Ode to Joy A Popular Traditional German Song in Japan Marco Oliveros (Tokushima)
H
ands tucked in warm coat pockets, scarf wrapped around my neck, I climb down the mountainside Japanese shrine in my neighborhood as the winter sun dims into the horizon. My breath is a condensed white as I exhale down already dark stone stairs. Clocks everywhere strike 6:00 p.m., and the loudspeakers around Naruto City play a song from, oddly enough, Germany: Ode to Joy. And on it plays, in every season of every day: from winter, spring, summer, fall, and winter, this hopeful ode plays. It’s kind of weird music to hear played to mark the beginning of evening, but Ode to Joy is a song with an interesting history in Japan, and a remarkable past in Naruto, Tokushima. Inspired by the poem of the same name by German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, German composer and pianist Ludwig von Beethoven wrote up an whole section in his Ninth Symphony as an homage to it, turning the words of the poem into lyrics for his music.
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Ode to Joy’s humanistic message of freude, brotherhood, and goodwill to all fits fairly neatly with the Christmas vibe, even if it wasn’t explicitly written to be a Christmas song. December does happen to be Beethoven’s birth month. Today in Japan, Ode to Joy and Beethoven’s Ninth is sung and played in the choruses and
