The koto instrument is Japan's thirteen-string zither: about 180 centimeters of hollowed paulownia wood, strung with thirteen strings of equal thickness, each lifted by a movable bridge that the player slides into position before a note is ever sounded. It is the instrument you hear in the background of almost every film set in old Japan, and almost nobody who hears it can say what they are listening to.
That gap is worth closing before you travel, because the koto is one of the few Japanese art forms still open to an outsider at every level—a workshop floor you can see if you arrange it, schools that teach beginners in ninety minutes, and, in Kyoto, a confection nearly every visitor carries home that is, by one account, shaped like one.
This article answers the four questions people actually ask about the koto instrument: whether it is Chinese or Japanese, how many kinds there are, why it is not a harp, and whether it is hard to play. The accompanying Digital Guide draws Japan's instruments, their ceremonial settings, and the experiences around them into a single connected reading.
Start with the object. A koto is roughly 180 centimeters long and made from paulownia—kiri, a light, open-grained wood Japan reserves for things meant to resonate or to breathe. Thirteen strings run the length of the body, all the same thickness, which is the first surprise: on a piano or a guitar the low notes come from heavier strings. Here they come from somewhere else.
Under each string sits a bridge called a kotoji, and the bridges are not fixed. The player positions all thirteen before playing, and their placement is the tuning. The right hand wears three plectra, called tsume, on the thumb, index, and middle fingers.
Now the question asked more often than any other on this subject: is the koto Chinese or Japanese? The honest answer is that it is a Chinese instrument that became Japanese, and that Japan had its own zither before it arrived.
The Japanese koto descends from the Chinese guzheng, and was first introduced to Japan from China in the 7th and 8th centuries. The ancestor instrument had five strings, which later increased to seven. It came as part of a larger import—the court orchestra, the notation, the repertoire—and it stayed inside the court for centuries before it went anywhere else.
But there was already a zither here. The wagon, also called yamatogoto, is a six- or seven-string instrument that is believed to be truly native to Japan, and not imported from mainland Asia. Its form has changed very little since the eighth century. In the Kojiki, Japan's oldest surviving chronicle, it originates from six hunting bows laid together to coax the sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave. Today it survives in Shinto ceremonial and court music, and even there it is not common.
So the two instruments answer the question differently. The wagon is older and more purely Japanese, and you will almost certainly never hear it; the koto arrived from China, was rebuilt over a thousand years for Japanese music, and is the one you will.
The koto did not arrive on its own. In 701 the Taiho Code established the Gagakuryo, the imperial music bureau—an office charged with performing and preserving both Japan's own song and dance and the imported repertoires of Tang China, Goryeo, Silla, and Baekje, and with training the musicians to do it. Its founding roster ran to close to 500 people.
That office has never stopped. It lost its status as a legal bureau after the Meiji Restoration, but the line runs unbroken through a series of renamings to the Music Department of the Board of Ceremonies at the Imperial Household Agency. When a program says gagaku, this is the institution behind it.
The koto's literary life begins in the same court. It threads through The Tale of Genji as a marker of cultivation: the Akashi Lady is introduced to Genji, and to the reader, through the sound of her playing. The story that stayed in the repertoire is Kogo's. Born in 1157, a favored consort of Emperor Takakura, she was, tradition holds, a beauty and a koto master without equal. Book Six of The Tale of the Heike tells how she fled the court to Saga and was found there because someone recognized her playing Sofuren—"longing for one's husband." She was forced to take Buddhist orders at Seikan-ji, a temple still standing in Kyoto's eastern hills, and Fujiwara no Teika recorded visiting her sickbed in Saga in 1205. The Noh play Kogo, attributed to Konparu Zenchiku, is still staged.
If you want the wider map of what else is played alongside it—the shamisen, the shakuhachi, the drums of festival music—our guide to Japan's traditional instruments lays them out together.
Almost every visitor to Kyoto comes home with a box of yatsuhashi—thin, cinnamon-scented sheets of steamed rice flour, sold at the station, folded around sweet bean paste or baked crisp and curved. By one of the two accounts of where it comes from, it is a portrait of a musical instrument.
The man is Yatsuhashi Kengyo, who was born in 1614 and died in Kyoto in 1685. Kengyo is not a family name. It was an honorary title given to highly skilled blind musicians—the top rank of a guild that gave blind men in Edo-period Japan a protected professional path through music, massage, and moneylending.
