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037 Sailortown
Erfgoedstuk
Bladmuziek
Sailortown,
Titel:
Sailortown
Naam uitgever:
Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. - E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc.
Jaar van uitgave:
1997
Omschrijving:
Liedtekst en Liedtekst verklaring
Aantal pagina's:
360
Taal:
Engels
Plaats van uitgave:
London & Newe York
Auteur:
Stan Hugill
ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN SAILORTOWNS
holding seven pounds of earth. In Nagasaki, too, native women worked cargoes, in particular coal, which they carried aboard the ships in baskets, with, very often, babies slung athwart their backs be- neath the baskets. In later years, in the port of Miike, women, with their babies attached, were employed in the conveying of coal aboard steamers.
Nagasaki was one of the last ports where the samurai went around
slashing at sailors ashore with their katanas. From being the first port in Japan, more or less, to allow Europeans ashore, to well after the opening of the Treaty Ports, Nagasaki was the last place to become agreeable to the inroads of the White Man. This statement refers in particular to the Japanese male. The women of Nagasaki from time immemorial had shown great interest in the White Man, hence the 'Nagasaki Marriages' between local girls and sailors from both men- o'-war and merchant ships. This was the sort of thing in which Pierre Loti once indulged, giving him food for his book Madame Chrysanthemum, from which probably stemmed the idea of the opera Madame Butterfly. Besides the 'Nagasaki Marriages' there was another form of amuse-
ment which the sailors loved, something not found in other Japanese ports, and that was the famous Nagasaki geisha dance, the John Kina or Chionkina. The dance is supposed to have been derived from the Dutch, and its name to mean 'Just come here'. All over Nagasaki there were, and probably still are, John Kina Houses. The sailors ashore would visit these bamboo-and-paper-joints, squat down, each with a bottle of sake, and await the dance. It was a sort of Oriental strip-tease. The girls would dance to the music of the samisen and taiko or drum, and, as in our musical chairs, when the music stopped the girl who could not hold her posture had to pay a 'forfeit', or rather shed one article of clothing. These girls wore several kimonos, not to mention innumerable belts and sashes, tabi or bifurcated socks and slippers, all of which counted, and obviously, since the same girl rarely wavered twice when the music stopped, it took quite a while for the sailor to feast his eyes on any one girl's nakedness. Still the girls themselves, if the customers began to get a bit impatient, would hurry things up a little by wavering on purpose. This was the dance taken by Gilbert and Sullivan for their Mikado :
John Kina, John Kina, John, John, Kina, Kina, Yokohama, Nagasaki, Kobe, Moji, hoi!
In actual fact the girls who performed this dance were not true
Geisha, but rather untalented Geisha who, somewhat like the back row of the chorus in the West in Victorian days, augmented their salaries by prostitution. They were known in Japanese as shirokubi or 'white-necks', and had a police permit or nimai-gansatsu—a 'two- way pass'—allowing them to be both entertainers and harlots. As in 309
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Organisatie: Shanty Nederland
laatste wijziging 18-09-2022
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