Ayako Koide
poetry / writing
Technopoetry
Photohaiku
Essays
translation / Editing
Goze by Shoko Hashimoto
Japanese post-war photography
Others
Blog - Goze Uta
Collaboration
About
© 2024 Ayako Koide. All Rights Reserved.
poetry / writing
Technopoetry
Photohaiku
Essays
translation / Editing
Goze by Shoko Hashimoto
Japanese post-war photography
Others
Blog - Goze Uta
Collaboration
About
© 2024 Ayako Koide. All Rights Reserved.
Shoko Hashimoto: Goze New Complete Edition (Zen Foto Gallery, 2021), jp-en translation
Shoko Hashimoto: Goze Asahigraph Reprint (Zen Foto Gallery, 2019), jp-en translation of the artist’s essays
Goze [pronounced as in rosé] are groups of blind women musicians who earned their living by touring from village to village, staying with farmers for free and, in return, performing shamisen (three-string lute) songs. Their history dates back to the medieval period, and after longstanding and changing practices that served both rural and urban communities of Japan, they stopped their practices in the 1970s.
As a translator, I was involved in the projects undertaken by a photography gallery in Tokyo to publish photo books re-compiling Shoko Hashimoto’s work from the 70s. He travelled with one of the last practising goze groups and produced an outstanding body of black-and-white photography documenting their life. I translated the selected texts from Hashimoto’s travelogue, which not only vividly depicts the everyday lives of goze against the backdrop of the idyllic landscape of rural Japan but also shares how he gained friendship from these alienated and brutally pragmatic travelling women musicians with visual disability. Without such a bond, his photography would have been a mere record of these curious and mysterious entities and would not have presented their character. These texts have now been published in two photography books.