# Japanese Peasant Songs/Introduction

Introduction
I. Cultural Context of the Songs
Kuma county, the locale of the songs presented in this collection, is a rural district in south central Kyūshū Island, Japan, about two and one-half hours by rail from Kumamoto City and thirty from Tokyo. The mountains which border the county enclose a fertile basin through which flows the Kuma river, an ideal setting for the traditional Japanese form of wet rice agriculture.
The people of Kuma live in villages, each made up of a number of hamlets or small clusters of thatched cottages surrounded by paddy land or upland mulberry fields. As with other agricultural folk societies, periods of tedious farm labor alternate with times of festival and sociability. During the spring months everyone is busy with rice planting and transplanting, during the summer with raising silk worms, and during the fall with harvest; but after each such period of work, especially during the winter months after the crops are in, comes a leisure period during which are held many banquets marked by drink and song and dance.
Ordinary daily work is carried on by each household individually—the able-bodied men and women working in the fields, grandparents doing lighter chores around the house while their grandchildren lend a hand or play, as they sing some tune in rhythm with their occupation. While this daily life may become at times a tedious affair, it is rarely a grind, for there are frequent pauses to smoke a miniature pipe or indulge in an in-between-meal snack enlivened by gossip and rude jokes. Work follows the sun and the seasons, not a time clock.
Certain types of work are performed communally, as when a group of households exchange labor at the time of rice transplanting, or a man’s neighborhood group assists him in building a house. Public works such as making a bridge or repairing a road are also carried out on a cooperative basis, the people working in groups, thus relieving the arduousness of the task. There is an esprit de corps among the workers which is maintained by the realization of the necessity of the task, enhanced by good humored, rather broad banter and an occasional snatch of song. Such cooperative labor is always followed by a drinking party at which all the workers relax, exchange drinks with one another and cement their economic interdependence with a warm social relationship. Social integration is reinforced with social euphoria.
In a peasant community such as a Japanese village the crises of life, the rites de ​passage, are marked by special ceremonies and celebrations, the most important of which is the wedding banquet. Whereas community labor is a neighborhood affair, a gathering of people on a geographic basis, the gathering of relatives for a wedding or a funeral is a coming together of people as kin. In one situation the solidarity of the local group is expressed, in the other the ties of kinship strengthened.
Another event, something of a crisis in a peasant community, is departure on a long journey, an event socially recognized by farewell banquets. These feasts are big occasions, especially of recent years when the prospective traveler happens to be a young conscript. The young man’s family gives a large banquet for neighbors and relatives, a banquet marked by much song and more wine, “to lighten the traveller’s footsteps.”
The waxing and waning of the moon and the rhythmic round of seasons both affect the social life of a Japanese folk community. This is reflected by the predominance of festivals on the fifteenth of the lunar month, that is, at the time of the full moon, and by numerous festivals in spring and in autumn, at New Year, and midsummer. Some of these festivals are celebrated on a small scale at the neighborhood god house, others on a larger scale at the village temple or shrine and all of them are, of course, occasions for song and dance and the exchange of drinks. The periods of labor in the fields are thus both relieved and set off by festivals of the full moon and by celebrations in honor of deities of rice, of motherhood, and of medicine.
The songs sung at banquets and festivals are true folksongs; they are anonymous, familiar to every one present and reflect in one way or another the social values of the group. With the exception of some of the seasonal songs (Shonga, No. 71, and Jūgoya, No. 76) there is little discrimination in the choice of verses to be sung at a given banquet—they may include Rokuchōshi (Nos. 1–4), a favorite at all times, some verses from March 16th (No. 64), a song or two from another region such as Sado Okesa (No. 121).
The popular songs are well known to everyone in the village and are learned as part of the general folkways of the group by a growing child rather than through any formal teaching. Children always linger about a house where a banquet is in progress, so it is not difficult for them to acquire a knowledge of the words and of the tunes. As far as performance goes, it is usually the full adults of the group, that is those married and with children, who are the freest performers, for it is not seemly for the youthful to indulge in such boisterous pleasures. Furthermore, most dancing is solo, and serves as a means of ​self-expression and of attracting attention direct to oneself, a behaviour privilege reserved to older people.
