A Cultural History of Postwar Japan Page 9

  1 The Butterfly (Chch)

  military songs prompted by the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War were introduced to children and the young through the agency of the government.

  The original aim was to instil into the young Western music in its pure form. But this presented difficulties in practice, and the result was something of a compromise: the mass production of melodies composed of five notes, skipping the fa and ti of the seven notes of the Western scale. This is discussed by the historian of music Sonobe Sabur (1904–1980) in his history of popular song in Japan.71

  Izawa and his advisory group were not the sole originators of this type of composition. Unknown musicians who had been exposed to Western military training songs composed marches in their spare time, one of which came to be known as Miyasan Miyasan, or Tokoton yare-bushi, adapting currently popular Japanese songs. This was the first Japanese revolutionary march in the Western sense. Its composition was claimed by two army commanders,

  2 Miyasan (Tokoton yare-bushi)

  mura Masujir and Shinagawa Yajir, but the true composer and songwriter are unknown. The song was later adapted by Gilbert and Sullivan for the operetta The Mikado, through which it has come to enjoy international recognition.

  The Japanese musical tradition is characterized by asymmetry— that is, an avoidance of repetition—according to musicologist Koizumi Fumio (1927–1983). In this respect it resembles the musical traditions of Korea and Iran. Iranian music, unlike Arabian music, which returns at the end to its original form, changes its form endlessly as it progresses. In the words of composer Dan Ikuma, Iranian music is like endlessly flowing water. Japanese music proceeds in a similar way, defying symmetry of form.72

  Japanese agrarian work songs, as Koizumi shows,73 are in simple duple time, almost never triple time. The reason is traced to the rhythm of two feet walking on the ground which is required by agriculture. There was very little use of horses in Japan, which would have naturally produced triple time, for on horseback the rider has to resort to triple whereas the march of infantry can proceed in duple time. Even the Japanese Army in recent times relied mostly on infantry rather than cavalry, which encouraged the use of duple metre in the new music of the Meiji Period.

  30 Stanislavsky (left) as Nanki Poo and Stekel (right) as Yum Yum in the operetta The Mikado, 1887

  The government itself was responsible for the discontinuity of musical tradition between the Edo and the Meiji Periods, by means of music education in schools. Western musical tradition, which was seen as the model, had a pronounced effect after 100 years of existence in Japan. Today, in most major cities in Europe one is likely to find some Japanese in the local orchestra. On the other hand, Koizumi points out, in Japanese music colleges there are few Japanese who can perform on Japanese traditional instruments, but among students who come to study from other parts of the world, there are some specialists who can play with skill instruments such as the sh and the hichiriki. These foreign students lend their strength to performances of Japan’s oldest court music, gagaku, creating a situation of reverse cultural borrowing.

  There is a widespread belief in Japan, which persists to this day, that only the Japanese can understand Japanese culture. Donald Keene, for example, the historian of Japanese literature, not only knows the Japanese classics better than most Japanese, but is also well versed in modern literature too, and in addition has a thorough intimacy with the Japanese way of life. He writes, however, that he is often admired by Japanese who marvel at his reading Japanese classics, or eating raw fish. It is strange that such outdated reactions still occur. The Japanese themselves are as yet unaware that a new relationship of borrowing and lending, such as with the sh and the hichiriki, has arisen in Japan, that great changes have taken place in Japanese culture which they cannot keep up with. In actual fact this is not a new situation, but it has been hidden and not taken cognizance of. Surely Japanese culture is not so unique that only the Japanese can fully master it. Kabuki is considered to be representative of Japanese culture, and yet one of the most popular modern kabuki actors, Ichimura Uzaemon XV (1874–1945), was the son of a French general and his Japanese wife. This was not widely known among kabuki circles, but was kept hidden right through the Meiji, Taish and Shwa Periods.74

