Sōran Bushi

Sōran Bushi is a Japanese folk song (min’yō) from the herring fisheries of Hokkaidō’s Japan Sea coast, and is said to have started on the Shakotan Peninsula. From the Edo period into the 20th century, migrant fishermen from northern Honshū came every spring for the herring runs, and their work had a set of four songs: one for rowing out, one for raising the net, one for scooping out the catch, and one for knocking the roe off the nets.

Sōran Bushi comes from the third, the okiage ondo. The herring were scooped from the holding net with a huge dip net and tipped into a carrier boat. While the net filled, the crew beat time on the boat with their poles and shouted “sōran, sōran,” calling it more times as the fish thinned out. Then the leader sang a verse, often a comic or bawdy one to keep tired men awake, and on “dokkoisho” they heaved the net up and emptied it. The tune probably came with the migrant fishermen from northern Honshū: around the port town of Noheji, in Aomori, people unloading ships sang a work song with the same “sōran” calls.

Around 1935 the Sapporo singer Imai Kōzan made the work song into a stage piece, adding a shamisen accompaniment and choosing verses fit for an audience, and about 1957 Hamada Kiichi’s more ornamented version became the standard one.

The melody here is from the transcription on Japanese Wikipedia. See also Kaigara Bushi.