The songs are accompanied by the samisen, a stringed instrument played by a woman, while the dances are performed by both men and women. The more indecent dances involving suggestive forward and backward jerks of the hips and an occasional loosening of the upper part of the kimono to expose the breast are performed, for the most part, by older women.
These folksongs and dances bring out two interesting contrasts in Japanese peasant life. One of these is the formality of the opening phases of a banquet with elaborate seating arrangements in order of rank, age, and sex, neatly placed trays containing food carefully arranged and of set quality and type according to the occasion, a formal request to partake by the hostess, and perhaps a few formal speeches in regard to a wedding or a departing soldier. Throughout this opening formal period of the banquet everyone sits stiffly on his knees until finally, formalities over, the host tells his guests to be at ease. This is the signal for everyone to cross his legs in front of him, begin eating and exchanging drinks. The conversation becomes general and loud, and the formal seating arrangement is shattered as people go from place to place to exchange drinks, or play Kuma-gen, a special finger game (played only by men). Soon some woman brings out a samisen and the party is on. In general, the more important the occasion, the stiffer the opening formalities of a banquet and the noisier and bawdier the subsequent period of song and dance.
The other marked contrast in village life is the difference in behavior at a party of a young girl and an older woman. While the women at a banquet become literally the life of the party, young girls neither sing nor dance, but instead demurely carry out their duties of serving the guests and pouring drinks. They never drink themselves, neither do they smoke. This contrast between young unmarried girls and old mothers of children, so marked at a banquet, is but an accentuation of a general condition in village life where a woman begins to smoke and drink only after the birth of a child, and where the older she becomes the freer she may be in her conversation. The extreme sexuality of some women at banquets may be a reflection of severe repression or deprivation in daily routine farm life.
​The reader may be curious as to the extent to which popular urban songs have encroached on the territory of the rural folksong, so far as small out-of-the-way villages such as Suye, in Kuma county, are concerned. The answer to this is that popular songs of the city are almost unkown in the village. One or two young men who have been away from home for several years working in a city or attending college may bring back one or two such songs, but they are rarely taken up by anyone in the village. Another sort of song is that sung in geisha houses, more along a classical sentimental line than a rustic outspoken one, and some of these undoubtedly do diffuse to the village from time to time. Some villagers visit geisha houses from time to time and many of the girls in the houses are from villages, so a certain amount of diffusion both ways is to be expected. Songs 40 and 57 are probably examples of geisha songs which have become part of the village repertoire, and on the other hand, any geisha, if necessary, can always produce a coarse folksong.
It is perhaps worth noting that in Japanese immigrant communities in America, the folksong plays a very minor role. There are fewer occasions for banquets, and members of the society come from various parts of Japan, and so do not share a common body of folk tradition. Group solidarity based on a common body of folklore and folksong is much weaker in an immigrant community than in a Japanese village. Furthermore, the second generation, having acquired American ways, looks down upon the ways of its parents as uncouth. These younger people, more urbanized than their parents, are more likely to know the latest popular swing tune than the words of a song from their parents’ home country.
* ↑ Each neighborhood or hamlet god house is the home of some popular deity such as Kwannon (mercy), Yakushi (medicine), or Jizō (children and safety).
* ↑ Called in the local dialect shami.
* ↑ An interesting custom which may also be related to this behavior is that of women masquerading as men on certain occasions, the commonest being the return home of a soldier or other traveller from afar. At this time a number of women from the traveller’s hamlet don some old clothes of their menfolk and join the welcoming group of villagers at the outskirts of the village. In addition to the clothes, makeshift masks are worn to hide the identity of the masqueraders who act the part of buffoons, imitating in an exaggerated manner the gait and attitudes of men, making lewd passes at young girls and in general creating hilarity among those present. Later the women return home to divest themselves of their men’s clothing and help serve at the welcoming banquet of the hamlet and join in the song and dance. The disguise is so effective that men cannot, or at least claim they cannot, recognize their own wives when they masquerade on such occasions. This lack of recognition may of course be formal, a way of avoiding the embarrassment of recognizing a female relative acting in such a manner. A less formalized transvesticism occurs frequently at banquets where some woman may put on a few men’s garments and sometimes even use a cushion or the spout of a wine jug as a phallus as they perform some comic dance. (This behavior of Kuma women parallels in some ways Naven behavior of the New Guinea latmul as described by Gregory Bateson in his book Naven.)
