Old Japanese Songs in Shape Notes

Someone in a Japanese teachers’ Facebook group had asked if anyone had Japanese songs to share. I wrote this in response, but I think I wrote too much because not that many people had any response. I should have put it in this blog and let people decide for themselves if they want to come here and jump in. If you just want the songs, scroll down.

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The posts asking about Japanese songs reminded me that I have a bunch of them lying around on a website that I should be sharing with you all. I didn’t think of it because they were part of a different project to transcribe songs into American shape notes. It just so happens that a few of them are Japanese songs. If you’re not into shape notes, you can ignore the shapes and treat them as regular round notes, but I’ve got to tell you, this musical curiosity of early American history is miraculous. I never could sight-sing music before, and you probably can’t either, but if you learn shape notes and pick up any piece written in them, you can just start singing it cold, no instrumental accompaniment, no one humming it to you so you know how it goes. It’s what musical notation is supposed to do but fails for so many. Even most professional musicians would be hard-pressed to pick up a page of round notes and just sing it. You get a room full of people who can read shape notes and bam, you’ve got instant four-part a cappella harmony. The notation was created for mostly rural church congregations, mostly in the American South, who needed a way to sing the hymns because, either from poverty or dogma, they didn’t have musical instruments. However, there’s no reason for rural Southern churchgoers to keep this to themselves. A good pedagogy is a good pedagogy no matter who uses it. If you want more information on that, I wrote an article about it here.

The Japanese songs are all from an earlier era and only a few may be familiar to you. Quite a few are from old American songs which became more popular in Japan than they were in the US. I put them in kana order by song title. Following the old shape-note tradition (there are newer shape-note traditions that don’t do this), I put the melody in the tenor line (i.e., 3rd from the top). The rationale in the fiercely democratic shape-note tradition is that no one part should stand above the others like soprano, which literally means “above.” In this music, the high part is called “treble” and is sung by both men and women an octave apart (usually). Likewise, tenor is sung by both men and women, whereas altos are usually all women and basses usually all men—again, usually, but not necessarily. Each part has its own musical staff. Combining the notes into two staves is rather for the convenience of the keyboardist to see it more put together, but since we sing unaccompanied, that doesn’t concern us. I’ve written some details for each song, some brief, some more extensive. If you’re interested in the other songs besides the Japanese ones, you’ll find them in the same website, musescore.com, under my user name, Tim Sensei. Over half of them are more church hymns in English only because the notation in parts was easy to find and the old ones don’t have copyright problems. There are other kinds of songs, though, and two are in other languages, Hawaiian and Croatian. The only common characteristic of all the songs is that they’re old. At the MuseScore website, you can play the songs, and if you scroll down the right side, find a link to the sheet music in PDF. Lastly, if you’re ever in Tokyo on the first Saturday or fourth Sunday of the month, and you’d like to drop in and sing with us, go here for details.

仰げば尊し – “Aogeba Tōtoshi” (Song for the Close of School)
Not so long ago, every Japanese kid could sing this song. It was a tear-jerker that was sung at school graduations in honor of the students’ teachers. Seems that kids nowadays have never even heard it before.

赤とんぼ – “Akatombo” (Red Dragonfly)
A favorite among Japanese children’s songs. The first time I became aware of this song was when I saw the first few bars on a Japanese commemorative stamp on a letter that one of my mother’s friends sent her. I sang it out as best I could (in round notes) and thought “I want to find that song.” Well, here it is.

大きな古時計 – “Ōkina Furu-dokei” (The Big Old Clock)
“My Grandfather’s Clock” in Japanese. People still sing this in Japan.

カチューシャの唄 – “Kachuusha no Uta” (Song of Katyusha)
Popular song from the early 1900s. This is not a Japanese version of the Russian song “Katyusha.” The Japanese song predates the Russian song. The name “Katyusha” is from Tolstoy’s novel, Resurrection, about a Russian nobleman, the elite of the elite, who takes advantage of Katyusha, a ward of his aunt, and seduces or rapes her, not sure which (I haven’t read the book). She then goes on to find herself convicted of a murder she didn’t commit. The story exposes the gap between the most elite and most destitute in Tsarist Russia. For such an exposure, Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. The book made an impression on the Japanese too. It was turned into a play which featured this song. Harking back to Tolstoy’s fate with his church, both the play and the song became so popular in Japan that high schools banded students from seeing it, and a few banded students from singing the song. The lyrics now read like the epitome of sentimentality, but in the context of the play and the book, they had more meaning. This song, by the way, can be seen as a kind of transition from traditional Japanese melodic structure to western. The nonsense syllables “ra ra” are reminiscent of 囃子言葉 (hayashi-kotoba), the syllables added for rhythmic effect in a lot of traditional Japanese songs.

草切節 – “Kusakiri-bushi” (The Grass Cutter’s Song)
I heard a senior citizens’ chorus group from Tanegashima sing this on YouTube and I was so smitten by it that I wrote to the town hall of the group’s town (Nishi-no-omote) and asked if they knew of a way to get the sheet music. In rather short order, I got the music in my mailbox direct from the town hall. I didn’t mess around with arrangement on this one. It’s in three parts, soprano, alto, and bass. Sing it and think of Tanegashima.

