As serendipitous first encounters go, the story of how the Japanese Blues Cowboy met the Tsugaru Shamisen Player isn’t nearly as thrilling as the music the two make together as George and Noriko.

If life were a movie, George Kamikawa would have bumped into Noriko Tadano on a pilgrimage to Mississippi’s dusty and fabled crossroads, the two bonding over a love of old-time blues, a shared cultural heritage, and a belief that Takahashi Chikuzan would have loved hanging out with Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Instead, the two made each other’s acquaintance Down Under on the other side of the world. And it was hardly the stuff that biopics are made of.

“Actually, we met at an Asian grocery store in Melbourne,” Kamikawa relates with a laugh, speaking alongside Tadano on a conference call from Australia’s second-biggest city. “You know, because we are Asian.”

Tadano quickly jumps in: “I’d heard of George from other people. They’d told me that there was a Japanese busker on the streets, but I had never seen him. George had also heard about me, that there was a Japanese girl playing the shamisen on the street. Finally, we met in that grocery store—I went up and asked, ‘Are you George?’ And started talking about music and maybe doing a jamming session.”

That jamming session eventually morphed into George and Noriko, which finds Kamikawa (a.k.a. the Japanese Blues Cowboy) wailing on guitar and harmonica like a man raised on the music of raw and gritty giants R.L. Burnside and T-Model Ford. Tadano, meanwhile, hammers away on the shamisen (a kind of traditional Japanese banjo) in a way that’s as beautifully exotic as it is crazily percussive and generally badass.

The two started out entertaining locals and tourists on the streets of Melbourne. They’ve since gone on to make two records (including last year’s unvarnished and scorching Howling Sun), land a second-place finish on the wildly popular Oz TV show Australia’s Got Talent, and become a favourite on the festival circuit.

Right from the start, the band’s white-lightning bridging of Japanese folk and American blues led to huge crowds on the streets, a big part of the attraction being the ethnicity of the two people tearing into revved-up numbers like “Devil in Your Bed” and “Howling Dog Boogie”.

Fixated on throwback blues and country, Kamikawa moved to Melbourne in 2001 determined to carve out a career in busking, something that everyone from local police to the yakuza made it difficult to do in Japan. An early love of the Rolling Stones (his dad was a fan) led him to discover Keith Richards and Mick Jagger favourites like Muddy Waters. 

“From Muddy Waters I started doing a lot of reading,” he says. “That led to people like Robert Johnson. And that’s how I started playing the blues. The most difficult thing was that not many people like the blues in Japan, so I didn’t have many friends to share and play with.”

Tadano moved to Melbourne to teach Japanese. The daughter of a Japanese shamisen player, she played in traditional folk groups at home, where everything was performed in the style of the old masters.

“Absolutely I wasn’t doing any rock ’n’ roll, blues, or any western music,” she says. “It was all completely pure, old traditional Japanese folk songs going back 200 and 300 years ago. I never played blues and rock ’n’ roll in Japan—I only started when I met George.”

For a great idea of how far she’s come—and how entertaining she is wielding her instrument while Kamikawa works the harp, guitar, and stomp box—consider how an Australia’s Got Talent judge complimented her.

“He told me that I reminded him of Slash,” Tadano says with a laugh.

George and Noriko acknowledge that they have become loved on the streets of Australia since that fateful meeting in the grocery store. Not only are they regulars on the festival circuit in their adopted land, but they’re also starting to catch attention internationally, which explains their upcoming local appearance at the Powell Street Festival. The attraction? Well, you shouldn’t really have to ask, but that won’t stop Kamikawa from trying to explain it.

“When I’m playing with Noriko,” he says, “there are a lot of people going ‘What’s this? I’ve never seen that before, especially in Australia.’ They’ve never seen a shamisen before. And then there’s the blues-and-shamisen mixture—that’s something that not even I have ever seen before. It’s such a surprise that people really want to hear what we’re doing.” -

George and Noriko play the Powell Street Festival on Saturday and Sunday (August 5 and 6).