ISAMU ASATO

FROM- THE JAPAN TIMES

Truck driver, pool hall hustler,glass factory worker, pineapple picker, propane gas delivery man, driving instructor, chef, you name it, Asato Isamu seems to have done it. These days though, he's quite happy with just the three jobs. By day a fisherman who doubles up as an electrician on Taketomi island, Okinawa, and at night a musician at the local "Asadoya" snack bar.

With the release of his debut CD in Japan, and upcoming first concert on the mainland, he might find he has to devote more time to the music. A rather unlikely character for an interview, Asato, 51, sits in a chic Harajuku cafe, during a recent press trip to Tokyo and recounts the story of just how a part-time everything, has suddenly become one of the hottest Okinawan musicians. "I met the designer Jun Mimura while he was on holiday on a small island in Okinawa. He was swimming and we started talking and somehow just hit it off and became friends. He would then visit me when I was living in Taketomi, but I had no idea what he did, or that he was famous or anything for ten years, and he also didn't know I played music. He then brought his friend with him to Taketomi, Toshiki Arai who is the editor of Switch magazine. I was a fisherman by this stage, and the three of us would often go around the islands catching fish, and I would cook them and serve them up. We would drink and eat and then I would get out my sanshin and play for them. I had been playing sanshin since I was eight, but never professionally or anything." Arai of Switch magazine liked what he heard.

Asato made a demo tape and Arai started peddling it around his friends in the music business. Although from Yaeyama, the nearest of the Okinawan islands to Taiwan, Asato's music was different to the usual Yaeyama minyo. If Okinawan's think of Japan as the foreign mainland, then Yaeyaman's think of Okinawa in the same way. For years, Yaeyaman's lived under the oppressive Ryukyu government and were forced to pay high taxes. Most Yaeyama minyo is of the Yunta or "working song" variety, up tempo, originally just vocals and hand claps (they couldn't afford any instruments) and sung as people worked in the fields or at sea to cheer each other up. Asato sings Nasake Uta, the slow, tragic type. "About four hundred years ago, we had to obey the government in Okinawa and our life was so hard. The songs tell of such sad experiences,almost too tragic to tell. For example a man and a woman couldn't marry with whom they wished. So the songs I sing on the CD are all Nasake Uta."

Asato learnt to play from the greatest current players from Yaeyama. He studied with both Tetsuhiro Daiku and Yukichi Yamazato, the current standard bearers of Yaeyama traditional music during a three year stay in Naha. Nevertheless, he says he can't quite believe the attention currently being afforded him. "I'm afraid of everything. I think I need to study more and more. But I hope people can be moved by listening to my music. I want people to know about the traditional Yaeyama music and history."