Michiya Mihashi -- Ringo Hana Saku Furusato e（リンゴ花咲く故郷へ）

 

I was listening to some of Michiya Mihashi's（三橋美智也）material a couple of days ago for some of that enka shibui-ness. But according to my fellow blog co-administrator and expert on the old Showa Era music, Noelle Tham, the term enka itself wasn't officially put into Japan's lexicon until 1970. Basically between the end of World War II and that year, enka had once been split apart into different subsets of kayo kyoku, including bokyo kayo（望郷歌謡...popular songs of homesickness）. With the nation's strenuous efforts to rise from the ashes on all levels, a lot of young people were heavily encouraged to move from the towns and villages to the big cities like Tokyo to do their part in the companies and factories to man the engines of their economy. Of course, the new generations working there could get homesick from time to time which got songwriters and singers to come up with the wistful ballads of the old hometown which would also get the workers even more homesick.

Well, the First Man of Enka (though he was probably given that title after 1970), Mihashi, came up with a huge hit in "Ringo Mura kara"（リンゴ村から）in 1956. The words and music were by Ryo Yano（矢野亮）and Isao Hayashi（林伊佐緒）respectively as the Hokkaido native sang nostalgically about the old apple orchard village up north. Then, the singer and songwriters were thinking whether lightning or apples could strike twice and so they collaborated once more on the 1957 "Ringo Hana Saku Furusato e" (To the Hometown of Apple Blossoms).

The song was on that recording of Mihashi that I have so I wanted to see if I could write about it, and with the YouTube video present, I could indeed do so. As with the earlier "Ringo Mura kara", "Ringo Hana Saku Furusato e" displays the melody as an old-fashioned wistful ditty of a wagon on an old dirt road while Mihashi sings of hearth and home among the apple trees. Perhaps listeners had a sense memory of the sweet scent of the apples.

Come to think of it, being the final day of September, I can imagine that the apple farms here in the province of Ontario are all very busy right now with the autumn harvest. I can no longer easily make it out to the orchards anymore, but it's nice remembering going there as a kid and having fresh apples, apple pie, apple cider and even apple strudel.