Like folk around the world, the Japanese traditionally sang themselves through their workday. If not lulling a child to sleep or singing for amusement, they used song to pace their work — be it threshing barley, rowing boats, or making sake. In sake-making, the verses might even be calculated to take the time needed for a certain stage of the rice-wine processing.
Changing Roles for Folk Songs
By the early 20th century, songs with strong local links functioned to promote domestic tourism. New songs praised the local landscape and community. These helped draw urbanites to the countryside for recreation, while rural residents increasingly moved to the city to work.
The latter soon found themselves isolated and pining for their hometowns. Song was a way to recall fond memories and create new friendships with others stranded in the big cities. Homesick factory workers from the far north might find another expatriate who could teach them songs, and some formally untrained but naturally good singers found themselves elevated to be folk-song teachers.
Staged Performance: Concerts, Recitals, TV and Folk-Song Bars
Because native Japanese music was completely excluded from the school system through 19th-century reforms during westernization, other avenues were found for studying and performing traditional music. Folk song became classicized along the model of traditional Noh and Kabuki theatre forms or of the classical zither, the koto.
Folk-song teachers formed schools with many eager students studying for qualifications. Now, regular recitals help focus their efforts, and some achieve teaching status themselves. Thus, like many classical and martial arts, the folk-song world was professionalized despite its humble rural origins.
Folk song (min’yô) is now a stage art in Japan — it is extremely difficult to find traditional songs out of a performance context. This context, however, includes not only recitals and concerts but television programmes and dedicated folk-song bars. Once prime-time viewing during the folk song boom of the late 1970s, the genre is now largely confined to educational TV, attracting a smallish but dedicated audience.
Several surveys in the 20th century revealed a fascinating pattern of changing musical tastes with increasing age. While we of the boomer generation continue our liking of Elvis, Beatles and Acid Rock, Japanese often change genre preference from pop to trad folk as they get older.
Most customers in folk-song bars, therefore, are well above 40. Attending such a bar is like doing live karaoke: one can get up on stage and sing one’s favourite folk song but to the accompaniment of live instruments. The 3-stringed shamisen lute, the vertical shakuhachi flute and taiko drums are the usual back-up. But one has to study hard first to know the songs! In between audience efforts, the bars offer professional performances; the younger artists may spend the daytime hours at the bar taking lessons.
Taiko Drums, Tsugaru-jamisen and Okinawan Folk-rock
The youth of Japan have been brought into traditional folk song through various routes. Folk-song teachers and organizations such as the Japan Folk Song Association (Nihon Min’yô Kyôkai, with over 40,000 members) work hard to reach the young through recitals, volunteer teaching in schools, and song contests. Over a hundred national contests each promote a single song, and others cater to the whole repertoire. Being born into a folk-song family (photo) gives a contestant an edge — a chance to absorb the style and the songs from childhood.
Three genres on the edges of folk song have recently caught the enthusiasm of Japan’s youth. Wadaiko, Japanese ensemble drumming, developed since the 1960s from folk roots. The Kodô ensemble is the leading exemplar, stimulating the creation of similar groups throughout Japan and even overseas.
The Tsugaru-jamisen (-jamisen = shamisen) style of northern Japan originally accompanied the exceptionally vibrant folk songs of the Tsugaru region. From the late 1800s it developed as a unique solo instrumental style, often featuring musical duels between two players (recreated in the anime film “Nitaboh”). Stunningly virtuoso playing is required. Loud and percussive, it amazes audiences. Younger performers such as Hiromitsu Agatsuma, feeling a connection of this style with rock and blues guitar, indeed mix it in with various Western popular styles.
Third is the folk-derived shimauta (“island songs”) of Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture. For centuries Okinawan ships traded from Southeast Asia to China and Japan, until the Japanese government disbanded the Okinawan kingdom in the 1870s. Traditional costume, dance, musical scale and language differ greatly from the Japanese mainland, as seen in their Eisa Bon dance.
The main instrument is the snakeskin-covered sanshin, ancestor of the shamisen. Okinawa’s Shoukichi Kina, son of a traditional folk singer, began the spread of this style to the rest of Japan, with his sanshin-and-rock group Champloose. His compositions “Haisai Ojisan” (“Hey Old Man”) and “Hana” (“Flower”), the latter featuring Ry Cooder on guitar, stimulated mainland rock groups such as The Boom, whose song “Shimauta” adopted Okinawan elements.
All of the above elements — traditional folk song, wadaiko, Tsugaru-jamisen and Okinawan music — are sometimes combined, perhaps along with rock, jazz and/or world music elements, by artists such as Takio or the group Chanchiki. Chanchiki’s English-language website stresses that, despite this fusion, they are “always conscious of respect for the root of minyo [folk song] in the conduct of composition.” Just don’t try rowing a boat at the tempo of their version of the rowing song “Funakogi-nagashi Uta”!
Reference
Hughes, David W. (2008) Traditional Folk Song in Modern Japan: sources, sentiment and society. Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental
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