The Year Nothing Happened / W. David MARX
We should all feel blessed that Japan did not see any further tragic natural disasters this year, but at the same time, the widely-desired, post-earthquake national resurgence was not exactly forthcoming. If the last decade saw an explosion of recessionary culture in Japan, 2012 suggested that even this recessionary culture could be on the wane, leaving us a true social vacuum. To have culture, people have to participate in society; to have political change, people have to vote and organize; to have global economic success, companies must make products that the world wants.

None of this happened, however, and in its place, we got nothing new. Instead of a more terrible AKB48-like thing, we got just slightly less AKB48. Instead of extreme political change, the disheartened electorate voted for a return to LDP rule.

A decade ago there was something slightly interesting in the long decline: How would a truly advanced country handle poor economic prospects, fatal demographics, and dwindling global relevance? But now in 2012 we’re too familiar with the very process of decline. We all know that 2013 will just see a little more slouching in the same direction — more nothing. And while the stakes are getting higher and higher for this great nation to turn things around, the stakes for any individual action, field, or event could not feel any lower.

Nothing really happened in 2012, but for your reading pleasure, here are a few things that transpired this year.

Tokyo Skytree / Matt ALT
Even if you don’t appreciate the architecture (or the neato circular pulsing at night), any fan of Japanese entertainment has to pay the Tokyo Skytree a certain grudging respect, if for no other reason than that it serves up its lifeblood — a stable high-definition television signal. But there are two big strikes against the Skytree. In a city filled with perfectly free observation decks (like those of the the iconic Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building), it’s hard to imagine forking out ¥2,000 a head for an elevator ride. But more importantly, every Tokyoite knows in their heart of hearts that the Skytree isn’t really part of the skyline until it gets smashed to pieces in a giant monster movie.

The Election / Adam RICHARDS
Through some weird twist of fate, Abe Shinzo and his long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party regained control of Japan’s messy political system, giving Abe of all people a second stint as prime minister. For three years, the rival Democratic party attempted to forge a new direction for the country but were mired in disagreements on which direction to take, a series of petty scandals, mismanagement following the March 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster, and a mixed bag of policy decisions. The most lasting of these unpopular policies was to pass a consumption tax hike together with the LDP, in a deal that also kickstarted talks to fundamentally revise Japan’s social safety net protections.

So when Prime Mnister Noda called a snap election as part of said deal, a disappointed electorate returned the LDP to power in resounding fashion. The returning Abe administration has taken on a decidedly bolder policy agenda than when he first came around in 2006, when he tried unsuccessfully to maintain the positive momentum of the Koizumi years. Now his first priority is ending deflation, seemingly at all costs, enlisting former PM Taro Aso as finance minister to keep the bureaucrats from meddling. Once that’s out of the way, he wants to revise the constitution; not to change the pacifist Article 9, at least at first, but to lower the threshold for triggering a referendum for proposed revisions from a 2/3 Diet vote to a simple majority. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Abe will manage to stay in office long enough to do any of this.

Nuclear Protests in Japan / W. David MARX
In 2012, there were many protests against nuclear power in Japan. The DPJ government did nothing concrete in response to these protests, and then the most pro-nuclear political party — the LDP — won back power.

Ishihara Shintaro Trolls the Planet / Connor SHEPHERD
If you think Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintarō’s most entertaining days are behind him, last summer he raised the bar for global-scale trolling with his offer to buy the Senkaku Islands from the Japanese private citizen who owned them. There is ostensibly no practical reason why Tokyo would want or need some unpopulated islands hundreds of miles away from the city, so when Ishihara raised ¥1 billion from some friends to purchase them, we can assume that he did so for no reason other than to anger the Chinese, who want the islands for their awesome hypothetical oil and gas. And it worked — the Chinese got angry! And by essentially forcing the Japanese central government to buy them before he could, he single-handedly caused a significant international incident. Seriously, this guy is a pro.

Operation “Sue-my-datchi” / Matt ALT
2011’s disaster relief “Operation Tomodachi” marked a rare high point in the often strained relationship between Japan and the US military. Late this year, however, eight crewmen from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan announced a lawsuit against TEPCO for exposure to radiation, demanding $40 million in compensation and punitive damages. Let’s get this straight: A group of men serving aboard a floating arsenal packing not one but two nuclear reactors and ostensibly engaged in rescue operations, are suing the very country they were trying to assist in the midst of a disaster. One might hope they’d donate any winnings to those who actually lost families and homes, but given the chutzpah needed to even raise a suit like this, it’s probably too much to wish for.

Grandma Went to Jail / Nick DONEGAN
While much is made of Japan’s graying population and the perceptions of filial respect shown by its youth, 2012 saw the elderly turn towards a new activity: crime. With a strangely “understanding” white paper from the Ministry of Justice, and the number of rather gruesome incidents starring the gentile grand-figure, 2012 was a banner year for showcasing granny’s true skills with a knife. With the overall crime rate on the decline — by the National Police Agency’s estimation, at 5.8% per year — and the world economy on the possible brink of recovery, perhaps we will look back on 2012 as “just a phase” in the high-stakes, rebellious, and attention-seeking world of the Japanese pensioner.

Macabre Murder Factory Flies Under the Radar / Adam RICHARDS
Over a period of decades, one woman orchestrated a criminal operation specializing in the systematic kidnapping, torture, defrauding, imprisonment, and murder of perhaps dozens in Hyogo Prefecture’s Amagasaki. Before her arrest this year, Sumida Miyoko would hire thugs to storm the house of an intended target family, subdue them, and proceed to keep them in captivity as she gradually emptied their bank accounts and took ownership of their property. To aid her reign of terror, she would force children to beat their parents while other family members watched. She maintained an apartment full of human doghouses, some of which were on the balcony to keep people for bad behavior during the winter. At least one died from injuries sustained there, while other victims were found in states of extreme starvation, many beaten severely and one with scars making her all but unrecognizable. One daughter of a victim family caught Stockholm Syndrome, became a key accomplice, married Sumida’s son, and had a child.

The grisly details do not stop there, but after reading about this story I had to wonder why on earth isn’t this the Crime of the Century? Perhaps because it highlights so many of the embarrassing systemic problems of Japanese society — police inertia (police refused to intervene on behalf of multiple victims), a lack of neighborly concern, the shocking ease of defrauding Japan’s various bureaucratic systems, etc. Sumida recently killed herself in prison, deftly avoiding justice in a final bit of police bungling that sends a fitting message for those of us living here: When the rules aren’t well enforced, as is so often the case in Japan, it’s the bullies and monsters that will have the upper hand.

Japanese Electronic Maker Doom / Nick DONEGAN and Adam RICHARDS
2012 was one of the most disastrous years for the bloated electronics industry since its inception. Sharp, Panasonic, and Sony started the year off with bad news but thoughtful hopes — selling off factories to Chinese investors, realigning product foci, and even looking to create new product lines! — but ended up reporting losses totaling to ¥1.23 trillion ($15.3 billion). The massive investments failed to pay off, and now Sharp, the most cash strapped of the once-mighty giant manufacturers, looks increasingly likely to end up mostly a parts supplier for Apple. With Sharp supplying iPhone and iPad panels, Sony making the camera sensors, and a small army of smaller manufacturers making many other components, the Japanese electronics industry as a whole seems fated to lack compelling products of its own, forcing it to occupy the less glamorous and less profitable role as the world’s ultra high-tech parts maker.

Japan Keeps Buying US/UK Tech, Nobody Cares / Connor SHEPHERD
Here’s something you might not know: Over the past two years, companies from Japan have been buying all kinds of high-tech companies in the United States and Britain. At the tail end of 2010, social-games giant DeNA bought the American mobile game shop ngmoco for a WTF-level $400 million, and that kicked off a crazy chain of Japanese companies gobbling up US and UK assets (look how many companies mentioned in this article are high-tech), ending with Softbank buying Sprint and HR/classified ad giant Recruit snapping up jobs-listing startup Indeed.com for you-know-what’s-cool-a-billion-dollars (allegedly, not much about this deal is transparent). Despite all this, no part of these deals made any headway towards complicating the general narrative of Japan’s decline.