* ↑ See Embree, Acculturation among the Japanese of Kona, Hawaii.
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II. Form
The chief formal characteristic of Japanese folksong, as also of the literary poem, is an emphasis on syllables rather than meter. Practically all Japanese poetry, including folksong, is arranged in a series of lines of five and seven syllables. Another important trait, brevity, is also characteristic of both the literary and the folk poetry.
The standard literary forms of Japanese poetry are the tanka dating from the seventh century at the latest as evidenced by the poems in the Manyōshū (Japan’s oldest anthology, early ninth century), and the haiku, a later development from the tanka. A third type is the naga-uta. The tanka is a poem of thirty-one syllables arranged in a series of lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. The haiku or hokku is a poem of seventeen syllables, 5-7-5. Practically all standard Japanese literary poetry is composed in these two forms. The third form, less common, is the naga-uta or “long” poem, consisting of an indefinite number of lines up to one hundred or so in a series alternating between five and seven syllables with an extra seven-syllable line at the end. A tanka by way of envoi may be added at the end of a naga-uta.
The folksong is a quite distinct form from the much studied literary tanka and haiku. Instead of thirty-one syllables the regular folksong or dodoitsu is composed of twenty-six syllables arranged in a series of 7-7-7-5. At the end of the dodoitsu there is usually a refrain of nonsense syllables serving as a chorus, e.g., the ‘Yoiya sa’ of rokuchōshi or ‘Dokkoise no se’ of dokkoise folksongs. The dodoitsu form is the predominating type of song in this collection.
There is also a long form of folksong or ballad to accompany the work of foundation pounding which may be in the alternating five- and seven-syllable line form, but lacking the final extra seven-syllable line of the literary naga-uta, and without benefit of a tanka envoi, or it may be one long series of seven-syllable lines (e.g., Nos. 61, 79, 90).
In addition to the predominating dodoitsu or twenty-six-syllable songs and the longer ballads there are a number of other special forms. One of these is a form of 5-7-7-5 or twenty-five syllables (as in No. 54), another is 5-7-7-7-5 (Nos. 36, 48). There are also occasional six-line, thirty-eight-syllable songs (7-7-7-5-7-5) as for instance, Song 75; this is simply the dodoitsu form with an extra couplet added. The Penis Song (No. 59) has a special (5-7-7-7) pattern.
A free irregular form of varying length, often more or less improvised and of humorous content, is the hayashi, which may follow after one or more dodoitsu in singing. Song 4 is a good example of the hayashi.
Children’s game songs exhibit a number of special patterns unlike the dodoitsu ​or the ballad, the length of the line being irregular to correspond to movements in the game and full of onomatopoeic words and plays on sound to accompany a pebble game or the bouncing of a ball (No. 91). A common form in children’s game songs is one in which the final syllables or final words of a line correspond to the beginning syllable of the next line (Nos. 90, 91); another form of song found in children’s games combines counting with the content of the song (No. 88), a form which also occurs in the Penis Song (No. 59).
Rhythm is as important to Japanese folk poetry as to most folksong. A regularly repeated chorus such as ‘Yoiya sa’ is characteristic of all the songs in actual singing, the refrain occurring after each “stanza” and in some songs after the second as well as the fifth lines. Sometimes the last word of the second line is itself repeated as a refrain as in Song 1. A simple rhythm is found in the ballads sung to accompany earth pounding (dotsuki) where lines of five and seven syllables alternate regularly. In addition there are alternating pairs of refrain which are sung as a chorus after every line; this imparts a regular rhythm in time with the pounding regardless of whether the ballad is of the 7-7-7-7 or 7-5-7-5 syllable pattern. E.g., Song 79:
Kyō wa hi mo yoshi yoi yoi Kichijitsu gozaru yoi yoiya nya ara nya tose Kichijitsu yoi hi ni yoi yoi Dotsuki nasaru yoi yoiya nya ara nya tose etc.
