And we’re back, after a slight commercial break. All the good music programs have an intermission, right? Did you stretch? Get a snack?
In the first half, we covered 36 of the 72 microseasons, going through the themes of the Spring and Summer kō. Next up we move from the heat of late Summer into Autumn and Winter. Let’s see how the mood shifts to match.
If you missed Part One of this musical venture, you can check it out here or just scroll through the official Spotify playlist at your own pace.
Headphones on! Let’s jump in.
And there we have it! The Absolutely Official And Totally Final playlist for the 72 Microseasons of Japan. It was a lot of work, but someone had to do it.6
If a song seems like it doesn’t fit as well as you feel it should and you’re wondering why, it’s either Spotify didn’t have a better match, or I found one I liked that only kind of matched but wanted to include anyway.
So, what did you think? Discover anything new? Any favorites or interesting things that stood out? Even if you don’t speak a lick of Japanese, music is one of our most universal experiences as people, and this newsletter is about noticing and appreciating things as they are, even without necessarily understanding them fully.
To close out: a couple bonus tracks about the seasons in general. These won’t be on the playlist because I like having it be 72 tracks exactly, so you can consider these as Newsletter Exclusives™.
See you next kō~
[Images & info by kurashikata.com, kurashi-no-hotorisya.jp, 543life.com, and Wikipedia except where otherwise noted]
This is an old folk song (民謡, minyo) from northern Japan, but I quite liked this cover by Isamu Yashita, who was a master of the traditional shakuhachi flute and specialized in folk songs
If you weren’t here for these newsletters, Kō 44-49 were combined into one, with original tanka poetry by yours truly to describe them instead of the usual deeper dives—no mistake in the repeated linked URLs of these five!
As with 44-49, the next six of these were also combined into a single newsletter, so they’ll all have the same link
Originally written around 1935 in Germany by composer Henry Himmel, this famous European tango song gained larger popularity when covered in French as “Il pleut sur la route”
Such tangos were popular in Japan at the time, so it was performed widely in nightclubs and eventually translated into Japanese as well—it is one of singer Noriko Awaya’s best known songs
Another well-known standard of Japan’s musical canon, “Momiji” has been part of NHK’s radio broadcast of classical music Minna no Uta (Songs For Everyone) since the ‘70s
This version was recorded by Kurumi Kobato, who also performed the singing voice for Snow White in the Japanese version of the Disney film
It’s not as if I just spent two weeks discovering a bunch of fun new music or anything
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