Mako and I are now back in Alabama, but Japan is still lingering on our minds the way a place does after a memorable visit, the way I suppose Alabama does for those of you who come here to sing. In the month of June, we led what were, as far as I can tell, the first shape-note singing schools in Japanese history (or if anyone ever sang shape notes before in Japan, there’s no Internet trail). I used songs from the Christian Harmony in seven shape, as well as some old Japanese songs and a couple Sacred Harp songs transposed into seven shapes, mainly because Japanese learn solfege in elementary school. I don't mean they just sing the Do-Re-Mi song from the Sound of Music as you may have done in school. They actually use do-re-mi to learn new songs. So at the singing schools, teaching shape notes was a relatively simple task of attaching shapes to something they already knew. With amazing speed, we could go from talking about what shape notes are and singing them off of my chart to launching into actual songs in four parts. The whole idea of shape notes had always struck me as so thoroughly sensible, and now it seemed that way to so many Japanese people that I wondered why nobody had ever done this before. Last year I mentioned to the Alabama State Council on the Arts people that I would be teaching shape notes in Japan and was so brazen as to ask if they might be able to offer any financial assistance. To my surprise they did, which helped a lot. So now a little bit of Alabama has been lovingly planted in Japan. I think the Japanese refer to this as “soft power.” Y’all, there’s an entire nation there just waiting to be taught shape notes.
With said assistance, as well as a lot of generosity from people in Japan, I ended up doing a singing school in some form or another on four separate occasions, with Mako’s help in Hitachi, Birmingham’s sister city, and Tokyo, and by myself in Osaka and Hagi in Yamaguchi Prefecture. The first event was on June 1 in Hitachi on the campus of Ibaraki Christian University. Mako and I were leading a study group of 10 students from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the good folks at IC treated us like VIPs, inviting us to stay on their campus and teach our singing school just for the mere fact that we were from their sister city. Altogether somewhere around 60 people showed up: university students and faculty, townspeople, church folks, and our UAB students, who had to go all the way to Japan to learn this.
I wanted to start out with something familiar to Japanese people, and in their own language, so the first song we sang was a Japanese song called "Ryoshuu," which means the kind of longing you have when you go back to your hometown and it’s not the same, and you're left with the overwhelming sense that you really can’t go back. All that meaning packed into that one word. Someone took some home movies of part of the singing and that video eventually got to me. It’s a little shaky, and there’s a jump in the first one, and remember, they hadn't seen a shape note 30 minutes before this, but anyway, here it is:
Then we tried "Dundee"
and "Angel Band"
in English, both from the Christian Harmony. Then we sang another Japanese song about picking tea, called "Chatsumi."
We sang more, but that’s enough to give you an idea.
The next singing was on June 24 in a church in Tokyo (Tokyo Holy Trinity Church). By then the UAB students had already gone back to Alabama, but Mako and I stayed another 8 days. This workshop came about thanks to friends of a friend, the in-between friend being Hunter Hale, who lived in Japan a long time, but is originally from Dalton, GA. I met him at the National Sacred Harp Convention several years ago and last year mentioned to him that I would be teaching this shape-note workshop in Hitachi and asked if he knew if there might be any interest in Tokyo. Sort of a leading question. I was determined to do this in Tokyo too. It’s always a surprise to Americans, but there’s an avid bluegrass music community in Japan and the folks he paired me up with were Japanese bluegrass enthusiasts who were also interested in shape-singing as it's one of the roots of bluegrass. They created a bluegrass/shape-note event in a church in Tokyo to raise money for victims of last year’s earthquake and tsunami, but after a few numbers by the bluegrass band, most of that event was my workshop. We had wonderful publicity, including mention on NHK-FM, Japan's public radio station, which played shape-note songs that morning. Over a hundred people showed up, including family members and relatives on both Mako’s side and my side. A lot of things moved us, but having our own kinfolk show up was high up there. Same wonderful reaction there as in Hitachi: Why don't we already know this and when are we going to do it again?
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| Tim and Mako and kin in fellowship hall after Tokyo singing school |
It helped that Osaka was right on the way to Yamaguchi Prefecture, where I was hired 30 years ago to roam around the prefecture as an assistant English teacher in public schools. One of the reasons we stayed in Japan longer than the UAB students was so I could go there again. I stayed in the city of Hagi with a teacher friend whose late husband was an English teacher who had me visit his school several times. She herself was an art and music teacher, so I mentioned that I was doing all this singing instruction and would she be interested in scraping together a few of her friends to try it. Which is exactly what she did. So my last singing school was with seven Japanese ladies in my friend's house. She keeps a blog and wrote all about it there, which is all in Japanese, but the pictures alone tell most of the story.
The amount of time I had at each of these events was woefully inadequate, but enough to make people, including myself, want to do it again. The evening before the Tokyo singing, Yui introduced me to a warm and engaging music professor from the Tokyo College of Music. She couldn't attend the singing school because of a schedule conflict, but she wanted to meet me because she wants to have me do this again someday, like on her campus. That's like Juilliard or the New England Conservatory asking you to have a shape-note singing on their campus. I did all I could to keep my jaw from dropping. I think I've started something.