The Rise of Smartphones / Adam RICHARDS
2012 was undisputedly the year of the smartphone. I bought an iPhone in late 2011, and it has made me curious about what devices my fellow Tokyo commuters are using. Over the past 12 months there has been a remarkable shift. Initially there were maybe one or two smartphone users vs. traditional feature phones in Tokyo, and now the ratio is reversed. I almost feel pity for people who have not opted for a smartphone at this point. By 2013 a clear majority will have them, giving them access to the “real” Internet (and not bastardized versions for feature phones), often for the first time.

Internet Rage Flourishes / Adam RICHARDS
For years now, the mainstream media’s response to — and hence the elite’s general impression of — the Internet was to see it as a threat, prompting all manner of scare stories even as the general population found its own uses for it. And politicians made sure to have a presence there but seldom would turn to it for either policy advice or a source of popular support. In 2012, however, Internet rage became much more visible in public discourse. Earlier this year a scandal erupted on the Internet when it was found that a popular comedian’s mother was fraudulently receiving welfare benefits. Not surprisingly, the right wing Internet communities (by far the most visible on the Japanese web) railed against what they saw as an unworthy program that gives cash to the undeserving. What was surprising, however, was that the political class — both then ruling party DPJ and opposition LDP — reacted to the scandal with measures aimed at responding to their concerns. One might be tempted to praise politicians for joining the modern age as it were, but net right wingers are mostly out of step with the general public (not to mention good policy). The question now is whether new PM Abe will be as eager to please what he sees as a core constituency.

Video Games / Matt ALT
2012 marked Microsoft’s decision to abandon the Tokyo Game Show. Many pundits spun the move as yet another symptom of the Japanese game industry’s decline. Others spun it as yet another example of Japanese gamers’ traditional disdain for the fetishistic first-person violence of American shooting games. But the real story was about the rise of mobile gaming aggregators like Gree and DeNA, whose floor displays dominated those of traditional Japanese console game developers in terms of both size and bombast. Their apps are wildly popular in Japan, but can they crack the foreign marketplace?

Japanese Game Developers / Jean SNOW
The world gaming community has not been kind to Japanese game developers in recent years. In response, a majority of the games being produced in Japan overly cater to the home audience, leaving the rest of the world looking to the West for their gaming entertainment. Not a good thing for the Japanese gaming industry, considering the impact gaming has in today’s culture (see iOS gaming and blockbuster launches of the latest iteration in the Call of Duty series) and especially sad considering that many a longtime gamer was raised on Japanese-produced titles and consoles. But as 2012 comes to a close, there are some signs — like RPG king Square Enix aggressively releasing titles on iOS and Android — that all may not be lost.

The Pop Music Charts in 2012 / Ian MARTIN
At the end of every year, chart organisation Oricon publishes its rankings of the best-selling music of the year, and for the past few years the singles charts have been congealing like a scab around mass idol collective AKB48. This year they and their sister groups accounted for twelve of the top twenty, with the other eight positions taken by boy bands from the stable of the more established evil organisation in pop Johnny & Associates. Meanwhile the album charts were dominated by “best of” repackagings of older artists like Matsutoya Yumi, Yamashita Tatsuro, Exile, and Mr. Children, who held both of the top two positions with their “Micro” and “Macro” compilations. K-Pop was largely absent from the rankings, although KARA and Girls’ Generation continue to be reasonably strong sellers. With singles largely existing as a means for fans to display their love for idols, albums seemingly an exercise in nostalgia for a gradually ageing fanbase, and either the industry or the market turning away from overseas influences, the future looks pretty dismal for the Japanese pop mainstream.

Shugo Tokumaru — In Focus? / W. David MARX
The sweeping and majestic guitar strums of 2010’s Port Entropy took Japanese genius songwriter-producer Shugo Tokumaru from international Pitchfork darling to the heights of indie fame in his home country, complete with his songs plastered under TV CMs for blue-chippers Sony and JAL. With his new In Focus? Tokumaru could have easily gone full-out, feel-good J-Pop, but instead took a step back to his daring, experimental roots — resulting in what is easily the year’s best Japanese record. His eclectic instrumentation may have been further neutralized into a mellow mix, but peppy, peppy songs like “Katachi” and “Down Down” took Tokumaru to new places with fully danceable rhythms and tight pop structure. The whole thing is held together with the glue of cartoonish micro set pieces, weird time signatures, inventive vocal melodies, sped-up munchkin background vocals, and 1960s vocal jazz references. Really, what other miracles could we possibly want from this musical Messiah?

Best Indie Albums / Ian MARTIN
Aside from Shugo Tokumaru, the indie and DIY scenes continued to release a wide array of great music under the radar. Fukuoka all-girl indie supergroup Miu Mau released the News EP on CD/R, with a combination of chunky synths, sweet harmonies and spindly, flat, metallic guitars wandering over tunes ranging from the lo-fi Shibuya-kei of “Neon Sign” to the retro-futurist new wave Asiatica of “Mirai no Classic.” Another all-girl three-piece Fancynumnum put out the more densely layered No Now, bringing mantric krautrock beats and textures together with kayōkyoku-like melodies. One of the most extraordinary albums of the year was minimalist psychedelic post-punk band Extruders’ Pray, a live album recorded in a Buddhist temple and released as a CD/R in a brown paper bag, while at another extreme Half Sports showed that 1980s styled guitar pop doesn’t have to be gloomy and affected with the raucous, ramshackle Slice Of Our City providing moment after moment of joyous power pop. Finally, one of the most category-defying and downright odd albums of the year was Kumamoto band Doit Science’s Beefheartian splatterfest Information, with its off-kilter melodies, disorientating collision of rhythms, and wide-eyed diversions into barbershop.

No Dancing / Ian LYNAM
June saw a handful of protests to the recent renewed enforcement of a 1984 addition to the Entertainment Business Control Law that bans dancing in music venues and clubs with less than a 66 square meter floor. Since 2010, Japanese law enforcement agencies have gone out of their way to crack down on dancing in small clubs in Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Osaka. With ten raids in 2010, twenty-one in 2011, and an as-yet undisclosed, yet potentially higher number in 2012, the government is doing its absolute best to uphold an archaic law. The odd thing is that the law was originally instituted in 1948 to crack down on prostitution. As for the reasoning in the contemporary context, the jury is still out.

Jail Time for Downloading / Ian LYNAM
Both houses of the Diet passed a law that added punishments to pre-existing anti-piracy legislation in June of this year, and it came into effect in October. Draconian in nature due to the sprawling range of content and lack of clear definition, this new legal framework, in essence, means watching pirated content or making a backup copy of a DVD can get you up to two years in prison or fines up to ¥2 million. (Don’t worry, Tsutaya fans — ripping CDs is legal.) A key (if untested) loophole that has been discerned thus far is that the viewer must be aware of their pirate action’s illegality. The law requires a rightsholder to identify and report violations themselves, and so far no one has been arrested. All the same, tech-savvy Japan residents would be wise to watch their digital backs.

Sony Music Japan on iTunes / W. David MARX
Sony Music Japan — one of Japan’s biggest music labels — finally put its domestic catalog on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The lesson here is that Japanese companies can’t stop history or progress, but they can delay for a very long time.

