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Playing for survival: the blind Japanese woman keeping a music tradition alive

Goze – women who earned a living as musicians despite sight impairments – are all but forgotten in Japan but Rieko Hirosawa has learned their songs

Those who chose the latter route out of poverty and discrimination became live-in apprentices at guilds run by an experienced goze, who would pass on songs by word of mouth and teach the shamisen by sitting behind younger musicians and guiding their hands along the instrument’s three strings. “It wasn’t unusual for parents to go directly to the master of a goze household and ask her to take on their daughter,” says Zenji Ogawa, curator of a museum dedicated to the musicians in Takada, a town in Niigata prefecture that was once home to almost 100 performers. Three or four musicians, led by a sighted guide, spent 300 days of the year walking from one village to the next, mainly in Japan’s northwestern prefectures of Nagano and Niigata, although some ventured to Fukushima on the Pacific coast, or as far as present-day Tokyo.

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