For days now, I have been flipping between television stations showing images of Japan and NCAA basketball. I am torn between everyday pleasures of my comfortable life and heartache for those suffering half a world away.

My family had already planned to attend the Bates College Orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” a pivotal work in Western music, last weekend. And we were touched by Bates conductor and composer Hiroya Miura’s story of his birthplace, Sendai, near the earthquake epicenter and his descision to make the concert a fundraiser for his hometown.

I wonder about my own family. For the first five years of my life, I lived in Japan. I spoke Japanese and watched Japanese television. I remember having nightmares as a child after watching kabuki theater. I remember playing in the ocean and being sent on errands to market. And I remember the music of festivals and holidays.

Japan is the second largest music consumer market behind the United States. Much of the music is rap, rock, punk, techno, emo, reggae, pop. The country is a modern meld of East meets West, just as my life has been being half-Japanese and half-American.

When my father moved us to the United States, my mother made us speak only English. She gave into my plea to have yellow hair like the kids at school, even though neither of us could read the directions on the Clairol box and the result was awful orange hair that had to be shorn.

My mother stopped talking about my aunts, uncles and cousins. Born in 1939, she never spoke of growing up during the war and the awful aftermath in Okinawa. We are not actually Japanese, being born in Okinawa with a separate culture and language. My grandparents spoke Okinawan. My mother, a product of Japanese imperialism, spoke Japanese. Today, she speaks a hybrid of languages that only close family and friends can understand. She doesn’t say much about what is happening in Japan. She says only that it is terrible. She lives in her present and assigns the past to ghosts.

But sometimes the ghosts — the spirits — come to visit. Almost immediately after moving to the States, my mother found a piano teacher for me. She wanted me to be a classical pianist. Once in a while she would play, too, except her songs used only the black keys.

They were the tones of Obon festivals, when we honored our ancestors. They were the sounds of my grandmother, whose name, Michiko, I carry as my middle name. It has been 40 years since I have lived as an American, but the sounds of koto, shakuhachi and taiko remain familiar.

So much of Japanese music, even traditional Japanese, has been blended with Western influences. Some of it has been adopted and adapted into New Age music or altered with technology. But classical Japanese does continue to flourish.

Digitally remastered and released this month by Amazon, last year on iTunes and originally recorded several years ago, is a collection by the Izumi-Kai Original Instrumental Group called “Classical Japanese Koto.”

Koto is a 13-string, zitherlike instrument often accompanied by the shakuhachi, a bamboo flute. The music, composed for both religious and secular events, is arousing and soothing at the same time. Sometimes there is taiko, Japanese drums, but usually the drums have a genre all to themselves. And sometimes there is a shamisen, a three-stringed, long-necked instrument plucked like a banjo.

On this album, there are five songs that are easily identified as Japanese. “Rokudan,” the first track, goes back to the 1600s, but is played in the style of the classical revival of the 1800s. The last track, “Haru-No-Kyoku (Ode to Spring),” brings you slowly out of sleeping winter and joyously into new life.

I hope for new life for the Japanese. I hope that West will meet East. I hope that as an American, I remember my Japanese.

As of Sunday, Bates College had received more than $8,500 in donations to help conductor Miura’s hometown recover. The college is continuing to collect donations online at www.batestickets.com and by mail, with checks payable to Bates College care of Support for Japan, The Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell Street, Lewiston, ME 04240.

During this past weekend’s concert, after the second movement of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” a funeral dirge, Miura honored those who died in Japan’s triple disaster. In the third and fourth movements, he celebrated the courage of rescue workers and survivors desperately dealing with nuclear plant failings.

Music truly is universal, as is the human spirit.

Emily Tuttle is a freelance writer living in Minot. Her e-mail address is [email protected].