He began on the shamisen, working in that field in Settsu before going down to Edo and turning to the koto. He learned it from Hosui, a monk of Zendo-ji in Chikushi—the Kyushu temple tradition, not the imperial court, a point most English writing on the koto gets wrong. What he inherited was tsukushi-goto: koto music as a closed repertoire of, by the count that has come down to us, six pieces. Yatsuhashi came at it carrying another instrument's habits with him.
Those habits are why he is called the father of modern koto. He adapted the hirajoshi and insen scales for the koto from the shamisen repertoire, importing a tonal world the court instrument had not used, and built a new form on top of it—kumiuta, sets of songs with koto accompaniment—which broke the repertoire open. He is also credited with Rokudan no Shirabe, the six-section solo piece that still sits early in the standard course of study, though the attribution is not settled and he may not have written it himself.
The print above catches the moment before the music: the plectra going on, one finger at a time, in a domestic scene court music never had.
Two competing accounts explain the name, and both are transmitted as tradition rather than documented fact. One holds that the confection was named in memory of Yatsuhashi Kengyo and shaped after a koto—the long curve of the baked version reads convincingly as an instrument body. The other holds that it commemorates the poet Ariwara no Narihira and the eight bridges of Mikawa in the ninth episode of the Tales of Ise, the shape being eight bridge planks side by side.
The confectioners are split, and not evenly. Six makers back the koto account, including Shogoin Yatsuhashi Sohonten and Izutsu Yatsuhashi Honpo; two—Honke Nishio Yatsuhashi and Honke Yatsuhashi—back the Tales of Ise account. Both camps agree the prototype appeared in the Genroku era and the modern form settled in the Kyoho era after it.
Now the correction. In 2018 Izutsu Yatsuhashi Honpo sued Shogoin Yatsuhashi Sohonten in the Kyoto District Court, and the case is often summarized abroad as a fight over which origin story is true. It was not. Izutsu's claim concerned Shogoin's display of "founded in Genroku 2"—1689—arguing that the founding-year claim was a misleading representation. The Kyoto District Court dismissed it on June 10, 2020, the Osaka High Court dismissed the appeal on March 11, 2021, and the Supreme Court dismissed the final appeal on September 14, 2021. Both parties to that lawsuit are on the same side of the koto question.
Standing in front of the yatsuhashi counter at Kyoto Station, this is better than a settled answer. Japan's oldest confectioners have spent three centuries selling the same sweet under two stories about what it depicts, and no court has been asked to choose. If the koto account is right, you are holding a blind musician's instrument in rice flour, four hundred years after he retuned it.
For the wider world of Japanese sweets these belong to—what distinguishes them from dango, why the seasons dictate the form—see our guide to wagashi and Japan's confection tradition.
"What are the four types of koto?" comes up constantly, and it has a real answer: the four names describe four musical worlds, not four models of one product.
Gakuso is the court instrument—the koto of gagaku, the orchestral music the imperial household has maintained for more than a millennium. It is the one people mean by Heian era instruments, and it is still played from that repertoire today. It has thirteen strings. It is played inside an ensemble rather than as a solo voice, and its role is closer to punctuation than to melody.
Chikuso, or tsukushi-goto, grew up around temples in northern Kyushu and bridged court music and everything after. It is what Yatsuhashi Kengyo was taught and then changed.
Zokuso—literally the "popular" koto—is the thirteen-string instrument that came out of that change and spread through Edo-period towns. This is the koto in nearly every photograph, school, and performance you are likely to attend.
Tagenso means "many-stringed koto," the modern category, made with 17, 21 and 31 strings and today also in 20 and 25. They exist because twentieth-century composers wanted a range thirteen strings could not give them.
So what does counting the strings tell you? Enough to place the instrument in the right century, not enough to name the tradition. Seventeen strings or more means a modern instrument playing modern repertoire—there is no Edo-period music for a twenty-five-string koto. Thirteen strings puts you in the older family but separates nothing within it, because the gakuso, the chikuso and the zokuso all have thirteen. For that you need the setting: wind and percussion around it means gagaku; a solo player, or a pair with shamisen or shakuhachi, means the tradition Yatsuhashi opened.
Westerners meeting this Japanese string instrument for the first time reach for the harp, and the two do share a silhouette. Structurally they are opposites, and that difference is the whole reason the koto sounds the way it does.
