The Shakuhachi.(尺八): Surviving when you can’t talk..

For years, I was given carte blanche at family gatherings to sit in a corner to read, or to quietly slip away next door and watch a video. To make up for the fact that I couldn’t talk with people, because of my minimal Japanese, I took up the shakuhachi, one of the traditional bamboo flutes.

The shakuhachi is made from a piece of bamboo cut out ot the bottom part of carefully selected shoot. The name means literally “one shaku, eight” and could be safely rendered “one-foot-eight” since a shaku was the pre-metric measurement roughly corresponding to a “foot”. Actually there are instruments of different lengths but the generic name remains that of the most commonly used instrument which is in the key of F.

I’d fallen for the instrument years before I went to Japan. All my life I’d been fooling around with flutes, whistles—anything you could blow into. I’d loved the way Matt Malloy of the Chieftains had described his affection for the “bark” of his favourite flute at a music scoil I’d been to in Ireland. At a Japanese culture evening in Auckland, in the early eighties, I’d heard a shakuhachi being played with a range of tones that were fuller and more expressive even than Matt Malloy’s ebony wooden flute. The player had let me handle it, and even though I couldn’t make a sound, I loved the bamboo solidity and simplicity of this instrument which kept it’s bamboo-shootedness in spite of being valued at many thousands of dollars.

During my first year in Kumamoto, through a friend of a friend, I was put in touch with a shakuhachi teacher called Fujiyama Shoryu. Fujiyama sensei also happened to be a Buddhist monk. We met at the home of Kamisakoda sensei, a koto teacher. Fujiyama sensei was very encouraging, and let me try and play one of his shakuhachi. He appeared delighted that I could make a sound at all. He lent me a wooden practice instrument and we began a year of irregularly spaced lessons.

Although I had images of deep mystical meditative playing, I quickly discovered that the world of traditional classical music was very much a part of post-Meiji Japan. Fujiyama sensei was affiliated to Tozan Ryu (the Tozan School) of shakuhachi, as opposed to the Kinko School. Somewhat to my disappointment, I found that the Tozan people seemed to be the modernizers, in that their instruments were modified by the addition of a further hole to the traditional instrument to make it easier for them to play the chromatic scale. The Kinko School seemed closer to the traditional approach and I couldn’t help envying a Canadian friend who was learning from a Kinko teacher. He invited me to come and learn from his teacher but I liked Fujiyama sensei too much to risk any disloyalty.

It was years before I actually met anyone who played honkyoku ("real melodies”--the solo pieces in the style of thope played by Zen monks), and years after that before Shoryu took me to meet another monk who played them well. By that time though, I was studying Noh theatre and didn't have time to work at the shakuhachi.

The melodies I learnt seemed to be traditional style tunes written post-Meiji with ensemble playing in mind. The old shakuhachi was very much a solo instrument and exact tuning was not necessary. The folk music I had encountered before coming to Japan was very much aural music. Most traditional Irish musicians could not read music and would learn the tune by ear, often writing down the notes in letters to jog the memory. The shakuhachi had its own system of musical notation based on a succession of letters with added symbols to mark rhythm and timing.

When I played in public in Kumamoto, it was usually in a team of shakuhachi players lined up behind massed koto in one of the big theatres around town. The other regular “gig” was playing with Fujiyama sensei at the annual concerts of the Koto Club of the Prefectural Women’s University.

I did enjoy the lessons with Shoryu. He was an enthusiastic teacher and although I could understand only bits of what he was telling me, I would record our sessions and Y would tell me what I had missed. There are all kinds of special effects to master, including various onomatopoeic effects echoing wind and wild geese. The names of the notes reflected not only the pitch but also their sound colour. I was told early on that it might take seven years to master the art of producing vibrato, not with the diaphragm, but by kubifuri—literally "neck shaking" although it is more like "head-shaking". It’s sixteen years since I first blew on an instrument and I’m ashamed to say that I still can’t do kubi furi properly.

Fujiyama sensei lived about an hour’s drive out in the country, but that was not a problem since he frequently visitied the city. Like many country monks, Fujiyama sensei is also a school teacher. Every year, in early summer and his wife Kyoko, host a concert of koto and shakuhachi music at their temple, and a hundred or so local people gather for the music and enjoy a communal meal of soba (buckwheat noodles) and mochi (rice dumplings) afterwards.

Although I haven’t taken any lessons after that first year, I continue to enjoy the shakuhachi and it's breathy, windy sound has followed me to the other end of the Pacific.