The Night Before: Transcriber Kishiura Ushio Checks Her Score One Last Time

After the final joint rehearsal at the Bay Community Hall reported earlier, Kishiura Ushio spent the evening of the 6th alone at the neighborhood community hall where she has long taught piano, checking the conductor's score she will use at tomorrow's ceremony. The original score remains kept at her home altar, to be made public only after her death, as previously reported; only a copy has been given to the city. "The point was never to lock the score away," Kishiura said. "It's to increase, as much as I can, the number of people who can sing it. That's all."

Of the song's thirteen verses, only three words — sea, window, and the way home — have been tentatively identified in the official record, which uses the term "undeciphered" rather than "unknown" for the rest. No translation will be read at the ceremony. "If the meaning were understood, I think this song couldn't go on being sung the way it is now," Kishiura said of that decision. "Singing it out loud without understanding it — I think that's the role this song has." Her teaching method has likewise never used phonetic notation, relying instead on call-and-response. "The moment you write it down, one pronunciation becomes the correct one. But I think this is a song that had as many pronunciations as there were first-generation speakers."

Kishiura began transcribing the lullaby in her thirties, she said. "By then, the number of first-generation people who could still sing it was already shrinking. I felt an urgency that someone needed to properly capture the sound, or before long no one would be able to sing it at all." The work began with individual interviews with a handful of first-generation singers, noting down the subtly different melodic lines one at a time. "Even the same thirteen verses come out with slightly different phrasing depending on who's singing. I never tried to decide which one was correct — the approach has always been to preserve all of them." In her instruction of this year's chorus, she said, she deliberately kept some of those subtle variations between parts rather than flattening them into one.

Kishiura is herself a first-generation drift settler. As previously reported, the ceremony's oldest attendee, 101-year-old Kishitani Tane, will attend tomorrow as a "listener," and briefly sat in on the 6th's rehearsal to check on her own condition, reportedly crying near the end. "Seeing Tane-san cry almost made my conducting hand stop," Kishiura recalled. "Her tears reach everyone, even without anyone understanding the words." She also disclosed that one of her former piano students now works on the ceremony's organizing staff for the city's civic engagement division. "I was sad when that child quit piano. I never expected her to come back like this."

This year's chorus draws thirty-seven students from Bay Third Junior High School — 28 of mixed drift heritage and, as previously reported, nine recruited from the general student body, broadening the base of singers beyond what was originally expected. "What I'd like next year is to grow it a little more," Kishiura said. "I don't want to force it, but if a child says they want to sing, I try not to turn them away," signaling her intent to keep widening the circle of transmission a little at a time.

The ceremony opens at noon on the 7th at Kishihama Park with the Shore Lullaby. Putting the score away in her bag, Kishiura said, "It would be a lie to say I'm not nervous. But this is nervousness I've felt dozens of times now, so I'm used to it," and locked up the hall with a laugh.