Adrian Favell vs. Nara Yoshitomo / W. David MARX
Earlier in 2012, British sociologist Adrian Favell published an academic look at the rise of Japanese contemporary art titled Before and After Superflat. There was little notice in Japan until a translated version of his chapter on Nara Yoshitomo “as a businessman” hit the desk of… Nara Yoshitomo. The aging punk rocking artist took to his Twitter account to vent his spleen (calling Favell lots of not nice things, including “会ったこともない外人”) and denouncing the article as being factually inaccurate. The controversy boiled down to Favell’s challenge of Nara’s image as a “naïve” pure painter; Nara did not like being called “consummate slacker CEO” — at least the “CEO” part. Most interestingly, this controversy created a wave of people in the Japanese art world who rushed to defend Nara against the evils of foreign academic analysis.

Modern Times / Ian LYNAM
It’s been a big year for Tokyo-based Taiwanese-American photographer Patrick Tsai. After an upset at the Canon “New Cosmos of Photography” competition, he went on to have his first monograph Modern Times published by boutique photo publishing house Nakarokusha. A slew of exhibitions in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Nara, and elsewhere followed, as well as being picked by Time Magazine’s for its best photo books of the year. Modern Times is now being displayed in the art/photography sections of every major bookstore in the country at present — a rarity when most foreigners’ work is valued as an import. Tsai has managed to cultivate a body of work that is deemed worthwhile during their his time spent domestically in Japan.

Takamine Tadasu’s Solo Show / Darryl Jingwen WEE
Almost two years after the fact, Takamine Tadasu presented one of the more nuanced responses to the aftermath of 3/11 by casting a penetrating eye on parts of the Japanese psyche that are often neglected, shrugged off, or willfully ignored. Highlights of his show at Art Tower Mito included a room littered with shambolic reams of paper filled with xenophobic, jingoistic hate speech and bulletin board ephemera, and revolving LED signs that churn out the trite hyōgo slogans that festoon every street corner and public transportation facility in the country. The deft spatial composition of this show that straddles theater set and conceptual, text-based art, combined with a finely balanced sense of irony — as well as fortuitous timing hot on the heels of a rather disappointing election — makes this a highlight of the past year in contemporary art.

Goldblatt in Delight Shock about Murakami Loss / Matt TREYVAUD
Not only did Murakami Haruki not win the Nobel Prize this year, actual winner Mo Yan‘s English translator Howard Goldblatt was reportedly “delighted that the other Asian titan, Japanese author Haruki Murakami […] didn’t win.” The sentence ends “… when so many other Asian writers get so little attention in the West,” which, okay, admirable sentiments we can all get behind, but still — ouch, man. Next year’s winner will probably just hire a small child to point at Murakami and laugh. (Goldblatt’s Granta interview is also worth reading.)

The Return of the King / Matt TREYVAUD
Ten years after delivering a Tale of Genji for people who like commas and poetry, Royall Tyler has graced the world with a The Tale of the Heike for people who like line breaks (and homework). Fans of tales about premodern Japanese entities with two-syllable names might also want to check out the translation of the Ise Monogatari Tyler banged out in the interim with Joshua S. Mostow.

New Books about Old Music / Matt TREYVAUD
In the world of comics, Amyū’s Kono oto tomare! 『この音とまれ!』 took on the monumental task of making koto music cool (mainly by putting very little actual koto music in the story).On the other hand, 2012 did also see the republication of jiuta master Tomiyama Seikin I’s 1966 Seikin: jiuta shugyō 『清琴 地うた修行』 (as the meat of Jiuta/sōkyoku no sekai『地歌・箏曲の世界』) and Okamoto Chikugai’s Shakuhachi zuisō shū 『尺八随想集』, so the news was not all bad.

Best Action Manga of 2012 / Matthew PENNEY
Yūyami Tokkotai (Twilight Suicide Squad) by Oshikiri Rensuke is a real seinen original that combines high school club stuff, gags, hand-to-hand combat with a ridiculous sense of impact, and some genuinely creepy J-horror scenes that borrow equally from the 1990s and 2000s hits (Ring, Audition, Ju-on) and classic films based on Edogawa Rampo and Yokomizo Seishi novels. Moving deftly between parody and homage and driving almost immediately into a single-arc story that at ten volumes is already foreshadowing a tight and timely conclusion, Yūyami Tokkotai stands out from the many similar series on the market that are ponderously drawing out their stories past thirty volumes and beyond any artistic credibility.

Meanwhile Hunter x Hunter is a series that due to juvenile early arcs and a long hiatus has not built the international fan-base of Shonen Jump brethren Bleach and Naruto. Creator Togashi Yoshihiro, best known for his work on Yu Yu Hakusho, is a experienced creator and in 2011-2012 has successfully introduced a darker tone along with artistic experimentation in the fight scenes — characters take on the form of Buddhist statues and one protagonist’s lines become almost calligraphy-like as he powers up, a far cry from the usual (and increasingly sterile) speed lines and flaming auras.

Best “Artistic” Manga of 2012 / Matthew PENNEY
Maruo Suehiro’s Binzume no Jigoku (Bottled Hell) shows that the ero-guro master continues to grow as an artist. In the title adaptation of Yumeno Kyusaku’s 1928 novella, Maruo brings alive a natural environment that is equally beautiful and terrifying, mirroring perfectly the combination of sexual desire and horror that tears at the protagonists — a shipwrecked adolescent brother and sister. Where Maruo once went for licking eyeballs, he now maintains his transgressive style with symbolism and understatement. Even better, the volume also contains a number of shorts that show he can still summon the old grotesquerie on cue.

Also, Yukimura Makoto’s Vinland Saga is finally beginning to hit the thematic highs of the author’s past hit Planetes. Yukimura uses an old Norse setting to deal with slavery and structures of power and hints that his version of the push to the “new world” is rooted in utopian anarchism.

Fukushima Manga / Matthew PENNEY
There have been over a dozen volume length manga dealing with the March 11, 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi meltdown. The most challenging is Imashiro Takashi’s Genpatsu genma taisen (the title combines “genpatsu” — nuclear power — with the name of the series of novels about a psychic invader from deep space that became the famous/infamous 1983 anime move Harmagedon) which captures the anger felt by many readers while looking critically at the political economy of nuclear power in Japan.

Kobayashi Yoshinori’s (yes, that Kobayashi Yoshinori) Datsu-Genpatsu Ron (On Abandoning Nuclear Power) makes a strong critique of Japan’s nuclear industry from the Right, asking why the public should be asked to pay month after month to electrical monopolies while still picking up the tab to the tune of hundreds of times the company’s stock value if something goes wrong. Kobayashi, of course, believes that while nuclear power is a no-no; nuclear weapons are where Japan should be looking. On the whole, this volume is less deliberately offensive than most of his work and certainly shows a shadow of the mid-1990s Kobayashi who was held to be an adroit progressive before Sensōron (On War) blew everything up.

The most powerful manga on the 3.11 disasters deals with the tsunami rather than the nuclear crisis. The twenty-first volume of Kusaka Riki’s Helpman! (a reference to elder care “helpers”) looks at the quake and inundation of Tōhoku communities from the point of view of the elderly and care workers. Over half of the total dead were 65 or older and hundreds of elderly died in shelters in the days and weeks after the crisis. Helpman! draws attention to this side of the tragedy, which was often homogenized as a “national” or “regional” experience, without losing the sharp affective high points of a mature seinen style. Helpman! is a underrated series that keeps getting better and shows that mainstream manga magazines (in this case, Evening) continue to explore new possibilities for the medium.

The final installment in a week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ musical masterpiece Fantasma. Read Parts One, Two, Three, and Four.

