On August 22, music store Shibuya HMV shut down operations. Surely it’s never good to see a large-scale culture shop smack middle in Tokyo’s central youth shopping district have to close its doors, but the obituaries have focused more upon HMV’s historical role than the possible contemporary impact of its disappearance. Mainichi called it the “holy ground” for the ’90s epoch-making music genre Shibuya-kei. As we will see, this is only partly true.

Shibuya HMV opened on November 16, 1990, at the height of the Bubble economy. The original store was inside the ONE-OH-NINE building (not to be confused with Shibuya109), but in 1998 moved to its more iconic location on Center-gai. We should not assume that the opening of Shibuya HMV was as dramatic as its closing. Tower Records was already down the street, as well as Wave — the ultra-trendy import record shop chain from the ultra-trendy Saison retail group (Seibu, Parco, Loft, Muji, Seed). J-Pop and other Japanese sounds could always be bought at Shinseido and other old-school retailers. So Shibuya had both multiple outlets for Japanese and foreign music. Tower was the place to go to buy cheap foreign imports of big mainstream acts. Meanwhile Wave had an incredible diverse selection of small foreign labels and imported 12″s. If you wanted to actually see your favorite DJs and musicians out in the wild buying their latest haul, Wave was the place to go.

So in this record shop ecosystem, Shibuya HMV was positioned as a foreign megastore with a slightly domestic Japanese feeling — like a souped-up version of Shinseido. The shop’s real innovation, credited in all the retrospectives, was the corner where the staff curated a selection of more interesting contemporary Japanese bands — ones that had strayed far from classic kayokyoku conventions to sound like Japanese-language versions of modern Western music. At first, this focused around Flipper’s Guitar, Love Tambourines, Pizzicato Five, and Scha Dara Parr. The bands eventually became known as “Shibuya-kei” in that more than half of their sales came from the record stores within this one shopping district. Shibuya HMV was not the only record store to push these artists, but that particular outlet’s support was perhaps the most visible. (The local retail push surely helped these bands catch on with a trend-sensitive audience, but their mainstream success came after television commercials and dramas used Shibuya-kei songs as the theme songs.)

We should also remember that at the time Shibuya was not just a shopping district but the shopping district. Around 1988, Harajuku emptied out completely as rich delinquent cool kids staked their claim in Shibuya. So the idea of “Shibuya-kei” was not just about the stores in Shibuya but an idea that trendy Tokyo kids alone could get Oricon spots for obscure artists with slightly strange sounds, without powerful management companies and who did not play by the usual “let’s appear on TV variety shows” rules.

Looking back, Shibuya HMV’s ability to foster Shibuya-kei was not just a testament to its ingenious retail curation. The store’s influence stemmed a bit from right time, right place. Everything was predicated on (1) the relative centrality of the store in consumer’s minds (2) the relative simplicity of the market (3) the small number of Shibuya-kei artists who could be organized into a makeshift genre (4) the small amount of new releases from those artists.

None of those conditions lasted beyond the early 1990s. Once Shibuya-kei exploded, indie record shops became a big part of the scene, so hardcore Shibuya-kei fans would go to independent shops Zest or Maximum Joy to find the most precisely-curated selection of rare records. This ended up scattering taste-making legitimacy amongst more players in the market. And when the next wave of Shibuya-kei artists showed up, they nestled easily into the pre-legitimized genre and on the original artists’ own labels like Trattoria and Readymade. There was no need for a larger authority to go out on a limb and vouch for them. The secret to Shibuya HMV’s influence was its brief moment of centrality, when J-Pop fans would go in wide-eyed, browse its shelves, and take note of the special curated records. Now curation of this manner is so commonplace, so built into a record store structure that a consumer would easily glide right by. Tower Records’ well-decorated listening booths seem to play into this, although ironically they are now mostly payola.

So Shibuya HMV and its ilk lost most of their major influence sometime in the 1990s. And forget influence: After the music market peaked in 1998, being a music retailer suddenly became a much less profitable operation. The Daily Yomiuri tries to pin the fall of Shibuya HMV on digital downloading, but the market has basically declined at an equal rate for the last twelve years straight. The original Wave chain folded in 1999. HMV still exists at least, but again, it’s not a good sign that a music store in the middle of Shibuya of all places is no longer sustainable.

But think about the difference two decades make. The neighborhood was once full of rich suburban kids, in the middle of the Bubble, with nothing to spend their overflowing pockets of money on besides records and clothing. Now Center-gai is famous for being the den of the most hardcore lumpen gyaru, who come from prefectures far away, who have suffered twelve years of income decline and have to spend most of their pocket money on cell phone bills. A digital world may not of helped, but the entire Shibuya HMV business model was based on the idea that music was still an exciting part of youth culture and that people still cared vaguely about buying into “the West.” A ¥3000 CD now can buy you ten beef bowls at Sukiya with some change leftover. And who really cares about buying triple-cover price imported magazines. Popular music, more than ever in Japan, is an expensive hobby.

With these factors in mind, the closing of Shibuya HMV should not come as a significant shock, but the defeat is a relatively bold symbol for the desperation of youth culture retailers in 2010. H&M, Forever21, and Shibuya109 may be doing fine due to low reasonable prices but in the days to come, we should probably expect more historic disappearances than arrivals of brand new epoch-defining stores.

1. J-Pop: From Peak to Weak

I recently heard rumors from Japanese music executives that Japan has become the world’s largest market for recorded music. Consumers in the U.S. can no longer be suckered into buying $18 CDs. Meanwhile the loyal Japanese music fan still shells out ¥3,000 — this is not a typo: ¥3,000! — for the third “Best” album of their favorite artist, even though they already own every track. The trick of selling CDs as loyalty-proving “character goods” rather than musical content likely softened the decline for the Japanese music industry.

Despite this very relative success, however, the J-Pop market is a total cultural disaster. The best selling artists of the 21st century are the best selling artists of the 20th century — with a few local “hip-hop” faces and over-manufactured rock bands thrown in the mix for good measure. Any country where the non-idol, non-singer, non-entity Shibasaki Ko is a chart-topper means it’s all over. At least Johnny’s Jimusho acts — NEWS, Arashi, SMAP, etc. — are a weird freak subculture where young women lust over unremarkable, untalented yankii boys sent in from weird corners of the Japanese countryside. Seeing B’z in the top Oricon slot is just sad: Great, they’ve produced another featureless musical cog that their institutional consumers have already slotted into their provisional expense budgets. For the best-selling bands in Japan, fandom is all rote.

Few J-Pop songs are able to bring together ad hoc audiences of non-core fans. They are no “society-wide” hits — just bands playing the commercial game “Who has the most fans?” J-Pop was once about the “mainstream” — now it’s about isolated silos of people with specific mainstream tastes.

And there’s also the old people problem. The elderly make sure that the highest ranking music show every week is “NHK Kayo Concert” (NHK歌謡コンサート) — featuring old people music — rather than shows like “Music Station” or “Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ” that in the past helped bring in new genres and bands.

It wasn’t always this bad. Consider Sony back in 2000. Puffy had peaked at that point, but that epoch-making female duo released a killer remix project that year — on three vinyl records, natch — featuring Captain Funk, Malcolm McLaren, Fantastic Plastic Machine, and Cubismo Grafico. Supercar‘s fanbase somehow grew despite their abandonment of melodic shoegaze rock for abstract techno. Denki Groove‘s VOXXX came out in Feburary 2000 and contained probably the pinnacle track of J-pop’s clash with club culture: “Nothing’s Gonna Change.” Even Judy and Mary had a few labyrinthine melodies left in them.

A few years later, things were still okay at the company. The Yuki/Chara double-drummer side project Mean Machine was all girl power and no songs, but “Suu Haa” was a most brutal piece of candy. Tommy February 6 did the ’80s revival to an obsessive technical degree only possible in Japan — not to mention the perfectly-realized visual component and the inside jokes about alcoholism. J-Pop was alive and well… and this was just Sony!

Now Sony is creating things like throwback boy band East West Boys and gyaru singer Nishino Kana. They also keep milking the Judy and Mary template with derivative bands like Chatmonchy.

