f40


two songs which took longer. I just sang and played the sanshin and the whole thing (apart from mixing) was finished in only four days. After that it took a week to do the overdubbing and other things.”


joined on some songs by a roll-call of famous female island singers: Misako Oshi- ro, Yoriko Ganeko, Katsuko Yohen, Keiko Kinjo, Yasuko Yoshida, and Kanako Hatoma. I wondered how this was organ- ised. China replies: “I carefully chose which song is better for which singer and thought about the whole thing a lot beforehand. For example, I can’t sing a duet on my own so I thought a lot about who to sing those songs with. I also thought about the key of the singers’ voic- es and which songs were more suitable for each singer. There are 101 songs altogeth- er. I’ve never counted but possibly I know about three or four times the amount of songs on these CDs. That’s just minyo (tra- ditional) or shimauta (island songs). If you add classical Ryukyu music then I must know about another 300 songs.”


A


The prestigious Nihon Record Taisho Kikaku Sho was awarded in late 2009. Getting a national award then must have been, well, very rewarding? “I was very surprised to get the award. It was a revo- lutionary thing even to be nominated for an award in Japan as an Okinawan musi- cian. And then I actually won the award so I was very pleased. Also, I think this will encourage young musicians in Okinawa. I won a national arts award some time ago but I don’t rate it so highly because it’s just an academic thing, but a record award is a people’s thing. The record com- pany recommended me to the committee without telling me. When we were recording and having a drink we some- times made jokes about how this should be getting a record award, but I never thought it would really happen.”


China was not born in Okinawa but spent his first few years in Osaka in the Kansai area of mainland Japan where a large number of exiled Okinawans still live. His father Teihan China was one of the first generation of Oki- nawan recording artists along with the likes of Shouei Kina, Koutoku Tsuha and Rinsho Kadekaru. The young Sadao


made his debut as


lthough the album is mainly a solo project featuring just China’s voice and sanshin, there is also some use of other accompaniment and he is also


a singer at the age of 12 and recordings of him at that age still exist. His high-pitched vocals are in complete contrast to the deep resonance of his singing voice today at the age of 65. China, who seems to be a keen smoker, lights a cigarette and then reveals something I hadn’t known at all – he didn’t even want to be involved in Okinawan music in those early days.


“I began to sing when I was about five or six years old. I learned hardly any songs from my father. He used to teach classical Ryukyu music and I just used to listen. I hated music at that time, especially Ryukyu music. I didn’t even want people to recognise me as an Uchinanchu (Okinawan person). I was living in Kansai then and there was so much discrimination against Uchinanchu in Japan. It was the time of the Korean War and it was a very rough period for everyone and especially for minorities like us. My father used to say there will be a time in the future when Okinawan music is going to be written down and so there’s no need to grab someone like me to force them to learn, because they can learn in the future.”


When did he change his thinking about music? “I seriously thought about doing music after I was 20 years old. I had already been playing music before that, but very reluctantly, and when I became a pupil of Seijin Noborikawa at the age of 12 I really didn’t want to do it. I never thought it was fun to record when I was very young. I started playing western clas- sical music when I was about 16 on classical guitar. I did it because it was a good way to make myself popular with the girls. The sanshin wasn’t fashionable and girls wouldn’t fancy you if you played one because they had a bad image about it. Then one day I just played some Ryukyu minyo on my classical guitar and I felt that it sounded quite good. From that time I began to get more interested in Ryukyu music and I began to think that maybe we should be proud and show this music to people in the outside world.”


The original Nenes “T


hat happened after I had moved to Okinawa from Osaka. I was dis- criminated against by Okinawans who said I


spoke more like a Japanese but that was nothing compared to the discrimination I had suffered in Osaka. The difference was that Okinawans wanted you to be part of them in the end. They were just testing me and I had fights with several of them, but in the end they wanted me to be a part of the community. In Osaka they did- n’t want me to be one of them at all. This also made me start to learn Okinawan dialect very hard. My parents spoke Oki- nawan but I only understood a little, rather like young Okinawans nowadays. People spoke Uchinaguchi (Okinawan) in daily life and they only spoke Japanese at school because they were forced to.”


In the 1970s China made his break-


through Akabana album, but this was revo- lutionary in itself because it contained Oki- nawan-sounding songs written by China, some with traditional melodies and an overlay of rock and reggae. “People in Oki- nawa reacted with outrage and said these songs are rubbish because I already had the reputation of being a talented young minyo singer and was a great hope for the future of traditional song. They thought I was leaving the minyo world because of this album. This was about four or five years after the reversion of Okinawa to Japan and many young people wanted to leave for Tokyo or the mainland. They had the idea that things in Japan were better. I felt worried about this. So it had a big meaning for me to release this in Tokyo in order to protest and show Okinawan people their own music in a modern way and make them proud of it. That album was satisfying because I had a lot of feedback from people who said it made them happy as well. After that I just carried on with my music career on a small scale. But through these activities I met quite a few Japanese musicians who were interested in Okinawan music, such as Ryudo Uzaki, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Tokiko Kato. As you know, Okinawan music then became more recognised in Japan.”


So does he see himself primarily as a performer or a producer? “I learned so much from old singers of the past that this is why I am still a minyo singer today. I think I have a duty to hand down these songs to future generations. On the other hand, I’m also producing young people because I want to do so many other things apart from singing minyo. I produce Nenes, Kanako Hatoma, and The Fere, and I have to say that this is a good way to do things because they can sing on my behalf. I’m well over 60 now and if you think about me as someone with important respon- sibilities in the minyo world then it’s difficult for me to sing and perform like they do. Also, I really enjoy producing Nenes, because when I write songs for them I really like writing in a subjective way and then pro- ducing the results objectively. But I never tell Nenes that you must sing in a certain way. So possibly being a producer is more fun.”


The new Nenes are much changed from the four women led by Misako Koja who rocked the world of Okinawan music back in the


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