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Japanese Music: Some Songs for Children

Module by: Catherine Schmidt-Jones

Summary: Here are four songs from Japan that young children from any culture may enjoy.

Here are four Japanese folk songs that you can teach to young children of any culture. All were published, including accompaniment and English translations, in Florence Hudson Botsford's Folk Songs of Many Peoples in 1922, and so are considered in the public domain in the U.S.

Suggested Uses for this Module

  • Music class
  • Children's Concert - Particularly a multicultural concert. "Cherry Blooms" is particularly appropriate for springtime."Counting Song" is particularly appropriate for celebrations of east Asian (Lunar) New Year, which falls in late winter.
  • Social Studies - As part of a unit on Japan or Eastern Asia.
  • Lunar New Year Celebrations - "Counting Song" is meant to be sung at the Lunar New Year, a major holiday in many east Asian countries. Its exact date on the Western calendar varies from year to year, but it falls in late winter.
  • Literature - "The Rabbit and the Turtle" is a children's song based on the familiar fable. You may want to include it if your class is studying fables.

Notes on using these Songs

  • You can make copies of the scores below, but if you can open these PDF files, they will probably give you better copies: Cherry Blooms, The Rabbit and the Turtle, The Moon, page 1, The Moon, page 2, Counting Song, page 1, Counting Song, page 2.
  • Grace Hazard Conkling wrote the English versions of "The Rabbit and the Turtle" and "The Moon". Edwin Markham wrote the English words to "Cherry Blooms". Shigeyoshi Obata provided the translation of "The Counting Song".
  • In case you can't read music, you can listen to the tunes: Cherry Blooms, The Rabbit and the Turtle, The Moon, Counting Song
  • I have included the accompaniments in case you want a public-domain piano accompaniment for the songs, but I do not recommend that you use them. All four songs are pentatonic. The accompaniments, however, are not pentatonic, and, to my ear, they obscure the original flavor of the tunes too much. I recommend singing them unaccompanied, or with a simple accompaniment of percussion and/or drone notes taken from the scale that the melody uses.
  • When performing "The Rabbit and the Turtle", you may want to add actions or gestures and substitute more familiar syllables or sounds for the "snoring" and "hopping" parts of the tune, and/or divide the class so that a soloist or small group takes the turtle's part of the song at the end.
  • Pronunciation of Romanized Japanese text for English speakers: "a" as in "ball", "i" as in "machine", "o" as in "hope", "u" as in "rule", and the lone "ha" is pronounced "wa".

You may want to point out to the students that the text of the second verse of "Cherry Blooms" is a Romanized version of the Japanese text; it is written out phonetically in Roman letters so that people who don't read Japanese can "sound it out". Here is the Japanese text for "Cherry Blooms".

さくら　さくら やよいの空は 見わたすかぎり 　かすみか雲か 　 匂いぞ（においぞ） 　 出ずる（いずる） 　 いざや　いざや 　 見にゆかん

Figure 1
Figure 1 (CBlooms2.png)
Figure 2
Figure 2 (RabbitTurtle.png)
Figure 3
Figure 3 (Moon1.png)
Figure 4
Figure 4 (Moon2.png)
Figure 5
Figure 5 (CountingSong1.png)
Figure 6
Figure 6 (CountingSong2.png)

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