  Again, one of the top three sum wrestlers of modern Japan, Taih, was born of a Russian father and a Japanese mother. This fact too has been hushed up and not generally talked about. Such hushing up supports the belief that only the Japanese can understand Japanese culture. Furthermore, the most popular sum wrestler today, Takamiyama, was born and bred in Hawaii, and is not Japanese. Kabuki, sum wrestling, gagaku, all these are supposedly the most intricate arts Japanese culture has produced, and yet some of their most prominent practitioners come from outside Japan. If the Japanese were unhindered by prejudice they would recognize that there is some international element in Japanese culture. Soon they will be forced to recognize these historical facts, and when they do they will recognize also that there is something in Japanese culture which is comprehensible, accessible and useful to non-Japanese. This need not be seen as a

  31 Ichimura Uzaemon XV playing Sukeroku (photo: Kimura Ihei)

  sad thing but rather something to be glad about. This all belongs to the future of Japanese culture.

  We have looked at the success of the Westernization of Japanese music education. In contrast, the traditional music of pre-Meiji Japan has made a come-back, without people being aware of it, since the sixties, now that the Japanese have achieved a level of industrialization comparable with European countries. To quote Koizumi Fumio in Kaykyoku no Ongaku Kz (The Musical Structure of Japanese Popular Songs): ‘“Sergeant Pepper”, one of the songs sung by Pink Lady (a popular female duo), seems very way out and modern, but is it really so? The composer Togura Shun’ichi has spiced it with considerable delicacy and skill and at first glance it seems that various techniques of Western music are being applied. However, the most vital part of the song, the bare bones of the melody, uses the same scale as our traditional children’s songs, basically, a minor scale missing the second and sixth degrees (re and la).’ Furthermore, this is very like popular songs of tenth century Japan. Scores of these songs remain in the Konoe family to this day, and show very close similarities to the scale used by the Candies in the song ‘Haru Ichiban’ (Spring Number One).

  32 Takamiyama

  Various interpretations can be made. Among other things, we may say that on the level of spontaneous feeling the Japanese people in general, as opposed to the ruling elite of the bureaucracy or intellectuals connected with universities, have freed themselves of the belief that the only real music is Western music.

  A brief look at examples of three different groups of songs will illustrate further some of the points made above. The first group is songs in the pre-Meiji tradition of Japanese music. First, the

  33 Pink Lady

  famous ‘Chgoku Chih no Komoriuta’, a lullaby adapted from a traditional song of the Chgoku region (western Honsh) by Yamada Ksaku (1886–1965), who modernized it by giving it a new rhythmic feeling and expression. The second example is a work song, ‘Hietsukibushi’, to be sung while performing the monotonous but rhythmic pounding and hulling of barnyard (deccan) grass. As would be expected from the above discussion, it is in duple time. The song comes from a farming village in the mountains of Kysh, and is said to have originated several hundred years ago.

  3 Sergeant Pepper (Pepp Keibu)

  4 Spring Number One (Haru Ichiban)

  34 The Candies

  The third example is of a type of song called ‘Imay’ (‘In the modern style’), which were popular 800 years ago. The texts of these songs are to be found in the collection called Ryjin Hish . This old melody was borrowed as a hymn tune in the early Meiji Period when Christian hymn books were being compiled in Japan. Early hymns made use of traditional tunes in this way, but later it came to be strongly felt that hymns had to have Western tunes to be authentic, and the
se old tunes dropped out of use. In the same way was discarded in the post-Meiji Period the peculiar method of learning and reading the Bible which had been transmitted by the hidden Christians through the Edo Period. This illuminates from one perspective the character of post-Meiji Japanese Christianity, or more accurately the nature of the culture of Christians in post-Meiji Japan. They firmly believed that only the hymns sung by

  5 Lullaby from the Chgoku region (Chgoku chih no komoriuta)

  6 Traditional Song from Miyazaki (Hietsukibushi)

  7 Hymn based on Imay melody

  Europeans and Americans were genuine hymns. This is now being questioned by Japanese Christianity and will become a bigger issue in the future.

