Aketa Ocarina

The Aketagawa family, the Tokyo jazz club their ocarinas were sold from, and the copy of aketa.org the museum keeps.

A note from the museum

This page is the museum’s account of a website it has copied. It is not by the people who made that site, and nothing from the site is republished here.

aketa.org is the website of アケタの店 — Aketa’s Store, a basement jazz club in Ogikubo, Tokyo, open since 1974 — together with AKETA’S DISK, the record label it has run since 1975, and AKETA ocarina. It is, unusually for this list, still online.

The ocarinas reach back further than the club. Takashi Aketagawa (明田川孝, 1909–1958) was a sculptor and music researcher, and is credited with working out the twelve-hole ocarina. Baz Jennings, writing his history of the ocarina, put it as “Japanese sculptor Aketa began ocarina making in 1928” — Takashi would have been nineteen. The word sculptor was exact. His wife, Kazu Aketagawa, developed the Sonetto model and died in September 2017, aged 98.

The site belonged to their son, Shoji Aketagawa (明田川荘之), a jazz pianist who also played the ocarina, and who ran the club and the label. He died on November 16, 2024, aged 74.

That is why this copy exists. A site whose proprietor has just died is the case most likely to disappear without anyone noticing, and the Internet Archive’s coverage of aketa.org is thinner than its age suggests.

There is also a museum: the 明田川オカリーナ&アート記念館, the Aketagawa Ocarina & Art Museum, at the club in Ogikubo, holding Takashi Aketagawa’s sculptures, ocarinas, essays, sheet music and photographs. It opens for exhibitions and concerts rather than permanently. The Ocarina Museum has written to no one there yet; it should.

How the copy was made

Directly from aketa.org, in September 2026 — not from an archive. The site answers, so the museum asked it: one request at a time, a second’s pause between them, identifying itself, and taking nothing the site asks robots not to take. The files are stored as the bytes that came back, because the pages are Shift-JIS and converting them would have been a change.

The Internet Archive separately holds captures of the site from 2001 to 2026, across about 1,060 days and some 5,000 distinct addresses.

What the museum holds

1255 files, 18.1 MB.

1003	pages
156	photographs and illustrations
75	small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers

Most of it is in Japanese, which no one here reads. That is a limit on what the museum can say about the site, not a reason to let it vanish: the copy can be made now and read later.

Rights, and what is published

Nothing from aketa.org is published here. The museum’s own two articles about Aketa instruments — on the MT-8Bb and S-5C and the Prima Cornetta M5C — are its own work, written from instruments in the collection, and were not drawn from this copy.

The copy is held as insurance. Nobody at Aketa has been asked for anything, because nothing is being asked for yet. If anyone connected with Aketa, the club, the label or the Aketagawa museum would like this copy handed over, restricted, or destroyed, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.

aketa.org · the site in the Internet Archive · Aketagawa Ocarina & Art Museum