If you ask Kozo Toyota how he discovered Irish music, he offers a surprising answer: Tokyo Disneyland.
“I loved the atmosphere of the Western area,” Toyota said on a recent Zoom call from his home in Tokyo.
As a boy, he was particularly enamored with “Westernland,” Disney’s mock frontier town, because of its twangy soundtrack of fiddle and banjo. Then one day, while he was browsing in a music shop, he stumbled across a CD by the Irish folk band Dervish. Toyota was captivated. The music reminded him a little bit of the Western soundtrack at Disney – except it featured a flute.
“I used to play the trumpet, and so I feel more familiar with the wind instrument, compared with the fiddle and the banjo,” Toyota said.
A few years later, hestarted teaching himself the Irish flute, a warbly, wooden counterpart to the silver concert flute. Toyota has spent the past two decades channeling his passion for Irish music into a career in Japan, which is home to a thriving Celtic music scene. One of his projects, O’Jizo, performs at Club Passim on Friday, March 13 as part of a short New England tour.
Toyota met accordion and bouzouki player Hirofumi Nakamura at their university’s Irish music club in 2005. A couple years later, guitarist Koji Nagao approached the pair after a gig. The three became O’Jizo – a combination of their names, plus a winking reference to many Irish surnames. The band marries traditional Irish repertoire with contemporary grooves and inventive arrangements, propelled by Toyota’s nimble flute playing and spiked with the occasional electronic flourish.
O’Jizo has released three albums and one EP and toured internationally, including in the U.S. Toyota says the band has been well received outside his home country, even though sometimes people are confused to see a Celtic band from Japan.
“Some of the audiences ask us, what kind of music?” he said, laughing. “Our sound sounds, of course, Celtic. But they sometimes call us ‘Japanese Celtic music.’”
Is it Japanese Celtic music, or just Celtic music that happens to be from Japan? When it comes to musical influences, Toyota cites the great traditional Irish ensembles of the modern era: Dervish, Solas, Lunasa, The Chieftains. O’Jizo, like a lot of contemporary Celtic folk bands, favors acoustic instruments and traditional-sounding melodies propelled by pop-inflected rhythms and harmonies.
“If you close your eyes and hear them play, it just sounds like good music,” said Matt Heaton, a guitarist from Medford.
Heaton and his wife Shannon Heaton, a flute player, will split the bill with O’Jizo at Passim on Friday. They first met members of the band on trips to Japan in 2019 and 2025. But their connection to Japan’s Celtic scene began over a decade ago, when a Japanese fiddle player reached out to Shannon requesting permission to record a tune she had written.
“I’d like to say that I wasn’t curious and fascinated and weirded out by the fact that there was Irish music in Japan. At that time though, I think that I was a little surprised,” she said. “ It’s so far from Ireland, it doesn’t seem like such an immediate, obvious, social and musical connection.
She thinks American reactions to O’Jizo have less to do with the band’s sound and more to do with assumptions about what Irish musicians look like. In the U.S., the Celtic music scene is predominantly white. Her own perspective has shifted since performing in Japan and befriending Celtic musicians there.
“Seeing the scene over there, it’s kind of like how we build it over here. You get into the music, you spend some time learning the tunes and making trips to Ireland,” Heaton said. “It’s kind of the same story as we have.”
In Japan, much like the States, interest in Celtic music was spurred in the ‘90s by cultural blockbusters like “Titanic,” “Braveheart” and “Riverdance.” Today, it’s not uncommon to hear traditional Irish tunes piped through the aisles of the popular Japanese retailer Muji. In the U.S., Celtic music scenes thrive in cities with large Irish immigrant populations, but many practitioners have no cultural or familial ties to Ireland. Much of the music’s appeal is social.
“When you go to sessions, you sit down with people that very likely you wouldn’t have come across any other way,” Matt Heaton said. “It’s such a cross section of what sounds like the Village People: the construction worker and the computer programmer and the chef and the freelancer.”
In Tokyo, it’s the same story. Players of all levels get together in pubs to play tunes, chatting and sipping beers between sets. Toyota plays for a monthly ceilidh dance. The Irish music scene in Japan has grown since he got into it 20 years ago. He estimates that the ceilidh – a type of social dance found in the Celtic Isles – regularly attracts 40 or 50 people.
“Especially among the younger students, Irish music and set dancing is so popular,” Toyota said.
Still, he is excited to check out the scene in Boston. O’Jizo has toured on the West Coast and Midwest, but never made it to any of the country’s Irish strongholds.
“A lot of people told us, ‘You should go to Boston, New York or Chicago,” he said with a chuckle. “I’ve wanted to visit for a long time.”