THE JAPANESE FOLK SONG KAGURA MAI: TO BE OR NOT TO BE PRESERVED (original) (raw)
It is said that in order not to lose the folk material, be it for the folk songs or the folk performing arts, we have to preserve it so it would not disappear. In this paper I will focus on Kagura mai, which is a folk song from Gokayama district‘s small village Tairamura Kaminashi, located in the southeastern part of Toyama prefecture in Japan. The song is related to a dance song called Maimai, which used to be a part of courting songs sung at festivals, usually combined with agricultural rites. Visiting the actual place of Kagura mai shows that we can still today hear the song for the two main festivals in the year: namely the Kokiriko festival and Haru festival. Since 1973 it has a place as an Intangible Cultural Asset together with the oldest folk song in Japan, the Kokiriko bushi. Comparing all the sources the author could collect on Kagura mai, spanning from its first transcription and recording (1952), its first available video (1974) to a new audio recording (2002) and recent video recordings of Kagura Mai (taken by the author (2007, 2008)), there are changes seen in how the Kagura mai is performed today compared to around 60 years ago, in its musical content as well as in its function. We can see that the song‘s preservation society or hozonkai decided on the form of preservation of it and tries hard to keep it exactly the same. Moreover, the song became also a part of what we could call a ’stage presenting show’ which gave a new function to the song as a folkloric and touristic art. We could say that the song survives through hozonkai, but at the same time it becomes like a "growing flower" tightened by the "box". In this way the preserved Kagura mai will probably not receive many musical changes in the future. How long can it stay "under the box"? Is the law which helps to protect the folk song heritage beneficial? Could it be possible that this way of preserving Kagura mai does not keep the song alive, but it restrains it and allowing it to become more a part of the culture which uses folk songs only to exhibit?
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