This early Summer, I spent a week on the tropical island of Ishigaki and naturally became obsessed with its history.
Everything felt surprisingly different from the mainland Japan.
The people. The food. The architecture. The culture..
One cloudy afternoon, after the weather basically forced me to stop snorkeling for once, I ended up wandering around Ishigaki Yaima Village looking at old Ryukyuan houses, water buffalo, hundreds of squirrel monkeys, and various extremely cute island details.
Meanwhile this Ryukyuan scale would NOT leave my head.
Do. Mi. Fa. Sol. Si - over and over.
Then suddenly I realised.. wait, this is literally Shima Uta(島唄)!!
Immediately opened my Spotify and shoved The Boom in my husband’s face.
I’ve L O V E D this song for years and years as one of those insanely beautiful 90s Japanese tracks you play whilst pretending your life is more cinematic than it really is.
But somehow I had never properly looked up the lyrics.
Huge mistake honestly.
Because the song is about the Battle of Okinawa.
Which means this gorgeous melody I’d been casually romanticising for years was actually carrying one of the darkest memories in Okinawan history.
Spring 1945. American bombardments. Japanese military operations. Civilians trapped in caves called gama while the entire island basically collapsed into hell.
The lyric about deigo flowers blooming before the storm suddenly became horrifying.
So did the line about saying a final goodbye beneath the sugarcane fields.
Then I found out something even worse.
Apparently during the song’s most devastating section, Kazufumi Miyazawa intentionally abandons the Okinawan scale and switches into a Western musical scale instead.
Once you notice it, the song genuinely feels wounded.
Like it briefly stops belonging to the island.
And weirdly enough that immediately made me think of two other songs.
One is Korean.
The other is Irish.
First was Thorn Bush by Poet and Village Chief.
Most Koreans know the Jo Sung Mo version, but songwriter Ha Deok-gyu has spoken before about confronting the trauma left behind by modern Korean history, including the Jeju 4·3 massacre.
“There are too many versions of myself inside me for you to rest.”
Insane lyric honestly.
The song does the exact same thing as Shima Uta.
Wraps devastation inside something unbearably beautiful.
Then there’s Sunrise by The Divine Comedy.
A song sitting somewhere in the emotional aftermath of The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the years around the Good Friday Agreement.
Huge orchestration. Gorgeous melody..
Meanwhile underneath it all is exhaustion. Violence.
Survivors trying to continue living after history has already wrecked everybody involved.
And somehow the song still chooses hope.
That’s probably what connects all three songs.
If you never pay attention to the lyrics, they just sound beautiful.
But underneath them are massacres, separation, grief, silence, and entire generations trying to survive what happened to them.
And strangely, all three songs are about wounds between people who were never supposed to become enemies in the first place.
After knowing all this, the songs became harder to romanticise.