五木の子守唄 (Itsuki no Komoriuta)

Sung for generations in the mountain village of Itsuki, in Kyushu, this is one of Japan’s most beloved and most bittersweet lullabies — written, it is said, by the young girls sent from home to nurse other families’ babies, who poured their own homesickness into the songs they sang to lull the children in their care. Itsuki sits deep in the mountains of Kumamoto Prefecture, historically one of the most remote and hard-to-reach villages in Japan, and after folklorists began collecting and recording it in the early twentieth century, the song spread far beyond the valley to become one of the most widely known lullabies in the country, still taught and sung today.