1989 Van Dyke Parks – Tokyo Rose

Tokyo Rose is a 1989 album by American musician Van Dyke Parks. The album concerns the intersection between Japanese and American cultures, particularly as reflected in the competitive “Trade War” of the 1980s. The intersection between the two cultures is nowhere more obvious than in the album’s first song, “America”, an adaptation of “America the Beautiful” with numerous pentatonic shifts characteristic of Japanese music, played on a combination of standard Western instruments and traditional Japanese instruments, such as the biwa and the koto.