Sanshin: strings, song and Ryukyu

The sanshin is a Ryukyuan plucked instrument heard in Okinawan classical music, folk song and modern performance. It developed from the Chinese sanxian and is historically related to mainland Japan’s shamisen. Amami has its own related traditions, with differences in strings, plectra and technique.

A long, fretless neck joins a wooden body covered with skin. Three tuning pegs adjust the three strings, which pass over a small bridge on the body. The left hand stops the strings at different positions. Python skin is traditional; modern instruments also use synthetic coverings.

Plucking sets a string vibrating. The bridge transmits that motion to the skin-covered body, which helps radiate the sound. Bridge and skin are working parts of the instrument. Skin tension and the construction of the bridge and body affect its response.

The left hand changes the vibrating string length while the right hand plucks. An Okinawan player may use a claw-shaped plectrum worn on the index finger, a pick or a fingernail. Downstrokes are basic, with techniques such as upward hooks adding variety alongside the singer’s phrasing.

Players often sing while accompanying themselves. Classical performance can also include koto, flute, kūchō fiddle and drums. Court-derived repertoire and local folk traditions differ in songs, vocal style and setting. The instrument accompanies slow songs as well as lively dance music.

Okinawa Prefecture describes Tancha-mē as a song about fishing-village life. Its words tell of shoals arriving at the beach in front of the village, sung with sanshin accompaniment. Male dancers carry oars and female dancers baskets. The words and the dancers’ objects describe the same setting, with the sanshin contributing to a performance combining song and dance.

Honchōshi is a basic tuning, illustrated by C–F–C from low to high: a fourth followed by a fifth. Players can raise or lower the overall pitch to suit a voice. Other tunings, including ni-age and san-sage, alter the relationships between strings.

Kunkunshi is traditional sanshin notation. Characters such as 合, 乙, 老, 四 and 工 indicate playing positions or open strings, often beside lyrics. The notation is tied to fingering: a character does not always mean one fixed Western pitch.

In the Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department’s honchōshi score of Tinsagu nu Hana, the rightmost column begins 中–合–尺–上. With open strings tuned C–F–C, 中 stops the middle string for A; 合 is the low open C; 尺 and 上 stop the middle string at B and G. This short passage switches between stopped and open strings. Raising or lowering the overall tuning preserves the written positions while changing the sounding pitches.

Its prototype is usually traced to the Chinese sanxian, arriving around the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. Ryukyuan makers adapted it to local music and court performance. Records of the royal craft office include sanshin makers, known as sanshin-uchi.

In the mid-sixteenth century the instrument reached mainland Japan through Sakai, developing there into the shamisen. Both use three strings and a skin-covered body, but shamisen acquired its own construction, plectra and performance genres. Their shared history connects two distinct instrument traditions.

After the Ryukyu Kingdom was abolished and Okinawa Prefecture established in 1879, former elites lost their old status. Some moved into rural communities, helping carry sanshin into village festivals and theatre. Migrants later took songs and instruments overseas, where they continued in families and community performance.

The Battle of Okinawa in 1945 destroyed many instruments. In the shortages that followed, people made kankara sanshin with empty cans as bodies and materials such as parachute cord for strings. Available materials replaced traditional components while retaining neck, strings and a resonating body.

Preservation involves repertoire as well as instruments. Founded in 1955, the Nomura-ryū Hozonkai continues the notation tradition refined by Nomura Anchō through performances and teacher qualifications. Sanshin also shares modern stages with instruments such as guitar, as the 2014 Japan Music Festival photograph shows.

Seven traditional forms are distinguished primarily by neck shape and associated with named master makers. Forms such as Makabi and Yunagushiku differ in head curvature, neck thickness and lower contours. These are construction forms, not seven scales; the body and skin also matter to the sound.

The makers’ cooperative describes Kubanu-funī as the smallest of the seven forms, with the slenderest neck and a side profile resembling a fan-palm leaf stalk. Yunagushiku has a thicker neck, a longer pegbox and a larger lower-neck swelling, called the hatomune. Neck thickness, pegbox length and lower contour offer separate points of comparison. The form name alone does not determine the sound of the whole instrument.

The 2019 exhibition catalogue shows the neck of a Makabi-form instrument named 御茶屋御物 outside its body. Four faces of the normally concealed tang bear incised inscriptions filled in red. Alongside a date, the back records the instrument’s name and the right side reads ヨナ城. The neck preserves written information about the object as well as its carved profile.

Makers lay out the selected form, shape and smooth the neck, then apply and polish lacquer. Skin is stretched separately across the front and back of the body. Final assembly adds the pegs, neck, strings and bridge and adjusts the neck–body angle. Sanshin making received national traditional-craft designation in 2018. A 2014 Tokyo University of the Arts exhibition account also described difficulties following the early-2000s sanshin boom: competition from cheaper imports and a decline in craftspeople making the instrument bodies.

In the cooperative’s python-skin process, the cut skin is shaped around the wooden frame with nails, reinforced on its back with cloth tape and sewn to a stretching fixture. Driving wedges progressively into the fixture stretches the skin to adjust tension; front and back are worked separately. During assembly, the maker inserts the neck into the body and carefully adjusts their angle, a fitting operation called 部当て that affects tone. This is the cooperative’s described skin-working route.