Koga Melodies and Romantic Poetry, Part 2

English translation of the prose

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

Originally published: 2 June 2024.

Material from the Japanese website. Historical assertions and dates are retained as written; quoted song lyrics remain in Japanese.

Koga melodies and romantic poetry, part 2

Seishu Hamano, President, Japan Romanticism Society

“Jinsei no Namikimichi”

一、泣くな妹よ　妹よ泣くな

　　　　泣けば幼い二人して

　　　　故郷を棄てた　かいがない

Both words and music sound as if Koga had written them. Yet the lyricist was Sonosuke Sato.

This tale of a brother and sister’s hardships runs through the experiences of both Koga and Sato. Indeed, leaving one’s birthplace in this way was something anyone from a poor farming family of the time would have known.

People like to call the school song “Furusato,” with its opening うさぎ追いしかの山, a peaceful song in which every Japanese person sings of nostalgia. That is wrong. Reality was anything but peaceful: the song expresses how poor that birthplace was, where there was scarcely enough to eat, and how badly one wanted to escape. Poor farming families had many children. Second and third sons cultivated land in the shadows of mountains, without sunlight, while taxes were high. They planted beans on field ridges, grew wheat as a second crop, dried astringent persimmons to sweeten them, sent daughters to spinning mills and sons into the army. Even then, families unable to eat chased wild rabbits and raccoon dogs, clubbed them to death, and put them in soup to keep starvation at bay.

The line 小鮒釣りしかの川 is not leisurely either. Muddy-tasting little crucian carp, loaches, carp, catfish, crayfish, snakes, sparrows: one had to catch and eat anything to survive. A daughter sent to factory work contracted pulmonary disease from overwork; her younger sister was sold into prostitution.

Such were the circumstances of the brother and sister who left their birthplace while still young.

二、遠いさびしい　日暮れの路で

　　　　泣いて叱った　兄さんの

　　　　涙の声を　忘れたか

The elder brother can only weep and remonstrate, even in court. His boyhood returns as though it were yesterday.

Such a tragedy would be incomprehensible in America; the Japanese government put all its strength into the military; Japanese politics was hopeless. Is that what you think? Was it really so?

In 1958, the American economist Galbraith published his celebrated book The Affluent Society. The 1950s in victorious America were a rightward-turning era at the height of an Americanism symbolized by Hollywood. Galbraith’s phrase “affluent society” promptly acquired a life of its own around the world. Japan soon entered its period of rapid economic growth, and following America came to seem natural.

Yet America too saw immigrants and refugees moving from the Midwest westward. During the pioneering era, impoverished people wandered in confusion. Even the 1920s Jazz Age was outwardly advertised as universal merrymaking, while New York’s East Side teemed with Russian, Eastern European, and Jewish refugees. Social systems cost money, and Japanese people knew nothing of the bottom layer of hunger and disease. Poor white people living barefoot were everywhere; they were called “poor white.” Newspaper advice columns of the time overflow with accounts saying that returning to the homeland would be better than this.

Nevertheless, many Japanese immigrants who supported themselves as farm laborers saved steadily, built splendid Western-style houses in their home villages, and proved themselves by having homes grander than the village head’s. Yet industrious Japan was desperately poor. Why did it fall behind? Why did it devote itself only to expanding armaments?

Every Japanese person knows from schoolbooks that the policy of enriching the country and strengthening the military was announced at the Meiji Restoration. Russia was the threat. Japan acquired Taiwan and Manchuria through the Sino-Japanese War and strove to maintain what it called an “absolute national defense zone.” Although it obtained rights over the southern half of Sakhalin in the Russo-Japanese War, everything remained half-finished. It consequently became trapped in continuing a war with China at enormous expense. Regarded as an aggressor, it was abandoned by America too.

The Manchurian Incident led to the war with China and finally to war with America. Common people were sent to the front by a red conscription notice costing one sen and five rin. In the army, sons of poor farmers were slapped day after day, yet second and third sons enlisted because even this seemed better than life as destitute peasants. The slogan 欲しがりません、勝つまでは—wanting nothing until victory—was therefore strikingly apt. In those circumstances, men reportedly volunteered to save younger sisters from being sold. The brother and sister of “Jinsei no Namikimichi” fled their birthplace before the call-up notice arrived, before they could be sold into prostitution or factory labor. This song appeared in 1937, only four years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Until quite recently, such mechanisms allowed poverty to distort an entire life.

Let us present the third and fourth verses together. Notice the change in tone.

三、雪も降れ降れ　夜道の果ても

　　　　やがて輝く　曙に

　　　　我が世の春は　きっと来る

　

　　四、生きてゆこうよ　希望に燃えて

　　　　愛の口笛　高らかに

　　　　この人生の　並木路

Dick Mine’s sweet-voiced singing, including these third and fourth verses, is exquisite and brings tears. Yet after the first two verses, this content offers no way out; despair cannot possibly be swept away by such an attitude alone.

The song is sung in a film in which Setsuko Hara plays the younger sister. Yet even the story of the film made afterward lacks the intensity of feeling in the song.

I feel that film or drama plots diminish the poignancy evoked by the first two verses. What do you think? Rather, let the song stand alone. Reflect on the circumstances I have described, which individual effort could not overcome, and on Japan’s poverty and helplessness. Then the song’s heart presses upon one all the more urgently.

Both Sonosuke Sato and Masao Koga were children of poor farmers who later achieved great success. Galbraith too was born into a poor farming family in Canada and became a forceful voice at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of California, Berkeley. He too belonged to the world of the “poor white” depicted by the American writer Anderson in Poor White. They were all almost contemporaries.

Seen this way, in 1932 the world was in the Great Depression and Japan had only just begun war with China. Not even ten years had passed since the Great Kanto Earthquake. The imperial capital’s reconstruction remained incomplete, yet war demanded money. The whole nation was frantically expanding its armaments. Relations deteriorated with America, its export market; it was an age of being told to sweat for increased production rather than indulge in Western music. A strong military required taxes while productivity was low, leaving the state unable to attend to relief for the poor.

Masao Koga’s life in his twenties, when he wrote the words and music of this song, was also at rock bottom. Earning a living by singing of the anguish of love was a dream beyond dreams. It was no ordinary world.

Do not assume that Koga was comfortably provided for merely because he attended Meiji University and founded its mandolin club. He lived in such poverty that he repeatedly missed meals. Just as he thought he had no choice but to sell his mandolin, his mother sent him five yen and some change. I recall writing elsewhere that today’s Koga melodies would not exist had he sold it. Sato too was at the very bottom of poverty.

I therefore believe that Koga, moved to tears by Sato’s lyrics, gave this sorrow-filled poem its deeply affecting music.