I was already feeling the angst about J-Pop’s future in 2003 (villains of the era: pornograffiti, Soul’d Out, Kick the Can Crew, the proliferation of Morning Musume side projects) but it ended up being a relatively good year. When Halcali debuted in 2003, I thought they were a Puffy-rip-off, but the debut album Bacon has managed to stand the test of time — mostly due to the ingenious premise of forcing two 15 year-old girls to “rap” over fun sample-pop beats. The strength, however, was the project’s roots in Shibuya-kei aesthetics: Shindo Mitsuo did a video, Scha Dara Parr did minimalist grooves, FPM flexed his old latin sampling muscles. The follow-up Ongaku no Susume was alright and had the drama of the Noda Nagi-Aida Makoto pakuri cover. Then Sony bought them and promptly ruined the entire fun.

Shiina Ringo’s 2003 Karuki Zaamen Kuri no Hana (named after three things that all have the same semen smell) is easily the J-Pop album of the decade — if it can be considered J-Pop. Listening recently, it hasn’t aged as well as I would have hoped, and the songs are not her strongest. No one, however, has ever pulled off such conceptual framework and dense production. The opener “Shukyo” and closer “Soretsu” appear at first to be about religion and death but are respectively, meta statements on the constrictions of the Japanese music industry and the challenge of original creation. Many sensible people will find lyrics like「不條理を凝視せよ」to be out of the realm of good taste but this is real innovation and progression above the everyone else’s「抱きしめたい」poison banalities.

2. Japanese Indie Scene: The Old Guys

What happened with “indies”? Here I mean the old confrontational, progressive, internationally-minded indie artists — not the farm league major label mainstream pop bands who now dominate the genre.

Things were super hot over at Escalator and Trattoria as the new century broke. Cubismo Grafico’s bedroom house music peaked with Mini (2000) and Untitled (but one wish (2002). Citrus’ Wispy, no mercy — arguably the best 10 minutes of music ever produced in Japan — also hit the shelves in 2000.

The rest of the decade was not a good one for this subculture. Shibuya-kei decided it was over being Shibuya-kei, and everyone went in different directions. The album that defined the post-Shibuya, “Nakame-kei” sound was Tomoki Kanda’s landscape of smallers music. The sound was gentle and atmospheric, void of any cultural references, heavy beats, or foreign samples. Cornelius followed the same deconstructed course with the stripped-down and song-free Point (2001) and Sensuous (2006). Kahimi Karie went free jazz, then even drowsier. Yoshinori Sunahara abandoned his Pan-Am obsession and degraded-sample grooves for the relentlessly cold and slow Lovebeat. Then he disappeared. Citrus broke up, and Emori took almost seven years to make his abstract bossa-nova chanson landscape of Yoga’n'ants. Salon Music’s output was also relatively “Nakame-kei” but New World Record in 2002 was a great set of sonic experiments. Escalator completely threw away its unique brand of sample pop to become Japan’s answer to the techno-punk Electroclash — a total disaster other than the incredible Yukari Rotten album of 2004.

But there was ultimately an economic component to the “good indie” collapse. The vinyl market bottomed out very quickly after its peak in 1999. Quintessential Shibuya-kei record stores Zest and Maximum Joy both closed in 2005. The magazine Relax dropped the whole “My most obscure 100 records” column and then promptly folded. Beikoku Ongaku put out its last issue in 2005. In a panic, retro-lounge hound Fantastic Plastic Machine reinvented himself as an Avex-friendly house DJ who could command the floor at ageHa. Pizzicato Five’s Konishi Yasuharu started working with Johnny’s Jimusho. A generation who was rewarded monetarily for sonic experimentation suddenly wasn’t being rewarded at all. This was not encouraging.

So the Shibuya-kei scene faded away, but those were all old guys anyway, in their 30s, past their prime, looking to create some kind of stable income stream through music. What about the artists born in the Aughts?

Things started relatively well, mostly thanks to two labels: Vroom Sound and Usagi-Chang.

Vroom had the edit-frenzy of Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, the immaculately produced bossa pop of Petset, and the bedroom funk of Fab Cushion. The PSB tracks that hit in 2003, “fiddle-dee-dee!!!” and “starship 6″ (aka “打ち込みで派手な曲”) are still, hands down, the most revolutionary pop music pieces of the last decade. Both utilize the full potential of hard-disc recording to cut between thousands of samples in a single minute, to do away with traditional song structure, and take the listener close to the edge of the speed of light. The album that finally followed cartooom! in 2004 had its moments but felt like a pop compromise on the PSB premise. Hayashibe of PSB is busy doing commercial background music last I heard.

Petset meanwhile produced its masterpiece mini-album Sound Sphere in 2003, recorded in lush 8-track tape with vintage instruments, textured guitar strum, a Rhythm Ace drum machine, double live drummers, harmony boy-girl vocals and a sentimentality that somehow avoided being too twee. Both PSB and Petset, however, have basically retired from the thankless Japanese indie scene. Petset’s last EP Flow Motion,Feather Light was a slight wrong turn into sterile digital synths.

Usagi-Chang, on the other hand, was a short lived phenomenon but managed to invent an entire new genre of “pico pico” or “pico pop” — a term Trevor from Music Related and I are still convinced we invented. (I am pretty sure we stole it from a Japanese reviewer in hindsight.) Usagi-Chang will be always remembered as the guys who discovered YMCK — led by an ex-metal cover band member who pushed Nintendo 8-bit pop into jazzy chord progressions and squirted every possible sound out of that old chip. For me, the real Usagi-Chang heroes were MacDonald Duck Eclair — easily one of the most under-appreciated bands of the last decade. Both short short and The Genesis Songbook are masterworks of songwriting and production: As if Atari Teenage Riot composed a John Hughes soundtrack with a cast of Japanese café kids. The Genesis Songbook in particular is refreshingly noisy and aggressive — with points that seem to push the kitsch of bad ’90s J-pop into weird avant-garde composition. And even the bossa nova tracks match the mood. Usagi-Changs’ other artists Aprils, PINE*am, Misswonda, and Sonic Coaster Pop were all pretty solid. Hanger-ons Sylvia 55, Hazel Nuts Chocolate (the faux lo-fi years), Strawberry Machine, and Eel were also fun. Uinona were the only melodic punk band who had a foot in the old indie spirit.

Unfortunately, however, the energy got sucked out of the movement around 2006. Being in the 21st century Japanese indies scene is a thankless job — especially when the only people vocally championing you are penniless foreign bloggers who procure all their music from Rapidshare. Your best friends are nice enough to pay ¥3,000 to see you play in hostile clubs, but this doesn’t really get you anywhere. But the problem was, selling out after 2005 was not even an option. The only real artistic solution was to get more weird, but the record labels did not want to go further into debt and no one really had the heart. Most of this generation had seen the Shibuya-kei guys succeed both financially and critically at making interesting indie music and wanted to follow that path.

As of 2010, this particular entire indie scene has basically imploded, with zero new records from almost anyone. Capsule — who became the face of this scene somehow thanks to Yamaha’s advertorial largesse — are still hanging on, thanks to Nakata’s success with Perfume. They started the decade as a Pizzicato Five clone and then moved towards Daft Punk when that didn’t work. They are not so much a band as an industrial concern: 12 albums in seven years!!! — all of which have been brick-wall mastered to destroy your ears and stereo and soul.

4. Shugo Tokumaru: My Vote for the Messiah

The real star of Japanese music in the Aughts was Shugo Tokumaru. Shugo not only produced the three best albums of the entire decade but built up a legion of fans both Japanese and foreign. His Tokyo concerts sell out. He makes music for Mujirushi Ryohin (MUJI) and NHK. He shows up in kids’ shows. He is closer than anyone to following the old Shibuya-kei model of broad indie success.

