Treasures of the Island People: Tradition and Modernity in Yaeyaman Pop Music

The warm breeze blew in from far away in the south-west. If you listened carefully you could hear the sounds of a sanshin. Whatever else happens in the world, the beauty of this island will never change, as long as the island people (shimanchu) are living there.

(From Bagajima nu Panasu [Stories of My Island], Ikegami 1994, 5)²

Introduction

Traveling down the Japanese archipelago from Hokkaido in the north, it is possible to traverse the island chain as far as the main island of Okinawa without ever losing sight of land. In the days before jet planes, sailing from one island to the next never involved more than a day's journey over seas that are relatively easily navigated. Proceeding farther south from the Okinawan mainland to the Sakishima island groups of Miyako and Yaeyama, the last inhabited islands in the Japanese archipelago, involves crossing a stretch of sea that is both large and renowned for its unpredictable weather. The very name by which these islands are known, Sakishima (which translates roughly as the islands "far ahead"), implies their separation from the central culture, originally of Okinawa, and later of Japan itself. Despite Yaeyama's status as a part of the Ryukyu kingdom from 1390, a part of Okinawa prefecture from 1879, and a quarter-century of American rule following World War II, before Okinawa's return to Japan in 1972, the islands' geographical isolation has led to the development of distinctive cultural forms and an acute sense of local identity.

Despite the islands' small size and population—approximately 45,000—since the early 1990s they have exercised an inordinately large influence over Okinawan cultural life both inside Okinawa and as it is presented to mainland Japan. The paragraph quoted above, the opening passage of the novel Stories of My Island (Bagajima nu Panasu) by the young Yaeyaman writer Ikegami Ei'ichi, who has had considerable success in mainland Japan, can be seen to situate Yaeyama in the three ways, which have become broad stereotypes for the way in which the islands exist in Japanese and Okinawan cultural discourse. First, Yaeyama is seen as connected (by the wind here) with the Asian mainland to the southwest. Secondly, with the sound of the sanshin, Yaeyama is represented as a region rich in traditional folk music. Thirdly, Yaeyama is represented as a place lost in time: whatever changes occur in Japan, in terms of loss of traditional culture, Yaeyama will remain constant. The passage is also interesting for its use of one of the catchphrases of modern Yaeyaman identity in Japan—"Island People" (shimanchu), from which the title of this paper comes.

Images of Yaeyama such as those quoted above can be seen in a wide variety of cultural artifacts. For example, Figure 1 shows an Okinawan tourist poster from 2002 depicting the Asian connection through the legend "Okinawa—Asian resort," the traditional music connection, again through the image of the sanshin, and the "lost-in-time" image represented by the inscription at top right, which translates as "take it easy, island time."

Since the early 1990s there has been an unprecedented explosion of popularity of Yaeyaman musicians in Okinawa and Japan that, as we shall see, has largely played on these three images. These musicians have had a high profile in presenting Okinawan music to mainland Japanese audiences. At the same time, their musical output and the discourse surrounding it, has explicitly addressed many of the issues of tradition vs. modernity, and of what it means to be Yaeyaman. In this paper, I examine the phenomenon of Yaeyaman musicians who, through the juxtaposition of both traditional and modern elements, play out many of the issues of Yaeyaman identity in the context of the Okinawa prefecture, the Japanese nation, and the rest of the world.

Treasures of the Island People—Shimanchu nu takara

In the summer of 2002, the band BEGIN, originally from Yaeyama's most densely populated island of Ishigaki, released the CD single Shimanchu nu takara (Treasures of the Island People) onto the Japanese market, in commemoration of the 30th...