> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Ichiko Aoba and the Fifth Verse - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/ichiko-aoba-and-the-fifth-verse/ - Published: 2026-10-21T03:42:47.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-21T04:11:10.000Z - Description: Essay on Ichiko Aoba, Hateruma and who keeps an island song alive. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Essays, 2026, Landscape, Ambient Folk ### The coordinates in the title of the second song on Luminescent Creatures lead to a lighthouse that does not stand on the coast. It stands near the middle of Hateruma, among sugarcane and goats, about as far from the sea as a small coral island allows. --- Typing 24° 3′ 27.0″ N, 123° 47′ 7.5″ E into a map is a small game, and most listeners who played it got what they came for. The pin lands on a white tower roughly sixteen metres high, set well back from the shore, as if someone had drawn a lighthouse correctly and then, out of stubbornness, put it in a field. Cane on every side, goats along the verges. Until 2007 it was the southernmost light in Japan; then a newer one further south took the title, and the local guides have written about it since with the mild pity reserved for people who retire before they meant to. Hateruma is a place where little comes free. Ichiko Aoba, who has been going there since August 2020, describes an island of about four hundred and fifty people (a 2009 count gave 546) that you can drive around in twenty or thirty minutes. Nothing stands higher than two storeys. There are no real rivers, only small streams in the woods, and the coral soil lets rain straight through. Drinking water reaches each house from the sea, through desalination, so that on Hateruma even what you drink has been made, at a cost, with something taken out. When the supply boat is late or a typhoon cuts the power, people improvise; asked about the islanders, Aoba talks about the way they walk and speak, tough and supple in the same movement. She first arrived while finishing *Adan no Kaze*, travelling through the islands of Okinawa and Amami. On Kudaka and Taketomi she felt she had been allowed to visit for a while. Hateruma felt like coming home, and she understood early that it was not somewhere to use for a record and then leave. It is a lovely sentence, and lovely sentences about islands ought to be checked against the islands. What follows tries to do that, walking down from the tower into the villages, where the song was actually taught to her, by particular people, in a particular order. Most international writing on *Luminescent Creatures* (hermine, 2025) stopped at the tower. The coordinates became a figure for guidance, and the album its own beacon, a reading Aoba herself encouraged. Some reviewers added that the song had been sung for centuries and was taught only to islanders, which lends it the glamour of the sealed and the ancient. The awkward questions are more practical. Who taught it, in which language, with what already gone, and what happens to a ritual song when it leaves a village of a few hundred people on a record that, a year later, will be played under the dome of the Royal Albert Hall. ### I. The fifth verse The melody is *Hateruma Kudoku*. It is sung during the Mushaama in the village where Aoba takes part, and it was the first song anyone there taught her. The first four verses are in standard Japanese. The fifth is in the language of the island, and on the album that is the verse she sings in dialect. So the song arrives already divided. A song sealed off from the world would be easier to romanticise and less faithful to what the southern Ryukyus have lived through in the last century and a half. *Hateruma Kudoku* is bilingual, crossed by the national language, which occupies four fifths of it like a tenant who stopped paying rent long ago and has no intention of moving out. The island's own speech keeps one verse. The arithmetic is almost too tidy, and it tracks the linguistic situation closely enough to be uncomfortable. Hateruma belongs to Yaeyama Ryukyuan, which UNESCO lists among Japan's endangered languages; a linguist working on the island in 2019 counted around two hundred speakers, all over seventy-five. Across Yaeyama, people under sixty tend to use the language only in songs and rituals. The Hateruma variety has more vowels than any other in the group, seven of them, and more and more those vowels are kept alive inside verses like this one. Aoba is wary of the role this offers her. She told Apple Music she was not yet obsessed with singing folk songs; this one simply happened to be sung at ritual events. The arrangement came from Taro Umebayashi, who heard a recording of her playing guitar, plunkily by her own account, while