Part Five: After Fantasma’s Japanese Release

How Matador Came to Put Out Fantasma in the U.S. and Europe

From the Matador website (complete with timeless Monica Lewinsky reference):

February 5, 1998
Some thrilling new signings to report, the first of which being Japanese pop mastermind CORNELIUS. His U.S./European debut, Fantasma will be released on March 24. For background purposes, the biography prepared by Mr. Amory will be online shortly. For now, an appreviated [sic] version is on our upcoming releases page. I could add something like “prepare to be blown away,” but I don’t know how you prepare yourself for that (not without running for office first)

Personal recollection from Isaac Bess, Matador employee in the mid-1990s:

My family lived in Tokyo for a year in 1986, and my parents went back to Tokyo again in 1996 for their second research trip. I was working at Matador at the time, having started in 1994 after college and doing mostly domestic and international distribution. I went over to Japan for Christmas and did my regular routine of listening to anything that looked interesting in the listening stations of Tower and HMV.

I remember seeing Cornelius’ first single “The Sun is My Enemy,” which I thought was a super cool song title, and all the other Cornelius releases had this amazing aesthetic. They were the kind of records that jumped out visually. I bought some Cornelius records and an amazing EP from Fishmans Long Season that I still dream of someday releasing on vinyl.

I brought these CDs back to New York and played them in the office. I don’t know what it’s like at the Matador office now, but at the time there were frequent battles over control of the office stereo. At some some point after us listening to Cornelius, it was determined that we’d reach out to Trattoria, the label on the back of the CD. I had zero Japanese label connections myself — we’d put out Pizzicato Five records but that was about it. I sent a fax to the number on the back of the CD, and as I recall, my fax letter was written in the worst Japanese of all time.

We traded some faxes back and forth, then some phone calls, and then a crazy, crazy care package of Japanese records arrived on our door. The packaging on those Trattoria records at the time was absolutely insane. I remember the whole office being totally blown away by those huge elaborate compilations. I don’t know how they might have made money on those things

We got an advance of Fantasma’s lead single “Star Fruits Surf Rider,” and I put it through the office ringer. I still think it is not nearly the strongest track on the record, but I liked all that frantic drum programming stuff, which was just starting to percolate into the non-DJ world. The response was good but not insane.

But when we got the full length, we reached out. Matador started a deal process (that I was not involved in), and we were off to the races. I quit a bit afterwards, but I got to spend time with Keigo and Hiroko (from Polystar) and the band in NY. Then I moved to Tokyo and saw more of them then.

Even now, it feels like Japanese labels aspire to have international success stories, largely to no avail. And at the time in Matador, we had, at least in relative terms, three — Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, and Guitar Wolf (depending on how you define success story, I suppose). I think the key was really in the marketing angle Matador took, which played little or none on “Japan = crazy!” It was more about “This record sounds absolutely genius.”

Fantasma is still a super dense record. I remember all the reviews citing the studio wizardry, the attention to detail around the recording process. From that point, I had little hand in the trajectory of the record, in the US or elsewhere, but it was extremely gratifying to see such critical acceptance.

How I Discovered Fantasma

If I recall correctly, I was at a real-deal “cocktail party” in the Spring of 1998, talking to Matt Murray and Dan O. Williams about my interest in Japanese pop. Dano asked if I had heard Minekawa Takako, which I had not, and he asked if knew about Momus, which I did not. He then mentioned if I had heard of Kahimi Karie, produced by Momus. I had not. He then said, oh so what do you think of Cornelius — he’s this important DJ / producer. Although I had become a Buffalo Daughter fan by this time, I clearly knew nothing about anything. I promptly went to Newbury Comics the next week after class and saw the Matador release of Fantasma sitting in the “New” bins — at $10.99 loss-leader pricing. I picked it up and headed home.

Upon returning to my door room, I popped Fantasma into the communal stereo and thought something was wrong with said stereo for the first minute as nothing came out but mostly inaudible sound effects. The rest of the album was equally mysterious and incomprehensible, although I distinctly remember liking the part in “Free Fall” where they say “Slow down” and then the song slows down. For the first three or four or five listens, I still prefered Buffalo Daughter, but went around believing that this was an epic, important record even if I didn’t particularly enjoy it or understand why. So I tried to convince myself that I loved it by convincing everyone else that it was amazing. During some study session, I let my classical music aficionado girlfriend hear “2010” which she saluted but then played her “Magoo Opening” which she did not. The fundamental problem was that mind just did not possess the capabilities to understand the musical sounds contained within — I didn’t get the references and did not even know what half the musical instruments were.

Upon visiting Tokyo in 1998, I took the album with me, listened to it in my lonely days walking the streets, and then started collecting used copies of Cornelius’ other CDs at the lowest prices I could find. I first picked up the remix album 96/69, which is not a good place to start. I do distinctly remember, however, finally getting my head around Fantasma the 15th or so listen, and I soon found myself in Ochanomizu, haggling over prices for a SP-202 phrase sampler and DR-202 drum machine.

Through convoluted circumstances of my internship at Kodansha, I ended up at a photo studio at the end of the summer where Oyamada Keigo was a model for a A Bathing Ape shoot, destined for the next issue of Hot Dog Press. I sat near Oyamada but did not talk to him until he was leaving, where I got him to sign my copy of Fantasma (coming directly out of my CD player) and the cover/CD of 69/96. He signed in an oddly bombastic backwards graffiti — SUILENROC. As I slinked away, Nigo came over and handed Oyamada a copy of the UNKLE album, which I then ran out and bought as well.

Cornelius toured the U.S. later that November with Natural Calamity, coming to Boston and playing to a room full of Japanese exchange students. I faithfully wore my A Bathing Ape T-shirt like the rest of the crowd, and Cornelius showed up in Ape uniforms. (Read Alex Pappademas’ early brilliance in this Phoenix review: “Amid thunderous applause, he laughingly accepted a “You da man!” high five off a dude in the front row.”) By this point, the Cornelius touring band was a tight unit, transforming his complicated Fantasma tracks into high-energy crowd pleasers. He also added a few particularly good live tracks “E” and the soccer themed “Ball in Kick Off,” with Horie (of Neil & Iraiza) in charge of blowing the referee whistle. (I spent too much money later on some weird German compilation that had “Ball in Kick Off” as the opening track.) He also passed around the SP-202 phrase sampler for the crowd to “play,” and since I had one at home and knew how it worked, I grabbed it confident that I could jam along with Oyamada. Unfortunately he had put something to block you from touching any of the controls so the best you could do was wildly press the buttons to make random noise.

What truly made the show though was the video visuals accompanying every song in perfect timing — cut-ups of lost children’s shows, retro 1960s groovy movie footage, and early visual effects. It appeared that the backing tracks were played off the videotapes, and drummer Migu faithfully listened to a click as she played. After the show ended, I said hi to Cornelius’ manager Takahashi, who vaguely remembered me from earlier in the summer. My roommate Chess and I walked home down Lansdowne street singing the a cappella opening to 69/96. That had been the best concert I had ever seen, only topped by Cornelius’ Point tour in 2002.

Cornelius After Fantasma

With Matador releasing Fantasma in both the U.S. and Europe, Cornelius transformed into a globally-recognized musical genius, which of course, made him an even bigger deal back in his home country of Japan. Cornelius spent the first few years after Fantasma in constant tour with his increasingly tight live band. This was documented in the video EUS, where Help! Films and long-time Oyamada visual partner Tsujikawa Koichiro’s Harvard Design turn cheap miniDV footage of the tour into an endless pageant of Pokemon seizure beauty (a few fragments are included on the Fantasma re-master boxset.).

Cornelius also began to remix every musician on the planet — a list that extended from fellow Tokyo bands like Buffalo Daughter (“Great Five Lakes”), Towa Tei (“Butterfly”), and Salon Music (“Galaxie Express 69 Mix”) to like-minded international stars Beck (“Mixed Business”), The Pastels (“Windy Hill”), and Coldcut (“Atomic Moog 2000”). In many cases, Cornelius improved on the original (Money Mark’s “Maybe I’m Dead,” in particular), but many of the tracks were mostly rebuilt with the Fantasma sound library to sound like Cornelius’ outtakes with guest vocals. The process of remixing, however, represented Cornelius’ entry into the global pantheon of producers. The kid who wrote “Goodbye, Our Pastels Badges” was suddenly remixing the actual Pastels. (It’s also telling that remixes of Cornelius have never been particularly good, as there is no much core “song” under the production to re-construct.)

