Goze – women who earned a living as musicians despite sight impairments – are all but forgotten in Japan but Rieko Hirosawa has learned their songs
ieko Hirosawa sits on a stone bench outside her home, tunes her instrument and takes a deep breath. She unleashes an impossibly high note while herCombined, they slice through the stillness of an oppressively humid afternoon. If her neighbours were wondering if the usually softly spoken Hirosawa was at home, now they know. – a prodigious genre of music spanning four centuries that most Japanese people have probably never heard.
In the north-western prefectures, where the tradition flourished during the Edo period , Hirosawa is at the heart of a movement to protect the legacy of the“They sang songs while they were living really tough lives,” she says. “Just surviving was a challenge. They used music to have a sense of purpose and then passed on those skills to their apprentices.”
Life among these groups of four or five women was strictly regulated, even though the apprentices were encouraged to view their peers as sisters and their master as a mother figure. Life on the road was even more arduous. Three or four musicians, led by a sighted guide, spent 300 days of the year walking from one village to the next, mainly in Japan’s northwestern prefectures of Nagano and Niigata, although some ventured to Fukushima on the Pacific coast, or as far as present-day Tokyo.
“They thought that feeding the rice to their children would make them just as strong-willed,” adds Ogawa, co-founder of the Takada Goze Culture Preservation and Promotion Association. “It was the opposite of discrimination.
Hirosawa had been warned by care home staff that Kobayashi would not be able to sing during their meeting.Photograph: Courtesy of Niigata Nippo Shimbun
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