English translation of the prose
AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.
Originally published:
This is material published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices describe circumstances at the time of its original publication.
The commentary is translated into English. Quoted lyrics remain in Japanese.
「湯の町エレジー」 and the Japanese People Immediately after the War
Author's name as given in the original: 橘かほり (lyricist)
Carrying On the Historical Songs of the Koga Melodies
Introduction
How many songs have I written lyrics for, won over by that enthusiasm? It seems only natural to me that every one of them has suddenly come to be sung so widely: 「なぎさ橋ブルース」, 「涙の観音さま」, 「ノストラダムスの魂」… Jun sets my poems to music. True to her character as a Romantic singer, she always sings with emotion poured into her whole body. She sings tearfully of a tragic love of the early Showa years at Sakatayama in Oiso in 「天国に結ばれた恋」, and also sings 「湯の街エレジー」, which became hugely popular after the war, and the songs of Noriko Awaya. What is more, this time she may have a chance to sing with a delicate sense of love in the Izu countryside, the setting of 『伊豆の踊子』, although this is not yet certain.
The Wandering Japanese of the Postwar Years
「湯の町エレジー」, introduced by Koga's melancholy guitar, appeared in Showa 23 (1948) and became a great hit in the sweet voice of 近江敏郎. Although its setting was a bar somewhere around Ito, it spread throughout the country. Few songs have spread so widely. Of course it suited the back alleys, where itinerant guitar players made their rounds and karaoke was still wholly unknown. But its success also came from lyrics that grasped the social circumstances of Japan at the time.
伊豆の山々 月淡く
灯りにむせぶ 湯のけむり
ああ 初恋の 君を訪ねて 今宵また
ギター爪弾く 旅の鳥
These four lines brilliantly reveal both the scene and the circumstances of a man with a complicated past. The lyricist's skill is exceptional. Listening, anyone is drawn in: what happened next? Did he find her? Who is the woman this man cannot forget? And so we are led into the second verse.
風の便りに 聞く君は
出湯の街の 人の妻
ああ 相見ても 晴れて語れぬ この思い
せめて届けよ 流し唄
So that is it. Poor fellow: perhaps he fell in love in Shanghai or Suzhou, or somewhere in the south, and repatriation tore them apart. Three years after the war he still does not know where she is, wandering with his guitar. The war ended in Showa 20 (1945), but demobilization and repatriation continued on a large scale. NHK radio broadcast 『鐘の鳴る丘』 every day, a drama about people working desperately to shelter dozens of war orphans. Its theme song, with the same name, played in elementary-school grounds across Japan. This was also the age of the 'Missing Persons' program: 'Someone who used to live in Jilin Province: so-and-so is now at such-and-such a place…' Such announcements filled long stretches of radio time every day.
So, just as in this song, a repatriate from overseas goes from bar to bar as an itinerant singer, following 「風の便りに…」. Beside him, military-themed bars are all the rage, former comrades loudly singing military songs and telling one another, 'I survived thanks to you.' Yet even if a lonely itinerant guitarist suddenly meets his lover, now another man's wife, they cannot speak openly. At least there is a song…
淡い湯の香も 路地裏も
君住むゆえに 懐かしや
ああ 忘られぬ 夢を慕いて 散る涙
今宵ギターも 咽び泣く
The second verse of the theme song 『青い山脈』 contains these lines:
古い上着よ さようなら
さみしい夢よ さようなら
Here, the old jacket means throwing off the khaki garments of the time—the military uniform and the so-called national uniform in the color called 'national-defense color'—and casting away the lonely dream of enduring privation, under the slogan 「ほしがりません勝つまでは」, for a great war that could never be won. But that does not mean one can say: throw away an unfulfilled love as well. It cannot be forgotten.
This is Romanticism. When someone is gravely wounded on a fierce battlefield and finally breathes their last, they think of the person they love and dream of heaven, becoming a corpse overgrown with grass or submerged in water.
Three years after the war, people were still searching for the missing. Thanks to General MacArthur's resourcefulness, the Japanese received tens of thousands of tons of LARA relief supplies, which kept them alive without any great number dying of starvation.
In Showa 25 (1950), the Korean War began, and Japan, serving among other things as a repair shop for damaged tanks, prospered in the boom in special procurements. Industry, too, came back to life. Today's elementary and junior-high schools pass briefly over the Japanese history of this period. Yet the boys and girls who had survived on substitute foods worked with fierce determination, transforming impoverished Japan into the world's second most prosperous country by GDP, after the United States, and leading the American economist Ezra Vogel to say 'Japan as Number One.' That is the generation now living frugally in their nineties on average pensions of 200,000 yen.
Original wording, author credits, notes and source materials are preserved there.