Perhaps this over-use of Fantasma space noises and guitar riffs from 1997 to 2000 is what made Cornelius move so far away for his 2001 follow-up Point. Where Fantasma was additive — building soundscapes by piling on sounds on sounds, references on references, genres on genres — Point was completely subtractive. Oyamada essentially worked to free himself from the DJ cut-and-paste aesthetic, and instead, tried to deconstruct his own tastes to a building blocks of “pure” but original sounds. Cornelius told Suzannah Tartan in Japan Times, “This time I drew my ideas more from myself, my own biorhythms and environment. With ‘Point,’ I wanted to enable the listeners to immerse themselves in the music to have more blank space or open margins around the music. Because, by doing so, the listener will be able to include more of their own influences, of their own personal memory, or environment.” Essentially, Cornelius understood his own references to be too idiosyncratic — crowding out fans building better personal relationships with his music.

So Point contains almost no explicit references to other music, other than a relatively tame robot-vocaled cover of the classic “Brazil.” Instrumentation revolves almost exclusively around acoustic guitars, digital tones, and clipped live drum samples. If Fantasma was always on the brink of disaster, with loud noises and drones bleeding from one song to another, Point is in perfect control, with sounds muted and ended precisely after they serve their purpose. The song titles of Point even moved away from band names (the one exception “Tone Twilight Zone” is a joke on the outré pop label Tone Twilight founded by friend Emori Takeaki). We move from the nearly fourth-dimensional “Microdisneycal World Tour” to the one-dimensional “Drop,” the formless “Smoke,” and the zero-dimensional “Nowhere.”

Oyamada may have grown tired of Shibuya-kei’s melodic plunderphonics after doing it for almost a decade, but his peers were also moving to a similar direction. Point’s most direct influence is Kanda Tomoki’s landscape of smallers music from January 2001 — an atmospheric sound safari where Rhodes plucks sound like raindrops and Minimoog oscillators imitate buzzing insects on an African veldt. Between Point, Kanda’s record, Emori’s Tone Twilight catalog, Takemura Nobukazu’s “Sign,” Sunahara Yoshinori’s ice cold Lovebeat, and Kahimi Karie’s increasingly slow and abstract whisper pop, we suddenly had a new mini-genre “Nakame-kei,” named after the retreat of 30-year old Tokyo hipsters from the Shibuya commercial district to the slow-life of the cafe-heavy Nakameguro neighborhood where Oyamada’s 3D studio is located. Maybe too many people were doing the sample pop thing and the originators needed some distance, but Cornelius certainly chose a reverse course — away from music that contained explicit cultural signifiers to one completely intended to be sculpting of acoustic space.

Few were thrilled with this new direction. Oyamada’s friend Momus publicly referred to the album as “Disappoint,” and most of the foreign fans, who had only heard of this Oyamada character in the last two years, did not understand why he needed to change up the classic Fantasma formula. There certainly were ways to push the Fantasma methodology even further; I would argue that unofficial disciples Plus-Tech Squeeze Box used a massive base of samples to hyper-extended a Fantasma view of the music into an even more intense frenzy (listen to “Fiddle Dee Dee”). Oyamada instead decided he would rather make the kind of “original” sounds that get copied and referenced rather than try to recreate others’ iconic recordings.

The question is whether Cornelius gained something in moving away from eclecticism and diversity. Everything on Point essentially sounds the same. It is holistic, but it is one ride at Epcot — not the entire Magic Kingdom. While the opening track “Point of View Point” may be one of the most clever and rewarding songs of Oyamada’s career, the rest of the album is essentially re-thinkings of the same idea. The metal interlude “I Hate Hate” even feels rote.

Despite the tepid response to Point, Cornelius did successfully turn the material into one of the greatest live music spectacles of all time. Far from the DIY days of the Fantasma tour, Oyamada no longer cut up from silly video tape footage of the past, but created high-quality productions that perfectly embodied every single song. The songs suddenly became incredibly good soundtracks to interesting short films rather than “songs.” These videos, combined with clever lighting and projection effects, brought the Point songs to life on tour, and the resulting DVD Five Point One of the video work was a legitimate standalone audio-visual journey rather than a “DVD of the videos for an album.” Oyamada moved from musician to multimedia artist. Most importantly, he moved far from “curator” to an un-ambiguous original creator.

After Point, however, Cornelius went further down the rabbit hole, into a music based increasingly on abstract expressionist sound detached from the history of music. The first sign of this was the Eno-esque cherry blossom tone poem of “From Nakameguro to Everywhere.” Then Cornelius really doubled-down by choosing an entire album of young “Logic glitch-squirt bedroom cases” like dj codomo and DRITT DRITTEL for his “remix Point samples” contest. (As well as “MC Cat Genius’ BomBassTic Re-bomb / Animal Family featuring MC Cat Genius,” one of the strangest works ever committed to a major label release.) When Tokyo Fun Party organized a session at Uplink for all the Point remixers in 2004, Oyamada showed up to play a secret spot at the end and treated the crowd to strange guitar-manipulated digital delay jams much like Sensuous’ “Wataridori.” Gone were the cartoon clips or videos, replaced with dynamically generated computer visuals that reacted in time with the sounds.

This was even a step from Point, and when Sensuous hit in 2006 — five years after his previous album — Cornelius had made a full transformation into painter of the soundscape (my full review here). Besides the clever “Toner” duet with a inkjet printer, Sensuous is almost completely humorless, beginning with a four minute exploration into wind chimes and acoustic guitar strums. The Cornelius palette has recently contracted to a very small set of digital synth sounds that reverb into nothingness. The original quest for complete control over sound fragments in Point has transformed into a kind of digital mania. Oyamada may be the only person in the entire world who prefers fake digital piano samples to the majesty of the real thing.

To his credit, Oyamada is at least not repeating himself, and he has moved miles from the questionably derivative parts of his musical output. For a while though, everyone secretly wanted him to go back and make another Fantasma. Viewed in the lens of Simon Reynolds’ exhaustive indictment of modern culture’s Retromania, our enjoyment of Fantasma clearly stems from it being so directly referential — rewarding us for our obscure musical trivia, borrowing from the hallowed aura of Brian Wilson, and regurgitating retro timbres thought lost to the detritus of society but that still existed in the deepest trenches of our brain. It felt good. But after Fantasma had delivered this drug, he decided to instead become a true techno-optimist. He has attempted to make sounds that are fiercely new, that push digital technology far beyond the comfort zone. Noise bands cannot shock anymore with noise alone, but there is something deeply disconcerting about intentionally making songs with fake piano samples. This may have often felt boring and anondyne on Sensuous, but these production techniques worked wonderfully for singer Salyu on her breakthrough 2011 record s(o)un(d)beams (listen to the machine funk of “Mirror Neurotic”).

The great lament around Cornelius is not really related to Oyamada — we no longer live in an era where an album like Fantasma is joined with 3-4 other concurrent releases that proclaim and prove a brand new wave of creativity. Something like s(o)un(d) beams stands in isolation, a strange quirk of the music industry that Salyu’s industry drones would tap an avant-garde talent to produce her record. In the 15 years since Fantasma, the Japanese music scene can no longer muster the power to create albums that make the world wake up and even think their own domestic bands in a new context. Cornelius was able to achieve that and much more, but the album also came out during the penultimate year of sales for Japanese music — a time when there was tons of money to burn on eccentricism, and more importantly, there was something important at stake. Japan’s top musicians were possessed with a burning desire to make big, meaningful, genre-changing albums, because they knew that if they succeeded, there would be an equally meaningful response. If Fantasma appeared in 2012, no one in Japan would know what to do with it.