On a harp the strings rise away from the soundboard, each fixed to one pitch before the concert begins. The koto is a zither: its strings run the length of the body, parallel to the soundboard, lifted by those movable kotoji bridges. Every string is the same gauge, so pitch does not come from the string at all—it comes from where the bridge sits. Slide a bridge toward the far end, the speaking length shortens, and the note rises. The strings were silk historically and are now usually synthetic, which trades some of the old warmth for strings that do not break mid-concert.
This is why the koto has named tunings the way a guitar has named alternate tunings. Hirajoshi, the scale Yatsuhashi brought over from the shamisen, is the one a listener would recognize as the sound of Japan; the Traditional Music Digital Library at Senzoku Gakuen notes that Chidori no Kyoku uses another, kokinjoshi. Retuning between pieces is normal, and watching a player lean over and move bridges mid-concert is part of the performance, not an interruption of it.
Then there is the left hand, which is where the harp comparison finally collapses. The right hand plucks, wearing its three plectra. The left hand works on the other side of the bridge, pressing down on the string to increase its tension and bend the pitch upward while the note is still ringing. A harpist cannot do this; the geometry does not allow it. On the koto it is the core expressive technique, and it is why a single sustained note can move, waver, and settle rather than simply decay.
It also explains the stillness first-time listeners describe. Koto writing leaves space around notes—what Japanese aesthetics calls ma—but the space is not empty. It is where the left hand is working.
Two schools account for nearly all koto playing in Japan today, and you can tell them apart from your seat before a note is played.
Ikuta Kengyo lived from 1656 to 1715. He was recognized with the rank of kengyo in 1696 and named his style the Ikuta school around then. What he built was a koto practice organized around the shamisen—the same borrowing that had served Yatsuhashi a generation earlier—and he originated the square plectrum.
Yamada Kengyo lived from 1757 to 1817 and worked in Edo, which is the whole difference. Edo was a city of joruri—stories delivered in song over shamisen—and Yamada made his name by bringing that dramatic vocal tradition to the koto.
The result is a division Japanese reference works describe in terms that sound backward until you think about them. The Ikuta school is instrument-centered and shamisen-centered; the Yamada school is song-centered in the joruri manner, and koto-centered. Ikuta brought the shamisen in, so the koto shares the stage; Yamada built around the voice and left the koto alone with it.
The photograph above shows the pairing Ikuta made ordinary: koto and shamisen together, neither accompanying the other.
Two visible differences follow. The plectra: Ikuta players—and in fact every school except Yamada—use plectra with the tip cut off square, while Yamada players use what are still called round plectra, although the modern version has come to a point. The name outlived the shape. And the seating: an Ikuta player sits turned diagonally to the left of the instrument, while a Yamada player, whose technique raises the hand higher, sits square to it.
None of this changes whether you enjoy the concert; it changes what you notice. A player angled away from the instrument, with a shamisen alongside, is showing you the tradition Yatsuhashi opened and Ikuta developed. A player facing you head-on, with a singer alongside, is showing you what happened when that tradition reached Edo.
If you are in Japan in early January, you will hear one koto piece more than any other, in department stores, on television, in hotel lobbies. It is Haru no Umi—"The Sea in Spring"—and it is a hundred years old rather than four hundred.
Miyagi Michio was born in 1894 and lost his sight at seven. He wrote Haru no Umi at the end of 1929, taking his cue from the imperial poetry theme announced for the following year's New Year ceremony: "rocks by the sea." It premiered at Hibiya Public Hall in Tokyo that same year, with Miyagi on koto and the shakuhachi player Yoshida Seifu. The seascape in it is the Seto Inland Sea, which Miyagi had crossed by ship in 1917 on his way to Tokyo—not, as is sometimes claimed, the harbor at Tomonoura.
The part worth carrying comes next. In 1932 the French violinist Renée Chemet came to Tokyo, heard the piece, and made her own arrangement of it in a single night at the Imperial Hotel. She performed it at Hibiya Public Hall, and the recording that followed was released in Japan, the United States, and France. Within three years of being written for koto and bamboo flute, a Japanese piece was on record in Paris in a violin arrangement made by a visiting soloist.
