Harry Minoru Urata (浦田ハリー實) (1917 – October 23, 2009) was a music teacher best known for preserving the '' Holehole bushi'', a type of

folk song Folk music is a music genre that includes #Traditional folk music, traditional folk music and the Contemporary folk music, contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be c ...

sung by

Japanese immigrants The Japanese diaspora and its individual members, known as Nikkei (日系) or as Nikkeijin (日系人), comprise the Japanese emigrants from Japan (and their descendants) residing in a country outside Japan. Emigration from Japan was recorded a ...

in Hawaii's sugar plantations.

Early life and education

Urata was born in

Honolulu Honolulu (; ) is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Hawaii, which is in the Pacific Ocean. It is an unincorporated county seat of the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, situated along the southeast coast of the island ...

in 1917. After his father died in a car accident, Urata was sent to Japan in 1924 to be raised by his relatives in

Kumamoto prefecture is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture of Japan located on the island of Kyūshū. Kumamoto Prefecture has a population of 1,748,134 () and has a geographic area of . Kumamoto Prefecture borders Fukuoka Prefecture to the north, Ōita Prefecture to ...

. He briefly also lived in Japan-occupied Korea, and was admitted to

Waseda University , abbreviated as , is a private university, private research university in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Founded in 1882 as the ''Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō'' by Ōkuma Shigenobu, the school was formally renamed Waseda University in 1902. The university has numerou ...

after high school. However, he did not have a chance to study there because in 1937 he returned to Hawaii at his mother's insistence, as the threat of war in Japan increased. After returning to Hawaii in 1937, Urata became a teacher at a Japanese language school. He also enrolled in the

Mid-Pacific Institute Mid-Pacific Institute is a private, co-educational college preparatory school for grades preschool through twelve with an approximate enrollment of 1,538 students, the majority of whom are from Hawaii (although many also come from other states and ...

to learn English. Soon after he was admitted into the

University of Hawaii A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, th ...

, Pearl Harbor was attacked and

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

began in the Pacific. In March 1943, he was arrested by the FBI and imprisoned at the

Honouliuli Internment Camp Honouliuli National Historic Site is near Waipahu on the island of Oahu, in the U.S. state of Hawaii. This is the site of the Honouliuli Internment Camp which was Hawaiʻi's largest and longest-operating internment camp, opened in 1943 and closed ...

. While there, he befriended Kenpu Kawazoe, a journalist who sparked Urata's interest in the ''Holehole bushi.'' Urata was later transferred to the

Tule Lake War Relocation Center The Tule Lake National Monument in Modoc and Siskiyou counties in California, consists primarily of the site of the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, one of ten concentration camps constructed in 1942 by the United States government to incarce ...

Career

After he was released from Tule Lake, Urata returned to Hawaii in December 1945. He sold newspapers for a while, then was hired to do Japanese music programming at KULA, a local radio station. He also reformed his pre-war music group, the Shinko Orchestra, to play for weddings and parties. He then studied with

Masao Koga was a Japanese composer, mandolinist, and guitarist of the Shōwa era who was dubbed "Japan's Irving Berlin" by Universal Press Syndicate. His melancholy style, based upon Nakayama Shimpei's '' yonanuki'' scale, was popularly known in Japan as ...

in Japan for a year and a half before starting his own music studio, where he taught hundreds of students. Urata worked with Raymond Hattori in 1960 to create a score for the ''Holehole bushi''. However, because they had based their score on one person's rendition of the genre, many singers were upset. Urata decided to gather more recordings of ''Holehole bushi''. He released a record of them in 1967. He collected recordings until the 1980s, when he gave his collection to

Franklin Odo Franklin S. Odo (May 6, 1939 – September 28, 2022) was a Japanese American author, scholar, activist, and historian. Odo served as the director of the Asian Pacific American Program at the Smithsonian Institution from the program's inception ...

, who in turn gave it to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Urata died on October 23, 2009. Before he died he was presented with awards from the governments of both the United States and Japan.

References

External links

Urata's collection of audio recordings
1917 births 2009 deaths People from Honolulu Japanese-American internees American musicians of Japanese descent 20th-century Japanese musicians American Folklorists of Color {{DEFAULTSORT:Urata, Harry Minoru