Art & Creativity Quote by Nobuo Uematsu

Uematsu is talking like a composer who’s spent his career smuggling folk DNA into pop-cultural megastructures. The “very strange” opener isn’t faux-modesty; it’s the audible pause of someone noticing a pattern that theory doesn’t quite tidy up. He’s gesturing at the way “Celtic” has become less a fixed geography than a portable set of musical signals: the lilt of modal melodies, the pull of pentatonic turns, the drone-like grounding, the dance-friendly momentum. Those ingredients can read as Ireland one moment, Japan the next, and “fantasy America” in between.

The subtext is a quiet argument against purity myths. Instead of treating traditions as sealed jars, he frames them as overlapping toolkits that different cultures independently assemble because they solve similar expressive problems: how to make longing feel ancient, how to make a landscape sound wide, how to suggest community without words. That’s why the comparison lands across Japan, the U.S., Europe, China, “other Asian countries” - a sweep that mirrors the actual circulation of styles in the 20th century: recordings, film scoring, tourism, and the globalized ear trained by media.

Context matters: Uematsu’s signature work sits at the junction of Japanese composition and Western orchestral/fantasy tropes, often leaning on “Celtic” color to telegraph myth, nature, and nostalgia. He’s not claiming everything is the same; he’s pointing out a shared emotional technology. The “element” he can’t quite name is the one listeners instantly recognize, even when they’ve never been to the places the music is supposed to evoke.