singing it, and built the track from that. It is the only piece on the album she did not write with him. On record it lasts about the length of a cigarette: a low bass, plucked strings, her voice taking the old line with the same unhurried attention she gives her own melodies. It makes no claim to be a field recording. Nobody has added birds for authenticity. I hear tact in that modesty first. The song enters the album as one song among others, with no footnote and none of the museum lighting that usually surrounds "traditional material" on records made for international ears. The doubt comes later, the way doubts about good manners usually do. A listener in Glasgow or Los Angeles hears the fifth verse as colour, another shade in the album's underwater glow, and has no means of knowing that this is the verse the state language never took. The map in the title leads to the tower, and the tower has nothing to say about the verse. ### II. The Jikata The Mushaama falls at the old-calendar Obon, when the ancestors come back, and it takes over the whole island. Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs, which in November 1993 listed it among the intangible folk properties for which records should be made, concedes that nobody is sure where the name comes from. Perhaps from a word for something amusing; perhaps from *musha*, a warrior or a tough, a word that some readings also connect to the dead. A festival whose name hesitates between a joke and a ghost suits an event that welcomes ancestors with clowns. The cycle includes a nembutsu dance, and the whole of it, from preparations on the seventh day of the seventh month to the clearing up on the sixteenth, sits inside the year's rites for the dead. Its centre is the *Michisanee*, a costumed procession led by Miruku, the god who brings harvest and good fortune. Women perform the *Inasuri-bushi*; horse dancers called Uma Musha go by, clowns called Boobuza, and a long line of others. Aoba walks in it as a *jikata*, accompanying on sanshin and singing for the Miruku section. She learned the instrument from a couple who had moved to the island and become teachers there, so the newcomer was taught by earlier newcomers who had stayed long enough to be useful. > **On a small island a song passes to whoever is still there in August.** Anyone from the south of Italy knows the band that follows a saint through the streets in the summer heat: players hired from the next town, uniforms too warm, a march repeated until the step holds. Nobody remembers the soloists. The procession needs someone keeping time underneath while the statue sways and the children run ahead. That is roughly where a *jikata* stands, a curious place for a musician whose name now fills concert halls on four continents. Asked how it felt, Aoba said the role was different and the energy the same; at home on stage she plays alone, and here she was one of hundreds. The festival was suspended during the pandemic. When it came back in 2023, after four years, people had forgotten some of the steps; the details survive because the thing happens every year, and four empty summers were enough for bodies to lose their place. She also mentions the island's clear line between those who can live with its frictions and those who cannot, and the local saying that the island will push away anyone who does not fit. She laughs and says she probably should not call the small conflicts interesting. Then a sharper observation: in a place that size there are people in the same village you might not see for a year, and that distance is part of how everyone keeps getting along. ### III. Paper Away from the procession the work gets slower. Aoba has a *nee-nee*, an older sister in the Okinawan and Yaeyama sense, a Hateruma woman who plays sanshin with her and remembers the songs her mother and grandmother sang. Together they are recording and transcribing those songs, so that children who have left the island might come back one day and find scores and recordings waiting. There are so many rituals on Hateruma, Aoba says, that a calendar of the local ones alone is printed and handed round. Every village has its rites and every rite its songs. Fewer and fewer people can sing them. Often only the words survive, on paper, and sometimes during the ritual someone simply reads them out, and that is that. A sacred song reduced to recitation is a strange, half-living thing: the words presumably still reach the gods, but the voice has gone on ahead. Some of the texts already circulate; a 2009 CD, *PATILOMA Hateruma Koyō-shū 1*, gathers Hateruma's old songs with their lyrics. What the records lack, she says, is phrasing, the way each person bends the melody, which she calls limitless. Her *nee-nee* told her that in the