GLOBALIZATION IS ANGLOFICATION:

Bluegrass is a sound as embedded in North America's landscape as the mountains themselves. It's a musical by-product of its birthplace, and its origins can be traced along the spine of the Appalachian Mountain range. But it travels, too, echoing off peaks, reverberating down in the valleys and transmitting across oceans. The fiddle sings a bright duet with the banjo's delicate twang - even the lightest touch creates a "snap". Steady guitar strums are paired against the mandolin's steel chirps, while a harmonica's metallic wail mingles with the heavy, hollow thumps of the upright bass.

The genre has its origins in classic tunes from the British Isles, old-time mountain music and traditional African-American blues, jazz and gospel. Kentucky-born Bill Monroe developed the earliest form of the genre during the Forties - it takes its name from his band, the Blue Grass Boys. It's a melting pot of styles and different instruments, but one of its most defining traits is the banjo, barrelling along the track like a runaway train. The arrangements rejoice in their own freedom to go anywhere. Yet it is also stylistically complex; improvisations, typical in rapid-tempo tunes known as "breakdowns", are a characteristic inherited from jazz.

The music has captivated fans from all over, but it may come as a surprise to learn that the world's second-largest bluegrass scene is almost 7,000 miles away from the American South, in Japan. It arrived there in the years following the Second World War, introduced via the Far East Network (or FEN), a military radio and TV service created to provide a source of news, information and entertainment for Japan-based US soldiers and their families. It was on this network that country and bluegrass were aired for an hour each day to troops and anyone else who could pick up the radio signal. By 1957, Japan had its first bluegrass duo, The East Mountain Boys, formed by brothers Yasushi and Hisashi Ozaki.

The Ozaki brothers fell in love with American music from a young age but the outbreak of war had forced them to learn about it in secret. "There would be great dissension if people knew they were listening to the enemy's music, so they hid their hand crank record player in a closet and played whatever records they could get," a 2013 article in Bluegrass Today explained. "There was little food or supplies available in Japan at the time, and metal was very hard to come by, so they had to make a needle for the record player from bamboo." The establishment of the FEN meant the duo had more freedom to listen to the music they loved, eventually becoming pioneers for the genre in Japan.

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