“Still laying in bed, I reached out and tried to turn on the stereo at my side.”

Thus begins Tanaka Yasuo (田中康夫)’s debut novel Nantonaku, Crystal 『なんとなく、クリスタル』. Although not a literary treasure by any stretch of the imagination, the short work immediately became a cultural phenomena upon its debut. After winning the Bungei Prize in autumn 1980, Nantonaku, Crystal attracted a storm of media attention for the unabashedly consumerist and materialist nature of the writing. When the book finally hit bookstores in January 1981, the initial printing sold out on the first day and eventually became a “million seller.”

The plot of Nantonaku, Crystal nominally concerns the ultra-chic Tokyo lifestyle of a young college student and part-time model named Yuri. Just as Moby Dick introduces the reader to overwhelming minutia about cetacean biology, Tanaka provides 442 footnotes in 213 pages to explain the brand names, restaurants, neighborhoods, private schools, and clubs that constitute the lexical environment for his protagonist. This technique is not particularly subtle: the book is printed with the novel text on the right page and the numbered notes on the left page. Japanese conservatives had a field day with the book’s obsession with proper nouns: Aha! Proof at last that prosperous post-war society has reduced youth to a bunch of empty materialists! Tanaka rebutted these charges by drawing obvious parallels between youth brand mania and the traditional Japanese tendency to desperately associate oneself with prestigious companies and universities. Really, isn’t the reluctance to recruit anybody outside of Tokyo University for the national bureaucracy also an example of brand loyalty?

Almost every proper noun in Nantonaku, Crystal is marked with a numerical footnote, giving Tanaka (or otherwise omniscient narrator) a chance to explain the item’s cultural significance to those who aren’t in the know. Some notes are essentially straight-forward encyclopedia entries: “29• Salem – American cigarette brand, menthol. They also make a longer size.” Others can be snobby social commentary: “117• Aoyama – Don’t say ‘I want to live in Minami Aoyama San-chome’ in front of people you don’t really know. It’s embarrassing.” Tanaka also provides a footnote in the middle of a sex scene to let us know that Yuri’s euphemism “my little mound” is code for her clitoris. Thanks.

At least half the reason for Nantonaku, Crystal‘s popularity was that readers — especially those outside of Japan’s capital — could functionally use the book and its notes as a style bible for Tokyo and as a primer on the latest trends in music and fashion. Tanaka may have been a sort-of-snotty, 24 year-old professor’s son and elite Hitotsubashi law student, but the immediate success of the book strongly suggests that his tastes reflected the more fashionable pockets of consumer culture at the time. And fitting with the oft-repeated claim that Japanese kids before the late ’90s exhausted allowances solely on music and clothes, Tanaka spends most of the book name-dropping the soundtrack.

Tanaka’s music choices, however, have greatly suffered from later redirections in musical historiography. The impact of punk rock upon future streams completely transformed our linear understanding of rock development, and Nantonaku, Crystal is frozen in time as a tribute to the now-forgotten dominance of Yacht Rock on the entire decade of the ’70s. Objectively-speaking, AOR was a huge force in Anglo music for a good while, and Tanaka’s book demonstrates how much this genre set the standards for proto-hipster snobs in Japan back in the day. Punk and grunge eventually relegated Tanaka’s beloved “smooth music” to footnotes, but Nantonaku, Crystal hit the market right before New Wave and the “London Night” scene started to win more power in setting the o-share agenda in Tokyo, eventually bringing a darker and more rebellious edge to musical sensibilities. The book now perfectly embodies a forgotten aesthetic era — like the last promenade of distinguished young Neo-Classicist painters before Monet threw open the doors to the Bastille.

Besides his parody-worthy devotion to “smooth music,” there are few clear fundamentals of Tanaka’s tastes that are useful for understanding the nature of the cool hierarchy in late 1970s/early 1980s Japan:

(1) Tanaka gains a mean advantage over the average youth from being able to read/understand English. This not only gives him a higher position in the educational hierarchy but means he has greater access to the latest trend information coming out of the Anglo world without being filtered through the Japanese media, and therefore, automatically accessible to a mass audience. Those individuals able to leverage linguistic ability as cultural arbitrage easily rose above “normal” Japanese who still relied on translation only at the time of formal importation. English ability was essential to taste-makers and style leaders of a certain sophisticated urban cultural strain: from Murakami Haruki to Hosono Haruomi to Ozawa Kenji. Needless to say, this particular skill is correlated with socioeconomic class.
(2) Tanaka apparently does not listen to domestic Japanese music and only references popular local musicians in the novel to disparage them. Here again, Anglo culture is automatically seen as vastly superior to Japanese homegrown culture — at least in the realm of pop music.
(3) Tanaka sees Japanese folk music and “nostalgic” magazines like An•An and Non•no as dwelling in an inauthentic “poverty chic.” To him, Japan’s economy has outgrown this kind of melancholy.
(4) Tanaka seems to know about punk rock and new wave, but essentially ignores these genres. He does not show any antagonism, however, leading me to think they had yet to gain enough footing within Japan to require Tanaka to muster up an opinion of solidarity or rejection.
(5) In Note 415, Tanaka explicitly casts himself as the literary equivalent of singer Rupert Holmes and notes that people of “exclusive” class are more reserved in demonstrating self-confidence to the outside world. Tanaka appears to be associating the use of Holmes’ literary technique as part of his own privileged class background.