金剛石の歌 – “Kongōseki no Uta” (The Diamond Song)
The words of this song were written by Empress Shōken, the revered wife of Emperor Meiji. She was known for, among other things, her charity work, visiting patients in hospitals (a first for a Japanese royal) and helping to found the Japanese Red Cross. This song presents a moralistic lesson as was appropriate for a member of a royal family. From the current western point of view, it’s hard to think of “royal” and “morals” in the same sentence, but the Japanese royal family then considered fostering morals part of their duty. In a way, they still do today.

七里ヶ浜の哀歌（真白き富士の嶺）– “An Elegy of Shichirigahama” (The Pure White Summit of Mount Fuji)
“Aika” here is a song of grief and “Shichirigama” is the name of a stretch of beach in Kamakura. The tune of this song is from the Franklin Square Song Collection of the 1880s. In 1910, 10 boys from Kaisei Secondary School for boys in Zushi, neighboring Kamakura, along with one younger boy, set out by boat to nearby Enoshima, but met rough seas and sank off the coast of Shichirigahama. All 11 drowned. A month or so later, the boys’ sister school, Kamakura Girls School, held a memorial service for the boys and their music teacher wrote commemorative lyrics to fit this song, which the girls, plowing through tears, managed to sing. For some reason, maybe because of the song, this story gripped the whole country in grief. People’s memory of it lingered on for decades. A movie was even made of it in the 1930s, and then a remake in the 1950. It was another song that everyone knew, it being taught in school all across the country. Now, however, only older people know it.

茶摘み – “Chatsumi” (The Tea-Picking Song)
Japanese children’s song taught in school until quite recently.

野菊 – “Nogiku” (Wild Daisies)
Japanese children’s song. I know a former student of the songwriter, Ishimori Nobuo (1897-1987). The student doesn’t particularly like the song, but I do. The score got separated on the website, but it’s all on one page in the PDF.

遥かな友に – Haruka no Tomo ni (To A Faraway Friend)
Long a favorite of Japanese university glee clubs. Also got separated on the website, but on one page in the PDF.

もみじ – “Momiji”
Something melancholic about this arrangement. You feel fall coming on.

山路こえて – “Yamaji Koete” (Over the Mountain Road)
Originally a shape-note hymn, “Golden Hill,” although this version sounds sweeter than the early American versions. (Early American hymns weren’t what you’d call “sweet”). The reason I’m sticking a church hymn in here is because of the story behind the Japanese lyrics. The writer was a Japanese preacher, Nishimura Sugao, from Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture. In the days just before the rail line from Matsuyama to Uwajima had opened, Nishimura walked all the way to Uwajima to preach (about 100 km depending on the road you take). On the way back, night was coming on and he was deep in the mountains far from any inn. The area has rather mild weather, but this was February and it was dark and he was lonely. He had recently come across “Golden Hill” in an English hymnal, but there were no Japanese words to it. That night, he made up Japanese words to it in his head and his loneliness went away. Nishimura later became the principal of Shinonome High School in Matsuyama. When I was in what was the precursor of the JET program (Mombusho English Fellows) in the early 80s, I was in Yamaguchi Prefecture, but I happened to meet an American teaching at Shinonome and he invited me to Nametoko English Camp in the mountains behind Uwajima. He knew the song too. Nametoko turned out to be about the biggest influence on my teaching career and I went back many more summers after that, even when I was no longer living in Japan. So I have fond feelings for the area between Matsuyama and Uwajima. The train tunnel goes right under Nishimura’s mountain pass (法華津峡、Hoketsu Pass).

夕べの鐘 – “Yuube no Kane” (Evening Bell)
If you’ve ever seen the Ozu Yasujirō’s 1953 classic, Tokyo Story, you’ll recall this song from the ending of the movie when Hara Setsuko’s character goes back to Tokyo from Onomichi. The Kagawa Kyōko character stands at the window of the elementary school where she teaches, seeing Hara Setsuko’s train go by down below. The sound of children singing this song is emanating from the school. Ozu used it to convey the innocence of the small-town life that Hara Setsuko was leaving behind. The original Stephen Foster song, however, is a lot more problematic, basically unsingable in English because of its lyrics regarding slaves. The title alone, “Massa’s In De Cold Ground”, is enough to tell you that. In Foster’s time, the song portrayed slaves as humans with human emotions, which was a step above conventional thinking, but the language he used would be considered deeply condescending or worse today. That problem is entirely absent from the Japanese, which just uses the tune. The words are the pure innocence Ozu wanted.

旅愁 – “Ryoshuu” (Loneliness on a Journey)
Another song adopted from an American tune, this one “Dreaming of Home and Mother.” It became a lot more popular in Japan in Japanese than it ever was in America in English, and is another song that was once taught it school. People up to a certain generation all know it, and after that generation, hardly anyone does.