  The second group of songs for consideration are the early Western-style melodies composed in Japan. To this category belongs of course the march song, ‘Miyasan Miyasan’, which, as discussed earlier, was composed in 1867, and is an early example of the new pentatonic scale based on the major scale minus the fourth and the seventh degrees.

  Jumping to the postwar period, we have a children’s song composed by Dan Ikuma, called ‘Zsan’ (Mr Elephant). In six-eight time, not a traditional metre, it also uses the pentatonic scale minus the fourth and seventh, and is very widely sung amongst today’s children.

  The next example, ‘The Gondola Song’ (Gondora no Utd), composed in 1915, was used in the final scene of Kurosawa’s great film Ikiru (Living) (1952). It is sung by a man soon to die of cancer,

  8 Mr. Elephant (Zsan)

  sitting alone on a swing in a park. The song was originally sung in the Japanese stage version of Turgenev’s novel, On the Eve. The text was written by Yoshii Isamu (1886–1960) and the melody composed by Nakayama Shinpei (1887–1952), a prolific composer of popular and children’s songs in Western mode. Russian novels were the rage in Japan at that time and many of them were adapted for the stage, not only in Tokyo but were taken also to all parts of the country by touring theatre troupes. At that very same time musical gramophone recordings were being developed, and samples of these songs could be heard in advance of the plays, which was an aid to their catching on widely in the provinces. Of course their use of the pentatonic scale missing the fourth and seventh degrees, a palatable kind of Western music for the Japanese, also assisted their diffusion.

  Even more popular was the song ‘Kachsha no Uta’ (Katyusha’s Song),75 composed a year before ‘The Gondola Song’, also by Nakayama Shinpei, to words by Shimamura Hgetsu and Sma

  9 The Gondola Song (Gondora no uta)

  Gyof, to be sung by the leading actress Matsui Sumako in the stage adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. The extraction of the farewell scene in the form of a song from the play suited Japanese sentimentality, and the song was very widely sung. Nowadays, however, hardly anyone knows that it originated in the stage version of Resurrection. It is just a song old men sing when they are drinking. Tolstoy enjoyed great popularity in Japan at the time. When The Live Corpse, actually written by Tolstoy for the stage, was first performed in Japan in 1917, Nakayama Shinpei wrote a song for it, ‘Sasurai no Uta’ (The Wanderer’s Song), this time to lyrics by Kitahara Hakush:

  Shall we go on, shall we return?

  Beneath the Aurora

  Russia is a northern country

  Stretching endlessly to the North.

  35 Shimura Takashi singing ‘The Gondola Song’ in the Kurosawa film Ikiru

  This song too was very widely known and sung.

  Next in this group of early Western-style melodies is Narita Tamez’s (1893–1945) ‘Hamabe no Uta’ (Song of the Seaside) in six-eight time, which, while not completely avoiding the fourth and seventh degrees, in fact basically uses this pentatonic scale.

  10 Song of the Seaside (Hamabe no uta)

  11 The Red Dragonfly (Akatonbo)

  ‘Akatombo’ (The Red Dragonfly) by Yamada Kosaku, on the other hand, uses the pentatonic scale strictly. In three-four time, it is a popular children’s song.

  12 If you go to the sea…(Umi yukaba)

  The next example, the melancholy ‘Umi yukaba’ (If you go to the sea) by Nobutoki Kiyoshi (1887–1965), has as its text an ancient poem, and was widely sung during the Second World War, more so than the national anthem, it is said.

  ‘Yuki no furu machi o’ (A town where the snow is falling) by Nakata Yoshinao (1923–) was a well-known song in the postwar period. The first part of the song in particular is reminiscent of traditional Japanese scales.