rituals everyone sings in their own way, and that this is what raises the hair on your arms. When five or six grandmothers start, each with her own phrasing, there comes a moment when the place itself seems to be singing, and the trees go quiet. The *nee-nee* added that the feeling has gone. Transcription keeps the melody and loses precisely what she is describing. A score fixes one version. The ritual lived in the rub between several versions sung at once, a little out of line, each voice tugging at the others the way two old women straighten a tablecloth from opposite ends without ever agreeing on the middle. Write it down and a returning child has something to learn from. The trees, presumably, stay noisy. Aoba works inside that contradiction and makes no claim to have resolved it. The State has its own version of the work: the 1993 listing of the Mushaama calls for records, and a preservation society looks after the performing arts. The linguists have theirs. A small dictionary of the Hateruma dialect, 3,614 entries, most with their accent marked, was compiled from April 2020 by what its authors call a hybrid remote method, researchers and speakers dividing the tasks and working apart, with a single face-to-face session of under two hours at the end. It began the same year Aoba first stepped off the boat. Three archives, then: the State's, the linguists', and the one being made on a living-room floor with a sanshin and a phone. Islanders, according to a linguist at Ca' Foscari in Venice who has studied the dialect, call their speech by a word meaning the language of my island. Some things stay out of every archive because they are still in use. For years people told Aoba that there was a *mazamun*, a demon or yōkai in the dialect, at a certain spot. Several people tried to drive it off during rituals and it would not move, until the family concerned decided that if it caused no trouble it could stay. Aoba greets it whenever she passes. When she told her *nee-nee*, the older woman cried, glad to have a friend she could talk about the mazamun with. The track after the coordinates on the album is called "mazamun", and when Aoba showed her the lyrics, the *nee-nee* said they matched what she had always seen there, down to the boat of light. Transmission here runs the oldest way, through conversation and a shared readiness to believe that something is there, and the song comes out of a friendship almost as a side effect. The island has had to survive a good deal to still have anyone who believes. In 1945 the Japanese army forced Hateruma's residents to evacuate, and the *Ryukyu Shimpo* records 552 islanders dead of malaria. The children the transcriptions are meant for would be returning to an island that has been emptied before. GROUND SECTION / 01 SELECT A LAYER 01 THE LIGHTHOUSE white tower / cane field / coordinates 02 THE VERSE Hateruma Kudoku / four verses in Japanese / one in dialect 03 THE PROCESSION Mushaama / sanshin / Miruku 04 THE PAPER written lyrics / 2009 CD / transcriptions 05 THE RETURN Ishigaki / residents' discount / concert halls The coordinates send the listener inland. The title of the second track on Luminescent Creatures gives the position of Hateruma Island Lighthouse, a white tower of about sixteen metres standing near the centre of the island among sugarcane. Until 2007 it was the southernmost lighthouse in Japan. Around it lives a community of a few hundred people, in buildings no taller than two storeys, drinking water made from the sea. The island's own language holds one verse out of five. The track carries the melody of Hateruma Kudoku, the first song Aoba was taught in the village where she takes part in the Mushaama. Verses one to four are in standard Japanese; the fifth is in the Hateruma dialect, and Aoba sings it in dialect on the album. The arrangement is Taro Umebayashi's, built from a recording of her singing the song with guitar. Hateruma belongs to Yaeyama Ryukyuan, listed by UNESCO as endangered, with an estimated two hundred speakers over seventy-five in 2019\. On the island, the touring soloist accompanies. The Mushaama is held at the old-calendar Obon and was designated in 1993 as an intangible folk property for which records should be made. In its costumed procession Aoba plays sanshin as a jikata, accompanying the song for Miruku, the god of harvest. She learned the instrument from a couple who had moved to the island and become teachers there. In 2023 the festival returned after four years and some of the steps had been forgotten. Transcription keeps the melody and fixes the phrasing. Fewer people can sing Hateruma's ritual songs; often only the written lyrics remain, and sometimes they are simply read aloud. Some texts appear on a 2009 CD, PATILOMA Hateruma Koyō-shū 1\. Aoba and her nee-nee are recording and transcribing the songs for children who may return to the island. According to the nee-nee, in the rituals each woman sang the melody her own way, and that plurality is what she says has been lost. The album goes back to Yaeyama at a regional price. On 17 January 2026 Aoba played Ishigaki with a string ensemble, with a ticket discount for Yaeyama residents, and called the concert a homecoming for Adan no Kaze and Luminescent Creatures. On 31 March she played the Royal Albert Hall with nine musicians. In July she sang alone at NHK Hall in Tokyo, including songs by Anmi Yamada and Silvana Estrada. WHAT REMAINS These layers trace the song's route as Aoba has described it in interviews, along with public records of the festival and the language. They do not show how islanders regard the recording, or what the nee-nee thinks of its circulation; no islander's account has been consulted. The several ways the grandmothers sang the melody at once appear in none of the archives cited here. ### IV. The return On 17 January 2026 Aoba played Ishigaki, the main town of the Yaeyama islands, with a string ensemble. Tickets carried a discount for Yaeyama residents. In her message before the concert she called it a long-cherished date and a kind of homecoming for *Adan no Kaze* and *Luminescent Creatures*, both deeply inspired by the region, and a way of saying thank you. Ishigaki is about an hour from Hateruma by fast boat, when the Pacific swell allows, and it is as close as a large hall gets to the villages. A year earlier, on 20 January 2025, she had played Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall for the [15th Anniversary Concert](https://www.hwaelmag.com/ichiko-aoba-15th-anniversary-concert/), which Hwael has reviewed. The recording, released this January, runs from her earliest songs to the newest and keeps making room for other people: Anmi Yamada joins her for "Kikaijikake no Uchuu", and the film brings on Keigo Oyamada and Taeko Ohnuki. Seen from Hateruma, the anniversary looks less like a retrospective and more like a roll call of the people who taught her, played with her, stood beside her. Ten weeks after Ishigaki she was at the Royal Albert Hall with nine musicians, members of the 12 Ensemble and Umebayashi, her largest production outside Japan. A reviewer for Echoes and Dust noted a wreath of leaves in her hair, a white dress, rattles of dry grass and nutshell shaken like wind, a lighting crew making fireflies from bulbs and wire. In July she was back in Tokyo, alone with a guitar at NHK Hall, some 3,600 seats, and the setlist again included a song by Yamada and one by the Mexican singer Silvana Estrada. Even on her own stage she keeps singing other people's songs. She tours with a *jikata*'s habits. ![Ichiko Aoba](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6b/c4/6bc44280-60e0-4784-b78b-3377713d3254/content/images/2026/10/ICHIKO-AOBA-Aphoto-2026-.jpg-1.jpeg) Between Ishigaki and Kensington the album changes weight. In Ishigaki the fifth verse could reach people for whom the dialect is a grandmother's voice, a language they follow and no longer speak. In London it is beautiful sound. The ticket discount quietly admits the difference: the people whose song it was are owed something, and gratitude at a regional price is one honest way of paying, small, practical, unsentimental, the sort of gesture a village understands. My verdict, after living with the record for some months, is that it handles its borrowed verse with real tact and almost no explanation, and that the tact has a price. *Luminescent Creatures* lets the Hateruma song pass through without turning it into a heritage lesson, which is the right instinct for an album. Because it explains nothing, though, the most important work connected to it stays invisible to nearly everyone who has heard it: the transcriptions, the procession, the sanshin lessons from a pair of migrant teachers, the conversation about a demon who was allowed to stay. Anyone following the coordinates ends up at the tower, a few hundred metres from where that work is being done, with no sign pointing the way. If the work ever produces a document of its own, it will probably be a stack of photocopied scores in a community centre, the *nee-nee*'s name on them and Aoba's somewhere smaller, and a child back from Naha or Osaka will learn the melody correctly and sing it alone, the same way each time. That is what scores are for. The grandmothers, on the word of the one person who heard them and told us, never once agreed. --- [Ichiko Aoba official](https://ichikoaoba.com/?ref=hwaelmag.com) [Ichiko Aoba is on bandcamp](https://ichikoaoba.bandcamp.com/?ref=hwaelmag.com) --- Last revised: October 2026 ---