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19 November, 2001
THE
SOUND OF JAPAN
IN HAWAI'I, CIRCA 1947
It's Saturday night and the room is so humid the walls slickly reflect the hot stage lights.
| The song has the distinctive military cadence of a John Philips Sousa march, but the singing is in … Japanese. |
The performance includes not just music, but a full variety show lineup, including magic and other entertainment for the children in the audience, short comedic and dramatic plays, comedy acts that would fit on a vaudeville revue, sexy adult dancing by long-legged ladies, music ranging from swing numbers to folksongs and nostalgic pop evoking earlier decades. The band at one point begins playing a song that at times seems to echo "Glory, Glory Hallelujah," but the melody and the lyrics are different. It has the distinctive military cadence of a John Philips Sousa march, but the singing is in … Japanese.
The song, "Hawai Butai," or "Hawai'i Battalion" in English, celebrates the accomplishments of Americans of Japanese Ancestry (AJAs) from Hawai'i who fought for the 100th Battalion in Europe during the recently ended war. The entire crowd joins in for the chorus of the song, as some veterans in uniform stand stiffly and salute the US flag in the corner of the room, tears welling up in their eyes.
It's Honolulu in 1947, and people are still celebrating the end of World War II, with the help of Hawai'i's most popular Japanese American big band, the Shochiku Orchestra, made up entirely of Nisei, or second-generation JA performers.
Thanks to Billy Rose, a third-generation, or Sansei, producer and music historian, the sound of the culture-bridging Shochiku Orchestra has been preserved on a new CD titled "Paradise Honolulu: Japanese Music of Hawai'i." The result is an aural snapshot of an era when the post-war boom was beginning to bring prosperity to the US, and Japanese Americans on Hawai'i was once again finding its place among the island community. But cultural ties were strong to the JA's roots in Japan and Okinawa, which helped forge the talents of the musicians captured on this collection.
Rose, who compiled last year's wonderful "Club Nisei" CD and a follow-up, "Club Nisei Encore," provides the same detailed liner notes and historical context for "Paradise Honolulu." He gives an introduction to Okinawan history, since much of the Japanese culture that settled in Hawai'i was transplanted from Okinawa, and then explains how the Okinawa Kingdom was invaded by Japan in 1609, and its rich pan-Asian heritage was subsumed. He traces the first emigration of Okinawan farm workers to Hawai'i in 1900, and then picks up the trail of Francis Zanami and Masaji Uyehara, two descendants of Okinawans who met as young men and nurtured each other's musical ambitions.
The two played in small groups, and eventually started the Smile Orchestra, a pre-war big band that played everything from the "haole" music hits of the day, plus Japanese and Hawai'ian songs that were popular with audiences at the time. The group disbanded during the war, but its core members re-formed as the Shochiku Orchestra in 1946, using the same formula that made the Smile Orchestra popular in the 1930s.
The post-war sense of reflection included songs written by members of the orchestra or by Raymond Hattori, a friend of Zanami who wrote many songs for Shochiku. Of the songs collected for this compilation, a handful are about the war, including "Hawai Butai" and "AJA Koshin Kyoku" ("AJA March"), which salutes both the Hawai'ian 100th Battalion and the Nisei 442th Regimental Combat Team with a slow, contemplative beat. "Gunjin Hanayome" ("War Bride") is a pretty mid-tempo song about a common occurrence - Japanese women marrying Hawai'ian Japanese during the postwar Occupation.
Other songs have wistful themes that reflect the hardship of war, such as "Ikoku no Oka" ("Strange Land"), a pre-war hit about soldiers in a faraway land that connected with JAs after WWII and during the Korean War, and "Waikiki no Yoru" ("Waikiki Night"), abut lovers parting on the beach.
The orchestra continued remaking Japanese hits into the 1950s, with a version of "Le Rai Shan" ("Fragrance of the Night"), a classy rhumba written by a Shanghai songwriter that was a wartime hit but made popular again by a Japanese movie in 1951. And the group's propulsive recording of a traditional "bon-odori" (a street dance during an annual festival to pay respect to ancestors) song from the southern city of Kagoshima, "Kagoshima Ohara Bushi," lends a festive air to the CD. As with the earlier "Club Nisei" project, Rose compiled a variety of styles from swing-y numbers to ones sung in the Japanese "enka" vocal style, a quavery form of blues that almost has to do with heartbreak and sadness.
Although it features several covers of Japanese hit songs, "Paradise Honolulu" reflects the Shochiku Orchestra's Hawai'ian base with a handful of songs that are about Hawai'i, even though they're sung in Japanese. "Honoruru No Lei Uri Musume" ("Honolulu Lei Selling Girl"), "Koyoi Mo Oka De" ("Another Evening on the Hill") and "Paradaisu Honoruru" ("Paradise Honolulu") all sharply evoke the island's cross-cultural mix with musical touches such as melodies that sway with an ocean rhythm and the ubiquitous Hawai'ian stringed instrument, the ukulele.
Whenever I've played "Club Nisei" in the past year for groups such as family dinners that include older Japanese Americans (and also my mother who is first-generation Japanese), there have been comments of surprised delight when people recognized songs from the 1930s and '40s. I expect "Paradise Honolulu" will elicit a similar response, although it'll be more likely from those who grew up in Hawai'i's polyglot, pan-Pacific mixture of sounds and styles.
I didn't grow up in Hawai'i, but I'm as fascinated by the sound captured on this collection as I was with Billy Rose's first project. I look forward to more musical time machines that can take me back to Hawai'i of five decades ago
You can order "Paradise Honolulu" and other CDs including "Club Nisei" through Cord International, or call 1-877-648-7881 toll-free.