So our nostalgia and respect for Cornelius’ masterpiece will remain tied with with nostalgia and respect for the era when music rained as the king of popular arts. And what better record to symbolize this than a long musical tribute to music itself. There may be albums that inspire more nostalgic longing and more succinctly prick up the painful melancholy of teenage longing, but the sheer depth and innovation of Fantasma make it an album that can be enjoyed over the long run. The album is now historical — it stands for a certain age in the 1990s — but at the same time, it is an important textbook for an alternative musical history, where Bach, Bacharach, and the Beach Boys stand as the great triumvirate. We students have spent years decoding and translating the work, but more importantly, we have listened over and over and over again. Thank you for the music.

Part Four in a week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ musical masterpiece Fantasma. Read Part One — the introduction to the series as well as “The Age of Music Nerds” — Part Two — a look at Oyamada Keigo before Fantasma and the structure of Fantasma as an album — and Part Three — track by track analysis of Side One.

Part Four: Fantasma, Side Two

8. “Chapter 8 – Seashore And Horizon”
Side One of Fantasma ends with the chaotic jungle drone crescendo of “Star Fruits Surf Rider,” but at the beginning of Side Two (or if on a CD, the theoretical start of Side Two), we are immediately transported back into the pop realm with a song in the style of 1990s American indie pop heroes Apples in Stereo. Wait, this isn’t a song like Apples in Stereo — this is Apples in Stereo. A small yacht comes over the horizon and lands on an isolated beach with gently crashing waves. Out steps Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney who start to sing a duet with an acoustic guitar, bass, and an incredibly sea-friendly drum kit.

Cornelius plays a neat joke here: After an entire album of naming songs after bands and reimagining other bands’ songs, he decides, why not just invite my favorite band to actually be on the album? Schneider’s resulting co-composition is pleasantly Apples-esque, but at the :44 second mark, someone hits the button on the cassette player and we are transported to a similar, but completely different song sung by Oyamada, which essentially sounds like an Apples in Stereo copy. In this, the entire sequence essentially acts as a summary of Cornelius’ own methodology at work — an original composition, followed by a similar yet slightly less melodic copy.

Before we get too comfortable in the Oyamada take on Elephant 6, however, the tape rewinds back to Apples in Stereo for a slightly longer version of their realm, and then we again tape click over to Cornelius’ response. For the last minute, Cornelius’ maudlin version wins out the duel and takes us out of the track with an increasingly loud and trebly synth drone.

9. “Free Fall”
The drone of track 8 suddenly pitches and slows down to the exact pace of “Free Fall”’s AM-radio guitar riff. This turns into a driving mock rock epic with electronic flourishes of drum machine rolls and space-age synth sounds. The song itself could fit well within Oyamada’s previous work, which is to say, this is not Fantasma’s most mature moment. “Free Fall,” however, adds some critical “rock” to what is nominally a “rock album” — and giving us a tough masculine moment before the electronic and pop tracks send us out.

The song’s great highlight is the reductive instrumental solo that harmonizes what sounds like a heavily processed metal guitar and portamento Moog lines, each standing proudly in separate stereo channels. And we get another meta moment at the end as the lyrics command “Slow down!” and the song suddenly starts to crank the pitch down until we end up in a sludge.

10. “2010”
At some point in the middle of production, Oyamada turned to his staff and said, “We need some Bach on this puppy.” They then dutifully downloaded the MIDI for “Fugue in G minor BWV 578,” sped it up, flipped the major part to the front and the minor part to the back, ran it through dinky synths, and added a complex backtrack of ultra-fast techstep rhythms. A harmonizing robot chorus and a sample from Noah Creshevsky’s “Great Performances” introduce the end result — “2010.”

This works as a nice counterpoint to “Monkey” but more importantly, doubles down on the album’s late 1960s baroque retro-futurism — channeling the math, science, speed, and technology at heart of hit record Switched on Bach as well as the outer space wonder of Kubrick’s 2001.

11. “God Only Knows”
“God Only Knows” begins with a fly moving around the headspace — a classic stereo demonstration technique — and then giant power vacuums jutting into the left ear to dispose of the flying pest. These vacuums multiply, then morph quickly into synth pads, and with windchimes acting as star twinkles, we are suddenly listening to the very sound of the universe — as commonly represented at planetarium events in science museums. Soon typical Fantasma rhythmic elements appear to move the soundspace into an actual song, and we are greeted with a repetitive one-line crescendo drone chorus in the mold of “Clash.”

The overall tone is grandiose — God, space travel, Brian Wilson — but the comparisons to the original “God Only Knows” are not particularly flattering to Oyamada’s skills at melodic composition. Oyamada’s way of paying tribute to possibly the greatest pop song ever written is to create a gigantic sonic landscape with no true hooks.

Again, however, the “song” isn’t in the song — it’s in the production. The bridge is particularly impressive — with what sounds like radio waves from Earth beaming out to the far reaches of the universe. “God Only Knows” works as a triumphant and ambitious moment for an album that may have otherwise been understood as detached and insular. Oyamada here creates perhaps the most bombastic expression of music nerdism ever — music nerdism as religious experience. Even as the song rolls out in an enormous exit, Oyamada quietly sings a wispy version of Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” (also mentioned in the lyrics).

At the end, the vacuums appear again to suck up all the sounds, and Rita Moreno from “Electric Company” breaks the tension by screaming out: “Hey, you guys!”

12. “Thank You For the Music”
Fantasma thus begins its denouement with “Thank You For the Music” — a musical bookend to “The Micro Disneycal World Tour.” The instrumentation is similarly folky — bright guitars, harmonica, The Association harmonies, Sean O’Hagan himself on banjo — although it’s much more of a classic Oyamada lyrical song. In fact a less complicated version could have found a home on The First Question Award.

In good meta-album style, like the “Sgt. Pepper” reprise, the song’s lyrics point directly to the musical experience we have all enjoyed. (There is also a reference to “smiley smile” if you hadn’t figured out by this point that Oyamada really, really likes Brian Wilson.) There are multiple layers of gratitude at work here: thanking Oyamada’s favorite musicians for creating music, thanking the audience for coming along for the ride, thanking himself in the third-person for creating the musical journey.

At the bridge, the string descent of “The Micro Disneycal World Tour” returns but then moves into a cut-up radio wave sample fest that recalls other moments and elements from the album. This is critical to making Fantasma feel like a coherent whole, reminding us explicitly that we have been “places” — like a photo book from a vacation, with one short audio image to stand in for an entire previous soundscape. With the short-wave radio bursts noises, the entire thing sounds like it would to someone on another planet who is receiving all of the noise of human civilization and trying to make sense of it. The song ends with a polite refrain of “Adios” and then a tape delay that collapses into infinite speed and disappears with a fairy twinkle.

13. “Fantasma”
The name of final a cappella track “Fantasma” is most definitely an Os Mutantes reference, as Oyamada repeatedly mentioned listening to the band before he made Fantasma. The song offers a monkish, human minimalism as the end to an album all about instrumental maximalism. Behind all the machines, there actually was just one man — Oyamada Keigo. In the track, we just hear layers and layers of Oyamada’s heavily reverbed harmonies, in a song almost identical in production and melody to lost SMiLE track “Our Prayer.” As the Oyamada clones’ harmonies extend, falter, move around in the stereo space, and fade out, we are left with the single, real Oyamada, who gasps for air. The record is complete. Fantasma literally leaves Oyamada breathless just as John Henry is exhausted and dies on the spot.

Next time: Some personal recollections and Oyamada after Fantasma

Part Three in a week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ musical masterpiece Fantasma. Read Part One — the introduction to the series as well as “The Age of Music Nerds” — and Part Two — a look at Oyamada Keigo before Fantasma and the structure of Fantasma as an album.

