Ziuta is a genre of chamber music for syamisen ‘samisen
’. There are many theories about how and when the syamisen, a three-stringed plucked lute (figure 1), came to
Japan
. According to the most commonly held theory, a similar Chinese instrument, the
sanxian
, was brought to the Ryûkyû Islands (present-day Okinawa Prefecture) by the fifteenth century at the latest. During the Eiroku era (1558–1570), this instrument, called the
sansin
‘three strings
’ in Okinawa,...
