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Irish and Japanese cultures meet as DFA Partners with TG4 for a Special Gradam Ceoil Showcase

Gradam Ceoil TG4 @ Expo 25: Dhá Oileán Ceolmhara

09.12.25

This collaboration underscores the importance of sharing Ireland’s creative energy, language and heritage with international audiences while also highlighting the cultural connections that continue to grow between both nations. Through this partnership, TG4 is proud to capture and amplify Ireland’s presence at Expo 2025 Osaka, bringing home the stories, experiences and artistic expressions that define this unique cultural moment.

The programme presented by Áine Hensey brings viewers together for a night of exhilarating music and dance displaying the very best musicians, dancers, and singers from two island nations, on opposite sides of the world, in a unique fusion of Irish and Japanese Folk traditions.
 

 
Produced by Big Mountain Productions, one of Ireland’s leading independent television production companies, specialising in music and event programming, Gradam Ceoil TG4 @ Expo 25: Dhá Oileán Ceolmhara is a major Irish-led feature-length documentary uncovering for the first time, the deep cultural relationship between Ireland and Japan through the prism of a shared passion and reverence for Irish traditional music and arts.
 
Jane Kelly, Executive Producer with Big Mountain says, “We are thrilled to have produced this premium feature-length documentary film with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and TG4 with support from ILBF. This project has been almost 2 years in the making. We are indebted to our brilliant, compact, live music specialist production and delivery team alongside our wonderful Japanese colleagues as we put on a spellbinding concert featuring the best of Irish and Japanese artists in front of 2000 people, all on the other side of the world. We hope audiences enjoy the spectacle as much as we had fun making it.”
 
The current recipients of the Gradam Ceoil TG4 awards, the foremost Irish Language event celebrating Irish Traditional music, who represent the ‘best of the best’ of traditional Irish musicians in the country travelled to Japan to take part in a major gala concert, curated and led by Ulster composer, Neil Martin, held in a 2,000 seater performance space in the Irish Pavilion at Osaka Expo 25. Musicians and singers, such as fiddler Siobhán Peoples, singer Cathy Jordan, group Flook, composer Johnny Óg Connolly, young musician and piper Colm Broderick, lifetime achievement and fiddler, Matt Cranitch, and community awardee and former broadcaster Áine Hensey, joined pianist Rod McVey, and sean-nós dancer Becky Ní Éallaithe.

This incomparable assembly of Irish artists were joined by the finest of Japanese folk artists; Singer Misako Koja, accompanist Kazuya Sahara, dancer Taka Hayashi, flautist Kozo Toyota, Taiko drummers Hiro & Luke Hayashida, piper Atsushi Yamane and snare drummer Kyoko Yamane.

TG4 has been honouring exceptional talent within the Irish traditional Irish music sphere for the past 27 years, and this documentary, supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, along with the Irish Language Broadcast Fund (ILBF), has presented some of these deserving recipients to an international audience in Japan, bringing Irish traditional music to a country which has an historic and growing interest in it, in turn helping elevate Ireland’s musical standing among the indigenous music of the world.
 
Commissioning Editor for TG4, Proinsias Ní Ghráinne said that Gradam Ceoil TG4 was “delighted to bring Ireland’s most prestigious live traditional music event to Osaka as part of Ireland’s Expo 2025 presence and that through this film, we share the event with Irish and global audiences. This body of new compositions and arrangements between both traditions encapsulates Expo’s theme for 2025 ‘Creativity Connecting People’. We hope this is the start of a new wave of Irish and Japanese artistic co-operations.”
 
From April to March 2025, Ireland joined nearly 160 countries in welcoming over 28 million visitors to Expo 2025 Osaka. Ireland’s Pavilion, designed by the OPW, staged over 1650 performances of Irish music, exhibited Irish artists and hosted high-level political and trade delegations. Ireland’s participation at Expo 2025 Osaka provided a unique opportunity to promote Ireland to a global audience, in a region where Ireland has significant trade and investment priorities and ambitions.

The Ireland Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka was an integral part of the Ireland Japan 2025 programme which also saw the opening of Ireland House Tokyo, the new home for our Embassy and Irish State Agencies. These developments in 2025 provide an unprecedented opportunity to further develop the cultural, economic and people-to-people connections between Ireland and Japan.
 
Áine Walsh, Chief Language & Cultural Officer & Head of Irish Language Broadcast Fund, Northern Ireland Screen, “We were delighted to support this project which beautifully celebrates the shared cultural connections between the two island nations of Ireland and Japan. The production was a mammoth task and is a fantastic achievement by Newry based company Big Mountain, and a wonderful showcase of their creative skills. I’m looking forward to watching the fruits of their labour when the cream of Irish traditional performers and their Japanese counterparts take to the stage.”
 
Gradam Ceoil TG4 @ Expo 25: Dhá Oileán Ceolmhara is on TG4 on Sunday 21st of December at 9.30pm and will also be available globally on the TG4 Player www.TG4.ie