Traditional Folk Song in Modern Japan: Sources, Sentiment, and Society

The Japanese say that ’folk song is the heart’s home town’. Traditional folk songs (min’yo) from the countryside are strongly linked to their places of origin and continue to play a role there. Today, however, they are also taught as a quasi-art music, arranged for stage and television, quoted in Westernized popular songs and so forth.

David Hughes is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at SOAS, University of London, where he served two periods as Head of the Department of Music. He has spent over nine years in Japan, much of it involved in the folk song world as researcher, but often also as performer and judge at song contests. His other main research interests and publications involve music transmission, oral mnemonics cross-culturally, Central Java (gamelan), traditional street musicians and grammars of music. Most recently, he has co-edited with Alison Tokita, and contributed to, The Ashgate Companion to Japanese Music (2007).