The Dōjin Japanese Arts Society celebrates the revival of ancient hitoyogiri bamboo flute

Marking 400 years since the death of Ōmori Sōkun, shakuhachi master Alcvin Ryūzen Ramos leads a series of programs about an instrument making a quiet return

By Ashley Kim

Alcvin Ryūzen Ramos

The Dōjin Japanese Arts Society presents Celebrating Hitoyogiri, the Single-Node Bamboo Flute at SaBi Tea Arts from June 27 to September 26

AT 16, ALCVIN Ryūzen Ramos first heard the piercing sound of the horizontal Japanese bamboo flute yokobue while watching Akira Kurosawa’s epic film Ran.

“Bang! It hit my consciousness so hard,” he recalls.

That haunting melody stayed with Ramos, leading him down a lifelong path into the world of Japanese bamboo flutes—all the way to leading a series of programs highlighting the instrument in Vancouver this summer.

Born and trained in Japan in the classical Zen shakuhachi tradition, Ramos is a teacher, maker, composer, artisan, and tour guide with over 30 years of experience. 

Still, the high-pitched hitoyogiri flute is a relatively new area of study for Ramos, who has been studying the bamboo instrument under Takeo Izumi since 2023, when Izumi gave a demonstration for Ramos’s students as part of his Shakuhachi Roots Pilgrimage. Although it wasn’t his first time hearing the hitoyogiri, Ramos felt inexplicably touched.

"Everybody played this flute—aristocrats, dancers, poets, beggars, emperors, the samurai."

“It’s a mystery why I got attracted, and that mystery is what keeps me coming back to the flute,” he says. “Why that particular time? What that set of notes? He [Izumi] just lit something up.”

This summer, in partnership with the Dōjin Japanese Arts Society, Ramos will host events centred around the single-node hitoyogiri, an instrument that was popular in 16th- and 17th-century Japan and was a direct ancestor of the shakuhachi. Marking the 400th anniversary of the passing of Ōmori Sōkun, a pioneering hitoyogiri revivalist in the Edo period (1603 to 1868), the progamming coincides with celebrations across Japan.

The hitoyogiri was widely played across Japan in early Edo period, eventually replaced by the modern shakuhachi.

“Back then, they called ‘hitoyogiri shakuhachi’ too,” Ramos says. “Everybody played this flute—aristocrats, dancers, poets, beggars, emperors, the samurai.” 

But even with Sōkun’s efforts and a short-lived revival, the hitoyogiri’s simpler construction and smaller range of one-and-a-half octaves couldn’t compete with the root-end shakuhachi and its three-to-four octaves.

“What happened was that the samurai found this flute that was bigger, louder, more club-like, and weapon-y,” Ramos explains. “So the shakuhachi dominated the sound world.”

Despite a long period of extinction, the hitoyogiri has been making a quiet return over the past 10 years. “This last couple of years, some of the greatest players in Japan are now playing hitoyogiri,” Ramos explains.

The Celebrating Hitoyogiri event kicks off on June 27 with a workshop from 3 to 5 pm, where Ramos will guide attendees step-by-step through the process of making hitoyogiri from scratch. He will then teach the first song from the repertoire of the Sōsa-Ryū, the fundamental school of hitoyogiri, with roots tracing back to the early Edo period. Later that evening, from 6 to 8:30 pm, Ramos will give a lecture on the flute’s history, followed by a performance featuring Vancouver-based sound artist and poet Soramaru Takayama.

For attendees who are interested in continuing to learn hitoyogiri, Ramos plans on holding more lessons throughout the summer, and hopes to collaborate with other musicians.

The performance contrasts traditional pieces with those of the modern shakuhachi, tracking the progression of the hitoyogiri. Takayama’s reading of hitoyogiri poetry and modular synth music combines with Ramos’s playing, creating an immersive dialogue between tradition and experimentation.

For Ramos, the revival of the hitoyogiri is more than musical—it’s emotional and spiritual. “When you hear the hitoyogiri, it sounds very simple, like a child compared to the adult shakuhachi,” he adds. “That’s what this hitoyogiri represents for me: a time of innocence, fascination, and mystery.”

Hosting the only hitoyogiri celebration outside of Japan, Ramos hopes audiences will leave the event with the same feeling of pure joy and curiosity.

“I hope people can take away the same feeling of fascination and beauty that the shakuhachi and hitoyogiri have instilled in me,” Ramos says.

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