2004′s Night Piece is deceivingly simple. It’s a quiet album. There are rarely drums — almost like he was secretly recording the songs in his room after his parents had gone to sleep. There are glimmers of what was to come: the sped-up guitar antics of “Paparrazi,” the bassy psychedelics of “Lantern on the Water,” the toy instruments of “Funfair.” By 2006′s L.S.T., all of those ideas were mashed into a super prog-pop freak-out with moments of Shins-like clarity drifting between squeaky toy box rhythms and lysergic black holes. Tokumaru claims that “L.S.T.” wasn’t a pun on LSD and his name, but I don’t believe him.

2007′s Exit, however, is listening to a man fully in control of his art. He reigns in all of the previous “excesses” to create songs that sound like charming pop concoctions to the average person but reveal a multi-layered, fourth-dimensional Rube Goldberg of arrangement on further listen. Tokumaru loves to make dueling pianica lines in 7/8 and has probably figured out how to use steel pan in the least annoying way since the instrument’s inception. “La La Radio” is the kind of full out pop symphony that would send Brian Wilson back to his therapist, containing more ideas in five and a half minutes than the entire J-Pop industry was able to come up with in ten years. Even “Button,” with its easily digested J-indie melody is clanky and bizarre.

This relative smattering of fame has not gone to Tokumaru’s head at all. He still sticks to his guns about being a terrible interview — saying nothing, but too polite to tell you that he doesn’t really want to talk about his music until the very end. He’s also a good barometer for whether anything interesting is happening in the J-indie world. When I ask if there are any good bands, he usually says, “No.” And he means it. When he says he likes Nhhmbase, that meant they were great. And they were great.

5. Honorable Mentions and Dishonorable Discharges

Otherwise, there were a lot of well-meaning guitar bands out there, whom we can pretty much ignore. Everyone still wants to sound like The Blue Hearts. I am sure these bands have lots of fans and stumble into some relatively solid songs, but so what? As much as we all laugh at ’80s soulless over-digital pop music, at least it sounds like ’80s music. Rock music of the 2000s could barely muster anything remotely signature — and I’m not just talking about Japan. I love the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” but I am sure it would have been a hit in 1995 too. So, yes, every song with full-crank Autotune will have to be re-engineered in the future to take out that hideous vocal effect, but at least when we hear it, we will remember the cultural nadir of the Paris Hilton decade. When I hear 175R, I will be like, “Wow, 1997!” and then, “Who was 175R again? Was that a Hi-Standard side project?”

Honorable mentions for the decade go to Afrirampo for managing to do the Osaka freak-out on a Sony marketing budget. I would love to go in detail about the genius of Kiiiiiii — especially the genius of (not my wife) Lakin’ as a song-writer — but I would rightly be accused of nepotism. DJ Codomo has hit upon one of the more unique soundscapes of the decade — toy-synth micro-funk? — but is not someone we can rely on to provide giant epic tunes. Oorutaichi makes music that I literally cannot wrap my head around, which is never a bad thing. Rip Slyme had a few good joints, like “Joint.” m-flo’s EXPO EXPO also had its moments, and they deserve credit for taking J-Pop in directions it clearly did not want to go. OOIOO’s Taiga was a grand culmination of the band’s past experimentation. Yura Yura Teikoku used the Aughts to move into legendary status.

6. The Prospects for Japanese Indie Music Before We Are All “Left Behind” in the Coming Rapture

Here in 2010, the entire infrastructure for good indie music has completely been wiped out, and those who were once our greatest hope to “save” Japanese music have retreated into doing things more rewarding than commercial music — eating, breathing, sleeping, throwing things against other things, counting clouds, quietly reading, personal hygiene. I still do not buy the idea that economic calamity was good or will be good for Japanese pop music. There will surely be some decent musical artists in the next ten years, but they will have a much harder time getting started, being heard, winning fans, and selling records. The pre-Flipper’s Guitar “indie scene” was tiny, inconvenient, and relatively inconsequential. We romanticize it now only because Flipper’s Guitar exploded and led to giant visible scene later in history. As much as we want to believe that music is a “pure” artform that can exist without a market framework, we still unconsciously value market success when it comes to judging albums’ relative importance.

This decade taught us that selling records has never just been a commercial act but a social one as well. More records sold meant more fans, more people to share the music with, more cultural touch-points, more physical spaces to go where those records are sold or the music is played live. To a certain degree, the corporate pursuit of money in a bullish market created a strong environment for good Japanese music. Without this commercial structure, Japanese music will likely retain a creative value, but we will no doubt find it less “valuable” without its communal value. The money is not coming back, so we have to figure out how to cherish music without the ingrained prejudices of the 20th century.

Takemitsu Tōru 武満徹 (1930-1996) was a self-taught composer of concert and film music who came to professional maturity during the 1950s’ and 1960s’ world-wide flowering of sound and art. His earliest compositions, from the late 1940s, display a strong impressionist flavor — elegiac fragments of melody and color that lingered “quietly and with a cruel reverberation” (the title of an early piano piece). His sonic curiosity blossomed after his friend and fellow composer Ichiyanagi Toshi 一柳慧 returned to Japan in 1961 after studying with John Cage, entering a period that some Takemitsu scholars call “Cage shock.”

Among the many wayward developments spawned in those fertile times, graphic scores often provoke the most wonder. Their cultural span steps outside of the traditional composer-performer role as they appear on the walls of galleries and museums for everyone to see. Musician and layman alike share an initial reaction to graphic scores and think to themselves, how in the world would anyone play that? But paradoxically, graphic scores address themselves intimately to the performer alone, who must make personal and unique decisions to realize the graphics in sound. Western art music has a long-established tradition of detailed notation for pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and phrasing so that a Debussy prelude or a Bach fugue are instantly recognizable from one performance to the next. Graphic scores dispense with all of this and approach the composition process from scratch.

Takemitsu tried out graphic scores, at first on his own and later in collaboration with designer Sugiura Kōhei 杉浦康平. He composed four works using delicate, variously ornamented circles. The first one, Ring for Flute, Guitar and Lute (1961), combines standard musical notation with ring-based improvisational interludes. The rings, one specifically for each performer, are abstract polar projections with angles, lines and points connecting the inner meridians. For his second graphic score and the first with Sugiura, Corona for Pianists, Takemitsu created ring graphics on separate sheets for five Studies: Articulation, Conversation, Expression, Intonation, and Vibration. In each graphic, there is a narrow band for the circle, and each one has its own distinctive ornamentation both inside and outside the circle. Each sheet is printed in different colors and is cut from the middle of one edge to the center of the circle, so that the sheets can be overlaid to create unique configurations for each performance. And each sheet has its own performance instructions (ironically, except Conversation, which has no instructions or annotations whatsoever) which direct the pianist to perform inside the piano and on the keyboard. The score for Corona for Pianists has been displayed in museums and is a high point of Takemitsu’s aleatoric music.

After Corona for Pianists, he also created a Corona II for a string orchestra (1962) and Arc for Strings (1963), both of which have been incorporated into other orchestral works (Coral Island for soprano and orchestra and Arc for piano and orchestra, respectively). After one additional piano work with Sugiura in 1962 (Crossing for pianists, also later incorporated into Arc), Takemitsu’s final forays into graphic scores were two percussion works from the early 1970s, Seasons and Munari by Munari, neither of which used the circle motif in any way. The remainder of Takemitsu’s music would use standard notation, and although his musical language became more traditional and expressive, he had absorbed many of Cage’s ideas about the relation of sound to silence and about the plurality and spatialization of music.

During the heyday of avantgarde recordings of the 1960s, Corona for Pianists was recorded several times for the Japanese market, but its first exposure in the west was on Roger Woodward‘s 1973 LP of Takemitsu’s piano music, where Corona — London Version takes all of side A. Woodward overdubbed four separate tracks, utilizing celeste and organ in addition to piano, and created a dramatic rendition, full of resonant gestures inside the piano and united by a short, recurring rhythmic motif, possibly from the Study for Vibration (the only page where specific pitches are identified). He introduces the organ during the decay from his signature gesture, changing the chords periodically before it settles primarily as a drone in the background, where it remains for the duration of the piece. The organ drones were most likely inspired by the different colors in the score, and the singular events to the structures and designs that pierce the circles. With few exceptions, Woodward plays inside the piano, but he made a live recording in 1990 that starts with the same rhythmic motif, but then veers into virtuosic dark runs concentrating in the low range of the keyboard but sprinkling into the upper registers as well. Accompanied by Rolf Gehlhaar on bowed cymbal, Woodward’s later rendition (which includes a simultaneous performance of Crossing for pianists) is more intense, a highly resonant cloud of sound, all the more uncanny for Gehlhaar’s metallic overtones.

