The present collection of songs from the single county of Kuma in Kyūshū consists of over a hundred texts transcribed in the village of Suye with a few (Nos. 79–85) from the adjacent village of Fukada. Only those songs actually sung are recorded. Many others, also popular, have been omitted or relegated to the Appendices, because not local to Kuma county. The present collection, then, while probably not complete, at least presents a fair proportion of the popular songs regarded by the people of Suye as local to the Kuma region. These of course include a few which in actual fact are not local, but have been introduced from other areas—and omit a few which might be regarded as local to Kuma by people of another part of the county.[1]
The Japanese text of the songs is given in the local dialect, romanization following the traditional Hepburn system.[2] The apostrophe is used to indicate
- ↑ There are a few other sources for songs of Kuma. One of these is a set of three small volumes, the Kuma County Readers, which deal with local history and geography for children in the upper grades of the elementary schools of Kuma. They include a couple of stanzas of Rokuchōshi (1–3) and one of the March Sixteenth songs (65). A better source is a mimeographed booklet entitled The Folksongs of Kuma District which is a collection of Kuma songs made by a school teacher, Ryūtarō Tanabe, in 1932. Tanabe includes musical notations, which unfortunately are not very accurate transcriptions of samisen music for the piano. A few of the verses in his collection occur in this study (Nos. 64–5, 68–70, 76–7, 117–20). On the other hand, he includes several not heard in Suye. Two other sources were also consulted: Nippon Minyō Jinten by Y. Kodera, a collection of songs arranged by type and by district. Kodera includes texts or references to Songs 64–5, 72, 75–7 of Kuma. Less useful is Gesammelte Werke der Welt Musik (text in Japanese, despite the German title); this volume, less reliable than Kodera, includes versions of Songs 61 and 82. Bonneau includes a bibliography on Japanese folksongs in his Folklore japonais, but most of the titles included were not available in Hawaii where most of the comparative work on this collection was done. One song in this collection (103) occurs in Uyehara’s Songs for Children Sung in Japan. Still another series of texts is to be found in Das Geschlechtleben der Japaner by T. Sato, H. Ihm and F. Kraus (2 vols.). Most of their texts, however, are from geisha songs, i.e. urban literary rather than rural folk.
- ↑ The Kuma dialect differs from the standard Japanese in a number of ways, the most common of which are:
(1) u sound for o as unna for onna (2) i sound for e as mai for mae (3) b sound for m as keburi for kemuri (4) dz sound for z as sakadzuki for sakazuki (5) n often becomes ŋ especially before g. (6) There are also many local terms as well as pronunciations, e.g. manjū means not only dumpling but also vagina; batten in the general sense of ‘but’ is local to Kyūshū, zuto is a local term, etc. (7) Occasional abbreviations such as watasi or wasi for watashi, shami for samisen, etc. In the Hepburn system consonants are as in English, vowels as in Italian; j and g are both hard as in English jug. A final ‘n’ counts as a separate syllable and a long vowel as two syllables. Thus the line, Kōyu goen ga, in Song 6 is counted as seven syllables.
