Shima-uta

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.

Although shima-uta is often considered to represent Amami's musical tradition, it is just one of various music genres. Amami's traditional songs can be classified into three categories:

Amami's min'yo is further divided into three genres:

In a narrower sense, shima-uta refers to asobi-uta and is also known as sanshin-uta, zashiki-uta (lit. room songs) and nagusami-uta (lit. comforting songs). In a broader sense, shima-uta also covers gyōji-uta and shigoto-uta.

Today shima-uta is recognized as a genre of songs both in academics and in popular culture. However, musicologist Takahashi Miki showed that the recognition had been developed relatively recently.

The word shima (島^?) means an island in Japanese. In Amami Ōshima and other islands, it also means (one's own) community within the island. 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. Thus shima-uta originally means songs transmitted in one's own community. A report states that elderly people only refer to their own community's songs as shima-uta; songs from other communities are not considered shima-uta. In written Japanese, the specialized meaning of shima is sometimes indicated by the use of katakana (シマ), instead of the conventional kanji (島).

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