Wakare no Ipponsugi and the Hometown in the Heart

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 9 April 2021. Essay dated 1 April 2021.

“Wakare no Ipponsugi” and the hometown within the heart

河内裕二

1. If it does not reach the heart, it is not a song

“There is music, but there is no song.”

These are the words of lyricist Yu Aku. He was lamenting a popular-music scene in which songs with almost unintelligible lyrics became million-sellers. This was in the late 1990s, when Japanese popular songs came to be called J-pop. His 1998 essay “Ongaku to Bungaku” puts it another way: there is only 音楽, enjoyment of sound, with no 文楽, enjoyment of words. He asks that 文楽 be read bungaku: “It is pronounced bungaku, but it is not 文学 [literature]; it is written 文楽, but it is not bunraku [puppet theater].” It is a characteristically witty expression. People listening to music enjoyed the sound but no longer enjoyed the words. He continued to lament a social tendency to disregard lyrics. Describing song as a matter affecting the survival of language itself, he wrote:

It was the mission of song to make us notice the unexpected weight of each small word it contained, or to lead us into a wider world we had never imagined. Precisely because of this, singers and listeners alike could become reflective, find encouragement, open their hearts, and receive intimations. I think this probably influenced everyday language too. (Showa Omochabako, p. 120)

We say that songs follow the times and the times follow songs. If song is a mirror of society, then society had become insensitive to language. As a lyricist expressing his age and society in words, Aku must have sensed that change more keenly than anyone and felt a crisis approaching.

I was in my twenties in the 1990s. As a young literature student, the popular songs I heard daily on television, radio, and street corners were precisely the million-sellers Aku questioned. Looking back, although I followed trends like everyone else, perhaps songs never interested me because what was playing was “music,” not “song.” It did not sink into my heart.

Many years have passed. Recently, one song did reach my heart: Hachiro Kasuga’s “Wakare no Ipponsugi.” This great enka song of homesickness became a major hit in 1955, more than fifteen years before I was born. The words are by Kimio Takano and the music by Toru Funamura. The two had worked together since music school and finally found success with this piece. Takano died of tuberculosis the following year, 1956, aged only twenty-six. Funamura overcame his grief at his friend’s death, continued working, and became one of the leading composers of postwar popular song. In his autobiography he writes:

A song is sung with the heart. No matter how excellent the technique, unless it comes from the heart’s murmurs and cries, it can never move the listener. (Uta wa Kokoro de Utau Mono, p. 2)

What is song? Aku says it is song, rather than music; Funamura says it is heart, rather than technique. Surely they mean the same thing. Song resonates in the heart, rather than merely the ear. Funamura described his life as “a rebellion against the tendency to rank Japanese music below Western music, and to despise popular songs and enka that sing of the sorrow of people living quietly in the corners of our towns.” The breakthrough that set him on his life as a composer was “Wakare no Ipponsugi.”

2. Tears overflow at the village boundary

泣けた 泣けた

こらえきれずに泣けたっけ

あの娘と別れた哀しさに

山のかけすも鳴いていた

一本杉の石の地蔵さんのよ

村はずれ

A man must cry only three times in his life.

I seem to remember hearing that as a child. Perhaps it included “in front of others.” The permitted occasions were birth, the death of a parent, and one more. I cannot recall the last, but the point was that a man should not cry readily. Today such a statement, premised on masculinity and femininity, would probably be considered gender harassment. Once, however, parents commonly told a child who had fallen, “You are a boy; do not cry.” Men do not cry: that was the shared understanding.

“Wakare no Ipponsugi” begins with 泣けた　泣けた. The sorrow of parting from his sweetheart makes the man weep; when he reaches the village boundary, the tears he has held back overflow. Perhaps he cannot cry before others. But what makes restraint impossible is that here he is finally parting from his hometown. Even the jay cries. The bird’s name, kakesu, is written 懸巣, referring to the nest it hangs in trees using dry twigs. Even its name somehow suggests home. His feeling is probably that he is abandoning his sweetheart and hometown, rather than simply leaving them. This is the remaining one of a man’s three occasions for tears. Nobody escapes parting. Even those who have never left home with a sweetheart behind can understand and share its pain and sadness. We are naturally drawn into the song’s world.

The lone cedar at the village boundary, with a stone Jizo beside it: the scene rises before our eyes. In Buddhism, the bodhisattva Jizo is said to appear in all six realms to save living beings. Jizo statues often stand at village boundaries, where travelers and ancestors are welcomed and seen off. Lyricist Kimio Takano wrote with the landscape of his native Ibaraki in mind, but the same scene existed in singer Hachiro Kasuga’s native Fukushima. There must be many such places in Japan. The cedar and Jizo were there before one’s birth; even if the village changes and one dies, they will remain forever unchanged. Tears shed on a station platform would not convey this rootedness in the land.

According to Funamura, Takano originally titled the song “Naketa kke.” When recording was decided, the producer changed it to “Wakare no Ipponsugi,” because, including the lyrics, there were too many repetitions of naketa. It was a brilliant change. The earlier title conjures no landscape; the new one evokes a scene and nostalgia, while the lone cedar’s presence also conveys loneliness and desolation.

The expression 泣けたっけ nevertheless embodies Takano’s intentions. The song’s novelty at its release was its colloquial language—more precisely, speech with a regional accent. Takano came from Ibaraki, but the ending っけ occurs in other dialects too. People from the provinces would have found something nostalgic in it. In Tokyo, Takano insisted on the regional. He reportedly told Funamura, “I will write lyrics in Ibaraki dialect. You set them to music in Tochigi dialect.” Songs they created could hardly fail to capture the hearts of people living in the city far from home. I too moved from Aichi to Tokyo in my twenties.

