World of Innocence: Japan's fascinating pop parallel universe
> Original article on Rollingstone.com read
Just 20 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and only ten years after the victorious USA had withdrawn its occupying troops from Japan, a young Japanese man managed to carry out a highly improbable invasion of proud American territory. Kyū Sakamoto, then just 21 years old, landed at number one in the US charts in 1963 with "Ue o muite arukō" - the first US number one in a non-European language ever. Because the sad love song, sung entirely in Japanese, seemed like a foreign body between "Surfin' USA" and "Puff The Magic Dragon", a British record boss renamed the title (in English "When I run, I look up to the sky") "Sukiyaki" for the benefit of radio DJs - although the Japanese table fondue of the same name is not mentioned at all in the song. It was a bit like translating "Moon River" as "Big Mac". Or "99 Luftballons" with "Toast Hawaii". Sakamoto's global hit, which also reached number 2 in Germany, remained a strange footnote in music history. In 1985, just as he was preparing his comeback, the "Japanese Elvis" died in a plane crash like Buddy Holly. And Japan remained a parallel universe of pop that only a few people from the West had access to.
Sentimental power of algorithms
It was only through the Internet, or more precisely through an air-cooled server near San Francisco, that Japanese pop music found a new gateway. To this day, it is not clear why YouTube's algorithms have been adding Japanese vintage pop music to the playlists of more and more music listeners around the world over the past four years - the video platform keeps the logic of its artificial intelligence secret in detail. One song in particular became a phenomenon there: "Plastic Love" by Mariya Takeuchi, recorded in 1984, reached 24 million views on YouTube within two years. The 64-year-old singer is still a star in her home country. "Plastic Love" was never a hit there, however, and only landed at number 86 when it was released. There was no way of predicting that the synth-pop piece about a young woman who dances her heartache away under a disco ball would trigger a wave of memes, mash-ups and cover versions.
And yet the fascination that the five-minute song exerts, especially on Western listeners, is not surprising: "Plastic Love" is not a copy of Michael Jackson and his producer Quincy Jones, but sounds like a perfect outtake from the "Off The Wall" sessions. Familiar and strange at the same time, it triggers a strange nostalgia, a kind of homesickness for a place you've never lived in, a place you've never seen. Once you've got used to the foreign language, worlds open up, not least because YouTube already has hundreds of similar recommendations in the "Up Next" loop. Together with "Plastic Love", an entire genre experienced a resurrection: Japanese city pop, a mixture of pop, disco, funk and jazz produced to the highest quality standards of the 80s, full of larger-than-life melodies, complex arrangements and live shows whose stage sets are megalomaniacal in the best sense of the word. It's as if you suddenly got the chance to hear the greatest pop songs of the 20th century for the first time, only their authors are not Prince or Kate Bush, but Tatsuro Yamashita or Yumi Arai.
Soundtrack to the bubble economy
Although song titles and hooks in city pop are often in English – "Oh No, Oh Yes!", "Mm, honey, it's you, lover" or "Windy Lady" – the music is deeply influenced by the time and place in which it was created. City pop reached its peak during Japan's economic miracle years between 1980 and 1989. The overheated bubble economy, which finally burst in the early 1990s, flooded the world market with electronics and cars; Japanese game arcades, Walkmans and Nintendo consoles also became part of pop culture here. Nowhere was the standard of living higher. The country that had been destroyed and demoralized after two atomic bombs were dropped less than 40 years earlier was suddenly a self-confident world power and so rich that Japanese investors were able to buy the Rockefeller Center in the heart of Manhattan at the end of the decade. In American science fiction films such as "Blade Runner", the fear of the dawn of a Japanese century is palpable: the future is alien and oppressive. Japanese characters are emblazoned on endless rows of skyscrapers that seem to grow into a smog-filled universe. You pay for your noodle soup with yen. Whites are now just a powerless minority, constantly dripping toxic rain. Today, books such as "Death by China" by Trump's trade advisor Peter Navarro can be published in the USA. Equivalents from the 1980s were "The Coming War with Japan", "Japanophobia" or "Zaibatsu America - How Japanese Companies Colonize the Vital US Industry". The self-image of Japan, however, was that of a perfect consumer world. The advertising clips from Sony & Co. invited people to a candy-colored land of smiles, faith in progress, optimistic, downright naive. Every wish, even love and happiness, seemed only a credit card away.
