Product Description
Homage to a classic 1975 album with the same title produced by Okinawan journalist and campaigner, Rou Takenaka (1930-1991). As well as writing about Okinawa and its music in the 1970s, he also brought several musicians to the mainland to perform and produced recordings for Japanese record labels of some of the island’s greatest musicians including Rinsho Kadekaru, Yukichi Yamazato and Tetsuhiro Daiku. Takenaka was against the reversion to Japanese rule in 1972. Under Takenaka’s inspiration of that original album, (it’s title meaning something like ‘Elegy for a Lost Sea’) the producer of this album, Tsukasa Kohama, has recorded 30 songs by these artists. He believes there are parallels between the hotly debated reversion of Okinawa to Japan at the time, and the current situation in Okinawa, with it’s nature increasingly under threat from the USA and Japan. The male performers Hirokazu Matsuda and Seibun Tokuhara are both long time stalwarts of the Okinawan music world, while the two women, are younger but also fairly well established names. They perform the songs, mostly traditional, in various combinations. New lyrics lament the environmental damage caused by hotels, the diminishing coral and fish, particularly in Henoko, Nago City, where a new US base is to be located.
