Rieko Hirosawa sits on a stone bench outside her home, tunes her instrument and takes a deep breath. She unleashes an impossibly high note while her bachi plectrum slaps the three strings of her shamisen, a traditional instrument.

Combined, they slice through the stillness of an oppressively humid afternoon. If her neighbours were wondering if the usually softly spoken Hirosawa was at home, now they know.

Barely a decade has passed since Hirosawa started learning goze uta (blind women’s songs) – a prodigious genre of music spanning four centuries that most Japanese people have probably never heard.

That she now plays with the composure of a veteran is remarkable for two reasons: not a single goze uta musical score exists, and even if the chords and notes had been written down, Hirosawa would not be able to read them.

“I knew when I was a young child that I would lose my sight,” says Hirosawa at her hillside home in Tomi, Nagano prefecture, the outline of the Japanese Northern Alps in the distance.

But it is because of her condition, not in spite of it, that the 65-year-old has formed an unbreakable spiritual bond with the music of the goze – blind and visually impaired women who earned a living as itinerant musicians and who numbered in their hundreds in the late 19th century.

In the north-western prefectures, where the tradition flourished during the Edo period (1603-1868), Hirosawa is at the heart of a movement to protect the legacy of the goze.

“They sang songs while they were living really tough lives,” she says. “Just surviving was a challenge. They used music to have a sense of purpose and then passed on those skills to their apprentices.”

The musical genre, which historical texts and artwork suggest began as long ago as the 1500s, was no simple career choice. In feudal Japan, girls from poor rural regions who suffered from visual impairment as a result of measles and cataracts, then both commonplace, had only two means of making a living – as masseuses or as travelling musicians.

Those who chose the latter route out of poverty and discrimination became live-in apprentices at guilds run by an experienced goze, who would pass on songs by word of mouth and teach the shamisen by sitting behind younger musicians and guiding their hands along the instrument’s three strings.

Life among these groups of four or five women was strictly regulated, even though the apprentices were encouraged to view their peers as sisters and their master as a mother figure.

They were expected to give a portion of their earnings to the most senior woman in a show of loyalty and observed a strict hierarchy, from the use of honorific to address senior musicians, to the way they wore their hair. The least experienced ate and bathed last, their stock rising with every year of their apprenticeship.

The women were not allowed to marry, and men were banned from their lodgings. Those who were found to be in illicit relationships risked being cast out of the group or losing years off their apprenticeships.

“It wasn’t unusual for parents to go directly to the master of a goze household and ask her to take on their daughter,” says Zenji Ogawa, curator of a museum dedicated to the musicians in Takada, a town in Niigata prefecture that was once home to almost 100 performers.

“They were worried about what would happen to them after they died, at a time when people with disabilities had few opportunities and there was no such thing as welfare.”

Life on the road was even more arduous. Three or four musicians, led by a sighted guide, spent 300 days of the year walking from one village to the next, mainly in Japan’s northwestern prefectures of Nagano and Niigata, although some ventured to Fukushima on the Pacific coast, or as far as present-day Tokyo.

Carrying their instruments and belongings, they trekked through mountain ranges and deep snow, each resting a hand on the shoulder of the woman in front. Those who collapsed from exhaustion would have to be carried to the next village.

The women were paid in rice that they would exchange for cash. “There was a belief that the goze must have magical powers to have overcome so much adversity and become musicians, so people would buy back the rice they had donated to the women,” says Ogawa, who organises bus tours of goze-related sites and will happily chat to visitors to the museum he has spent the past decade filling with artefacts, from the waraji straw sandals the women wore on the road to rare black-and-white photos of their performances.

“They thought that feeding the rice to their children would make them just as strong-willed,” adds Ogawa, co-founder of the Takada Goze Culture Preservation and Promotion Association. “It was the opposite of discrimination. People with disabilities suffered terrible discrimination in those days, of course, but the goze were treated differently.”

The women were expected to memorise a huge number of songs to play at private homes and at festivals, many of them jōrūri narratives of the struggles of ordinary people, sometimes with a spiritual message.

The last true goze

The spread of modern entertainment, along with the introduction of welfare, better education for people with disabilities and a more enlightened attitude towards those with visual impairments hastened the demise of the goze, whose numbers dwindled dramatically after the second world war.

Haru Kobayashi, who went blind when she was three months old, is regarded as the last true goze. Born in 1900, she spent her childhood locked in a room at the back of her family home in Niigata and began her career at the age of eight.

She continued performing until 1978 and was named a living national treasure and received the medal of honour.

If not for Kobayashi’s longevity – she died in a nursing home in 2005 aged 105 – Hirosawa may have never discovered the history, culture and music of the goze.

“Kobayashi-san was 101 years old when I met her,” says Hirosawa, who wanted to interview the musician for her local radio programme, Rieko no Mado (Rieko’s Window). “She had lost her sight, of course, and her hearing was failing too.”

Hirosawa had been warned by care home staff that Kobayashi would not be able to sing during their meeting.

“But she was determined to sing one stanza of a song to me. When I heard her sing it was like thunder … I’d never experienced anything like it. It sent chills down my spine, and I found myself crying the whole time, even on the train on the way home.”

Inspired by the encounter, she continues to memorise more of the goze repertoire with the help of a teacher who once studied under Kobayashi. “All I want is for people to enjoy the music … after all, that’s what the goze’s original purpose was,” she says.

Hirosawa, who plays at events around Japan, knew for 20 years that she would lose her sight.

“I was really anxious about the future and wondered how I would survive. My experience is completely different from those of the goze, of course. I’ve been a radio personality for more than 30 years and have a family … and that’s the case for other blind women these days.

“But society still imposes limits on what women can do … even more so for blind women. So when they hear me play goze uta, I hope people get a proper feel for the struggles that ordinary Japanese women experienced all those years ago.”

Her guide dog Sophia at her feet, Hirosawa readies herself for another song: “I love coming out here and singing while I’m facing the mountains,” she says. There is little doubt that the mountains are listening.