  The second group of Western-style songs mostly had some links with traditional scales, making them easy to sing for the Japanese. The third group is quite different. They are from the postwar period, but perhaps they represent a return to the Meiji and Taish Periods. After the close contact with American culture under the Occupation, and then with the coming of economic recovery, the pace of life changed dramatically, and Western ways penetrated into all areas of everyday life. The melodies in this group cannot be so easily categorized as the first two groups, but

  13 A town where the snow is falling (Yuki no furu machi o)

  they do form a new stream. Firstly, ‘Kaette kita Yopparai’ (The drunk who has come back home), in eight-eight time, utilizes fully the seven-tone major scale. Appearing in 1967 when economic growth was obvious to everyone, it is an abandoned sort of song, its lyrics in bad taste, and it scandalized older people. Children, however, loved it, singing it in buses and so on, while older people hated it.

  We can include in this group songs like ‘Haru Ichiban’ (Spring Number One), discussed above. It was sung by the Candies, a trio of young girls in miniskirts, thoroughly Western in presentation. The melody, however, is a minor scale missing (mostly) the second

  14 The drunk who has come back home (Kaette kita yopparai)

  and sixth degrees, a revival of the melodic style of popular songs of the twelfth century and earlier.

  To bring the peculiarities of Japanese songs into relief, one should of course really listen to popular songs of Asian countries closely related to but slightly different from Japan, such as bungawan solo of Indonesia, and ariran of Korea.76

  Another song worthy of mention, frequently sung in Japan, is the Scottish folksong ‘Comin’ through the rye’ The Japanese lyrics are quite different, however. After all, in the Meiji Period the

  15 The sky of my home village (Koky no sora)

  Japanese could hardly have sung about a boy catching and kissing a girl in a field of rye. So it became ‘Koky no Sora’ (The sky of my home village), a meteorological description about feeling good under clear skies, and in this form became extensively popular. Also adapted from the Scottish folk song ‘Auld lang syne’ is ‘Hotaru no Hikari’ (The glow of the fireflies). It is always sung at primary-school graduation ceremonies, and therefore conjures up nostalgia for school days. So we can see that these European folk songs are used whenever people gather together, but on different occasions, and for different purposes.

  In the early days, when Izawa Shji determined the policy that music education should be along Western lines, a sense of mission that Western songs must be sung appeared strongly in primary and middle-school teachers. Therefore the tendency was to be Japanese in textual content and Western in melody, perhaps a kind of

  16 The glow of fireflies (Hotaru no hikari)

  adaptation of the slogan ‘Japanese spirit Western learning’ (Wakon ysai). This principle had a restricting effect on the development of Japanese music education.

  In 1910, a tragic incident took place in Zushi, near Tokyo, when some middle-school boys died in a boating mishap. There was a girls’ middle school nearby, but of course in those days of segregated education boys and girls of this age could not mix freely with each other. They had to pass in the street in silence, recognizing each other’s presence only with looks, which probably served to create a much stronger mutual fascination than would have existed otherwise. Anyway, when the schoolboys perished, strong feelings of grief arose among the girls. As a result, the song
now known as ‘Shichiri ga Hama no Aika’ (Elegy of Seven-Mile Beach) was sung at the funeral. The music teacher at the girls’ school, Misumi Yko, immediately on hearing the news of the

  17 Elegy of Seven-mile Beach (Shichiri ga hama no aika)

  boat disaster and the boys’ death, is said to have written the poem and set it to music. She was, however, unable to compose a tune herself. She was even unable to borrow a Japanese tune. What she did was borrow a tune by someone, probably an American called Garden. This was sung at the combined funeral of the boys, amid the tears of all the students, boys and girls. The song later spread far beyond the Zushi area to be widely known throughout Japan, even to the present day. It shows us something of the kind of relationship which existed between teenage boys and girls way back in 1910. And furthermore, this taking of a European melody to express one’s natural feelings of mourning provides an episode which shows clearly the Japanese music culture of the time, and also the emotions of the Japanese who entrusted their hearts to this music culture.