And yet, there are Japanese who don't even know what gagaku is. Nakata Taizou used to count himself among this number. As a college student in Osaka in the mid-1980s, he played in a rock band, and knew little about the traditional music of his homeland. However, perhaps unusually, this started to bother him. I was Japanese, but I didn't know Japanese instruments.
Rock music is native to America.
I played rock. So then, as I was looking for the answer to this question, I discovered gagaku. At age twenty, he quit university and moved to Tokyo to become a musician, in spite of his parents' opposition to the idea. While demonstrating his instruments at schools, he met several other musicians doing the same on other instruments. As a result, in early 1997 he formed a band, called T's Color, with koto player and vocalist Hamane Yuka, bass kotoist Miyazaki Mieko, and Sakamoto Kazutaka on the melodica, a keyboard instrument that is blown by the musician playing it.