Besides Woodward, no other classical artist released a recording of Corona after the 1970s, but in 2006 an extremely impressive Japan-only release paired two studio realizations by pan-experimental musician Jim O’Rourke. O’Rourke’s resumé is long and extremely diverse, and includes participation in the avant-punk group Sonic Youth’s 1999 album of compositions by John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Japanese new music pioneer Takehisa Kosugi 小杉武久, Goodbye 20th Century, which included pieces with several different score approaches, including graphics. For Corona, playing small percussion, Hammond Organ and Fender Rhodes discreetly to support all manner of sound creation strategies inside and outside the piano, he recorded and mixed the two distinct Tokyo Realizations on July 11, 2006. In some ways his approach is similar to Woodward, and one can imagine connecting their sounds to different visual elements from the score. Both artists, for example, use an organ to create a slowly evolving drone that provides the horizon for detailed, amplified sounds on the parts of the piano typically hidden away. Both get color variation using keyboards with similar timbres, the celeste and electric piano. Including two realizations on the same release is a brilliant stroke and displays the possibilities inherent in open works.

Throughout his career, Takemitsu took inspiration from myriad forms of nature. He used circular imagery elsewhere in his work, such as his first orchestral work, Music of Tree, which was composed the same year as Ring. “Trees visualise time,” he wrote, citing J.M.G. LeClézio, “since the annual rings grow regularly but with subtle irregularities in the lines.” But a corona is more than just a ring, it is a crown, a halo, the light around the sun, metaphors of height and ascension. For Gaston Bachelard (one of Takemitsu’s favorite authors), material images of flight spur the imagination in an invitation to travel, a spiritual life dominated by elevation and light. Takemitsu remained true to these ideals, as dreams, gardens and oceans joined stars and trees among his symbolic archetypes.

O’Rourke’s superb recording notwithstanding, Corona has fallen into an undeserved obscurity. Despite its publication in the early 1970s, Takemitsu’s publisher, Editions Salabert, has withdrawn it, saying that its unusual nature makes it impossible to reproduce. It’s difficult to find copies in libraries, and even then it’s often a photocopy rather than the original. Virtually all recent recordings of Takemitsu’s “Complete Piano Music” omit it, with Woodward being the sole exception. Takemitsu’s mainstream reputation increasingly targets his early impressionist pieces or his later, more tonal work, but the uncomfortable middle, where he explored the widest variety of sound and composition approaches, is shunted aside. Conservative music publishers are less willing to undertake a complex art printing that steps outside their usual engraving and manuscript reproduction. Equally conservative performance venues want to know what their audiences (and donors) will hear, but graphic scores encourage unpredictable discoveries and don’t lend themselves to static computer previews.

Graphic scores take a special kind of musician to interpret successfully, and not necessarily the kind of training available from university music programs that turn out most of our new classical performers (in many cases, conductors arrange graphic orchestral scores into conventional notation for performance). Graphic scores are a spur to the imagination, and a channeling of the creative impulse, calling for more direct participation, a singular communication between the composer and the performer. Beautiful as they are visually, the musical collaborations between Takemitsu and Sugiura remain incomplete and require a performer whose nuanced understanding of the shapes and colors will produce a unique musical realization.

The following interview originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of Japanese magazine Cyzo (previously available online, but currently unavailable; Google cached part one and two). We have published this translation without the publisher’s express permission. We do not confirm, condone, or endorse the content, but merely provide the translation as a way to view into the discourse of the Japanese printed media on the Japanese entertainment world.

In the interview, veteran entertainment reporter Honda Kei discusses Suhō Ikuo — CEO of management company Burning Production and widely understood to be the most powerful single person in the Japanese entertainment world. (He is often called the “Don of the geinoukai.”) Despite such power, Suhō almost never appears in the media, is rarely photographed, and few people outside of the industry would know his name. Many publications (and previous incarnations of his Wikipedia entry) have subtly hinted at Suhō’s alleged relationships with the so-called “underworld,” but Cyzo‘s Honda interview is one of the few times where someone has made claims of this matter on the record.

Burning CEO Suhō’s True Face and Means of Power, as Seen from a Man Who Continues to Fight with the “Don”

Entertainment journalist Kei Honda is a man who continues to offer outspoken criticism of the (management company) Burning Production and its CEO Suhō Ikuo — normally said to be a “taboo of the entertainment industry.” In an entertainment mass media that is uniformly “Burning-friendly,” Honda has, up to this point, been sued five times by Burning. He also says he has been intimidated by mob members… so why does this man keep fighting with his pen?

—Mr. Honda, how many times have you been sued for slander by Burning Production’s Suhō Ikuo for writing critical articles about him?

Honda (H): I have been sued five times, for writing about Suhō’s dark associations with crime syndicates, the nature of his media control, and his true face. He demanded compensation for damages for the slander and I was sued. Out of the five, he withdrew the charge or we settled out-of-court four times. None of the suits reached final court judgment. The remaining one is currently pending in appeals court. Suhō apparently is telling people, “Even though we settled, it’s a crime of conscience that he keeps writing very similar things.” But no matter how many times I write, Suhō doesn’t ever change his ways.

—When did you first encounter President Suhō?

H: It was when I just started out as a novice writer for Shukan Post (Shogakukan), so it must have been 35-36 years ago. At the time, I found out about a sex scandal involving singer Minami Saori (currently married to Shinoyama Kishin), who was in Burning. I got a tip that a writer from Shukan Shincho got into a fight with Suhō about the incident and had his glasses broken. In order to confirm the story, I went to the Burning office and asked “Is Mr. Suhō here?” Suddenly the man who was cleaning the office wielded his mop like a sword. I remember that the mop guy was Suhō.

—Was that grievance what made you point your spear of criticism towards President Suhō?

H: No, it wasn’t anything personal. The big thing was, at that time, the owner of a big management company had told me in real grief, “The Japan Association of Music Enterprises has finally allied with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to try to sever the ties between the yakuza and the entertainment world. And even though they are cleaning everything up, Suhō is doing the exact opposite.” Suhō, through wielding power, was able to further cultivate associations with the mob.

—Why does Suhō associate with the crime syndicates?

H: Maybe he likes them? When Suhō came into the entertainment world, the mob was involved in running management companies and promoting singers. So there would have been points of contact all over. And I think that world of “duty and obligations” maybe agrees with his skin. It’s just that kids look up to the entertainment world and so it must conform to social norms. We can’t allow those kinds of associations. There was a consensus in the industry to move towards getting rid of the mob, but if the leader of the industry, Burning, wasn’t following those rules, what can you do?

—Why do you think President Suhō came to be called the “Don of the Entertainment World”?

H: This is my theory, but Suhō focused on the music publishing business, and at the time, he partnered with Watanabe Masafumi (now deceased), who dominated TBS’ music shows. Suhō turned the “race” for the Japan Record Award into a business. He took the sports paper writers and music critics involved with the awards out to high-end clubs and threw them big parties on their birthdays. He gave them presents. For weddings and funerals, etc. he would send unprecedented amounts of money, and with that, he was able to create cozy relations with the entertainment media.

So all the management companies and record labels that wanted to win a Japan Record Award would rely on Suhō, and in return, he would get that singer’s master recording rights or publishing rights. And if the singer won the award, those rights would create even more money. Using the conduit to the entertainment media he cultivated at that point, he could then suppress scandals. And Suhō, who had amassed huge financial power, was able to bring in great people working for him. He would also assist aforced the music publishers in his keiretsu to give him copyrights and the entertainment companies to give him business rights, and he created a money tree. He had money, controlled the mass media, and created a real business model. If you can do that, you are absolutely “the Don.”

