Living Together with Grief : Looking Back Over the Ages at Children's Songs

As modern science has spread and people’s views of death change, a shared culture of mourning has been diminishing in Japan. Children no longer tend to experience going to funerals nor do they join in rituals of mourning for people close to them. However, after this initial decline in shared mourning, there still were songs sung with which all could share the common sorrow. Now this, too, may be rare. In Japan after the Meiji Restoration, the first government attempted to teach children songs and nursery rhymes to share sadness, and in the Taisho Period people composed many nostalgic children’s songs which were sung by a wide variety of people of various generations until the 1960s. This was a period when modernization and urbanization advanced and people experienced the loss of having a hometown. It is the author’s view that during the last quarter of the twentieth century and after, the sense of national solidarity has been greatly diminishing in Japan. It is not easy nowadays for the general public to have a shared sense of “home”. By and by as individualization advances, it may become more and more difficult to have a sense of solidarity with those around one. People may become accustomed to feel that others are distinct individuals from them. In spite of all these changes, people still like to sing songs in which they yearn for their hometown or country. As loneliness increases and a sense of loss and grief becomes more and more acute, people seem to have a stronger need for healing and comfort. This suggests a perennial yearning for a “homeland of the soul” that might be one cause of the widening interest in grief care.departmental bulletin pape