3. A distant hometown and rosy cheeks

遠い 遠い

想い出しても 遠い空

必ず東京へついたなら

便りおくれと云った娘

りんごの様な赤い頬っぺたのよ

あの泪

We are not told why he came to Tokyo. Home is distant because he left feeling he was abandoning it and cannot return. It need not be Hokkaido or Kyushu: Ibaraki or Tochigi will do, for the distance is in the heart. We do not know where the song’s hometown is. By avoiding specifics, it can become anyone’s own. If hometown and apples are directly linked, as in Michiya Mihashi’s “Ringo Mura kara” (1956), the story belongs in the apple-growing Tohoku region or Nagano. With りんごの様な赤い頬っぺた, people from Tohoku or Nagano may think of apples, while those from elsewhere think of rosy cheeks. The presence of the two words 空 and りんご may also recall “Ringo no Uta” (1945), a song probably known to everyone then and perhaps heard at home.

In the decade beginning in 1955, when “Wakare no Ipponsugi” was sung, many young people came to Tokyo through organized group recruitment, often rural junior-high-school graduates. Ministry of Education statistics put the 1955 high-school progression rate at 51.5 percent. These young graduates were called the “golden eggs” supporting Japan’s rapid economic growth. Special employment trains took them to their jobs. The first is often said to have departed Aomori for Ueno on 5 April 1954, although books such as Satoru Yamaguchi’s Shudan Shushoku to wa Nani ka suggest earlier examples. Hachiro Izawa’s “Aa Ueno Eki,” a hit about nine years after “Wakare no Ipponsugi,” has a more specific setting. A farming-family youth arrives at Ueno by employment train and, while struggling with delivery work, hears regional accents there, as Takuboku did, and remembers his parents at home. The 2005 film Always: Sunset on Third Street recreates this period. Set in Tokyo in 1958, it shows a young woman, Mutsuko Hoshino, arriving from Aomori by employment train to live and work at a downtown auto-repair shop. Still innocent-looking, she has conspicuously apple-red cheeks.

“Aa Ueno Eki” and Always also move us as we imagine these people’s feelings, but the open spaces of “Wakare no Ipponsugi” touch me more deeply. Perhaps it is more poetic. Even the final あの泪 may use 泪 rather than 涙 because these are the tears of the sweetheart in the hometown to which he cannot return: 涙 contains the character 戻, associated with returning. The writer’s feeling is invested in that choice.

4. What does one think of in a corner of the city?

呼んで 呼んで

そっと月夜にゃ呼んでみた

嫁にもゆかずにこの俺の

帰りひたすら待っている

あの娘はいくつ　とうに二十はよ

過ぎたろに

At night everyone feels lonely. Does the moon in the night sky illuminate the human heart as well? For some reason, looking at it makes us remember home. Long ago, Abe no Nakamaro, who had traveled to Tang China, thought of the home to which he could not return and composed:

天の原ふりさけ見れば春日なる三笠の山にいでし月かも

When we think of home, what comes first: landscape, people, or memories? If a woman comes to mind, it becomes an enka of homesickness.

At home, a woman awaits his return. Remaining unmarried, she waits single-mindedly for a man who does not even send letters. Looking up at the moon over Tokyo, what does he feel? He softly calls her name rather than shouting it. Surely he feels remorse. Yet he cannot return: he has accomplished nothing in Tokyo.

How old is someone described as とうに二十は過ぎたろ? Twenty-two or twenty-three, or perhaps in her late twenties? The neeya in the children’s song “Akatombo” marries at fifteen, but Rofu Miki wrote its words in 1921, thirty-four years earlier, and the word refers to a young maid in service, so it offers no guide to marriage ages in a song of this later period. The Ministry of Health and Welfare’s vital statistics give women’s average age at first marriage in 1955 as 23.8. If rural women married slightly younger than the national average, the waiting woman must already be beyond the customary marriage age, approaching an age when marriage would become difficult. If she is to marry, she should do so now; time is short.

What kind of life is he leading in Tokyo? Since the moon makes homesickness well up, his life must be unwelcome, painful, and harsh. Perhaps he lives with impatience and frustration, wondering how long it will continue. He does not seem broken or sunk in despair, so probably he has not abandoned his dreams and hopes. Are his days spent simply enduring?

His attitude does not convey a wish that his sweetheart keep waiting. Somewhere within him, might he want her to forget him and find someone else? He still has feelings, but cannot keep her waiting any longer. He sends no letter because doing so would give her expectations for their future. He must also have considered writing to end the relationship. Yet imagining her grief if the long-awaited letter brought a farewell makes him unable to write. If only, receiving no letters, she would give up this fruitless love and take a new path herself: is thinking this a man’s evasiveness, or his kindness? The song is filled with the sorrow of separation.

The song appeared in 1955, the first year of Japan’s period of rapid economic growth. In 1956 the Economic White Paper famously declared that it was “no longer the postwar period,” announcing the end of postwar recovery. Rapid growth continued until the 1973 oil shock. People went to the cities seeking prosperity and opportunity. Only when we leave the place where we were born and raised does a hometown come into being. This era created many hometowns.

In considering this song of homesickness, we should avoid simple binaries such as city versus countryside, or a changed self versus an unchanged hometown. As Funamura said, song is heart. As Saisei Muro expressed in the poem beginning ふるさとは遠きにありて思ふもの, home is something we hold in thought, and thinking of it brings it into being. “Wakare no Ipponsugi” does not sing about an already existing hometown. When we sing it, a hometown arises within the heart: a different lone cedar within each of us.