The song “Akai Kutsu”
“Akai Kutsu” (Red Shoes) is a children’s song with words by the poet Noguchi Ujo and music by Motoori Nagayo, published in 1922. It tells of a girl in red shoes who was taken by a foreigner on a ship from the port of Yokohama to a faraway land, and it has been widely sung with its melancholy melody. A statue of “the girl who wore red shoes” gazing at the sea stands in Yamashita Park in Yokohama.
Urban legends about the song
Various rumors have been whispered about the song. A well-known one is that “the girl was kidnapped by a foreign child trader.” Another often-told story is that children misheard the word ijin-san (foreigner) as hiijii-san (great-grandfather) or ii jiisan (nice old man).
The true story of “Kimi-chan”
As for the song’s model, research by a Hokkaido newspaper reporter and others produced a well-known theory that she was a girl named Kimi-chan from Shizuoka Prefecture. According to this theory, her mother, struggling to make ends meet, entrusted the young Kimi-chan to an American missionary couple for adoption. The mother believed her daughter had gone to America, and Noguchi Ujo wrote the poem after hearing her story.
In reality, Kimi-chan had tuberculosis and could not board the ship; after the missionaries returned home, she was left at an orphanage in Tokyo and died at the age of nine, it is said. Her mother never learned of her death, believing her daughter was living happily in America. However, this model theory is disputed.
