Japanese Collections

As a continuation of the previous post about Shinpei Nakayama’s composition “Tokyo March”, this article will focus on Nakayama and his other well-known works.

Shinpei Nakayama (中山晋平) was born in 1887 in Nagano prefecture. He attended Tokyo School of Music (present day Tokyo University of the Arts).

One of his most beloved works is “The Gondola Song” (ゴンドラの唄, Gondora No Uta), which was used in Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1952 film, Ikiru (生きる）. During his career, Nakayama composed a great number of popular melodies, including nearly 800 children’s songs, many of which were featured in the children’s picture magazine Kodomo No Kuni (Children’s Land).

• Rekion access in OSUL – Rekion Identifier for the 1934 recording of The Gondola Song” (ゴンドラの唄 ） is “info:ndljp/pid/1322660”

Nakayama was active at a time when radical changes were occurring in the nature of Japanese music and performance. Continue reading

Longing for the past when the streets in Ginza were lined with willow trees
A young beauty becomes a nobody with age
Dance to the jazz music and down liquor into the night
And the rain that is the tears of the dancers will sprinkle at the break of dawn.

Tokyo March (1929) Lyrics taken from the English subtitles in Tokyo March (1929), directed by Mizoguchi Kenji, in Talking Silents 1, DVD (Tokyo: Digital Meme, 2007)

Shinpei Nakayama(中山晋平) was a Japanese composer known as “the father of popular music” who was active during the early 1900’s. Nakayama rose to fame when his composition “Tokyo March” (Tokyo Koshinkyoku) was used as the theme song for the 1929 movie by the same title directed by Mizoguchi Kenji. Upon the song’s release, “Tokyo March” came to be considered one of the first Japanese “pop” songs, selling an unprecedented 400,000 copies according to The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema. The resounding success sparked the careers of Nakayama, the song’s lyricist, and the song’s performer Chiyako Sato (佐藤千夜子), which subsequently caused a surge in the country’s overall record production. Japan’s professional music industry was set into motion. Continue reading