In order to relay a sense of Tanaka’s work, and more broadly, his particular style moment, I have translated all the references to music in Nantonaku, Crystal‘s Notes. This is “fashionable music” in Tokyo, circa 1980.

(The individual entries for song titles may seem superfluous in English, but in Japanese, the katakana name for the song is used in the text, requiring the note to reveal the proper English title.)

2• FEN – Abbreviation for “Far East Network.” It’s good background music for those who don’t know English. Those who understand English jokes can enjoy it on a higher level.
4• Willie Nelson – Singer born in Texas who introduced lots of new elements previously unknown to country & western music.
5• “Moon Light in Vermont” – Standard number written in 1927 by Karl Suessdorf.
10• Stephen Bishop – Singer-songwriter who did a pretty good job as an actor in Kentucky Fried Movie.
11• “On and On” [Stephen Bishop song]
14• Kenny Loggins – Originally one half of the duo Loggins and Messina. Currently working solo. The Bob James-produced album Nightwatch is especially good for waking up in the morning.
Continued »

On February 20, 2004, I found myself at tiny club Bar Drop in Kichijoji with dozens of other twee kids in border shirts, celebrating the release of a tribute album to the band Flipper’s Guitar — the second album in four months. The first tribute had been a B-list major label effort (TRIBUTE TO FLIPPER’S GUITAR~FRIENDS AGAIN), and the more dedicated indie-pop kids were so incensed by this hack revisionism that they went out and made their own two-disc collection of covers (The Sound Of SOFTLY! ~tribute to Flipper’s Guitar~ Vol. 1 and Vol. 2). In theory, 2004 was the 15th anniversary of FG’s first release three cheers for our side, but this was a pretty weak rationale for the sudden onslaught of tribute albums. At the time, however, a certain nostalgia for the band had inhabited the zeitgeist. And this particular young crop of new musical acts had been particularly indebted to Flipper’s Guitar and the wider “Shibuya-kei” movement for their entire understanding of what it meant to “make music.”

In years prior everyone was mostly pre-occupied with the post-breakup solo careers of FG members Oyamada Keigo (aka Cornelius) and Ozawa Kenji. But once Ozawa disappeared to New York and Oyamada went into leftfield acousto-electronics with his album Point, the Japanese indie pop world became like the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin — a political battle between the disciples for securing the crown of legitimacy in a time with no designated successor. A myriad of young partisans appeared on the scene, ready to steal away the banner of Shibuya-kei for their own side. Who would be the proper youngsters to “fire the tricot” into the 21st century?

But before we can understand the Shibuya-kei nostalgia in the early 21st century, we have to ask, what exactly was Shibuya-kei and why was it so important? Sonically, the artists included in the genre did not share a specific style, but more of a guiding philosophy. They took sonic cues from California ’60s soft rock and psych pop, French Ye-Ye, Chicago house, East Coast hip-hop sampling, krautrock, Scottish anorak pop, Madchester club beats, Brazilian bossa nova, Italian film soundtracks and any other internationalist, retro-futurist genres. The central idea was to not sound like an imitation of Billboard-charting pop nor be rebelliously “underground” in its classic confrontational mode — but to occupy a chic space in the wider consumer culture similar to their favorite tastemakers overseas. Shibuya-kei was often called “Japanese yogaku” — Western music created by Japanese artists. The music itself, however, was often less important than the total aesthetic impact.

Shibuya-kei was ultimately an attempt to create a Japanese analog to the indie music cultures that had developed in the U.S. and U.K., but the Japanese artists ended up succeeding far beyond their international peers in impacting the entire Japanese music market. Shibuya-kei was not just the emergence of a new genre. The appearance of Flipper’s Guitar in 1989 was a pivotal event in the surfacing of “independent” culture into the Japanese mainstream consumer market during the 1990s, setting the stage for a wider cultural movement in media, fashion, art, and interior/graphic design.