As noted, the regular dodoitsu or twenty-six-syllable form is on a 7-7-7-5 syllable pattern, but occasionally a sort of symmetrical rhythm occurs as in the songs of 5-7-7-5 or 5-7-7-7-5 (Nos. 54, 36). Rhythm also occurs within the songs through the regular repetition of certain words or phrases, e.g., Song 5.
Omaya meiken Washa sabi gatana gatana gatana to Omaya kirete mo Washa kirenu yoiya sa koi sasa
​In this song in addition to the regular refrain of rokuchōshi (yoiya sa, koi sasa) the last word of the second line is repeated to correspond to a refrain and within the song itself Omaya and Washa alternate rhythmically.
Rhyme is not used in Japanese poetry either literary or folk, since the language is basically a series of syllables all ending in vowels. An exception to this is a final ‘n’ which is derived from an archaic ‘mu’. It always counts as a separate syllable where it occurs and if it is followed by a ‘b’ or ‘p’, it becomes ‘m’. In place of rhyme other devices are used. Alliteration occurs as in Song 20: Korobi kokureba or Song 39: Okitsu motsuretsu More common is assonance, e.g., in Song 31: Mono mo īyo de or Song 34: Kaya-yane arare Internal repetitions and plays on sound are also frequent, as in Song 37:
Sake no sakana Udonu ka soba ka Udonu soba yori Kaka no soba
or Song 50:
Shōchū wa nomi nomi Mi wa hadeka demo Geko no tatetaru Kura wa naka
Rhythm of the songs is emphasized or coördinated with various bodily movements depending upon the occasion. In the banquet songs in addition to the samisen music, the participants clap their hands to emphasize the time, in children’s games songs the rhythm corresponds to some movement such as the bouncing of a ball, in the dotsuki, the rhythm of the song assists the pounders to keep regular time in their work.
There are two notable characteristic literary forms in Japanese poetry, the pillow word and the pivot word. The pillow word is a formalized set phrase, like the “rosy fingered dawn” of Homer, which often serves as the opening line of a tanka. This is not common in the folksongs, though some examples do occur such as comparing a girl to a flower in Song 41. The pivot word is a single ​word used in one context with two or more meanings and is a valuable device for imparting much meaning in few words. In the literary forms this is not used in a humorous way, but in the folksong the pivot word often serves as a broad sort of pun (e.g., ‘koshimoto’ in Song 18, ‘irekuri’ in Song 53).
Onomatopoeia is common, usually for humorous effect, as in the description of a country headman’s gait “shakkuri, shakkuri” (Song 4b).
In general, each stanza, even of the same song, forms a separate thought and is complete in itself, so that a song such as Kuma Rokuchōshi consists of a number of stanzas which, while all dealing with Kuma, could be and are arranged in any order when sung. Thus, while words and tunes are standardized, arrangement and choice of stanzas is up to the singer. There are a few exceptions to this, as for instance the double stanzas of Shonga Odori (Nos. 73, 74) or the numbered series of stanzas in the Penis Song (No. 59) which are always sung in the same order.
III. Content
As to content, the two basic human needs of food and sex receive the most constant attention. The references to ordinary foods and to the drinking of wine are very frequent (e.g., Nos. 15, 50). The treatment of sex, though sometimes sentimental (Nos. 10, 26) is more often frank and vulgar (Nos. 8, 20). The old village custom of visiting a young lady in her room at night is reflected in Songs 12 and 38 and a broad humor, mostly sexual, is characteristic of many of the songs. In addition there is frequent parody of the solemn or serious (Nos. 4, 109). Simple descriptions of nature occur, as in Song 47, but there is a remarkable lack of reference to the seasons, the words winter, summer, spring, and autumn being almost completely absent. Together with this there is a general lack of any personification of the forces of nature. There are similes such as comparing a woman to a flower but no metaphor unless one can consider secondary hidden meanings read into a song as metaphor (No. 51).