—As an entertainment reporter, what do you think of the mass media people who are subservient to Burning?

H: I though it was inexcusable! After all this, I quit my job at Shukan Post and became a freelancer, doing a lot of work for Tokyo Sports. The bureau chief at Tokyo Sports at that point approached me and said, “Our Culture Department is way too cozy with the management companies. So you should do as you like.” I thought, “what, am I a bullet?” No one in the Culture Dep’t liked me, but I started to cover the entertainment world. Even though the mass media knew about Suhō’s dark associations and scandals about Burning talent, they stayed quiet. I thought, if that’s the case, I will just cover it all myself and bring scandals about Burning talent to light in not just Tokyo Sports but in media like Asahi Geino (Tokuma Shoten) or Tsukuru (Tsukuru Publishing), or Hanashi no Channeru (Nihon Bungeisha).

—President Suhō never tried to win you over?

H: He did. I don’t know if it was him acknowledging defeat from my attacks, but about twenty years ago, through a friend, he had a couple of plans for conciliation. As a result, I had the chance to dine with Suhō, and for a while, we had friendly relations. I was taken to a performance by Hosokawa Takashi at the Shinjuku Koma Theatre and got to go backstage. There, I heard Suhō ask Hosokawa, “Did you greet oyabun Noda?” “Oyabun Noda” was the godfather of a huge crime syndicate. Discovering these clear associations with the mob made me realize that I just shouldn’t be hanging out with Suhō. So I separated from Suhō about a half-year later, and because of that, I was told suddenly by him, “Tomorrow I am going to wire ¥2 million to you, so could you tell me your bank account?” I refused, saying, “I have no business receiving that,” and that was it with Suhō.

—After that, how were your relations with Suhō?

H: I personally strengthened my criticism of him. When I did that, I received anonymous calls to my home. My wife picked up and the guy said, “I am a classmate’s of Suhō. Because the Anti-Organized Crime Law has made things complicated, I can’t say the name of my syndicate, but tell your husband to make nice with Suhō.” The substance of the call made it clear that it was a threat. I could not allow this intimidation of my wife, who is not involved in the industry. I eventually figured out who called, and it wasn’t his classmate, but a guy who was in one of the mob groups that he runs with. But even after that, I kept writing about scandals related to Burning. When I did that, I was finally sued for slander.

—Do you think President Suhō hates most when you write about his relations to crime syndicates?

H: Maybe he hates that, but in my memory, he has never really said that my concrete statements about his connections to the mob have no basis in fact. Basically, he insists that the entire article is slander. He sued me for my book The Crumbling of the Johnny’s Empire (『ジャニーズ帝国崩壊』) published by Rokusaisha, and in there, there is an eyewitness account that when Fifth-Generation Yamaguchi-gumi’s Lieutenant Takumi Masaru (now deceased) came to Tokyo, Suhō went to meet him frequently at the ANA Hotel in Roppongi. But that particular part was not challenged.

—From what you saw, has Suhō’s power only risen over the years?

H: They say that Suhō got scared and stopped coming to the office after the shooting incident at Burning in 2001 [where someone shot a bullet through the office window] . Around then, he purchased a golf course in Okinawa and started working as the owner. He got hooked on golf, and they said that he started to slowly lose the unifying force worthy of a Don.

But from my point of view, I just couldn’t see where he had lost power. At that time, Suhō had expanded his conduit with the financial world. He was beloved especially by a now-deceased former chairman of a giant paper company. He also created connections with powerful politicians and had a honeymoon relation with former NHK Chairman Ebizawa Katsuji. And he built up connections even with people in the judiciary. They say that Suhō’s son is even involved with the company Japan Risk Control, which employed Norisada Mamoru (who lost his job at the Tokyo High Court Counsel because of a sex scandal) as a top advisor.

When K-Dash chariman Kawamura Tatsuo came to prominence, the entertainment industry was a flutter with things like “Suhō’s power has fallen” or “the Suhō era is over,” but that’s ridiculous.

In the fuss over the marriage between Fujiwara Norika and Jinnai Tomonori last year, Suhō wielded power behind the scenes to the degree that Yoshimoto Kogyo (Jinnai’s agency) couldn’t move hand or foot. From the leaked information about their engagement to the exclusive live broadcast rights given to Nihon Television, that was all Suhō’s own work. I wrote about this in the magazine Kami no Bakudan (“Paper Bomb”, Rokusaisha), which brings us to the fifth suit against me I mentioned earlier, currently pending. Just as always, Suhō sues with legal means those who cannot be controlled by the carrot and the stick. But the fact that Suhō has come to do it like this, I think is a reason why the mass media succumbs to him.

I love the entertainment world and all the people who work hard so hard in it. But I don’t plan on dropping my pen as long as the industry is being controlled by dirty people.

In the liner notes for Umezu Kazutoki‘s new album, Umezu Kazutoki plays the ENKA (『梅津和時、演歌を吹く』), Harada Kazunori (via translator Cathy Fishman) describes enka as a genre “roughly corresponding to American blues and country music, French chanson, and Italian canzone.” I don’t know much about chanson or canzone, but the comparison to blues and country is fruitful. Let’s consider:

• Unlike blues, enka is resource-intensive and top-down. Blues is a niche genre, but the startup costs for a blues musician are so low — a Robert Johnson record and a cheap guitar — that its grass-roots audience and performer base is almost self-sustaining. To sing enka like a pro, you need wind and string arrangements, percussion, backup singers, a saxophone and a guitar trading licks, and maybe a biwa for the intro. No doubt many people are blown away by great enka tunes in their youth and dream of growing up to sing them, but taking it beyond the shower stall and learning to front an enka ensemble involves serious logistical issues. And that’s just the vocalists: how many kids hear the instrumental breaks in “Tsugaru kaikyō fuyu-geshiki“ and run out to buy a secondhand oboe?

No, the only way to start performing enka seriously is with the backing of the industry that packages and promotes it for mass consumption. It was Big Entertainment that shaped enka into the television-age genre it remains today, and Big Entertainment is still the sole source of legitimacy for an enka artist. There is no indie enka, and there are no three-man enka bands practicing in the drummer’s garage after school.

• Unlike country music, enka has a one-dimensional listener base. Country has demographc biases, but its listener base is multigenerational and therefore self-reproducing.

  Enka’s demographic is “old people.” Hikawa Kiyoshi is not their fantasy boyfriend; he is their fantasy son, perhaps even grandson. It’s possible that this is because its lyrical content is more mature and subtle. It seems more likely to me, though, that it’s because the current enka listener base is exactly the listener base it had thirty years ago, and that it will eventually be replaced by a cohort of boomers kicking it to SuperDVD compilations of Kaguya-hime‘s greatest hits.

These comparisons are not meant to disparage enka as a genre. My point is simply that enka’s current situation seems unlikely to continue into the future. There are only so many Jeros out there to revitalize enka for a season or two. Enka will either have to evolve — dinosaur-like, into smaller and nimbler forms — or go the way of kabuki and become a “traditional art,” formally renouncing its ties to popular tastes in exchange for a guaranteed museum gig.

Umezu’s new album is not so much an example of the former as an argument against the latter. It is difficult to imagine that enka melodies played by virtuoso solo instrumentalists will emerge as a new genre. What Umezu does achieve, however, is a solid demonstration of how fresh a good enka tune can sound when liberated from the orchestras and sequins. (Unlike many solo sax albums, Plays the ENKA isn’t even that far out — the only tune that gets seriously deconstructed is “Yume wa yoru hiraku“.)

Umezu doesn’t rely entirely on Johann Mattheson’s “edlen Einfalt, Klarheit und Deutlichkeit” of pure melody to retain listener interest: timbre is foregrounded more often than not. His last solo album, Show the Frog, was by his own admission, a combined celebration and exploration of the bass clarinet alone, but on Plays the ENKA he switches between four different kinds of reed, getting a different character out of each. There’s even a credible hojok impression on the clarinet for the Korean folk tune “Paennorae” (ペンノレ/뱃노래).

