Min'yo

Min'yō is Japan's body of traditional folk song: regional work songs, festival dances, lullabies and drinking songs transmitted orally for centuries and named after the Meiji-era calque of the German Volkslied. Each district guards its own standards — Hokkaido's "Soran Bushi", Akita's "Akita Ondo", Fukushima's "Aizu Bandaisan" — sung in local dialect with shamisen, shakuhachi, taiko and handclaps, or unaccompanied. Codified by collectors and preservation societies in the twentieth century, min'yō became both a concert art, mastered by professional singers, and the root repertoire of enka.