I thought this topic should have its own thread so it is easier to find later, and since it’s an important part of shamisen history. I don’t know if moving posts from other threads is possible, or even something we want to do, so I thought I’d summarize what came up in the original thread (“So, wow, I mentioned Tsugar style to my traditional teacher…”).
Kyoko started by telling us about her mother’s experience:
According to my Mom, people in her area were all usually looking forward to having Goze entertainers probably once a year. At that time, no TV no radio, nothing entertaining, just work and work and work, in their farmland.
As a child Mom experienced looking adults give them some food or rice in return and they had some special house in the area to stay for a while.
I looked wikipedia and it says the same thing in Niigata, Nagano and Gifu prefecture. Mom’s hometown is Nakatsugawa, Gifu.
Mom says people in the area usually serve them food in plates that are special for Goze people. But my mother’s mom, who happens to be my grandmother, said they are all the same people like us and let us use our plates. Washing the plates and cups cleans everything.
My grandma can be very generous or accepting everyone, or just lazy to prepare special extra plates for them. I am happy to inherit her DNA.
I often to see my mother and if you have any questions, please ask me. She is now 85 years old and quite fine. I am happy to make as much interview as I can while she is alive.
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Kyoko also put up a link to a short trailer for a goze documentary which Sayuri said was filmed in 1971 (three years before the last group of goze finally gave up on travelling around, and moved to a retirement home).
Lorraine linked to a short article on the website wfmu that has some mp3s that give you an idea of part of the goze repertoire (long ballads).
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So I think that catches us up.
I got interested in the goze about 20 years ago when my neighbor in Kyoto found an old LP set of goze recordings blasted it from his stereo for a week straight. It was a lot rougher than the min’you I had been listening to, and when I finally asked him about it, he said that it was “Japanese country blues” (he himself was fronting a three-piece Chicago Blues band at the time). Ever since then I’ve been on the lookout for books and CDs on the goze, and have a shelf full of them now. That record came from a boom in the 70s, about the time the last group of goze (all old women by that time) stopped travelling around and retired. That signaled the end of the tradition as it was originally practiced, though they did record after that, and to this day there are a few women who perform goze songs learned directly from goze.
I met Kobayashi Haru, “The Last Goze” in 2003, just about a year before she died. The wife of a friend of mine in Niigata had wanted to go visit her after seeing a documentary, and when I visited them, she suggested we go together. It was a long trip from Niigata city, involving several trains, and a long bus ride into the mountains to the retirement home where Kobayashi lived. I was thinking that I might interview her, but it turned out to be impossible - she was almost completely deaf by that time, and anyway spoke in such a thick accent that even my friend, who’d lived in Niigata for decades, couldn’t really understand. We ended up communicating through her nurse, who yelled what we said into Kobayashi san’s one good ear, and then translated her answers into comprehensible Japanese for us. It was almost like speaking through a spirit medium. I felt like our visit was really taxing Kobayashi, who seemed to hardly move, and felt sort of bad for being there. finally, I played some shamisen for her, since she couldn’t play one herself anymore, and then she sung us a song in an incredibly powerful voice that moved us all to tears. My last memory of her is from the moment just as we were leaving. The nurse told me to shake her hand, and I stood over this tiny old woman who had graciously put up with our visit, and, except during her song, hardly moved a muscle or changed her facial expression. She was blind, and at this point almost completely deaf, and I wondered if any of what had gone on had gotten through to her. But when I held her hand, I felt this surge of power, and a weird kind of communication seemed to pass between us which made me feel like she still knew exactly what was going on.
Gerald Groemer (the same guy who put out the great book on Tsugaru shamisen) has written a 1200 page book in Japanese on the goze traditions all over Japan. The last I spoke to him, he was working on a shorter book in English, which I am looking forward to, and on the strength of all his other work would recommend sight unseen to anyone interested in the topic.
Loraine, thanks for the link, and Kyoko, thanks for the great story - I’d love to see what else your mother remembers about the goze’s visits to her town.
