Harry Urata audio recordings
odd: label: Shared Stewardship of Collections
content: The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage acknowledges and respects the right of artists, performers, Folklife Festival participants, community-based scholars, and knowledge-keepers to collaboratively steward representations of themselves and their intangible cultural heritage in media produced, curated, and distributed by the Center. Making this collection accessible to the public is an ongoing process grounded in the Center's commitment to connecting living people and cultures to the materials this collection represents. To view the Center's full shared stewardship policy, which defines our protocols for addressing collections-related inquiries and concerns, please visit https://doi.org/10.25573/data.21771155.
name: label: Creator
content: Harry Urata, 1917-2009
label: Former owner
content: Franklin  Odo, 1939-2022
topic: label: Occupation
content: Sugar workers -- Hawaii -- Songs and music.
label: Occupation
content: Immigrants -- Hawaii -- Songs and music.
label: Topic
content: Work songs
label: Topic
content: Japanese Americans -- Forced removal and internment -- 1942-1945
acqinfo: label: Provenance
content: Harry Urata bequeathed his collection of holehole bushi recordings to Franklin Odo in the 1980s. Odo presented the holehole bushi recordings collected by Harry Urata to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in 2015. This was done at the request of Harry Urata himself, who had, years earlier, visited the Center and decided that the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections were a good fit for his material.
creator: label: Creator
content: Harry Urata, 1917-2009
culture: label: Culture
content: Japanese Americans
setName: label: See more items in
content: Harry Urata audio recordings
abstract: label: Summary
content: The Harry Urata audio recordings consists of 20 field and oral history recordings, one commercially-released recording on CD, one documentary on DVD, and 9 transcribed lyric transparencies documenting holehole bushi, a folk song tradition originated by Japanese immigrants working in the sugar plantations of Hawai'i.
bioghist: label: Biographical / Historical
content: Harry Urata was born in 1917 in Hawai'i. After the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawai`i, Urata, a Japanese American, was placed in the Honouliuli Internment Camp. There he met Kawazo Kenpu, a journalist who supported Urata's interest in Japanese culture and popular music and encouraged  him to research  holehole bushi folk music once the war was over. 

Holehole bushi are "folk songs from Japanese immigrants who worked on Hawai'i's sugar plantations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries...Bushi is the Japanese word for melody or tune. Holehole is Hawaiian for the dead or dying leaves of the sugar cane." (1) 

When Urata was released from Honouliuli in 1945, he became a Japanese language instructor for the University of Minnesota but quickly turned around and returned to Hawai'i to work for the Japanese language radio station, KULA, to run their music programming. After a year, he traveled to Japan to study with the composer Koga Masao. When he returned to Hawai'i, he opened a music studio.  

In 1960, composer Raymond Hattori came to Hawai'i and worked with Urata to create a score based on holehole bushi, but it relied heavily on a single individual's retention, which was met with protest. As a result, Urata traveled to each of the Hawaiian islands, recording the songs with former plantation workers. He continued this field work until the 1980s, gathering both lyrics and sound recordings. 

Urata has been described as singularly responsible for the recovery of the holehole bushi repetoire. Toward the end of his life, he noted that his recovery, preservation and revitalization of the holehole bushi recordings was his proudest accomplishment. 

Dr. Franklin Odo met Harry Urata in the 1970s while Urata was running his music studio. While Odo was teaching in the Ethnic Studies Department at The University of Hawai'i in Manoa, the two collaborated on writing an article about holehole bushi music and participated in a 1984 episode of Rice and Roses, produced by Honolulu's public KHT public television station to discuss the holehole bushi tradition.

In the 1980s, Urata bequeathed his collection to Odo, who later became the founding director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. His book Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai`i  was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and dedicated to Urata to whom, he states in the Preface, "this work owes its existence." Urata's collection consists of 20 open-reel tapes and cassettes recorded between 1960-1980, as well as transcribed lyrics.
  

(1) Odo, Franklin. "Holehole Bushi." Densho Encyclopedia, April 8, 2024. Accessed February 5, 2025. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Holehole%20bushi/.
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 16 Sound tape reels
label: Extent
content: 4 Sound cassettes
label: Extent
content: 9 Transparencies
label: Extent
content: 1.25 Cubic feet
label: Extent
content: 1 Sound disc
label: Extent
content: 1 Electronic discs (DVD)
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1960-2000
label: Date
content: bulk 1960-1980
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections
identifier: label: Identifier
content: CFCH.URAT
objectType: label: Type
content: Collection descriptions
label: Type
content: Archival materials
label: Type
content: Sound tape reels
label: Type
content: Sound cassettes
label: Type
content: Transparencies
label: Type
content: Sound discs
label: Type
content: Electronic discs (dvd)
label: Type
content: Holehole bushi
label: Type
content: Oral history
arrangement: label: Arrangement
content: Audio series is arranged in original order, when possible. Open reel tapes were numbered sequentially before acquisition and remain in that order. Cassette tapes were not labeled with numbers; processing archivists continued sequential numbering from open reel tapes. Tape numbers in brackets were developed by archivists upon collection receipt.

Lyrics series is arranged original order, when possible. Lyric transparencies, like the tapes, were labeled with sequential numbers before acquisition, and remain in that order.
genre_format: label: Genre/Form
content: holehole bushi
label: Genre/Form
content: Oral history
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: The Harry Urata audio recordings consist of 20 field and oral history recordings on open reel tape and compact cassette formats, one commercially-released recording on CD, one documentary on DVD, and 9 transcribed lyric transparencies documenting holehole bushi, a folk song tradition originated by Japanese immigrants working in the sugar plantations of Hawai'i.