Ena Kajino Profile

Japanese violinist Ena Kajino is a concert violinist, violin teacher and a comparative cultural scientist— quite rear existence of Japan who established oneself as a specialist of the violin. 

After the graduation of the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo, she studied at theUniversity of Music and Dramatic Arts Mozarteum Salzburg. From 1996 to 97 she studied in Ottawa (Canada) and received a bursary from John Gazsi Memorial Fund for her first recital series. Following her studies at the Mozarteum University, received a Master of Music degree in Violin Performance and established her career as a concert violinist and a violin instructor in Japan, Europe and Canada. She studies solo violin with Calvin Sieb, Tsugio Tokunaga, chamber music with Hagen Quartet, baroque violin with Hiro Kurosaki. The great violinist who has especially influenced her is Ivry Gitlis, with whom she took master classes.

Since 2001 based in Tokyo. She released her first CD “Robert Schumann 3 Complete Sonatas for Violin and Piano” (Livenotes) in 2014.   

In every part of the sound and narrative, the reality of the present, what we can see, and what we have understood by our rational mind, suddenly wavers. It is as if the artist sensed the signs of madness that were present at the time these violin pieces were written and made them manifest. It is a unique technique that dares to accentuate the breakage and touch the depths of the music — CD Journal 

She is currently a member of Tokyo Universal Philharmonic Orchestra and Theater Orchestra Tokyo. She performs chamber music with numerous distinguished musicians Alfredo Perl, Lisa Smirnova, Nicola Frisaldi, Nadja Rubanenko, Mari Kato, Rafael Guerra (piano) and Nobuya Kato (viola). 

Under the concept of “teaching the real thing”, she has been teaching privately for over 30 years. While her technical instruction is highly regarded and her students have won several prizes in junior competitions, she believes the most important goal is for the violin to support each student in his or her life. She shares her love of music with her students and aims to help them grow as an individual through their violin studies. 

In 2007, she became the first violinist who enrolled as a research student at the University of Tokyo, one of Asia’s most prestigious universities, since its establishment in 1877. She studied in the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies and obtained a Master’s degree in 2009 and a PhD in 2019. Her main research interest is violin culture of Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In December 2013 her article ’A Lost Opportunity for Tradition: The Violin in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Traditional Music’ was appeared on the magazine ”Nineteenth Century Music Review” (Cambridge University Press). With this article she starts receiving an international evaluation as a scholar as well. 

Ena Kajino has published several books in Japanese and English. She is the author of Nippon no vaiorin-shi (History of the Violin in Japan: From the Birth of the Instrument to the Meiji Restoration) (Tokyo: Seikyūsha,in 2022). Her second monograph, Vaiorin wo hikihajimeta Nihonjin (Japan that took up the violin: The beginning of musical performance and instrument-making in the early Meiji period) (Tokyo: Seikyūsha,in 2024), won the University of Tokyo’s Jiritsu Award for Early Career Academics. She is also the author and editor of Kishi kōichi to ongaku no kindai (Kishi Kōichi and music of modern time) (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2011). In English-language book Handbook of Japanese Music in the Modern Era (Leiden: Brill, 2023), she wrote ’Violin Playing and Women in Japanese Music’.

Ena Kajino is a part-time lecturer in music at the University of Tokyo and Musashino University, Japan.

She plays the violin made by Stefan – Peter Greiner in 1997.