FT271

Visitors to Japan between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s may recall a curious melody that used to accompany the ‘green man’ at some pedestrian crossings – I can still hear it echoing in my head from the time I used to cross the road by Osaka Station on my way to work in the 1980s.

It’s a while since I heard it, though. On a return visit in September 2005, crossing the same road, I noticed something was different, and it took a while to work out what that was. The melody had gone, and it’s probable it will never be heard again. That’s because it has been replaced throughout Osaka Prefecture by two-tone bird-like bleeps: kakko or pyo-pyo. Groups representing those with vision difficulties say the bird-like sounds make it easier for them to discern where the sound is coming from, and thus make crossing the road safer. But is that the real reason?

The missing song is known as Toryanse, and is a 19th-century folk and children’s game rhyme describing a visit to a Shinto shrine. The song is thought to originate in Saitama Prefecture and to refer to Miyoshino Shrine in the precincts of Kawagoe Castle (oddly, however, the song’s words and dialect suggest an origin closer to Osaka). In 1921, composer Motoori Nagayo set the words to a tune from an early 20th-century song popular in the Tokyo area. Toryanse was one of two songs chosen in 1975 as street-crossing melodies (the other was Kokyo no Sora – the same tune as the Scottish song Comin’ Thro’ the Rye); aptly enough, as the song conveys a sense of having to get somewhere within a limited period.

The children’s game also known as toryanse is similar to other children’s games known in the West, such as ‘London Bridge’. It involves two children forming a ‘gate’ with their upraised arms, under which other children pass; when the song ends abruptly, the ‘gate’ closes, capturing the child beneath. The caught child then replaces one of the gate­keepers. But the song’s minor key melody and opaque lyrics evoke a rather more threatening atmosphere.

The words – Toryanse, toryanse, koko wa doko no hosomichi ja, Tenjin-sama no hosomichi-ja, chitto toshite kudashanse… – tell of a mother and daughter setting out on a journey to a shrine in the castle grounds, where the girl will be presented on her seventh birthday. This places the song in the annual calendar to 15 November and a specific Shinto festival, the shichi-go-san. In general, it evokes a pleasant enough scene, although the two have a narrow path (hosomichi) to follow: not just the path through the sacred gateways (torii) that straddle the approach to the shrine, but also through the castle gate and its guards. Here the words chitto toshite kudashanse – “please won’t you let us pass?” – come in. The mother explains – kono ko no nanatsu no iwai ni ofuda osameni mairimasu – that they’re going to the shrine to bequeath the shrine talisman (ofuda), to mark the little girl’s seventh year. They are allowed through, but not without a warning. Going there may be easy (iki wa yoi, yoi…), but it is at this point that the melody changes to a higher register, and a note of tension creeps in. Iki wa yoi, yoi, kaeri wa kowai – kowai nagara mo toryanse… The return journey (kaeri) is fearful (kowai), and the rather dour melody enhances this. But why should the coming back be any less pleasant than the going?

The shichi-go-san (7-5-3) festival is a ceremony in which girls of three and seven years of age, and boys of three and five, are taken to their local Shinto shrine by their parents. The children are dressed in their finest – often traditional, and always quasi-adult, clothes. The object is to present them to the local tutelary kami – a Japanese word inclusively encompassing deity, spirit, numen and other related English terms – and pray for their continued health and safe upbringing. In effect, it is also to let the kami know that the parents are looking after their offspring properly and preparing them for their adult roles (hence the quasi-adult clothing), thus contributing to the health and harmony of the local community. As the kami shares responsibility for the community’s wellbeing, a harmonious relationship between humans and kami (and thus their environment) is essential.

There is some disagreement as to whether boys of three were traditionally included in this observance. Some sources, such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, state that only girls of three years are taken to their shrine. However, general custom today allows boys and girls equality in two shrine visits each (at three and five and three and seven respectively), and this may have historical resonance. In the mediæval period, both boys and girls up to three years old had their heads shaved; at three, their hair was allowed to grow. Boys received their first hakama (formal male trousers) at five, while girls began tying their kimono with the adult-type obi sash, rather than with cords.

Indeed, it was thought that up to the age of seven, when the ceremonial presentations to the kami cease, child­ren ‘belonged’ to the kami; after the final presentation, they became ‘little men’ and ‘little women’, fully part of the human community and, as the clothing and nicknames imply, on the road to the responsibilities of adulthood. One function of this belief may well have been to ease the pain of all-too-frequent infant death through the idea that the young child was still ‘subject to recall’. This attitude also no doubt underlies both the indulgence afforded to young children in Japan and the commitment to beginning their creative education at an early age; in later stages of childhood, things get tougher, and in the teenage years the educational pressure on Japanese adolescents has regrettably often led to violent outbursts and adjustment problems in schools, even teenage suicides.

The 7-5-3 custom, particularly the final presentation, is clearly a rite of passage in which children finally leave their intermediate status between the otherworld of the kami and the human world, and move from protected childhood to the first vulnerable stage of maturity. Girls in particular have been in that halfway status for seven years. As with most traditional rites of pass­age, especially those signifying stages of maturity, there is an element of anxiety in the transitional period. Part of this anxiety is in the formality and enforced stillness of the Shinto blessing ceremony that would accompany the shrine visit, but part is tied up with the imminent changes that the child, in earlier times, would have learned to expect.

Is this related to the kaeri wa kowai anxiety of the return journey? Some, trying to explain the lyric, have sugg­ested that seven-year-old girls were once sacrificed on an altar within the shrine, but as well as there being no evidence for this, the practice would seem unthinkable in the Shinto context, where blood constitutes a serious pollution of the sacred precincts. A more likely explanation would be that, as a child of the kami prior to her final presentation at the shrine, the girl would be under the kami’s protection on her way there – but on her way back, she would be as liable as any other member of the community to the usual hazards of life. Are the castle guards warning her of the vulnerability of young girls to abuse from males? Is it an implied threat from the guards themselves, of teasing on her way back home? Or of some more official form of harassment? Indeed, as a girl in a patriarchal society where arranged marriages, including childhood betrothals, were commonplace, she would perhaps be likely to receive a ruder awakening to the demands of society than she might expect. Or is it just another way of expressing the tension of the rite of passage?

I thought Japanese adults might share my nostalgic sense of loss, but even those in whom familiarity had not bred unawareness of the melody and its folk roots were equivocal about the change of policy. Some hadn’t noticed its absence until I pointed it out – it takes a stranger to bring you news of home, according to one Japanese saying – and others, thinking over the words of the old song, agreed that it was a bit frightening, a morbid sort of tune. Perhaps planting the idea of frightening journeys home in people’s minds outside a train station wasn’t so clever (this response may have been exagg­erated by a recent railway accident in the Osaka region, in which a train on an elevated curve left the tracks at speed and ploughed into an apartment building, with several fatalities). Some suggested that it was the psychological import of the half-forgotten words and the potential traumatisation of young minds, rather than any sort of lobby pressure, that lay behind the decision of the central government in 2003 to replace all crossing melodies – but then, who knows?

From my point of view, if it hadn’t been for the change of tune I might never have learned about the song and its mysterious connotations, whatever they might originally have meant. But I will miss the idiosyncrasy of the Osaka street crossings. A few toryanse hung on in Aomori, Yamagata and Yamanashi Prefectures for a while, but by 2008 all crossings had switched to electronic chirrups – and now we’ll never know just how dangerous the journey home might be…