“Japan’s self-image was that of a perfect consumer world”
City pop sounds like "Christmas on a summer's day," writes one user under a YouTube upload of Tatsuro Yamashita's "For You," one of the most influential albums of the city pop era. The sentence sums up the spirit of the times just as well as the album covers designed by Eizin Suzuki and Hiroshi Nagai, on which the first day of summer vacation seems to never end. In fact, quite a few songs and even entire albums were created as commissioned works for galleries and department stores, air conditioning and perfume manufacturers. For the marketing departments of companies like Seiko and Shiseido, a hip image was everything. In return, they allowed musicians with a background in art theory like Yasuaki Shimizu and Hiroshi Yoshimura a lot of artistic freedom, which they promptly used to realize their own creative visions. Their “Kankyō ongaku” (“Environmental Music”) is the flip side of exuberant city pop: ambient music inspired by John Cage, Erik Satie and Brian Eno, which was intended to help escape the noise and stress of a 60-hour week, at least while shopping.
In fact, "Kankyō ongaku" is more like music for Zen gardens than "Music For Airports": crystal clear, subtle, often removed from all earthly things. Thanks to YouTube, the unobtrusive sound meditations are also experiencing a second spring. The ambient album "Green" by Hiroshi Yoshimura, who died in 2003 and is permeated with natural sounds and is hardly known even in Japan, has now 1.6 million views on YouTube. The comments underneath are all in English: "More green than Eno's 'Another Green World'", "Is it just me or is this therapeutic?" or "This album makes me feel like an insect living inside some sort of greenhouse on another planet". When entire albums are uploaded to YouTube, writes another user, he usually feels "conflicted". But if these albums are saved from oblivion in this way, he is glad that illegal file sharing exists. His comment has the highest number of likes among the clearly unauthorized upload.
“Musicians like Haruomi Hosono have created their own musical universe”
The phenomenon no longer only occurs on the internet. Labels such as Light In The Attic from Seattle, Wewantsounds from Paris, Palto Flats from New York and WRWTFWW from Geneva release reissues and compilations of Japanese artists for the western market, some of whom are almost forgotten even in their homeland. Midori Takada's polyrhythmic minimal music masterpiece "Through The Looking Glass" from 1983 was the second most popular re-release on the online vinyl marketplace Discogs in 2017, only beaten by Radiohead's "OK Computer OKNOTOK". Today, the 66-year-old percussionist is once again being invited to festivals around the world. And she has recorded new music for the first time in 20 years: together with the hip London producer Lafawndah. Other reissues have long been considered classics in Japan, such as those by Haruomi Hosono, who has been redefining the boundaries of Japanese pop music for 50 years as a songwriter, producer and label owner. With Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra, he founded two of the country's most influential bands. Five of his 25 solo albums, which range from folk to trance, have been available outside Japan for the first time since last autumn via Light In the Attic.
"Two or three years ago I noticed that my music was suddenly being revived in various parts of the world. I am astonished by this interest. I thought I was being made fun of," explains Hosono in an interview. At the age of 71, he is now giving his first solo concerts in Europe and America. He doesn't need to. "Musicians like Haruomi Hosono and Tatsuro Yamashita have created their own musical universe. In Japan they are still huge. Financially too," says the 64-year-old avant-garde pop singer Akiko Yano, whose first three solo albums were also released for the first time by us this year. "I think it's wonderful that young people in particular are digging up all these historical things. I have the feeling that the music conveys something that was missing in their lives." There might be something to that. City pop in particular has an unadulterated, unironic and innocent view of the world that must seem like something from a land before our time to a young person caught up in postmodern remixes (which also explains why Toto's "Africa" has also recently been given a new lease of life on the internet). For some reason - only the artificially intelligent YouTube autoplay algorithms can fully explain - the historical music from Japan, which has long since stopped booming, has struck a chord. City pop parties are now being celebrated in cities like New York, Chicago and Berlin. Platforms like "Pitchfork" regularly review obscure Japanese records. The hip Vice music channel "Noisey" euphorically called Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love" the "best pop song of all time". And the British business magazine "The Economist" headlined its website in April: "Make Brexit bearable... with Japanese ambient music."
