For the past several days, I had been thinking about Murata Natsuho and Himari as the representatives of Japan’s astonishing, almost indescribable, constellation-like emergence of genius violinists.
Murata Natsuho and Himari are Nagashima and Oh.
What bliss it is that, in the same age, the finest possible rival exists.
And in terms of Japanese tradition, which is also the answer to the phrase in the title, “And the reason is…,” they are Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon.
Since then, the number of newly discovered genius violinists I have found has been like a flood.
Among them, the one whose actual performance left me utterly stunned was Nakano Rina, in Korngold: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35, conducted by Masaaki Suzuki, with the Japan Century Symphony Orchestra, on Saturday, February 28, 2026.
Because I learned of this concert quite some time after ticket sales had begun, the seat I was able to obtain was in the front row, in the block on the left side.
But she swept away that seat and everything else.
In any case, she was extraordinary.
Hearing her performance for the first time, I was stunned.
That there was yet another violinist of overwhelming, superlative stature.
As for her, first of all, I was astonished from the very moment she appeared.
Above all, I was amazed by the unbelievable suppleness of the way she walked right in front of me as she entered.
Later, when I learned from her Instagram that she had also seriously devoted herself to ballet, I understood at once.
When I was in middle school, I too was told by my track-and-field teacher that if I seriously took up athletics, I could run the 100 meters in the ten-second range.
So I also possess that kind of athletic sense.
Thus, her suppleness—like some cheetah or other great feline had just passed by—her whole body was like a spring.
And yet her posture was extraordinarily good.
I instantly understood that she must have an astonishingly strong core.
As for the performance, it was nothing less than a historic great performance.
For the conductor and the orchestra as well, it was a night of historic greatness.
That is why I think this.
The organizers and related bodies should make such historic great performances known to not only all the people of Japan but to the entire world, without delay.
They ought to be able to understand instantly how to solve whatever problems arise concerning the method of making such performances public.
In any case, everyone involved in classical music should publicly transmit to not only the Japanese people but to the world those concerts held day and night across Japan that were historic great performances.
As for the problems that the classical music world has long faced, it is high time that the nation and the relevant organizations resolved them and created a situation in which all people involved in classical music can earn their living at the highest level in the world.
As a result of Japan’s box-structure public works administration, magnificent concert halls exist all across this country.
Therefore, now is precisely the time when the national government and local administrations must ensure that the countless outstanding classical performers who have appeared in Japan—who are also true craftsmen—can earn their living at the highest level in the world.
The Japanese government and the Japanese people have allowed the stupid old media to use the public airwaves, which are a national asset, at absurdly cheap rates found nowhere else among the advanced nations.
And on top of that, every broadcasting station, every day, airs so-called wide shows that are not only stupid but traitorous and anti-national in content, making stupid talents and comedians read in the dressing room equally stupid and malicious newspapers such as Asahi and Mainichi, and then letting them prattle on about their masochistic view of history, their anti-Japanese ideology, and their opinions as sufferers from the infantile disorder of communism.
More than one hundred million yen a year is being paid for such foolish, merely momentary entertainment.
Meanwhile, the reality is that most classical performers—true craftsmen and astonishing artists who, from early childhood, in addition to being geniuses, and precisely because they are geniuses, have undergone ceaseless training and discipline and honed their skills—are unable to make a living, and somehow scrape by only through side jobs.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most telling example of how our country has been vulgarized over the roughly eighty years since the war.
Now, one individual, lightly earning sums well above one hundred million yen as a performer of the airwaves, perhaps because he has eaten China’s poisoned buns, has repeatedly made anti-Japan and pro-China remarks.
And when he was the head of a local administration, far from recognizing the wonder and bliss that Osaka had as many as four world-class orchestras, he even went so far as to spit out the outrageous remark that they should be dismantled and merged.
This essay will continue.
New Japan Philharmonic “New Wind” Masterpiece Concert Vol. 3, complete performance — Conductor: Wada Kazuki, Violin: Nakahara Riisa