Things on Japan: August 2017

This 1600s koto was made as a thank you present from a guy to another guy for helping him kill people who were trying to kill him. (Cropped from a pic the Met's art gallery, if you were curious.)

So here we are again. Again. (Again....again. Ahem, again.) End of the month, the sun continues to rise in a generally east-ish direction, people fry their morning eggs and wonder about the true nature of cholesterol -- I've spent 28 of these 31 days basically not doing a thing for a post, in spite of slightly tense, mild remonstrances (or at least the one) to myself about getting it done. (You'd think there'd be some kind of solution to this somehow. ;) )

Now, I had had a thought of writing about another traditional festival dance (actually found tutorials on it even), but... I don't think so. Not yet. Instead, we'll talk about songs.

See, every so often, I try to find really old Japanese music. And fail miserably, as using my trusty keywords of old/ancient/traditional Japanese music/songs/folk songs tends to bring up absolutely the opposite of that for which I am hoping. (Ugh, nope, that's just stilted and unnatural. I don't care if it kept the preposition from the end of the sentence, it just doesn't sound right.) This week, I tried again. And came up with (non-video) results that included the Kinkafu or Songs to Koto (or Zither, depending, 'cause that's what a koto is, it turns out) Accompaniment. Which I tentatively posit the kanjis are thus: 琴歌譜.

History

There's only one known copy of then Kinkafu, and it's got a note that a guy, a ōutashi (a person who really knew what they were about when it came to music) named Ō no Yasuki copied it in 981 AD. Theorized dates as to the compilation of kinkafu include 810 or 918 AD.

I guess it was lost or something, because a guy named Sasaki Nobutsuna found it again in 1924 -- looked up the name, and there's a noted scholar with the same name (at least in the English alphabet, his kanji are 佐佐木信綱) who lived from 1872 to 1963. I wonder if it was him...Eh, probably. He had the motive and likely had access to ancient materials. (Lol, why yes I have been watching crime dramas, why do you ask?)

What's in It

Twenty-one song sheets/music-ified poems for koto and person -- or twenty-two, depending on the book (and verily which part of the same book, as I found) you read. (Because who wants to agree on everything? Sheesh...*inarticulate grumbling.*) It includes the right ways to stretch your vowels to fit the music. The lyrics are all written in Man'yōgana, the Chinese script worked to fit the Japanese language.

Seems the Kinkafu lifted a selections of its poems from other books like the Shoku Nihongi. Another thing that seems to be so is that whoever made the book changed the spellings of the poems a bit. (maybe to make the poems work better with the measures and the beats and suchlike) -- at least, that's what I got from one book. From my mathematical attempts, it looks like a good chunk of the songs came from the 600s and earlier. It gets confusing, so let's just keep going.

To give you a feel for what's in it, here's song 12, as from A History of Japanese Literature, Volume 2: The Early Middle Ages:

Soramitsu

Yamato no kuni wa

Kamu kara ka

Ari ga hoshiki

Kuni kara ka

Sumi ga hoshiki

Ari ga hoshiki kuni wa

Akitsushima Yamato

Is the Land of Yamato,

Seen against the sky,

A perfect place to be

Because it's true to the gods' ways?

Is it a perfect place to dwell

Because it's true to the land's ways?

The land where I want to be is

The Dragonfly Islands, Yamato.

Kinda nice, huh? Anyways, I like it. (A definite improvement over the farmer-swearing-at-the-rocks-he-keeps-finding-in-his-field song -- aka song 7. I mean, it does have a sort of meaningful weariness about the endless struggles and hardships that can plague the laboring man's days along with, to a lesser degree, a touch of wonder/mystery of ages long past meets paradise lost-ishness, but yeah, not one I'd advocate for singing in the complete original. (You are, of course, allowed to disagree, but I will disagree with you. ;) ) Plus, depending on the tune, I guess, it would be kinda depressing to sing or listen to, I'd think... Well, this l'il rant sure has got longer than I wanted -- I'll get back to the topic now.)

Here's another one, song 17, again kindly transposed and put into English by the same book. It's a mash up of "I love you thiiiisss much" meets "I'm following my significant other." But, you know, all naturey and rhythmic and poetic.

Isu no kami

Furu no yama no

Kuma ga tsume mutsu

Maro ka moshi

Ka ga tsume yatsu

Maro ka moshi

Mutsumashimi

Ware koso koko ni

Idete ore

Sumizu.

On Furu Mountain in

Isonokami

Bears have six claws,

And I -- oh my!

Deer have eight hoofs,

And I -- oh my!

I love him as much as that.

There's the reason why

I have come here to

The mountain spring.

Def'nitely got a sort of 1930s Disney/Broadway kinda feel. As for the title for these songs, I'm sure they're around. Somewhere. But I've not seen them on the page's I've read (or sometimes skimmed). So that's one mystery that'll just have to linger for now.

Segue to Atsuta Shrine and Back

There's also group of songs that, depending on the translation, you may see called "wine-blessing songs." They're some of the songs that also come from the Nihon Shoki. But in the Kinkafu, it (possibly) says (maybe) that they had a special use. You were supposed to sing 'em on Tōka no sechie. (A translation (boy, I'm using that word a lot in this post) I found for this term is 'stamping song banquet' -- 'cuz tōka can mean 'stamping song,' see. Apparently, tōka no sechie is only one part of a rite at Atsuta jingū/imperial shrine (or 熱田神宮 as people in Japan spell it) that's now held on January 11th. One place didn't mention all of this, but did say tōka no sechie was held (lunar style,mind) in the 1st month on the 16th day. Oh no wait, apparently the no sechie version was a Heian imperial thing, but it turned into a spring service of Atsuta shrine, praying for bumper crops -- the shrine's version's called Tōka Shinji. Whew, there, I hope that's got it all.)

Book on a Book

And speaking of wine and poetry (and the Kinkafu) there's an informative art book on it: Festive wine: ancient Japanese poems from the Kinkafu. Two guys (Noah Brannen and William Elliott,) and an artist called Maki Haku collaborated on it -- it's an annotated selection of the Kinkafu's song/poems plus art from Maki Haku (which he spelled 巻白 and it's actually his artist name; his actual name was Maejima Tadaaki. On a related note to this related note, he was born in 1924, the year of the Kinkafu's discovery -- coincidence?... Yeah, I think it was too.). It was published in 1969.

So Then

So then, did I find any recordings of these songs? No. Well, I may have found something (or two somethings,) but I wasn't sure exactly what they were. Instead, here's a rendition of Sakura on a 25 string koto: