Very Strange Record Label

[gramophone78]

Here is a very strange little 6" record we just found. It is Japanese and double sided. Has anyone seen a record like this??.

[Valecnik]

Do you know it's Japanese or just speculating so?

Only a guess but could it be Chinese from the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong at that time?

[gramophone78]

Bruce I'm 100% certain it is Japanese. The record company is the Kokka Record Co.

[transformingArt]

This is certainly a Japanese Kokka recording of the mid 20s and early 30s. Crown label was one of the subsidiaries of Kokka records, which was also a subsidiary of Nitto Records since 1926. They dabbled to expand their market in Japan, even went up into China and Korea in the late 1920s, but they were forced to abandon the whole market after Nitto went bankrupt in 1932.

The genre is identified as "(Bedtime story) Recitations". The title is "Bunbuku Chagama" ("Happiness Bubbling over like a Tea-pot."), a famous Japanese folktale dated back to Edo period. You can get some info about the story on this Wikipedia link here; (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunbuku_Chagama). The speaker is Masao Kusuyama (1882 ~ 1941), a noted Japanese literary critic/translator of the period, and he is accompanied by Crown Salon Orchestra.

Kokka/Crown records made lots of 6 inch records from 1927, most of them contains Nursery rhymes or bedtime story like this example here ; all INCREDIBLY RARE. I saw one example on an online Japanese record auction with minimum bid of 500 U.S. dollars! I never dealt with any examples in flesh, but one of my Japanese collector friend once told me that these recordings are sort of self-destructive, as most of Kokka products had terrible lamination problems. Also, nobody didn't care anything about Bedtime story records seriously back then, of course.

Although I'm not particularly interested in Japanese recordings, it is certainly very surprising to find that such a rarity turned up in Canada.

Can you provide the transfer of the record on this thread or so? I'm somewhat curious about hearing this.

[gramophone78]

Art, Thank you for that info. This record is not delaminating at all. However, the other side has several bad scratches on it. It was also not found in Canada but down here in Mexico along with the 7" Disco Zonophono I asked about on the machine thread. Here is Side A. As you can see it has many bad scratches and one small edge chip but, it still plays..... . The first pic I posted of side B still has dirt on it that looks like white spots on it. Sorry, I just had no idea about it. I have no way to clean these two record properly here. So, I will when back and I will record them for you to hear. I would like to post a pic of that "Disco Zonophono" #1368 I found with this Crown record. Do you have any idea the title and artist of this record???. As you can see the label has not held up very good but, the grooves look OK.