This study focuses on the connection between cultural identity and Japanese popular music. It contains conducted interviews and semantic analyses on musicians who use Japanese traditional instruments and Western instruments in their repertoire. It uses performativity theory as theoretical framework. The analyses are divided in to the three levels of Sauter’s phenomenological path: the symbolic level, the sensory level and the artistic level.  It concludes how musicians in Japan perceive their own musical identity, and gives insights on the role of cultural identity in Japanese music. The potential significance is to contribute to identity studies using a performativity perspective as explained above, and thereby elucidating both musicological and historical aspects.