Finally arrived in the West
Young musicians from the West are also paying tribute to Japan's legends. On their new album, Vampire Weekend samples an ambient piece in "2021" that Haruomi Hosono composed in 1984 as a commissioned work for the fashion chain Muji. US rapper Tyler, The Creator uses sunny song fragments by city pop grandmaster Tatsuro Yamashita on his new album "Igor". Indie songwriter Mac DeMarco counts Hosono as one of his main influences and released a 7-inch earlier this year with a cover of his stoned Caribbean "Honey Moon" from 1975. Portland-based producer Spencer Doran, who celebrated the Japanese vintage sound in blogs and DJ sets even earlier than YouTube, translates the digital sounds of the "Kankyō ongaku" into contemporary club music with his electronic project Visible Cloaks. In this sense, the Japanese vintage wave also comes full circle. Western pop music, especially from the USA, was a great inspiration for the Japanese musicians from the very beginning. "As teenagers, we often stayed up late at night to listen to the American military radio stations. That's how I got to know the Beatles," remembers Sachiko Kanenobu, who recorded "Misora" in 1972, one of the earliest Japanese hippie folk albums, before moving to California with her husband, ROLLING STONE writer Paul Williams. Haruomi Hosono, who produced "Misora", had his house converted into a studio commune on a former military base.
"He was a total expert when it came to boogie-woogie and 50s rock'n'roll," remembers Kanenobu. As in Germany, however, many Japanese artists soon began to want to emancipate themselves from the protecting power. On his first three solo albums, the "Tropical Trilogy," Hosono plays with the exoticizing island paradise fantasies that the Americans brought home from the Pacific War with Japan. On "Japanese Rumba," a cover of a Nippon kitsch piece from Hawaii in the late 1940s, Hosono follows it up with a new interpretation of an old folk song from the Okinawa Islands. He turns "Fujiyama Mama", written by Earl Burrows and sung by Wanda Jackson, which trivialized sexist exploitation and the dropping of atomic bombs in a hit song 14 years after the war, into shot-up, limping rock'n'roll: "I've been to Nagasaki/Hiroshima, too/ The things I did to them, baby/I can do to you."
“It was part of the concept to make fun of stereotypes that the West had of Asians”
Hosono once described the appropriation and ironic twisting of various genres as "sightseeing music": the musician reflects himself like a traveler in what he discovers, distorting and exaggerating it depending on his perspective and expectations. With an intuitive thirst for adventure and a humorous eye for detail, Hosono was more of a backpacker than an explorer. "Cochin Moon", his first purely electronic solo album from 1978, was created after a trip to India that he took with the Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo. On the cover designed by Yokoo, a glamorous Bollywood couple lie in each other's arms under the full moon, framed by lotus blossoms, palm trees and elephants. He had so much diarrhea during the trip that at one point he saw UFOs in the sky, Hosono says in the reissue liner notes. A particularly feverish piece on the record is called "Hepatitis".
The image of his Yellow Magic Orchestra, or YMO for short, founded with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, was ultimately fed by the image the world had of the colorful plastic planet Japan, similar to what Kraftwerk did with the cliché of the cold but technologically efficient German. By the end of the 1970s, YMO's machine music seemed to have come from the home computer rather than the factory. It was more colorful and playful than that of the Europeans, although the instruments, often from Japanese companies such as Roland and Yamaha, were essentially the same. YMO's first hit, "Firecracker" from 1978, transformed the oriental-inspired exotica piece of the same name by the US composer Martin Denny into futuristic techno-pop that was so funky that the band was invited to perform it on "Soul Train" during their first US tour in 1980. To this day, YMO is the only Japanese band to appear on the predominantly black dance show.
"Our manager was in the audience dressed as a typical Japanese tourist: with thick glasses and a camera around his neck," remembers Akiko Yano, who was on tour as a keyboard player at the time. "Part of YMO's concept was to make fun of stereotypes that the West had of Asians, for example by dressing in Red Guard uniforms. You can read that as a commentary against racial discrimination - for us at the time, it was above all great fun. Just the fact that we went on stage with these huge Moog modular synthesizers, could play them well and made pop music with them, gave the audience a whole new image of Japan - surprise!"
World music for the digital era
Perhaps this is the most beautiful view that the Japan wave gives us: that "world music" no longer means looking for the foreign and exotic, but for commonalities. That the mantra that music is a "universal language" is finally coming true when in pop no longer one cultural empire dominates the others, but many expand each other's vocabulary. City pop is experiencing further development in the genres of vaporwave and future funk, which have no geographical home, but emerged in the everywhere and nowhere of the internet. The fact that taste and cultural boundaries are blurring more than ever there could be seen as the spread of international hipsterism or globalization leveling. But you could also say that it has never been so easy to gain access to other cultural spheres across time and space. And that is something to be happy about as a music listener. It is all out there somewhere. You just have to let it find you.