Part Three: Fantasma, Side One

On August 6, 1997 loyal Cornelius fans headed down to the local record store to pick up their pre-ordered copy of Fantasma, went home, cranked up the stereo, and got ready to be blown away by what had been promised to be Oyamada’s most epic pop concoction. They were greeted, however, with something surely unexpected — an album beginning that contains nothing approaching “music” for the first minute and ten-seconds.

1. “Mic Check”
As Fantasma opens, we are treated to a suite of binaurally recorded noises — tape machine clicks, a filtered preview of the album’s final a cappella track, a drag on a cigarette (that we all hope deep down is a joint), reverb testings on opening a can of beer and the rustling of a potato chip bag, laughing, a toy dog, and whistling the First Movement of Beethoven’s 5th. Is this rock’n’roll? To the unprepared home stereo listener, the album starts off both disorienting and slightly boring, not exactly a harbinger of what is to come. Yet this opening sequence is necessary — Oyamada is demanding that you treat the album differently, begging you to come closer. After a few frustrated listens on speakers, you soon understand the sequence only makes sense in headphones for concentrated listening. Yes, there are moments of power, but Fantasma is a trip into head space rather than a full-blast rocker to crank on the speakers or a selection of mood music. “Mic Check”’s eerily quiet opening is Oyamada’s signaling of this fact.

Once the minimal break beat and autoharp strums crash in at 1:10, however, we finally move on to the first musical moment of the album — a song which in itself is a meta-musical commentary upon the recording process. We all understand that testing microphones is a practical necessity but this procedure to gauge microphone volume input has also become a performance cliché. By making it into the first track’s sole lyric — along with “Kikoemasu ka?” (“Can you hear me?”), the one-to-four countdown, the scratched words “echo” and “reverb” (from a turntable demonstration LP owned by MoOoG Yamamoto) — Oyamada raises high the signpost that further musical deconstruction lies ahead.

The final minute of the song moves closer to being a triumphant and loud pop song, but here we go with the meta-album. Between this ode to level testing and the liner note photos of Oyamada’s immaculate, orange recording studio, Cornelius is suddenly an engineer collective rather than a pop band. He poses like Brian Wilson leaning on a mixing board rather than Brian Wilson, I dunno, singing a song at a concert. Like many other musical giants in the 1990s, Fantasma worships at the altar of the producer.

2. “The Micro Disneycal World Tour”
Like Sgt. Pepper or any great concept record, Fantasma does not really get started until its second track “The Micro Disneycal World Tour.” The title is nominally a Sean O’Hagan reference, and the song is nominally Oyamada’s attempt at a High Llamas pastiche. While High Llamas’ pre-Fantasma work Hawaii was like being stuck in an infinite loop of The Beach Boys’ unreleased “Cabinessence” demos, “The Micro Disneycal World Tour” is a much more ambitious and sprawling sound adventure. He takes a vaguely SMiLE-era palette — musical saws, spritely harpsichords, acoustic guitars brighter than the sun, and the kind of harp strums that have come to signal “flashback” in TV shows — and makes a big dreamy statement that goes eons beyond O’Hagan’s Americana preciousness.

Cornelius has a bad habit of naming songs after other people, so perhaps we should ignore the O’Hagan reference entirely: the song’s title perfectly symbolizes the ‘60s internationalist kitsch permanently etched into the Magic Kingdom that may forever embody retro-futurism. Oyamada often compared the entire Fantasma album to “It’s a Small World” — explaining his own mish-mash of genres as akin to Disney’s mixed-up layout of national cultures.

Cornelius gives the 1960s Disney sound an update with breakbeats and electronic flourishes, but the rhythm is ultimately polka music hall. Cornelius never makes any vocal efforts beyond alternating baritone and falsetto ba’s and la’s. The bridge’s slowly descending string section is perhaps the most beautiful thing on Fantasma and the greatest production achievement of Cornelius’ entire musical career. And it certainly tops anything similar by The High Llamas. On Fantasma, not only did Oyamada go deeper into obscure references than his Western peers, he ended up out-producing their actual work. When O’Hagan later remixed the song himself, he made it sound exactly like the High Llamas would have: removing the dynamics and making it ignorable mood music.

3. “New Music Machine”
As “The Micro Disneycal World Tour” tape echos into chaos, track three “New Music Machine” enters in with high-pitched feedback and a machine gun snare drum roll. Oyamada wants us to know immediately that he can do the most modern of modern rock with as much panache as he can do ‘60s soft pop. “New Music Machine” works relatively well as a pop track on its own and is one of the few truly melodic songs on the album. The lyrics — referencing the not particularly famous mid-’60s L.A. garage band The Music Machine — are about a sonic satellite launched by NASA that fell apart, a techno-pessimism to counterbalance the Disney/Jetsons outlook in previous tracks.

Fantasma’s vast panoply of instrumentation makes you think Cornelius just threw everything at the album hoping to win through sheer numbers of sounds. Yet with “New Music Machine,” he perfectly combines electronic elements like d’n’b rolls and Moog drone with rock drums and guitar noise. For 1997, this genre combination was not only shockingly new but highly prescient for the last decade. Yet as we discover in the song, the rock and electronic elements all sound almost completely identical. The future apparently will be fully electronic… and sound exactly like rock music.

4. “Clash”
In case “New Music Machine” seemed too traditional, track four “Clash” returns to defy conventional song structure. The soundscape for the verse — bossa nova beats on an old drum machine, nylon-stringed bossa nova guitar, an organ drone, strummed autoharps delayed into psychedelic peacock patterns — works as a neat sonic shorthand for the Cornelius of the era. But the chorus is a total non-sequitur, possibly the strangest in pop history: an industrial cacophony of stilted drums, dissonant vocal melodies, an abstracted Brian Wilson vocal flourish, and a single lyrical mantra.

“Clash” is not a strong song by any means, but like “Fixing a Hole” on Sgt. Pepper it works as the key filler track to recombine previous sounds into codified album themes. It is also the “slow song” after the opening barrage, although you can imagine less adventurous listeners completely abandoning their mission after having to sit through almost six minutes of unresolved vocal harmonies chanting a single word. Even the entry of an arpeggiated synth in the final verse or Oyamada’s occasional chord change can’t make things less jarring.

5. “Count Five or Six”
This tension resolves, however, as the record “skips” and we are sent into the somewhat gimmicky “Count Five or Six” — a literal piece of math rock where the robots do all the heavy lifting on the vocals. The title is again a reference to a garage band, Count Five, who had faded out of the pages of musical history. (What came first, the intense need to name every track after obscure California garage bands or the tracks themselves? Was Oyamada reading a lot of Lester Bangs at the time?) The track is brilliant, however, both as a joke on a futuristic imaginary bizarro musical world where everything is in difficult 6/8 rhythms and a call back to the Speak-and-Spell era of early computer gadgetry. The best rock is apparently the most arithmetic.

6. “Monkey” (aka “Magoo Opening”)
The previous song ends in a field of guitar distortion, which, with the help of shortwave radio noise and Moog blurps, bleeds naturally into the next track “Monkey.” On the Matador release, the song is re-titled “Magoo Opening,” since they had to clear the rights to the samples by counting the track as a cover rather than an independent work. Almost the entire song comes from Dennis Farnon’s wacky opening theme on the 1957 LP Mr. Magoo in Hi-Fi.

On “Monkey,” Cornelius doubles down on his Ape-obsession by bringing in faux simian calls from the 1960’s r’n’b stomper “Monkey” by J.C. Davis and voice samples about “An escape from the Planet of the Apes” from what I assume is a spinoff storybook record from that film. For only being about 1.5 minutes of music, this track could be considered the quintessential Shibuya-kei moment — mixing super fast kitschy American TV instrumentals from the 1950s and 1960s with 1990s dance beats. In this case, the song gets its spritely fun from the Magoo soundtrack and David Seville’s “Gotta Get to Your House” and then adds gabba-like drum fills, tough-as-nails jungle breaks, distorted 909 kicks. Although Cornelius seems particularly interested in drum ’n’ bass the entire records, the actual appearance of jungle breaks does not begin until “Monkey” (one wonders whether Cornelius simply saw a joke in placing his “monkey” within a “jungle.”) The end result is high-energy cartoony frenzy and one of the most enduring timbres of the record.

