Saturday, February 21, 2009

SHIN KAWAHATA, IWAO / JAPAN


I am always networking when it comes to the ukulele. I have been selling items on eBay to pay for a custom ukulele from Mike DaSilva. I had some Hawaiian and Ukulele CD’s for sale and I was contacted by Shin Kawahata of Toyama, Japan, who wanted to know if I would ship to Japan. I said sure I would treat him fairly and only charge the actual postage.

I went to our local UPS store with my 9 CD’s and showed them the smallest box. They quoted me $55 for a U.S. mail rate. Ouch! I asked, "What if the box was smaller?" (I thought I would remove the CD’s and paperwork to get it as small as possible. They told me the U.S. mail rate would then be $44. Then after Shin and I agreed on the postage I went to the local post office and was only charged $11.95! Shin was happy to see a big refund.

I asked him to send me a picture and some info about his club. He told me that he likes Herb Ohta Sr. (known as, Ohta-san, in Japan) He sent me the picture at the top of this post and a link to his club in Japan. The link was all in Japanese, so I just kept clicking and found some pages that looked interesting and I was able to make some sense of the content.

http://www.ukefan.com/cgi/code/omakecode.php Japanese song sheet

http://www.ukefan.com/codehyo.html Japanese Chord Sheets

http://www.ukefan.com/mb/u_pearlyshell.php?inp=0&ktpc=0&frhyoji=1 Pearly Shells

http://www.ukefan.com/codefu/4slow/perlyshell-h.html Pupu o Ewa

Shin also indicated a favorite of his named, Iwao. Here’s Iwao’s info page…

http://www.iwao.info/profile/index.html and him playing…

When you wish upon a star – Iwao (Takes about 50 seconds before playing starts)


Other Japanese players to enjoy…

ALL THAT UKULELE XMAS - Gensblue (Walking Bass Ukulele from a previous post.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVo55iGvOh8&eurl=http://humbleuker.blogspot.com/search?q=japan

Shigeto Takahashi at New York Ukulele Festival (Mike DaSilva Videos)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ljBZCBqd4&feature=related

No comments:

Post a Comment