Which brings me to my final point. “Paennorae” is an obscure yet very popular standard in Japan, but it was popularized by what today we would call “folk” rather than enka singers. I suspect that Umezu seeks to blur this distinction in favor of a more inclusive supergenre of which enka is just the most representative, perhaps because the most Japanese, strain.

When the album closes with a subdued take on “Ringo no uta,” another tune that doesn’t really fit the modern concept of enka, it feels like more than just a tribute to the first pop hit after World War II. It feels like a redrawing of borders to stake a new claim on the cultural landscape: Here Begins the Great Postwar Japanese Songbook.

Hosono Haruomi, Takahashi Yukihiro, and Sakamoto Ryuichi’s Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) have been one of the few Japanese bands to receive superstar status both in Japan and abroad. Their self-titled debut offered the world a self-Orientalizing synth paradise, something like a high-tech disco upgrade on Chinese restaurant muzak. By 1980′s X∞Multiplies, however, YMO were creating a unique propulsive techno-rock that augured the bright promises of ’80s culture and set the template for every Konami game soundtrack.

Be warned: the Japanese version of X∞Multiplies is not your standard LP: the songs are broken up with long skits from Japanese alternative comedy legends Snakeman Show. Snakeman Show featured three comedians Masato Eve (伊武雅刀), Katsuya Kobayashi (小林克也), and Moichi Kuwahara (桑原茂一), with Kobayashi being “Snakeman” in a name inspired by famed American DJ Wolfman Jack. They hosted a popular radio show in Osaka, but their appearance on X∞Multiplies would transform them into national comedy heroes. (More English information here.)

Although some of the skits on X∞Multiplies are nominally in English (including the wicked “I love Japan”), the American release of the album wisely banished the comedy, bringing in the musical highlights from YMO’s previous album Solid State Survivor to fill the gaps. Thanks to modern technology, however, the original Japanese version of X∞Multiplies is now available to millions as free illegal download on Rapidshare and Megaupload — oh, and of course, Amazon Japan import. Many non-Japanese YMO fans now have a greater chance to finally hear these “lost” Snakeman Show skits. (Purists, I know you collected these long ago.)

As I listened to X∞Multiplies recently, one skit struck me as particularly illuminating in regards to Japanese attitudes towards popular culture during the 1980s. So I translated the entire transcript of Track 11, simply entitled “Snakeman Show.” The skit involves a mock radio talk show with three young music critics “arguing” about the state of rock music in the 1980s. The argument is between Critic 1 and Critic 2 , with Critic 3 only droning on about YMO and being ignored. A few notes follow.

For reference, an MP3 of the track in question.

(Classical music plays)

Radio Announcer: Good evening, everyone. It’s now time for the program “Young Echo.” Tonight we are joined by young music critics, who will give us their opinion on the topic of discussion: the rock scene of the 1980s. Everyone, welcome to the show.

Critics: (all) Hello. Thank you for having us.

Critic 1: (takes a drag on his cigarette) We’ll start from me. See, for me, I order a lot of records from overseas. So with rock right now — what would you say? — there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: I’m a bit different from you on that. I have a lot of musician friends in New York and L.A. who always send me records. And when I listen to those, there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: I think Y.M.O. is the best —

Critic 1: No, but listen, I have a lot of opportunities to go abroad and see concerts. I just got back from going around London and New York. The thing I felt most when I was there is that there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Announcer: I see.

Critic 2: I have a different view on this than you! I understand English. I am always being asked to be on shows overseas, but I have to turn them down. The more I listen the more I see that there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: But Y.M.O. —

Critic 1: Wait, no, there’s something strange about what you are saying. It’s not like that. You have to understand that I live my life listening to rock eight hours a day. If you did that, you would understand there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: No, no. This is not about the amount of time spent listening to music. I own 50,000 records. I own 50,000. My LPs are all rock records. You listen to those and you’ll realize there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: But really, Y.M.O. is —

Critic 1: You are totally wrong! If we are talking number of records, I own 80,000. All rock. If you listen to all of those, clearly, there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: I feel a bit different from you on this. I do interviews over international long distance, and we really talk about rock. If you listen to that you’ll know that there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: Can I say something? I absolutely think that Y.M.O. is —

Critic 1: You are so wrong. What you are saying is so off. Can I explain? In order to understand rock, you can’t remove the fashion. Are you listening? I am wearing silver London boots, right? Look. It’s not a big deal. I own ten pairs of London boots. If you think about rock while living this rock lifestyle, you would say that there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: Wait a second there. When foreign artists come over to Japan, I hang out with them. I take them to tempura, shabu shabu. I have to take care of them. And we get a chance to communicate. So with rock, there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

Critic 3: If we are talking about fashion, it’s all about the Mao suit.

Critic 1: Are you crazy? You are contradicting yourself. You are totally contradicting yourself. I host ten radio shows. I am going to host a rock show on UHF soon. Since I live in that kind of world, I can state clearly that I am the first person to really understand rock. So when you say it like that, I think there’s some good stuff but also some bad stuff.

Critic 2: No, no. I see this a bit different than you. I am about to produce a record! What’s more, a New Wave record! If you actually tried to make rock yourself, you would realize that there’s some good stuff and also some bad stuff.

(awkward pause)

Critic 1: (angrily) Listen, buddy! I don’t know anything about New Wave or whatever. But I am here right now as a guy who is trying to figure out whether to take Y.M.O. up on their invitation to play with them at the Budokan. There will be 10,000 people there….

(descends into argument)

1) The “mao suit” (人民服) is a reference to YMO’s use of the Chinese revolutionary clothing style as a band uniform on their cover of Solid State Survivor and at concerts.

2) At risk of killing the joke in an avalanche of overanalysis, the two critics are essentially saying the exact same thing, other than a small difference in conjunctions (and vs. but). But they are passionately arguing about who has the greatest legitimacy to make such a statement. The interesting part is how they try to build legitimacy. The two techniques are (a) proving the amount of records owned and time spent at the activity, and (b) proving direct interaction with the West.

The first method echos my earlier thoughts on the importance of “orthopraxy” in Japan: i.e., legitimacy from actual praxis of an activity rather than a more abstract sense of belief or “spirit.” In the case of the radio show, none of the critics have anything to actually say. There is no “content” in the message — only the meaningless “there is some good stuff and/but some bad stuff.” The entire dialogue consists of attempts to one-up each other in the arena of praxis. Even when Critic 1 tries to talk about living a “rock lifestyle,” he demonstrates this not through an abstract way of life or attitude, but how many “rock” shoes he owns.

For method number two of “association with the West,” I find their attitudes to be especially evocative of Japan in the 1980s. For most of the post-war, the entirety of “pop culture” was seen as a “Western” (read: Anglo-American) enterprise. Just as judo and tea ceremony are “Japanese,” rock music was Anglo-American — at least for the first 40 or so years of Japanese popular music. So proving “understanding” of this foreign art requires proof of interaction with the original locus of legitimacy. Although they do use their authority within Japan as a bolster to credibility, the rock critics mainly use connections to overseas: (a) direct importation of foreign records (b) travel abroad (c) fraternization with foreign musicians (d) solicitation fromh the foreign media.

By the late 1990s, the Japanese pop culture world had ballooned to an amazing size and had enough local heroes that young bands could find inspiration solely from Japanese talent. Ironically, YMO’s success helped weaken the inferiority complex that drove snobs to always look abroad. YMO and Snakeman Show, however, were of the generation who still saw the ultimate cool as being a link to overseas — or perhaps, they wanted to parody this widely-held attitude as a tired cliché of Japan’s cultural elite.

3) Any reference to UHF dates the material rather nicely.

Volume Two in this podcast series devoted to digging up punk and punk-derived music from Japan. This episode hops all over the nation and is a bit more stylistically eclectic in scope than Volume One. Bands from Hokkaido (Tranquilizer), Sendai (G-Spot), and Toyama (Z, Chaos C.H.) are represented, as well as the usual glut of folks from Tokyo and Osaka.

