Akatombo

Akatombo
Monument to the song in the hometown of the poet Rofū Miki (Tatsuno, Hyōgo)
English	Red Dragonfly Scarlet Dragonfly
Native name	赤とんぼ
Written	1921 (1921)
Text	by Rofū Miki
Language	Japanese
Melody	by Kosaku Yamada
Composed	1927

"Red Dragonfly" (Japanese: 赤とんぼ, Hepburn: Akatonbo^?) (also transliterated as Akatombo, Aka Tombo, Aka Tonbo, or Aka Tomba) is a famous Japanese children's song (dōyō) composed by Kosaku Yamada in 1927, with lyrics from a 1921 poem by Rofū Miki. It is a nostalgic depiction of a Japanese red dragonfly seen at sunset by an infant being carried on an older sister's shoulder.

The poem is written in the voice of someone recalling his infancy and being carried on the back of his sister (or nursemaid; the Japanese lyrics are ambiguous). The speaker now longs for this mother figure, who married at the age of 15, moved far away, and no longer sends news back to the speaker's village.

Symbolist poet Rofū Miki (1889–1964), who wrote the poem in 1921, had a similar background. His mother had been married at the age of 15. His parents divorced when Miki was five years old, and his mother moved away, never to return. He was thereafter raised by his paternal grandfather. When he was 12 years old, ten years before the publication of the poem, he wrote its final three lines:

Little red dragonfly
Resting, waiting
On the end of a bamboo pole

Miki's mother, Kata Midorikawa, became a significant figure in the women's movement during Japan's Meiji period. She died at age 91 in 1962, and her gravestone was inscribed with the words “At rest here, little dragonfly’s mother”. Miki himself died two years later, age 76, after being struck by a vehicle.

In her 2016 book Music in Contemporary Japan, Japanese music and culture commentator Jennifer Milioto Matsue wrote:

The song uses the imagery of red dragonflies to evoke nostalgic feelings of the past and of course for the old country home of the furusato [hometown]. ... [It] prompts longing feelings for all "mothers" in all our childhoods. These lines similarly capture the loss felt when loved ones move away, an increasingly common occurrence in the rapid urbanization of modern Japan in the early twentieth century.