Shima-uta, times four

Thinking about the forms of musical genre led me, once again, to YouTube, where I ended up spending an unhealthy chunk of my day watching videos of Okinawan music – especially the contemporary stuff, which provides a case study, I think, in the importance of hybrid form and spiraling trajectories rather than clear progression. Even as early as the 1970s Okinawan music was still a local taste, of interest to preservationists and ethnomusicologists. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, Okinawan musicians – and a number of Japanese ones, too – started to experiment, fusing traditional motifs and tonal structures with modern orchestration to produce something that was distinctly friendly to pop and rock-trained ears yet still evocative of an island sensibility. The result was an explosion of interest in Okinawan music (and arts, too) within the Japanese pop and commercial music scene, such that Okinawan artists are among the best selling and widely known in Japan.

One of my favorite examples of the Okinawan influence is the 1992 hit song Shima Uta (“Island Song”) by Miyazawa Kazufumi of the Japanese pop group The Boom. Miyazawa is actually not from Okinawa, but the hit helped to draw attention to Okinawan music and consolidate the commercial viability of splicing Okinawan themes into popular forms. Wikipedia has an entry on ‘Shima Uta’ (which is also a term used to refer to island music in general). As it explains, the song was later covered by Gackt, an Okinawa-born who’s currently a popular hard rock musician / actor; Alfredo Casero, whose version became a huge hit in Argentina in 2002, and was adopted by the Argentinian World Cup team that year as their the theme song; and Rimi Natsukawa, also an Okinawan born popular singer. Here’s The Boom version:

Gackt, along with a traditional instrument ensemble:

And Casero’s cover:

I hope someone is writing a dissertation on the recent revival and popularity of Okinawan music and art, if it hasn’t been done already. In any event, I’m sometimes tempted to think that the transformation of island music into ‘world pop’ (a term I hate) represents a distinctive dynamic of which Okinawan music represents a particular salient case. Island musical cultures exist in often fragile cultural ecosystems, pushed around by dominant national cultures. Yet, they’re sufficiently isolated that, under the right circumstances, they may be able to transform themselves so that they’re not only fixated on the preservation of pre-existing traditions but mutate and find niches in scenes and commercial contexts far removed from their original location (Okinawan music is also popular in Latin America, especially Brazil and Peru, where a lot of Okinawans emigrated in the early 1900s for work). This may be possible only because artists succeed in playing genres off one another, borrowing and competing, overlapping and diverging, in ways that prove fortuitous. Thus, Okinawan ’shima uta’ (here in the generic sense of island music) adopted commercial and industrial modalities, but in its selective retention of traditional instruments and distinctive tonalities and themes, produced something that’s at once part of and yet distinct from standard pop fare. The new Okinawan influence retains certain preservationist impulses – but the orthodoxy they seek to defend is the value of insular sensibilities and ineffable attachments, rather than specific musical histories or codes, thus allowing themselves to be experimental with respect to both. It’s not state-sponsored, but rather aims itself, although subtly and indirectly, against the losses to memory incurred by the system of states.

Miyazawa, who’s not Okinawan, said that he was inspired to write ‘Shima Uta’ after visiting the Himeyuri Peace Memorial, in southern Okinawa, where the Japanese Army had its last stand against the approaching Allied forces. Hundreds of thousands of Okinawan civilians died in the battle, many in suicides forced by the Japanese military – a perennially politically contentious issue in Japanese/Okinawan relations. Perhaps this is what prompted someone to post Rimi Natsukawa’s version against a backdrop of historical photos from the Battle of Okinawa. Read the comments to see how messy, and fascinating, it all gets: