Shima-uta (シマウタ, しまうた, 島歌, 島唄) is a genre of songs originating from the Amami Islands, Kagoshima Prefecture of southwestern Japan.
It became known nationwide in the 2000s with the success of young pop singers from Amami Ōshima such as Hajime Chitose and Atari Kōsuke.
Such a semantic extension can be understood by the fact that many communities had little contact with the outside because they were geographically isolated by the vast sea in the front and heavy mountains in the back.
These authors were influenced by Yanagita Kunio, the father of Japanese folkloristics, who developed the concept of min'yō as a product of society and communal space.
In his preface to Kazari's 1966 book, Shimao Toshio, a novelist from Kanagawa Prefecture, praised shima-uta as "Amami's spirit and embodiment" while he used min'yō in academic contexts, in the hiragana spelling (しまうた).
Ogawa Hisao, who was born in Hokkaido but played an important role in publicizing shima-uta, showed a varying attitude toward the word.
[4] As for popular culture, Takahashi analyzed the Nankai Nichinichi Shinbun, a local newspaper of the Amami Islands, and found that the word shima-uta (島唄, 島歌) gradually replaced min'yō from 1959 to the early 1980s.
A similar change can be observed in the titles of records published by Amami Ōshima-based Central Gakki.
Okinawa's folk songs were simply called uta in local communities and were described as min'yō in academic writing.
One is Nakasone Kōichi, who is known for his research on folk songs of the Amami, Okinawa, Miyako and Yaeyama Islands.
He borrowed the term from an Okinawa-based community of Amami people but extended its referent to folk songs of these four archipelagoes.
[7] In 1992, The Boom, a rock band from Yamanashi Prefecture, released an Okinawa-inspired song titled "Shima Uta" (島唄).
In this respect, Northern Amami stands in sharp contrast with the Okinawa Islands, where the ryūkyū and ritsu scales are prevalent.
In any case, Amami has developed its own variant of sanshin, e.g., using a plectrum (pick) made of thinly sliced bamboo instead of Okinawa's thick plectrum made of water buffalo horn[2] Shima-uta shares its 8-8-8-6 syllable structure with Okinawa's ryūka.
From such incantations, epic songs such as Okinawa's umui and kwēna and Amami's omori and nagare emerged.
He claimed that the development of lyrical ryūka from epic omoro happened in the 15th to 16th centuries, when Okinawan people were supposedly liberated from religious bondage and began to express personal feelings.
He dated the formation of ryūka to the first half of the 17th century, shortly after kinsei kouta became common in mainland Japan.