Abraham Cross, Slaver, and Disclose all feature straight-ahead, speedy numbers that are sure to make folks bop along. The standout oddball track is Ghoul’s gem “Jerusalem”, culled from an old Pusmort compilation (Pushead‘s old label which did a lot to bring Japanese hardcore and metal fare to U.S. collectors). It features a weird snoozer of a piano concerto which drops into a sludgy HC/metal number, followed up by questionable mega-riffage that brings to mind early D.C. bands like Kingface (not that Kingface was questionable, mind you…). It’s just a weird song– epic for its time.

Best song name probably goes to The Execute for “Inside of Human Outside of Human,” though Chaos C.H.’s “Boycott the Suck History” gives it a run for its money.

In all, Volume Two features 22 tracks and runs for 36 minutes and 27 seconds.

File: m4a
Feed: .rss feed for iTunes etc.

Volume One available here.

Track List:

1. Gastunk “Devil”
2. Lip Cream “Lonely Rock”
3. Lip Cream “No No Mercy”
4. G-Spot “Law Killer”
5. Sha-London “AntiAntiAnti”
6. Ghoul “Jerusalem”
7. S.O.B. “Slap in the Face”
8. Expose “Blue Accident”
9. The Execute “Inside of Human Outside of Human”
10. Slaver “Fried Chicken”
11. Idora “Helter Skelter”
12. D.O.N.D.O.N. “The End”
13. Chaos C.H. “Boycott the Suck History”
14. Final Count “Wild and Woolly”
15. Tranquilizer “Never Go To war”
16. Abraham Cross “Bad Circulate”
17. Iconoclast “Warlike Nation”
18. Disclose “Children Not Knowing Peace”
19. C.F.D.L. “45 Revolution
20. Disclose “Battlefield”
21. Anti Authoritize “Greed & Deceit & the Past Meaning”
22. Iconoclast “Peace and Blind”

As a skater/punk kid in the upstate New York countryside during the ’80s, a big factor in educating my would-be musical taste was reading Thrasher when I could get my hands on a copy. (Note that this was in the last few years that Thrasher still devoted a lot of time to punk.)

There were a number of articles on Japanese thrash and hardcore bands, stuff that would only make it into the hands of affluent record collectors in NYC, not the hayseed outskirts of Albany. I was consuming a steady diet of early thrash, speed metal, crossover, and punk and hardcore cassettes.

Somewhere along the way, a friend gave me a cassette that had a few Lipcream songs on it, and this was the proof in the pudding — the ferocity of those songs outmatched a lot of American bands. They were stripped-down, forceful, and grinding. No solos, no over-the-top glammy vocals, just hardcore-by-the-numbers, but played with speed and acumen that really stood out.

Fast forward 20 years and the wonder that is the internet has unearthed a ton of rips of vinyl from those golden years where I missed out on everything. I’ve been listening to a lot of them lately and have compiled what will potentially be the first in a series of podcasts that capture the essence of Japanese crust-oriented punk, hardcore, d-beat, thrash, and assorted metal micro-genres.

Volume One is fairly pan-Japanese in scope.Iconoclast hail from Kanazawa, Hakuchi from Niigata, D.O.N.D.O.N., Lipcream, and Disprove from Tokyo, Effigy from Takamatsu, and Gudon from Hiroshima. This volume is fairly Gudon-heavy, as I just really like their music — aggressive, fast, growling hardcore played with nerd-like technical ability and recorded with detailed production.

File: mp3
Feed: .rss feed for iTunes etc.

Track List:

1. Gudon “Hikashibou (Stoic Violence)” (from the “Hikashibou” EP, 1986)

2. Lipcream “Top Fight” (from the Anglican Scrape Fight compilation 7″ flexi)

3. Iconoclast “Silence equals death” (from the “Who Does the Freedom and Equality Exist For?” 7″ EP, 1985)

4. Hakuchi “The tragedy to be expected” (from the “Gods Disturb” 7″, 1993)

5. Damnable Excite Zombies “Sect (Suck your soul)” (from the “Suck Your Soul 7″, 1992)

6. Bastard “Slick plot” from the “Controlled in the Frame” 7″ EP, 1989)

7. Disclose “Just Another Warsystem” (from the Disclose/World Burns to Death split 7″, 2004)

8. Disprove “Deep mist” (from self-titled 7″)

9. D.O.N.D.O.N. “Nuclear Reek” (from the “Commercialism” 7″, 1990)

10. Warhead Junk “Troops to Murder” (from the Warhead Junk/Gudon “Bloodsucking Freaks” split 7″, 1991)

11. Iconoclast “Warlike Nation” (from the Meaningful Consolidation” 2×7″ EP)

12. Mink Oil “Youth of Height” (from the “Smashing Odds Ness!!” 8″ compilation, 1988)

13. Gudon “Burst your Head” (from the “Hikashibou” EP, 1986)

14. Gudon “Egger” (from the “Howling Communication” EP, 1987)

15. Effigy “Mortalwar” (from the Effigy/Aparat split 7″, 2000)

16. Effigy “From Hell (Summer Devils)” (from the “From Hell” 7″ single, 2001)

17. Gudon “Power of Dusk” (from the “Howling Communication” EP, 1987)

Soundmark vocals by Sam Farfsing and Snowy D. Bear. There is a surprise bonus track in here, as well. First person to correctly identify it wins this. (Hint: It contains Cookie Monster versus Skexi vocal stylings.)

The book Dave Barry Does Japan came out in 1992, perfectly amalgamating two family streams at the time: Dave Barry and Japan. At some point in the early 1990s, my father and sister became big fans of the Miami humorist, leaving his books strewn around the house for me to fumble through. During that same general period, my parents went to Japan on business for the first time. How surprised we were to learn that the manor’s favorite wit put out his own book about Japan, full of humorous anecdotes almost identical to those my parents experienced.

The timing was eerie, but not fortuitous. 1991 and 1992 were ultimately the darkest years for Japanese-American relations since WWII. While the American economy was in painful recession, the Bubble Era Japanese economy was invincible, nearly “Number One.” Americans started to project their anxieties about national strength onto the “unfair” Japanese manufacturing world. In early 1992, President George Bush the Elder went to Japan hand-in-hand with U.S. automobile executives to convince the Japanese to buy American cars and then vomited on Prime Minister Miyazawa. This was the peak hour of literal “Japan bashing,” where yokels smashed Toyotas with baseball bats in well-reported photo-ops. Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun sold paranoia about our Eastern “allies” to a wide readership. The CIA even briefly thought about using Japan as the major post-Cold War enemy.

So who better to defuse this tense situation than funnyman Dave Barry. Random House approached him with the idea of a book on Japan, and lacking anything else better to do, he traveled around the island nation for three weeks on his publisher’s dime and agenda. He knew absolutely nothing of Japan nor Japanese culture before departing and only experienced the most superficial travel while there. As expected, the final product Dave Barry Does Japan does not qualify as a particularly illuminating tome on Japanese culture. Yet, in three weeks and two hundred pages, Barry manages to covers every single cliché of modern Japan: exotic icky foods (live fish, octopus, fugu), chopsticks, gratuitous bowing, grown men openly reading pornographic manga on the trains, the evils of karaoke, corn on pizza, the difficulty of learning written Japanese, uyoku sound trucks, conspicuous yakuza members in American cars, “Engrish,” etc. An Amazon Review for the book screams “Must-Read for Every Japan Expat” — oblivious to the irony that a humorist with zero expertise could elucidate the entire discourse of long-term foreign Japan dwellers in less than 200 pages. They should pass out free copies of Barry’s book at Narita (and in JETRO press centers) so that no one will ever write books or articles about icky foods, bowing, reading pornographic manga on the trains, karaoke, and “Engrish” again.

Although a lot of the jokes about Japan are tired “classics” of the genre, there are a few key moments of delightful absurdity. Barry somehow is scheduled for a serious interview with the President of Keidanren — Japan’s most important business association — who launches into a thirty minute lecture on the special “matrix” between Japanese government and industry. Barry visits a baseball game and receives scores of glares for accidentally cheering outside of the “official” cheer framework. His recounting of a laugh-free rakugo recitation suggests that revered foreign “traditions” can be as poorly executed as any other form of cultural exercise: “‘My teacher likes baseball, and often he uses the rice spoon for a bat.’ [...] The audience members do not laugh.”