Judging by the content, the songs for the most part date from the Yedo period—eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An occasional use of some place name no longer existing or a thing no longer used, as the coin ryō in Song 62, would indicate an age of one hundred years or so. No examples of ancient poetry such as that found in the Manyōshū were discovered. While some of the dialect used may appear to a Japanese reader as archaic, it is no different from the current Kuma dialect of Japanese which contains many old speech forms no longer current among the speakers of standard Japanese in Tokyo.
A striking feature of Japanese folksong is its similarity to Japanese literary forms, a reflection perhaps that in many ways Japanese culture is firmly ​imbedded in an old peasant ethos. While the regular folksong or dodoitsu has an arrangement of syllables distinct from the literary forms of tanka and haiku, it is basically similar in form to the literary type, being a brief series of syllables arranged in a set pattern of fives and sevens. This is in contrast to the great difference in form of the English ballad and folksong on the one hand and literary forms such as the sonnet and ode, on the other. In Japan not only are both folk and literary poetry characterized by five- and seven-syllable unrhymed lines, each poem being as a rule less than half a dozen lines in length, but both employ much the same devices of pivot words and assonance for their effects. There are also certain similarities in content. Personification of nature is lacking and meanings are suggested rather than named. One sharp contrast does exist, however, as far as content is concerned: while the literary poetry is largely concerned with sentimental suggestions of love and the changing seasons, much of the folk poetry is concerned with the primary desires of food, drink, and sex. The court poet and more recently the city litterateur have both looked upon the peasant as a quaint individual of no great importance and have concerned themselves largely with the expression of delicate introspections in a limited poetic form, never realizing that the fundamentals of their form derive from the broad and earthy songs of the peasantry.
IV. Sources and Acknowledgements
The literary forms of tanka and haiku have been well studied by Occidentals, but almost no one has taken the pains to learn anything about the songs of the folk. Two men who have made collections are Georges Bonneau and Lafcadio Hearn. Bonneau, for many years a resident of Japan, has devoted much of his time to a collection of dodoitsu from various parts of the country, and has published his texts with French translations. Hearns’s work was less methodical, being incidental to his general writings about the country, and he frequently gives English versions of the songs without any original Japanese text.
​The present collection of songs from the single county of Kuma in Kyūshū consists of over a hundred texts transcribed in the village of Suye with a few (Nos. 79–85) from the adjacent village of Fukada. Only those songs actually sung are recorded. Many others, also popular, have been omitted or relegated to the Appendices, because not local to Kuma county. The present collection, then, while probably not complete, at least presents a fair proportion of the popular songs regarded by the people of Suye as local to the Kuma region. These of course include a few which in actual fact are not local, but have been introduced from other areas—and omit a few which might be regarded as local to Kuma by people of another part of the county.
The Japanese text of the songs is given in the local dialect, romanization following the traditional Hepburn system. The apostrophe is used to indicate ​elided phonemes. Titles, unless otherwise noted, have been invented by the author on the basis of either the content or the first line. No text is given in hiragana, the Japanese syllabary, for two reasons: (a) the songs form part of an oral tradition, hence may be transcribed as properly in romaji as in hiragana; and (b) in some ways the syllabary is misleading. The word used to indicate the first person singular in standard Japanese is ‘watakushi’ but in Kuma this word is often pronounced ‘watashi’ or ‘watasi’ and it is impossible to indicate these two different pronunciations in hiragana. Similar difficulties would attend the use in this study of the new government-sponsored method of transcription of Japanese syllables into roman letters.
The collection of texts was made in southern Japan in 1935–36. In the village of Suye most of the texts were transcribed by Ella Embree when first heard at some gathering, then were at a later date checked for accuracy with the singer or some other villager. The singers themselves sometimes furnished an explanation of a difficult line, while a college educated native of Suye, Mr. Keisuke Aiko, and Mr. Toshio Sano, a graduate of the Tokyo Language School, assisted in preparing the preliminary English translations. The final translations were worked out in Hawaii with the assistance of Professor Yukuo Uyehara of the Oriental Institute of the University of Hawaii.
