father for shakuhachi lessons until he was 18 years old, he made his professional debut only 4 months later in Shimonoseki, Japan. Despite his belated start, he picked it up almost immediately, proving himself a natural.
“I was kind of the definition of ‘misspent youth,’” Araki chuckles. “I just had no real direction. I had no real focus or draw towards anything, but as soon as I started playing shakuhachi, something finally clicked, like, oh, I understand something in this world.”
Reflecting Araki’s reverential ethos, Araki’s home office in Seattle pays homage to his Japanese forefathers. His walls are adorned with black-and-white photographs of his musical family, including his great-great-grandfather, Hanzaburō, and his grandfather, Atsumu, who played throughout the turbulent first half of the 20th century until his passing during the Second World War.
Araki is the sixth generation to have earned the professional name Kodō, a title one earns, he explains, after demonstrating a certain level of skill at the craft. He explains, “‘Ko’ means ‘old’ or ‘ancient,’ and ‘dō,’ strangely, means ‘child,’ so it’s ‘ancient child.’ It’s kind of like an eternal youth, just in that you’re always learning, and that you can never truly know everything.”
Playing shakuhachi as an American comes with its own set of challenges. About playing in Japan, Araki says, “You have to be there, because it’s an entirely enclosed ecosystem…there isn’t a lot that happens outside of this little tiny bubble, and if you’re not in that bubble, then you’re not ‘paying your dues,’ if you know what I mean. So we all support each other’s concerts, we all play for each other’s recitals when our students are coming up…if you’re not in that system then you barely register as anything more than an outsider, regardless of, in my case, my lineage.”
He recalls with humor an evening spent unwinding and jamming with family friends and fellow musicians after a concert in Kyushu: “At one point the they just said—and it was certainly not pointed or not meant to be anything—but they just said, ‘Wow, I really wish there were some Japanese players that were as good as you!’”
In addition to traveling, performing, and recording, Araki also teaches private shakuhachi lessons at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. Most of his teaching takes place online, and many of his students are international. His mornings are dedicated to his students in Europe, his afternoons to his students across the U.S., and his evenings to his students in Asia.
Before Araki was given the name Kodō, his father gave him the professional name Baikyoku, a name Araki has since given to one of his own students in China. “Having students in China means a lot to me,” he says. “I love them because they’re such great players and so devoted to the music.”
“Any kind of thawing between Japan, Korea, and China makes me really happy,” he adds. “I absolutely accept anyone having any problem with Japan based on the actions taken during World War II, absolutely, but the hope is eventually that, especially through art and music and this kind of thing, we can kind of forge bonds and build new relationships.”
Araki is also of mixed heritage; drawing on his Irish roots, he also plays the Irish whistle and flute. Despite his veneration for traditional arts and familial inheritance, he has managed to forge his own unique path as a cross-cultural musician. At the same time, he finds that there are more similarities between shakuhachi and Irish folk music than one might think, if not musically, then certainly culturally.
In the shakuhachi tradition, he explains, “Importance was placed not on who wrote the piece—and in fact most of the pieces are kind of anonymous—but on who you learned it from, and that is entirely the same with Irish [folk] music. Who you learned the song from is what has the most gravity. Sure, a lot of the stuff about the authors of this music was lost, but your ‘lineage’ sort of is more about who you learned from, rather than going into some archive and finding some dubious record of who wrote a thing.”
“Part of what I think is so beautiful about really any traditional folk music is that it is less about the individual, and more about the music itself, and the player’s place in this long timeline,” he says. “It’s less about ‘me, me’ and more about, ‘how do I fit in this timeline,’ and, hopefully, if you do it well, you will exist beyond your time, too.”
Araki will talk about “The History of the Japanese Shakuhachi” and perform on September 8, 2026 at 6pm at Folio at 43 Pike St. For details try folio Seattle.org. He also performs in concert on Saturday, September 12, 2026 at 8pm at the Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center on the 4th floor at 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N. In Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood.
