Toyota Visiting Professor, Center for Japanese Studies
About
Mariko Anno is associate professor at Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo), where she teaches in the Institute for Liberal Arts, and an affiliate researcher at the GENTEN (Generative Center of Enhancing Human Potential) Research Center. An ethnomusicologist and Noh practitioner specializing in the nohkan (Noh flute), she holds doctorates in ethnomusicology and flute performance. Drawing on more than two decades of training with Noh masters in Japan, her scholarship is grounded in Noh performance practice and examines musical structures, oral transmission, and cross-cultural adaptation. She is the author of Piercing the Structure of Tradition: Flute Performance, Continuity, and Freedom in the Music of Noh Drama (Cornell University Press, 2020), the first English-language monograph on the nohkan and the recipient of the 2022 Seiichi Tejima Book Award.
Her research on the cross-cultural adaptation of Noh includes Chiune: Visas for Life, an English-language Noh she wrote and co-composed about Sugihara Chiune, the Japanese vice consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, who issued transit visas to Jewish refugees during World War II. The project took shape during Anno’s 2018–19 appointment as Toyota Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, when she conducted fieldwork in Kaunas. Her work on Chiune has expanded into interdisciplinary research using psychophysiological approaches to examine audience responses to English-language Noh. Anno is also the producer of Chiune, which will be presented in October 2026 by Theatre Nohgaku and Oakton College in Des Plaines, IL. The production has received support from the Center for Japanese Studies and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Anno’s current research examines Japanese music communities in the U.S., particularly in the Midwest. Her ongoing fieldwork explores how and why Japanese music groups form and how musical knowledge and practices are sustained and transmitted across generations. As she returns to the University of Michigan, Anno will deepen this research with further fieldwork in the Midwest.
