So, the last post I talked about enka music, but didn’t bother to link to any examples. Well, this time I’m going to show you what I mean by “Japanese blues”.
This one is one of my all-time favorites, “Sake yo” by Ikuzo Yoshi. I even learned enough to sing it fairly well, and sang it in one of my Japanese classes. It was easier to learn once I could know that he was singing about the friends he had when he was young, and that are long gone, leaving him with his one friend, sake, and listening to enka.
This one is about a man living far from his home up north, remembering his girl, his father and mother, as the cold wind and snow reminds him of home. He drinks sake to help.
And lest you think that only men drown their sorrows in sake, this lady is singing about “lonely sake” (ã²ã¨ã‚Šé…’) in an izakaya bar.
And even not all enka are sad songs, my favorite singer (the one I knew when I went to the enka store the first time), Ishikawa Sayuri is known for singing both sad and upbeat enka songs, as you can hear here:
So, that’s just a tiny tiny sample of what enka is. It’s not to everyone’s taste, and in fact it’s considered “middle-aged peoples’ music” or even “old folks’ music” in Japan. Uh, oh, since I’m middle-aged…
I’m a big fan of Japanese Enka music, which is an original Japanese style of music often called “Japanese blues”, because it was influenced by American blues, and because it’s usually about the same types of subjects that blues covers: Lost loves, old friends long gone, “the good old days”, drinking. Older enka songs tended to be accompanied by a few instruments, including traditional things like shamisen and flutes, but after the 70’s they became more “Las Vegas”-like. In some ways some of the songs remind me of country songs, at least for the songs of “lost love and drinking”!
“Rhythm”, the enka store, in 2007
On my first trip to Japan in 2007, I learned about an enka store in the Ameyoko shopping district of Ueno, near Tokyo, called “Rhythm” （リズム）. At the time I was pretty deficient in Japanese and only knew of one enka singer by name, but the shopkeeper was very helpful in finding a couple of CDs of the singer. I thanked them as best I could, and promised myself I’d come back. I didn’t get a chance to in 2010, but in 2012 I went back with my friend John, also an enka fan. This time I could communicate much better, and talked to both the owner, Kazuhiko Kobayashi and his wife, and was able to tell them things like where I was from, how much I liked certain singers, and to tell them in more detail what kind of enka I was interested in. They were very surprised to know that there were Americans who had even heard of enka, much less being fans of the music, and they happily let me and John get pictures made with them. Even better, they took pictures of John and me and posted them on their wall of photos.
The reason I know this, there is a cable channel called NHKWorld, which is an English-language re-broadcast of select NHK programs from Japan, and one episode of “Tokyo Eye” covered enka. The TV crew went to Rhythm and interviewed Kobayashi-san, who told them of how surprised he was that foreigners would come to his store. The cameraman happened to pan down the wall of photos, and I saw part of the photo of me and John. Needless to say, it was quite a feeling to see a picture of oneself, in a tiny store in Japan, broadcast literally all over the world.
At any rate, this is Kobayashi-san and his wife, with some ugly foreigner! My next trip, I will go back to visit them again!
