Islands and borders: Okinawa and folk song

Songs for a task

Every winter, for about three hundred years, farmers from the Tamba hills walked to the breweries of Itami and Nada, near Osaka, to make sake in the months when their own fields lay idle. They were led by a master brewer, the tōji, and they sang at every stage of the work: scrubbing the tubs at the start of the season, grinding and stirring the moto, the yeast starter of rice, kōji and water. The songs kept the workers in step, and before clocks they also timed the work: sing so many verses, then move on.

The first recording is the song for grinding the starter, sung in 2017 by members of the Tamba brewers' guild at a library in Itami. The songs were heard in the breweries until about the 1960s and then almost vanished; the guild now keeps them alive. Two more from the same day follow other tasks: stirring the starter on cold nights, and washing the tubs in autumn. Today they are often sung with shakuhachi.

Japan has tens of thousands of such songs: for planting rice, fishing, festivals and dances. The word for them, min'yō, is quite new. It was coined in the Meiji era as a translation of the German Volkslied; before that, people just called them songs.

Three strings across the sea

The second recording comes from Miyako, an island between Okinawa and Taiwan. The instrument is the sanshin, three strings over a small body covered in snakeskin. It descends from the Chinese sanxian and was in the Ryukyu Kingdom by the fifteenth century, when Okinawa traded across the whole East China Sea.

In the sixteenth century it travelled on to the port of Sakai, near Osaka, and there it changed. Snakeskin gave way to cat or dog skin, a large plectrum like the biwa's came to strike the skin as well as the strings, and the low string was given a deliberate buzz. The result was the shamisen, the voice of Edo's theatres and pleasure quarters; listen to a shamisen song from the early 1900s and you hear how far it moved from its island parent.

A court and a village on one instrument

In Okinawa itself, the sanshin lived two lives. At the court of Shuri it became a classical art, sung by the player to their own accompaniment, with its own schools and its own notation, kunkunshi, which writes finger positions in Chinese characters. In 1719 a court official, Tamagusuku Chōkun, created kumi odori, a dance-drama sung to the sanshin, to entertain the envoys of the Chinese emperor: some of the kingdom's finest music was made to be shown to China.

In the villages the same instrument carried folk songs, min'yō, and the islands further south, Miyako and Yaeyama, kept songs of their own. Kotone's Miyako recording is a field recording of that everyday side; its notes do not name the song or the singer.

Hill songs and park songs

The third recording is from Shigang, in the Hakka hill country of central Taiwan. In Taiwan many Hakka families lived in the hills and grew tea, and their "mountain songs", shan'ge, sung in the fields and on hill paths, are a well-known kind of Chinese folk song. The recording, made in 2024, is of traditional songs in the Hakka language.

Folk song also needs a place to meet. Outside a metro station in Beitou, older people sing a Taiwanese folk song together; in a Shanghai park, others gather in the morning to sing old songs to the erhu. They are singing because it is what this place, at this hour, is for.

詞語

民謡 min'yō

folk song: a word coined in the Meiji era for the songs people had simply called uta

三線 sanshin

“three strings”: Okinawa's snakeskin lute, ancestor of the shamisen

杜氏 tōji

the master brewer of a sake brewery, who brought his team of workers each winter

工工四 kunkunshi

sanshin notation, written in Chinese characters that show finger positions

在別處聆聽

• National Theatre Okinawa, with regular concerts of Ryukyu classical music and kumi odori
• UNESCO: Kumiodori, traditional Okinawan musical theatre, with a film