Shout sister shout: inside and outside Japanese pop music - Access to Japan

BRUCE STERLING: Japanese pop often seems a funhouse-mirror reflection of American forms, but the thing is alive and has real blood, skin and muscle. People live rock and roll in Japan. The caption to a recent Whole Earth Re view cover ("The Global Teenager," #65) claimed that Japanese kids are "weekend rebels." Since that photo was taken in the early eighties, the teenagers in it have grown up to become, variously, a hip-hop DJ, a hair stylist, a designer, a model, and the guitarist for Salon Music, probably the best artrock band in Tokyo.

Since the 1920 with the then-startling advent of the mobo and moga (Modern Boy/ Modern Girl), Japan, and especially Tokyo, has had a persistent bohemian counterculture. Like all modern countercultures, it contains certain standard elements: flaming youth, hooliganism, student life, political radicalism, artiness, odd or deviant sexual habits, dope and booze, funny/ distinctive clothes and hair, lousy day jobs. The people who live this life are the wellspring of Japanese rock and roll. While plenty of weekend rebels in all modern bourgeois nations pass through this life as a stage," the bohemian cultural tradition itself never goes away. Japan has known a lot of boho cults of various stripes, known generally as zoku, or tribes. There are, or have been, bosozoku (bikers), Takenokozoku (street dancers), Miyuki zoku (mall rats), Ivy zoku (preppies), Saike zoku (acidheads), a plethora of purple-haired punks, and plenty more.

MAMI IKEDA; Those tribes are history! New ones have emerged in Tokyo such as Ichigo zoku, An-Non zoku, and people called Frecter. Ichigo zoku are 15-year-old mall rats who wander in packs through Harajuku eating ice cream and crepes and wishing they had more pocket money. An-Non zoku (Sloane Rangers) are girls in their late teens to early twenties who live for the fashion magazines An-an and Non-no. They tremble with joy if they can look exactly like the pictures in the magazines. Freeters are young people with part-time day jobs - who can actually earn more money with less restraint than a so-called salaryman."

Young salarymen in their first two to three years don't get much salary at all. But the average hourly wage for part-timers is getting higher than ever, so amateur band-people with day jobs can do pretty well.

BS: The purported founder of modern Japanese pop music was a songwriter named Nakayama Shimpei. His major smash-hit, Tokyo Dance," came out in the nervous summer of 1933. A peppy dance tune with lyrics by a major poet, the song caused such a frenzy of mass street-dancing that traffic was blocked in large sections of Tokyo and the Emperor was kept awake well past his bedtime. Serious mass street-dancing remains a charming if rather bizarre feature of the Japanese scene.

MI: The Hoko-Ten or Hokosha-Tengoku is a strip of street in Harajuku that turns into a vehicle-free promenade every Sunday.

Until the early eighties, Hoko-Ten was dominated by two tribes of street-dancers, the Takeno zoku and Roller zoku. Toward the mid-eighties amateur bands began to show up to play to the crowds, and Hoko-Ten has become an expo of street bands from everywhere in the country.

BS: Another odd feature of the Japanese scene is the strong emphasis on idol-bands and idol-singers. American parallels might be Fabian and Bobby Vee, or the Phil Spector girl groups. The Japanese tolerance for "cuteness" sometimes seems almost infinite, and Japan swarms with hairsprayed and shiny-toothed bubblegum bands that make New Kids on the Block look like no-kidding street-bred bruisers. Legions of idol-girls vie to project a giggly cuddliness that sometimes goes past the limits of charm and approaches the eerie. Current idol-girl Nori-P, for instance, sings in her own made-up dialect - as if Kylie Minogue sang in pig-Latin. The purest of pop commodities, the idols come and go swiftly.

Rock video has yet to hit the Japanese rock scene with the impact it's had in America. But it might be argued that the Japanese have short-circuited the MTV routine entirely and gone straight to commercials. Rock tracks in Japan sell cars, candy, clothes and soft drinks, and many bands trace their first big break to the use of a song in a national TV ad. There seems to be little or no opprobrium attached to this; the practice seems to move a lot of product for everyone concerned.

