m_nakamura wrote: Sat May 03, 2025 3:57 pm
Me!!
I don't know about any seperate groups but what's your project?
Thank you. I was thinking about groups in Japan.
I have a bit of mystery.
I bought a carrying case for 12” records the other day. It had a collection inside it, a mix of 10" and 12" records.
The seller could not tell me anything about it all because it wasn’t his. It was his partner’s, and it had belonged to his partner’s parents who because of serious health issues do not now even recognize that they ever owned the case. I did not meet the partner.
Pretty much all of the records in the case are of Japanese manufacture, except for one or two German records. I am reasonably certain that most of them date to the interwar years.
As discussed elsewhere here (
viewtopic.php?t=60599 ), there were two test pressings, one on the Nipponophone label, the other on the Japanese Polydor label. One of these records is dated 1925. The performers were Lena Nakamura (soprano) and H. Petzold (piano), and H. Petzold (soprano) and J. Dunn (piano).
So we probably have a soprano and pianist, a German woman, recording both with a soprano, a Japanese woman with a Germanic given name, and with a pianist with an English sounding name on Japanese record labels.
Most curious!
There is perhaps some evidence that the collection may have belonged to Petzold.
The sleeves on the records are a mismatched lot is so often common. But we have sleeves from the Chinese Victor company, although there are no Chinese disks present. We have Japanese Victor and Columbia sleeves. We have a Japanese Polydor sleeve. We have an English HMV sleeve but with a German dealer's sticker on it. We also have sleeves from Vancouver's English Gramophone Shop, although there are no Canadian, British, or American made records present. One of the English Gramophone Shop's sleeves is of WWII vintage since it is soliciting for Victor's wartime buy-back of shellac records for recycling. If the case belonged to Petzold, the wartime sleeve suggests that she was here during war.
The case which held the records has a printed cataloguing label glued into its lid. It is printed in English. The hand written catalogue might be in the same hand as that on one of the two test disk labels—the script style identified elsewhere here as Fraktur, a form popular in Germany before WWII. The catalogue contains some of the disks now present, but not all, and there are many items missing from the catalogue. The brand stamping on the case's lock appears to be in English.
The case was here in the Vancouver area.
The greater Vancouver area once was home to a very large Japanese population before the forced diaspora and internment during the Second World War.
There was once a lively connection between Japan and Vancouver, which may have included music.
What is the story here? Who were Lena Nakamura, H. Petzold, and J. Dunn? Why were they recording on Japanese labels? Why are the records here in Vancouver?
We may never know.
Research so far yields absolutely nothing.
It is a very cool collection which should stay together with the case.
At the very least I would like to document the records it contains, something that so far is proving quite challenging.