Miyagi is also known as the developer of the seventeen-string bass koto, which gave composers the lower register thirteen strings could not reach. His movement called itself shin nihon ongaku—new Japanese music—and dates from a large concert in November 1920. He died on June 25, 1956, falling from the carriage door of the overnight express on his way to a performance in Osaka; the record states plainly that the truth of the accident is unknown.
The instrument above answers the same century from the opposite direction: the taishogoto, invented in 1912 in Nagoya's Osu district by Morita Goro, who added typewriter keys to a two-string zither and sold it into Japanese homes on the promise that a beginner could sound the right pitch immediately. Miyagi extended the koto upward into a repertoire that demanded more of the player; Morita built one that demanded almost nothing.
All three ways of meeting a koto are open to a visitor, at descending levels of difficulty: putting the plectra on your own fingers, which anyone can book; hearing one played properly, which takes only knowing what to look for in a listing; and watching one being made, which needs arranging in advance.
Almost all of them come from one city. Fukuyama, in Hiroshima Prefecture, accounts for around 70% of the nation's koto production, and the Fukuyama koto was designated a national traditional craft on May 22, 1985. Of the several hundred crafts holding that designation, the Fukuyama koto is the only one in the musical instruments category.
The craft concentrated there for two reasons. Successive lords of the domain encouraged music in the castle town, so song and performance were popular there from early on; and the region produced players, among them Kuzuhara, a blind musician who held the rank of koto—one step below the kengyo that Yatsuhashi held—and whose activity across Bingo and Bitchu helped lay the groundwork. Demand from the late Edo period into Meiji did the rest.
A workshop visit is mostly a lesson in waiting. Paulownia logs are air-dried outdoors for at least twelve months, and seasoning can run to three years; Fukuyama's own account notes that nearly every step afterward is still done by hand. The decoration is where the money goes: maki-e gold lacquer, inlay, and carved grain patterns named for bamboo blinds and crossed cedar. Ogawa, a maker of fifty years, puts the apprenticeship at about ten.
Concert listings are the reliable route, and they reward decoding. A program billed as gagaku puts the koto inside a court ensemble where it will not carry the melody—go for the ensemble, not the koto. Sankyoku means the classic trio of koto, shamisen and shakuhachi, which is where the instrument does its most characteristic work. A recital by a named player usually mixes Edo-period pieces with twentieth-century writing, often with a seventeen-string instrument on stage beside the thirteen.
The other route is incidental, and better than it sounds. Temples and shrines schedule performances around seasonal observances, and a ryokan or a teahouse of the kind pictured above will sometimes program a player for an evening. The room is small, the instrument unamplified, and you hear the left hand working—which in a large hall you often do not.
This is the fourth question the search engines record, and the answer has two halves that pull in opposite directions.
The first half is that a beginner sounds good almost immediately, and this is not flattery. The bridges are already placed, so every string is a correct note in the scale, and the plectra produce a clean tone without the callus-building a guitar demands. A ninety-minute introductory session will usually have you playing Sakura Sakura—the cherry-blossom melody every visitor already knows without knowing they know it—and it will sound like a koto, not like a beginner.
The second half is the left hand. Everything described earlier—pressing behind the bridge to bend a ringing note, releasing it to let the pitch fall back—is invisible in a photograph and takes years. The koto gives you an unusually generous first hour and a long road afterward. For a traveler the first hour is the point: sessions are widely offered in Kyoto and Tokyo, need no prior training, and are among the few cultural experiences here where you make the sound instead of watching someone else make it. Our guide to Japan's traditional crafts and hands-on cultural experiences covers how these sessions are usually structured and booked.
The koto rewards preparation, because almost everything interesting about it is invisible or counterintuitive. It came from China and became Japanese while the zither already here retreated into ritual. Its pitch lives in thirteen movable bridges, not in the strings, which is why the left hand can bend a note already sounding and a harp cannot. The string count tells you the century but not the tradition; the seating angle tells you the school. The piece playing in every shop in January was written in 1929 and was on record in Paris by 1932.
And the man who made it public was a blind shamisen player who died in Kyoto in 1685, and who may or may not be the reason the city's most famous sweet is shaped the way it is. Six confectioners say he is. Two say it is a poem about bridges. Nobody has had to decide.
The room matters more than the program: small enough to catch the left hand working, and the rest follows. Ninety minutes with the plectra on your own fingers is the shortest distance between reading about Japanese music and having made some.