MI: To televise rock video in Japan, the record companies would have to buy the airing slot in a show. TV time is enormously expensive and there is no Japanese version of MTV cable to offer cheap access to domestic rock videos. Even if you find the money to make a good-quality Japanese video, it can't reach the Japanese audience. That's why appearing on TV commercials has become the "success barometer" of Japanese music acts.

BS: To the Western ear, Japanese rock often ns a bit persnickety - very tidy, very well-produced, meticulous. Bluesy, rootsy, funky, spontaneous there are some cultures famous for these qualities, but Japan isn't one of them. Still, if there's an exception to that rule, it's the near-genius hippie producer-guitarist Makoto Kubota, of Sandii and the Sunsetz, whose 1982 album Immigrants" is my candidate for the best Japanese pop album of the eighties. Fronted by the Cher-esque chanteuse Sandii, the Sunsetz are a world-class funky groove. Early Sunsetz were brisk power-pop New Wave. But late Sunsetz, with a heavy one-love reggae influence, may be the closest Japanese pop has ever come to unbuttoned sunny tropical bliss. Kubota hasn't lost his edge, though; in '89 he produced Billiken, a shrieking loping band whose female vocalist, Atsuko Noguchi, can belt out a lyric to peel paint.

If Japanese pop merely mimicked Western forms, there wouldn't be much thrill in it for the foreigner, For me, the core of the appeal of Japanese music is the intelligence, discipline and spooky intensity of its art-bands. Hitomi Takenaka and Zin Yoshida, known collectively as Salon Music, who often sing in English, choose such outre song-topics as female body-building and the voyages of Charles Darwin. They might be compared, distantly, to Brian Eno or early Talking Heads, though of late they have moved into percussive acid-house.

Real Fish sound like demented European circus music - a Fellini soundtrack played upside-down and backward. Dip in the Pool, with their extraterrestrial female vocals, might recall Cocteau Twins. Zabadak, with its haunting, twittering, insistent melodies, makes a perfect soundtrack for weaving daisy chains where in low Martian orbit.

MI: The past four years have seen a boom in rock bands on independent labels. Along with the band boom came a new three-hour TV show, "Ikasu Band Tengoku" or "IkaTen," aired every Saturday at midnight on Channel Six. Ten amateur bands appear on this program each week, hoping to win a chance to make their own record and video, a tempting shortcut to the mainstream.

It's definitely heart-aching to see those bands debuting one after another. Too often they are used by major labels as "disposable bands" to get a few quick bucks, and then they're dumped. This is called aota-gai or "buying rice before it is reaped." These "aota-gai" bands are swiftly turned into totally commercial products, exploited to death without having any chance to develop their essential artistic qualities. It's causing the Japanese pop scene an enormous amount of damage, and I just wish that such a harmful "boom" would end immediately.

The coming scene in Japanese pop is high-tech acid-house music. Electronic body-beat music will grow following the cultish but powerful debut of Soft Ballet and Dove. And the arty electro-pop acts will probably remain stable with the strong support from their fans.

BS: The stuff I like is a minority taste even in Tokyo. But for the American fan, half the fun is in hunting it out - snatching trophies from a vast but weirdly obscured realm of completely modern pop music.

Mail Ordering Japanese Rock Music Edison: Genre - mainly Japanese independent bands (records, CDs and videos). 7-5-14, Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo. Tel: 03-365-3531; fax 03-366-7699.

Flower Record: Genre - Japanese indie and major pop/rock bands (records, CDs, LDs, videos and books). 305 Kosan Bldg., 5-59-1, Nakano, Nakano-ku, Tokyo. Tel: 03-538-3505. Mail Ordering Procedure: Send your order list by fax or mail. it helps if you state whether you want your package by air, surface, etc.).

They'll check if they have those records and CDs available, and will inform you of the cost including shipping by fax or mail. Shipping costs may vary according to quantities and shipping methods, but standard shipping fees for one or two records/ CDs are about Y600 ($4.15); for three or four, up to Y1000 ($6.90). Send money either by registered mail or money order. Also, enclose a note (of course) stating the titles/bands/ retail prices of the records you want. Your order should arrive within two weeks.

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