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.[1]
- ↑ See Embree, Acculturation among the Japanese of Kona, Hawaii.
tity 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.)