With this historical change in mind, this six-part series traces the particular musical history of the movement and its evolution from the prehistory of the 1960s to the death and burial of Shibuya-kei in the mid-2000s.

Shibuya-kei Pre-History

Shibuya-kei officially started in the early 1990s, but the artists’ musical praxis and style philosophy has roots in the wider development of the pop music market during the late 1960s.

When The Beatles in 1966 managed to avoid assassination by outraged rightists and play their Budokan gig, the entire Japanese youth music scene moved away from the briefly-popular instrumental surf guitar “eleki” boom and started up their own beat bands. The resulting “Group Sounds” (GS) acts, however, did not leave much of a lasting mark upon Japanese pop history. Most of the GS repertoire copied the instrumentation of Western bands but still clung to minor-key Oriental melodies. Furthermore, the popular bands in the were essentially Monkees-type creations who didn’t write their own music, and those with a tinge of authenticity, like The Dynamites, The Spiders, or The Mops scored nary a huge hit. But even the most tame GS bands like The Tigers were too much for the Japanese authorities, who promptly enforced a nationwide crackdown on the the entire movement and banned many from TV.

Meanwhile, the era’s vibrant Japanese counterculture had an ambiguous relationship with Western music. The large-scale, culture-engrossing Leftist student rebellion chose an earthy and very Japanized folk for their rallying tunes. The Folk Crusaders became a national hit act thanks to novelty song “Kaette kita yopparai,” but melancholy enka-paced songs like “Eichan no Ballad” became the standard “folk guerilla” sound. There were intersections between international rock styles and the student left, however: The bassist of legendarily-mysterious psychedelic noise band Les Rallizes Dénudés was one of the Japan Red Army hijackers. But the band was so obscure as to have little relation to the wider consumer market. The underground, at this point, was truly underground.

In the early ’70s, however, the idea of widely-marketed youth music became more socially-acceptable. The era’s most enduring act — and the first direct ancestor to Shibuya-kei — was Happy End, a folk-rock band with pop instincts but a focus on musical credibility and independence. From there on out, Happy End’s bassist Hosono Haruomi became the Japanese patron saint of “obscure Japanese music with one foot stationed firmly in the pop market.” He released albums throughout the 1970s that strayed further and further into exotica and genre-denying international sounds, under his own name and then bands Tin Pan Alley, and of course, Yellow Magic Orchestra aka YMO. Hosono’s playful and open-minded approach would be an inspiration for Shibuya-kei, as well as the idea of making music that even Westerners would find interesting and new.

Throughout the 1970s there had been a strong “underground rock” scene, but in the early 1980s, a Tokyo-based “alternative” music scene emerged that was both closely aligned with the city’s fashion/design community and the international New Wave movement. This was mostly a small clique centered around the long-running London Nite party at Tsubaki House. This was the it party of all Japanese club parties, where people in Hokkaido would fly down to Tokyo for the weekend just to attend. This scene eventually spawned the The Plastics, Ookawa Hitomi of the punk fashion brand Milk, and much later, street-wear entrepreneur Fujiwara Hiroshi.

After the initial New Wave wave, Japanese non-mainstream music splintered into different sonic directions. Yet most of the bands still inhabited the same scene and had direct connections to the Hosono lineage. YMO’s personal patronage launched the careers of many younger artists waiting in the wings. The later core Shibuya-kei act Pizzicato Five debuted on Hosono’s own Nonstandard label. YMO drummer Takahashi Yukihiro produced the second album from Salon Music. And YMO’s keyboard master Ryuichi Sakamoto produced the first album for minimal post-punk band Friction.

In particular, the now slightly-obscure band Salon Music was particularly important for the story of Shibuya-kei. The two-person act is often considered to be “proto-Shibuya-kei.” Opposed to Friction, they had no interest in the aggression of punk rock. Unlike the other New Wave bands — P-Model, Hikashu, Juicy Fruits — they were not interested in being robotic “techno poppers.” They aimed for a chic vaguely-European music without much ironic self-Orientalization like YMO or The Plastics. Their excellent debut single “Hunting on Paris” came out in 1982 on British label Phonogram. Although the Japanese major label Pony Canyon put out their first album My Girl Friday and they scored some television CM ads, Salon Music never peaked above cult status.

They inadvertently made history, however, by discovering a young Japanese “neo-acoustic” band called Lollipop Sonic. Salon Music’s Yoshida Zin helped Lollipop Sonic get a record deal, with one condition: They had to change their name. The five-piece were thus rechristened as Flipper’s Guitar and prepared for a debut album.

Continued in Part Two

This original comments to this piece have been disabled as they mostly refer to an older edit of this post and make sense only in the broader context of the early Neomarxisme blog.