University of Hawaii July 1941
* ↑ More detail on the characteristics of Japanese poetry may be found in Primitive and Mediaeval Japanese Texts by F. V. Dickens (text, translation and commentary on the Manyōshū).
* ↑ Georges Bonneau, L’expression poétique dans le folklore japonais, 3 vols. (Referred to hereafter as Folklore japonais.) This work includes versions of Songs 41, 43, 65, 89, and 108 of Kuma. See also Bonneau’s Anthologie de la poésie japonaise and his Le probleme de la poésie japonaise.
* ↑ His translations and comments may be found in a number of different essays, the most important of which are in the volumes Gleanings in Buddha Fields, In Ghostly Japan, Shadowings, and A Japanese Miscellany. In 1914 most of these songs were brought together in a single posthumous volume, Japanese Lyrics. Variations of Songs 7, 26, 33, 103, and 108 have been recorded in one or another of these works.
* ↑ There are a few other sources for songs of Kuma. One of these is a set of three small volumes, the Kuma County Readers, which deal with local history and geography for children in the upper grades of the elementary schools of Kuma. They include a couple of stanzas of Rokuchōshi (1–3) and one of the March Sixteenth songs (65). A better source is a mimeographed booklet entitled The Folksongs of Kuma District which is a collection of Kuma songs made by a school teacher, Ryūtarō Tanabe, in 1932. Tanabe includes musical notations, which unfortunately are not very accurate transcriptions of samisen music for the piano. A few of the verses in his collection occur in this study (Nos. 64–5, 68–70, 76–7, 117–20). On the other hand, he includes several not heard in Suye. Two other sources were also consulted: Nippon Minyō Jinten by Y. Kodera, a collection of songs arranged by type and by district. Kodera includes texts or references to Songs 64–5, 72, 75–7 of Kuma. Less useful is Gesammelte Werke der Welt Musik (text in Japanese, despite the German title); this volume, less reliable than Kodera, includes versions of Songs 61 and 82. Bonneau includes a bibliography on Japanese folksongs in his Folklore japonais, but most of the titles included were not available in Hawaii where most of the comparative work on this collection was done. One song in this collection (103) occurs in Uyehara’s Songs for Children Sung in Japan. Still another series of texts is to be found in Das Geschlechtleben der Japaner by T. Sato, H. Ihm and F. Kraus (2 vols.). Most of their texts, however, are from geisha songs, i.e. urban literary rather than rural folk.
* ↑ The Kuma dialect differs from the standard Japanese in a number of ways, the most common of which are: (1) u sound for o as unna for onna (2) i sound for e as mai for mae (3) b sound for m as keburi for kemuri (4) dz sound for z as sakadzuki for sakazuki (5) n often becomes ŋ especially before g. (6) There are also many local terms as well as pronunciations, e.g. manjū means not only dumpling but also vagina; batten in the general sense of ‘but’ is local to Kyūshū, zuto is a local term, etc. (7) Occasional abbreviations such as watasi or wasi for watashi, shami for samisen, etc. In the Hepburn system consonants are as in English, vowels as in Italian; j and g are both hard as in English jug. A final ‘n’ counts as a separate syllable and a long vowel as two syllables. Thus the line, Kōyu goen ga, in Song 6 is counted as seven syllables.
* ↑ The field work was financed by the Social Science Research Committee of the University of Chicago. An ethnographic monograph based on the research, Suye Mura, A Japanese Village, was published by the University of Chicago Press (1939). Some of the songs given below first appeared in Suye Mura. The University of Chicago Press has kindly permitted the reprinting of such texts here.
* ↑ An interesting characteristic of folk society, that everything must be in its proper social context, was shown in the difficulty informants found in remembering the words of songs when alone and not singing. They felt, and said so, that they could not remember the songs properly without samisen music, a group of friends, and a drink.
* ↑ Whenever any variation in text or translation of songs appearing both in Suye Mura, A Japanese Village (see note 10) and in this collection appears, the text or translation given in this collection may be regarded as the more accurate.