I began this series narrating the journey from Ireland to the day I met my Satsumabiwa master, Fumon Yoshinori. This was at the Takasaki Geijutsu Tanki Daigaku (Takasaki Art Center College) on the 10th of December 1994.
The First Day
I've a habit of holding on to papers, and I kept the material and handouts from that weekend. Despite not understanding anything at the time, today with a fuller knowledge of spoken and written Japanese I can recall the occasion very well.
I remember the weather that day was very beautiful, warm with clear skies and the morning air fresh. I still had in my physiological memory the winters of the UK and Ireland. Heavy, wet and cold days, which yet retained a luminescence for me with the familiarity of all the bustle and social interactions in the lead-up to Christmas.
Miyashita the Innovator
The day began with an orientation followed by a lecture from a burly professor with a strong husky voice. He explained the theory and scales of Japanese music using Western notation with demonstrations on a very large koto zither.
His name was Miyashita Shin and he played an important role in the development of the koto from a 13 string instrument into a 22 string and also a 30 string instrument. His work extended to composing much new material for koto.
I came to know him over the next few years. He was kind and encouraging as a teacher. One of his favourite phrases is "Mistakes are a gift from heaven. Cherish them!" This phrase he often used after a student's performance had not gone so well.
Miyashita was close to Fumon and they respected each other deeply. However, their approaches to music were quite different. Fumon was concerned with finding all possibilities within the tradition he inherited and wanted to transmit. Miyashita grew up within the tradition, but he seemed to burst out of it in a spirit of modernity that complimented Western music yet remained tied to tradition.
I now feel, after playing Satsumabiwa for thirty years, that in all moves to modernity something elemental to the tradition must be sacrificed.
Fumon the Master
I met Fumon after Miyashita's lecture. He was not a tall man, but I could see that he was still strong and that he'd led a very active life.
He was born in the final year of the reign of the Emperor Meiji, 1911. People in Japan speak of each Emperor’s reign having a particular zeitgeist reflected in the national character. The character of the Meiji era for me is one of the tatsujin, a time of larger-than-life figures. This seems perfectly expressed in the first line of the Satsumabiwa classic Shiroyama.
それ達人は大観す
Sore tatsujin wa taikan su
The great one sees and takes all in
Hiezan
Less than six months prior to our first meeting, at 83 years of age, Fumon was the oldest person on record to complete a seven-hour mountain pilgrimage on Mt Hiezan in Kyoto. It was an event of such note that it was recorded in a newspaper at the time.
(Partial Translation)
On the 23rd of June at 2:30am, the party of 20 people left the Kojirin and started walking the mountain roads by torchlight.
It began to get bright just after 4:30 am as the group reached the Ganzandaishi Temple (where Ryogen is honoured) , and they could feel a little more sure of their footing, but the whole route was mountain path that would have tested a young monk. The previous year, Fumon had worn traditional sandals and had suffered a great deal with his feet, so this year he wore mountain boots.
At about 5, the party reached the Shōrō (the building housing the temple bell), Fumon acted as the representative of the party and struck the bell in prayer for world peace and the removal of all that was unclean from their hearts.
Seven hours after beginning, they arrived back at the place they had left. Fumon said "I was delighted to be able to complete the walk safely. I don't know about next year, but it would be great to set a new record"
He told me that he was asked not to attempt it again as they were concerned about his health. He seemed to feel that this was a little unfair.
Meeting the Biwa
Three other students took biwa for the first time with me. Another woman assisted him with teaching. She had studied with Fumon for a while. The lessons took place in a small room.
Now I saw the instrument for the first time. It had a very striking tear-like outline. The front face was convex with a pleasing contour. With four strings and four frets, it was also aesthetically satisfying in its simplicity. I thought it would be severely limited in the number of notes it could produce. However, my first impressions proved very wrong.
The body of the instrument was made from mulberry (kuwa). Zelkova (keyaki) can also be used. It was extremely heavy. To me it looked as though it was solid, but I soon noticed it had a cavity for resonance, and looking more closely I saw small sound holes.
The four strings were silk, each of different thickness. They were yellow in colour because they had been dyed with turmeric. This prevents damage from insects becoming a problem. In fact, in Japan, precious items of clothing are kept in fabric dyed with a tincture from wild turmeric.
The frets were magnolia (hō no ki) , which apparently produces the least amount of friction with the string. They were very tall, up to 5cm high and spaced quite far apart.
However, the biggest surprise for me was the plectrum. It was heavy and very large. It was made from boxwood (tsuge) and triangular shaped like a fan. At its widest point it was about 23cm, and this narrowed down to 3cm where the hand held the plectrum before widening out once more at the base. It was about 0.5cm thick at the widest point but much thicker at the base. I couldn’t fathom why such a large plectrum to play such a loose and thin string?
German – our common tongue
Fumon took a particular interest in me as the only non-Japanese there. With a struggle I managed to explain a little bit about myself with the assistance of the other students. However, once Fumon found out that I knew German his face lit up and he began to talk to me in German. My German was poor but I managed to understand that he had learned German from a Prussian in China. I guessed that this must have been before the Second World War, but it was some time before I came to understand the full story.
The lesson begins
The first thing we learned was how to hold the instrument. Thankfully we used chairs and were not sitting seiza. Holding the biwa itself did not present any issues except that keeping my left arm raised for a long period of time made my shoulder ache.
The plectrum, however, was an entirely different story. One finger was on top, another two below, another pointing one way and my thumb pointing another. It kept slipping out of my hand. I gripped tighter which had the effect of making it slip again. One top of all this, I had to bend my wrist at an extremely awkward angle to play the strings.
“Hold it like this!” Fumon said, as he caught my hand, bent my wrist forward at an acute angle, and started striking the string and the body of the instrument quite violently to the point that the shock would ring through my finger. “It is the same as using a fan.” What use I would have had for a fan in Ireland, I wouldn't know, so the advice wasn't the easiest to apply. After a long time sounding just the first string, I began to settle into it a little.
I remained very reluctant to strike the body of the instrument all this time, but gradually I noticed that if I relaxed my grip on the plectrum, it tended to slip less.
Soon, the lesson advanced to alternating between the first and third strings.
The next step was unexpected. We began to use the plectrum to play the string not just from above but underneath as well.
Once we settled into this new pattern, Fumon started singing as we played. “Don-Tay-Ray-Tay, Don-Tay-Ray-Tay….”. “Don” when we played the first string, “Tay” the third string from above and “Ray“ the third string from underneath.
It began to dawn on me that this was a traditional means of learning the instrument. Melody and rhythm were communicated through song and the syllables indicated which string as well as the direction of the plectrum.
These sung syllables are called kuchibiwa or, translated directly, “mouth-biwa”. Known as mnemonics, they were the traditional way of learning the instrument before notation was invented.
The notation for Satsumabiwa was an entirely novel experience for me. But, that was presented to us the following day, so I will write of it next time.
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