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
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