Dave Barry Does Japan is not likely to secure a steady place in the canon of great Japan writing, but like all books about Japan — whether bad or good — Barry’s work has value as a historical cross-section of conventional wisdom about Japan — in his case, during the early 1990s. This was about eight years before “Japan Cool” replaced “Japan Bashing” as the core paradigm. Barry is perfectly middle-brow, somewhere in-between William F. Buckley wit and Jeff Foxworthy gleeful ignorance. With no prior knowledge nor passionate interests, the views on Japan in the book ultimately reflect the standard of his era. Overall, Barry sees Japan as a very serious, hard-working, efficient country worthy of respect. After visiting in person, he understands exactly why Japanese products are higher quality than American ones. (“Being American isn’t enough; we have to work hard, too.”) However, Barry manages to retain a sense of American superiority in one area: Japan’s pop cultural output. Although he can blame disinterest in traditional forms like kabuki theatre and rakugo comedy on his own philistinism, he pulls no punches in his full-out attack on Japanese youth culture.

Barry was taken to Harajuku one Sunday to watch the greaser rock’n'roll dancers and amateur bands on the hokoten pedestrian paradise. The greasers had been an institution of the Yogogi Park area since the late 1970s, and to the Japanese, they had a strong image as somewhat aggressive delinquents. So here was a prime opportunity for Barry to see “bad kids” and their original pop subcultures. Upon viewing these specimens of early 1990s Japanese youth happenings, Barry writes:

Although there may be vast cultural differences between Japan and the United States, the scene in Harajuku served as heartwarming proof that rock music is indeed the universal language of the young, and the Japanese young cannot speak it worth squat.

I admit that I am not exactly Mr. Happening Dude in the music department myself. I am definitely stuck in the sixties. [...] But after seeing what passes for hipness in Harajuku, I felt like Jimi Hendrix. I felt cool enough to be on the cover of Rolling Stone

Ignore the outdated “cool” references for a moment and concentrate on his complaint: he immediately dislikes Japanese youth culture due to its lack of spontaneity in the performances, the orderly delinquency in an art form Americans expect to be drenched in disorder. The greasers are:

all dressed identically in tight black T-shirts, tight black pants, black socks, and pointy black shoes. Each one had a lovingly constructed, carefully maintained, major-league caliber 1950s-style duck’s-ass haircut, held in place by the annual petroleum output of Kuwait.

They did not seem to sense that they might look a little silly, like a gang of Hell’s Angels that tries to terrorize a small town while wearing tutus.

The greasers would take turns to dance in their circle, listening to “Heartbreak Hotel,” and dancing the Twist — a dance that may have never have been cool in the U.S., even in the ’50s. To an American spectator, these Yoyogi rock’n'roll dancers essentially took familiar cultural conventions and replicated them without any obvious “understanding” of their original context. In other words, would real ’50s greasers have ever danced in orderly manners in front of Sunday noon crowds? (Besides Grease, of course.) While Westerners today fawn over the unusual goth-loli girls and the kaleidoscopic colors of Harajuku layered fashion, Americans were never going to see the “cool” in a bunch of juvies un-ironically re-enacting silly past subcultures with the precision of army drills.

Apart from the Greasers, Harajuku and Yoyogi Park were also full of amateur bands. For Barry, these music groups further reinforced the cognitive dissidence of “organized delinquency.”

Playing loudly on both sides of the street, for a hundred yards or so, were twenty or so rock bands, each of which had come with a truckload of instruments, sound equipment, and generators. They had set up a few feet of each other, and they were all playing simultaneously, so it was impossible to hear one without hearing several others. No harm done. They were uniformly awful.

[...]

But what was really pathetic about them was their desperately misguided effort to be different. For example, you don’t see a lot of tie-dyed T-shirts in Japan, and there was one band whose members all wore tie-dyed T-shirts, which I guess made them different by Japanese standards, but they all wore virtually the same T-shirt. And dancing in front of them was a crowd of groupies — all teenage girls, and they all wore the same shirt, on top of which they were all doing the same dance step, which I assume they thought was cool, but which I swear looked exactly like the “Hokey Pokey.”

It was sad, really. All these kids, gathered in one place, trying so hard to be rebellious and iconoclastic, while in fact being far more regimented than a typical American bowling league.

Barry unwittingly sets up the critical binary for a major Western critique of Japanese culture: Americans/Westerners get it, and Japanese do not. Both groups can wear the same uniforms and listen to the same music and adopt the same mannerisms, but Americans possess a “soul” underlying their cultural participation that that the Japanese do not, no matter how hard they imitate. And during the early 1990s, when the Japanese greatly bruised the collective American economic ego, this was the critical judgment that kept Americans from feelings of complete defeat. Note the glee that Barry admits:

I felt wonderful, after being so intimidated by the industriousness, competence, and rapid technological progress of the Japanese, to discover that there is a Hipness Gap, a gap between us so vast that their cutting-edge young rockin’ rebels look like silly posturing out-of-it weenies even to a middle-aged dweed like myself. They buy our music, they listen to our music, they play our music, but they don’t get our music.

The era framed Japan and the U.S. in a competition, and Barry was openly relieved to see an American victory in Japanese kids not “understanding” American pop culture.

I doubt that anyone writing about Japan today — in a book equally vapid as Wrong About Japan or any number of JET/ALT memoirs with the words “bow” in the title — would go on with such conviction and confidence that Japanese youth are uncool. No one could possibly come to Tokyo in 2008 and not be blown over by the “cool” of Shibuya 109, Harajuku back street shops, or Omotesando boutiques. In 1991, Tokyo had a certain cool floating around in underground channels but Chage and Aska or “Shibuya casual” sloppy fashion weren’t going to break the world’s hardened biases towards Japanese pop culture. Simply stated, “Japan Cool” — as a branding for the entire nation-state — was impossible in 1991.

So what changed in the next five to eight years?

First of all, Japanese pop culture got a lot cooler. There was way more innovation and less imitation in 1990s street fashion and pop music, and the markets exploded to such a size that even “fringe” creators could become visible players. Also, the explosion of gaming culture in the U.S. made Japan a spiritual home for those baptized by Nintendo. Most importantly, the proliferation of unique subcultures made Tokyo a cultural ecology sure to wow any foreigners. “Greasers” could never be anything more than an impressive cover band: they had the details down pat, but the overall exercise added nothing to global culture. Kogyaru, on the other hand, rightly blew everyone away and added brand new ideas to the global cultural stew.

There was also a big change in judgment criteria. The end of “Generation X” cultural values in the mainstream around 1998 created the ideal conditions for an appreciation of Japanese culture. In 1992, “authenticity” was still very critical for judging music and other pop culture. Both the Boomers and the Gen X crowd rejected “pop music” on the charts as something inherently worthless. In that climate, there could be no enjoyment of Japan’s excessively-plastic, saccharine pop. Britney Spears and her cohorts changed that, however, by legitimizing a post-Gen X ironic appreciation of “pop,” eventually de-centering the entire debate on “being real.” This opened the door for over-organized, non-spontaneous Japanese “cool” being cool. The mythic “soul” was no longer required. Suddenly the best part of Japanese culture was that they didn’t get it, greatly dating Barry’s convictions.

Of course, the “competitive frame” between the United States and Japan also seems like ancient history. Once the U.S. economy exploded under President Clinton and the Japanese economy descended into the Lost Decade, Americans dropped all their hostilities towards their Eastern brothers in self-serving “forgiveness.” Publishers today no longer feel compelled to usher humor writers to Japan to ease international tensions, making Barry’s work the final word for a distinct era. Unfortunately, however, Barry’s book will not be able to permanently bury chopstick jokes and raw food gags. One man’s writing will not placate such a demanding and powerful plague.

English / 日本語

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