Seventy-five-year-old Misako Oshiro is widely regarded as Okinawa's greatest living singer of minyō (traditional folk song). In the 1970s her recordings with the late great Rinsho Kadekaru produced some of the finest moments of Okinawan music, and she continues to sing and record — and runs her own minyō bar, Shima Umui, in the island's capital, Naha. Her latest project is the release of a duet album, "Uta Nu In," with Kanako Horiuchi who is more than 40 years her junior.
Horiuchi's background is very different from Oshiro's. She's from Hokkaido in the far north of Japan but for the past decade has been living in Okinawa and learning minyō from Oshiro while working as a singer and musician at Shima Umui — and that was where I recently met up with both women.
I asked Horiuchi how she came to be in Okinawa in the first place. She says, "I left Hokkaido when I was still very young and worked as a set designer in Tokyo for an advertising company. That was the first time I saw a sanshin (a three-stringed lute) being played, or listened to Okinawan music, and it was for a commercial by the musician Seijin Noborikawa. I immediately wanted to play sanshin myself. My image of traditional music was that it's rather stiff. The closest thing to minyō where I come from is the Tsugaru shamisen, which the musicians always play with very serious expressions on their faces. In Okinawa it's very different — the musicians encourage everyone to dance and the atmosphere is much friendlier. Moving to Okinawa was a big decision but I didn't think all that deeply about it because I was only 22 at the time. I just felt strongly that I wanted to go there to play music."