Songs from the Edge of Japan: Music-making in Yaeyama and Okinawa brings a welcome note into the discussion of regional musics and how they interface with local, regional, and national identities. In his quest to figure out why music and musicians from the southernmost islands of Yaeyama in the Japanese archipelago have effectively, even disproportionately, captured the imagination of listeners throughout the Okinawan islands and mainland Japan, Matt Gillan explores Yaeyaman traditional music through its history and musical structure; pedagogical, ritual, and competitive contexts; individual and group aesthetics; and linguistic and musical choices, in order to come to some understanding of the relationship between music and identity.

The historical lineages of Yaeyaman musical forms, side by side with their interaction with mainland Japanese culture as described in chapters 2 and 3, contain what would become the basis for the “Okinawa Boom” of the 1990s. Centuries of oppressive governmental regimes and institutionalized social stratification are reflected in traditional Yaeyaman musical forms, divided into those originating with the peasantry and those associated with the elite. Peasant songs include unaccompanied work songs (yunta, jiraba) and religious ritual songs and chants. The elite fushiuta, on the other hand, are melodic, shorter, and accompanied by the sanshin (a three-stringed lute, relative of the Japanese shamisen).

The political forces outside of Yaeyama would continue to have lasting effects, as Yaeyama’s distinct regional music was used to conceptually realize the Japanese nation in the early-twentieth century. Gillan deftly describes the complex interaction among Japanese imperial policies that worked to erase Okinawan languages, customs, and culture after the 1879 annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom, the protestations of Tokyo academics who were concerned for those losses, and the challenge of Okinawans who wanted the respect and economic mobility that embracing Japanese culture would offer. At the same time, Japanese mainland musical interest focused on erotic and sexual folksongs from Yaeyama and demanded an “authentically” rustic sound and appearance (52), despite the existence of a more “respectable” musical repertory and the refined aspects of Ryukyuan elite culture (56-57).

One move that would have lasting effects during this period was to canonize Yaeyama’s musical texts, a task entrusted to the then-elementary school teacher and scholar Kishaba Eijun (1885-1972), the future father of Yaeyaman studies. Working against the tendency of academics focusing exclusively on the communal aspects of Yaeyaman song, Kishaba worked to authenticate lineages of songs by attempting to discover their original authors.

Many Yaeyaman folksongs were also translated into Japanese during this period, often shifting Yaeyaman musical scales and syllabic structures into mainland forms. The “new” Asadoya Yunta, released in 1934, became wildly popular across Japan, and remains the most widely-known Okinawan folksong even today, its thirty-two original verses about the seduction of a local girl by a government official reduced to four (five with the addition of a more recent verse extolling the beauty of Okinawa).

From this early political and musical history, Gillan moves to contemporary contexts for Yaeyaman music. In chapter 4, he spends substantial time describing the connection that music has to community rituals, much of it occurring in the context of offertory performances to the gods. Gillan describes not only those large events that have been selected as Important Intangible Folk-Cultural Property of Japan, but also the numerous rituals, public and private, that paint a more complete picture of ritual life with its many deep and complementary meanings. Students of Okinawan ritual will also find thrilling his (relative lack of) description of the closely-guarded Akamata-Kuromata ritual, where tourists are tolerated only on condition that all recording devices be off. The practice and performance of traditional music in each of these settings, as well as the usage of local language, are instrumental in shaping and maintaining distinct group identities.

From ritual music, Gillan moves in chapter 5 to exploring the byzantine system of lineages and preservation groups that exist within Yaeyama (and extend throughout Japan), as well as the internal politics and social dimensions inherent in their formation and continuation. Musical lineages, publicly performed grade testing, and village-level preservation societies all function in various ways to standardize the Yaeyaman musical repertoire. However, in tandem with the push for preservation there has been a resurgence in the popularity of traditional music within Yaeyaman schools, profoundly influential on future musical careers, and the accessibility of music tourism to visitors.

While preservation and standardization recur with disheartening regularity in chapter 5, in chapter 6 Gillan tells of the pushback against standardization through an extended case study of the song Tubaraama, a song in which the lyrics are traditionally improvised, yet which has been adjudicated in an annual Tubaraama singing contest since 1947. The contest has drawn local criticism since audience adjudication has been replaced with judges, not only for having common culture adjudicated by an elite but also for the involvement of the music lineages, whose own musical versions, judges, and preference for only certain local dialectical variants have limited the success of performers from other areas of Yaeyama. Other peculiar features also arise, such as the prevalence of Tubaraama classes offered to students by various lineages, focusing on accuracy of melody and pronunciation, with no attention to artistic expression or improvisation. However, Gillan notes that the reaction against this has produced its own innovation. Since 1991, on the night prior to the contest, an informal Tubaraama event occurs where singers of all styles and levels of formality are welcome.

In chapter 7, Gillan returns to the scene that inspired so many non-Okinawans to take up the sanshin and learn folksongs in difficult regional languages—the Okinawa Boom, at once a site of incredible creativity and uncomfortable appropriation, fraught with issues of image, authenticity, context, and tradition. Musical artists from Yaeyama embraced their fushiuta training in different ways and to different degrees, existing in an uneasy and yet strategic relationship to tradition, as they worked to both exploit the dominant cultural representations and stereotypes of Okinawa as well as to subvert them, challenging audience expectations and assumptions of cultural ownership. For some artists, utilizing various local languages served as an identity marker, a way of appealing to a broader Okinawan audience, or in some cases creating an “aesthetic of incomprehensibility” (172), appealing to outsiders as exotic while at the same time asserting a hyperlocal cultural pride.

Gillan concludes that in looking at music in terms of identity, it is important to recognize that music is not a way of expressing identity, but rather a place where identity is imagined and negotiated to begin with. As an excellent ethnography driven by detailed, longterm fieldwork and engagement with broader critical issues of heritage and identity, this book provides an entry point to regional culture as well as an incredibly refreshing look at some of the diversity of traditions within the Ryukyu Archipelago, and should appeal to students of ethnomusicology, folklore, history, anthropology, politics, and heritage studies.

Students of Japan and Okinawa will enjoy the fact that Gillan has dual titles for his chapters: the first in Japanese or Yaeyaman language, the English version following. For readers wishing to see Japanese text to clarify certain concepts or places, however, they’ll have to access the glossary, which, while not capturing all Japanese words used, does provide a very useful reference, equally so for the place-name and personal-name glossaries. As an additional bonus, Gillan has provided annotated videos from his fieldwork that he has placed online, at http://matsugane.wordpress.com (click the book title). I cannot but recommend the truly wonderful discography with Romanized and Japanese titles; you’ll be doing yourself a favor to hop online to find the kinds of sounds he’s talking about for yourself.

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[Review length: 1269 words • Review posted on February 12, 2014]