7. “Star Fruits Surf Rider”
The chaos subsides into the bossa nova pattern on an ancient Maestro drum machine and organ drone bliss of lead single “Star Fruits Surf Rider.” At this point in Fantasma, Cornelius starts to limit the sonic palette, returning to previously introduced sounds and references rather than swirling out into an infinite cornucopia. The cheap drum box and drone come from “Clash,” the intense drum ’n’ bass chorus from “Monkey,” the dreamy breakdowns from “Microdisneycal World Tour.” There are a few new tricks, including deteriorating tape delays that turn into extreme stereo pulses. Certainly viewed as an indie rock track, “Star Fruits Surf Rider” was heavily innovative at the time, taking the Pixies/Nirvana quiet-loud dynamics and re-imagining them with a completely different world of instrumentation. And as the end of Side One — an imaginary boundary for the digital age — the track rewards the listener with a hummable and powerful crescendo.

Despite the drone-y melody, Cornelius is able to make “Star Fruits” the central pillar of the album. He later re-emphasized the importance of this particular track by making it the lead single and releasing a two-vinyl record version (“Blue” and “Green”) that could be played together on two turntables in a mock-quadraphonic manner.

Next time: Fantasma, Side Two

Each country or cultural region has a uniquely-structured industry responsible for producing, promoting, and distributing the products that make up what we consider “pop culture.” In the case of Japan, there is a single organizational category most responsible for the form and content of pop culture: the artist management company, called colloquially jimusho (“office.”) The jimusho wield a powerful cultural influence on all fields that require performers — television (variety and drama), advertising, music, modeling, gravia, and films.

I will argue in this series that much of the content produced in these specific fields conforms to the business needs of artist management companies much more than it is created in response to audience desires. The opposite is also true: Non-jimusho controlled fields such as manga and indie music have enjoyed much more freedom of expression. In the case of manga, placement of certain titles within magazines is often tied directly to consumer feedback, meaning that competition is alive and well and consumers play a large role in guiding the industry.

With this in mind, we aim here to get a full understanding of the jimusho system in order to understand the structure in which Japanese popular culture is produced. Seeing that there is little written formally about the jimusho, we offer this multi-part series on Japanese artist management companies.

A note: This series is not meant as an “exposé” but a collection of the most reliable information about a relatively secretive industry for the purpose of sociological and business analysis. We welcome any corrections and additions.

Part I – What are the Jimusho? Roles and Labor Relations

The main role of the jimusho is essentially to “manage” the careers and schedules of artists, entertainers, athletes, and celebrities. They, however, claim a much deeper hold on the industry than simple management. The jimusho create stars much more than they just help maintain their fame. The stronger jimusho plan out every part of the performer’s persona, style, mannerism, and career. Most jimusho also have publishing wings, creating long-term revenue streams from songwriting related to their stars. Many idol management companies — such as Johnny’s Jimusho — finance and produce the master recordings of their singers, relegating record companies to pure distribution roles. This also means the jimusho can capture a large percentage of money made from CD sales.

The first important thing to understand about Japanese jimusho is the relation between labor and management. These companies are sometimes called “agencies” but they do not normally use “agent relations” — i.e., where stars hire the jimusho to act on their behalf. In the United States, William Morris and CAA perform agent services for 10% of the deals they broker, but stars have the ultimate power in that specific relationship as they are allowed to change agents or agencies at any time.

Japanese jimusho, on the other hand, hire their talent as salaried workers. They pay their “employees” a monthly salary, which usually starts at the relatively low ¥200,000 and can be re-negotiated on a yearly basis. (That being said, many famous stars have not been able to significantly raise their salaries to match the revenues they have brought to the company.) In exchange for the salaries, the artist relinquishes rights to 100% of their media appearance fees, copyright royalities, publishing payments, and any other income. Yes, 100%. If an artist secures a lucrative commercial contract, for example, this will not be reflected in his/her salary as any kind of bonus.

Management companies claim rights to this income, however, on the logic that they invest large sums in building up a young star. Hiroshi Aoyagi, author of Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan notes that the price of producing an “idol” singer can cost upwards of ¥30-40 million. The companies provide new talent (although most often charge for) lessons in singing, acting, dancing, manners, speech, and other skills required for celebrity status. Jimusho create appealing stage names, change appearances (sometimes even fronting money for plastic surgery), and provide clothing and cosmetics most flattering to the talent. Only when the talent makes their formal debut does the company see any returns. Therefore this high risk business model requires that all eventual income go directly to the management company.

Now many stars are able to negotiate an income increase in light of greater sales, but those who cannot unfortunately are not able to move to a different management company. While stars in the United States can change their agents and personal managers at a whim, Japanese stars cannot freely move management companies. In my own survey of 1300 popular musicians between 1985 and 2004, only around two dozen changed management companies. In other words, it is not a free market where Japanese stars can look for the best management deal. It is a “closed system.”

How do the jimusho keep stars in their stables? As a way to ensure that talent do not leave for other agencies for better deals, the jimusho have informal agreements to blacklist any talent who “defect” to other companies or go independent. With each star being an “investment” — both in terms of training but also of use of the management companies’ established media and industry connections to become famous — the jimusho have an economic incentive to curb their talent’s mobility. This secures profitability for their initial investment.

There is only one accepted way of changing jimusho: moving up to a more powerful organization. Horizontal movement or going independent are essentially verboten. Larger jimusho, however, can steal talent from smaller ones. We saw this with Kanno Miho, for example, leaving the small Tani Promotion to enter big player Kenon.

Like most aspects of the “closed” jimusho world, this blacklist is rarely detailed in specific terms. The case of mega-star Suzuki Ami, however, offered a very strong example of the blacklist in action. As reported by Steve McClure in Billboard, Suzuki attempted to leave her management company AG Communications after its CEO Yamada Eiji was arrested for tax evasion. Her parents cited “damage to her reputation” and received legal approval to break her contract with AG. Despite the legal right to go independent, the industry appeared to have conspired behind-the-scenes to punish her actions. All her advertising contracts mysteriously dried up, and later when she released her own music, she could not find basic distribution for the CDs nor television airplay. In effect, she was frozen out of the industry. She only came back in once she signed a new deal years later with Avex Entertainment. Not all blacklists are permanent, but they can “disappear” a star right at his/her peak, which is normally a death blow to a long-term career. Suzuki Ami never really recovered.

Cabal-like blacklists like this fail in most markets because there is such high incentive for companies to “break” the agreement and steal the profitable talent. The strongest jimushos’ power over the market, however, may be adequate to scare away anyone who wishes to scoop up ronin talent. And the blacklisting may not require wholly negative action. For example, YouTube star Magibon recently made allegations that her former jimusho would call up and offer Magibon’s clients their pick of the agency’s stable of famous stars to work in the place of Magibon. This could be considered a “positively-reinforced” blacklist.

The end result of this labor relation between talent and their jimusho is that the management company has full control over their salaried employees. And with the jimusho world working together to discourage movement, talent cannot use labor mobility as a way to break the agencies’ power. And with investments into master tape production, jimusho do not just hold power of their talent but within the industry as a whole. We will look at the source of jimusho power in later installments.

Next time we will look at broader organizational characteristics of jimusho: specifically, small size units structured into keiretsu hierarchies with a single company at the top of the ladder.

Click here for The Jimusho System Part Two: Organizational Characteristics of Jimusho — Size and Keiretsu.