Discovering Japan

Writing For Japanese Music Magazines

Did you ever notice how many good songs there are about Japan? "Discovering Japan," with its nightmare time zone confusion, may be my favorite Graham Parker song. "Big in Japan" stands out so much from Tom Waits' catalog that it was a meme before there were memes: Every precocious loser that's halfway somewhere is big in Japan.  The Vapors, one hit wonders of the early new wave, had a most likeable song, "Turning Japanese" in 1980. And if I had to choose a favorite Wilco song, after "Standing O," it would be "Impossible Germany"...wrong former Axis power, sorry.

I was an early Japanophile. When I was in fifth grade, our class had an experimental Spanish program. I loved it: We learned a lot of words, but conjugation of verbs and conversational Spanish would have come the following year. But they discontinued the program. I was interested in all languages. Dover books circa 1960 had a series of pocket sized paperbacks for travelers, " Say It In..." I eagerly bought a number of these,including one I still have, "Say It in Japanese." I told my mother I wanted to learn Japanese. Phyllis, my mom and discourager-in-chief, said, "Why would you want to learn Japanese? You would never use it."

Do shimashita? (What happened?)

My mother was no visionary, and could not envision a future in which Japanese cars would change America's auto preferences, and that Japanese businesses would remake the world economy in the 1980s. In my first job after college, at CBS Records in New York in 1972, I noticed that the activities of the Japanese label were closely watched: Asia was becoming a big market for American music, and I thought, you know, if my mother had let me learn Japanese, I could run that label. (CBS Records was absorbed by Sony Music Entertainment Japan in 1988.)

Still, languages fascinated me. I read an article in Holiday magazine –– which my mother subscribed to and kept in stacks in an empty bedroom we called "the purple room" –– by the linguist Mario Pei, who took the reader on a travelogue through some of the world's most interesting languages. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall being fascinated by the idea that "boi" meant "shark" in Swahili.

I guess I could look it up on Google, but I don't quite trust it. The other day, my friend Akiko Watanabe posted something on Facebook that had something to do with Eric Clapton. It was incoherent, and since I know Akiko to be quite fluent in English, I clicked on "post original" and saw that her posting was in Japanese, and mangled by autotranslate. I wrote something like, "whoever did this is not nearly as good as you were in translating my articles into Japanese." She blamed "Mr. Google," to which I retorted, "Google-san is not a trustworthy wordsmith," or something like that.

I met Akiko in the early 1970s, in San Francisco, introduced by John Morthland and Ed Ward. She was the editor of a Japanese rock magazine called Plus One, and she enlisted us to write for it. For the rest of the 1970s, I followed Akiko as she smashed the glass ceiling for Japanese women in publishing, as she became the editor of top of the line Music Life.

At first, I wrote reviews of American and British artists who were big in Japan. You may know who they are, since they all made albums "Live at Budokan," a Tokyo arena: Cheap Trick, Kiss, Bob Dylan. Cheap Trick was especially liked, because they were so all-American;  you can't get more American than Rockford, Illinois. Kiss, of course, were comic book superheroes on stage, and their lyrics embodied  the lingua franca of rock. Bob Dylan? Because he was Bob Dylan. They were crazy for David Bowie (who wouldn't be?), Aerosmith, Rod Stewart, all the bigger than life, the blonder the better. They also liked Eddie Money, which I reviewed here:

I did not know was Akiko was Akiko until I saw her on Facebook...I had known her only as Haruko Minakami, a pen name intended as a tribute to the Japanese novelist and short story writer Haruki Murakami. Little known fact: when my daughter Liz had a Sunday night radio show on the Binghamton University radio station, she called it The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, after one of Murakami's novels. She played a wide assortment of music, from Black Sabbath to Long Island emo, but her signature as DJ: Every show had one cut by Ella Fitzgerald. Now, when she's not lawyering, she's deep into K-Pop, which I hope we will discuss in detail. Watch this space.

At Music Life, Akiko/Haruko had a brainstorm: Why didn't I write about some Japan rock? Every few months, she'd send me a two-ton package tightly filled with Japanese rock. She did not give much information, beyond a one or two sentence sticker she would attach to the album cover, so at least I'd know the name of the band and the record. The rest was up to me, like a blindfold test. We had no internet or "Google-san" for research, so I was on my own.

But I did notice some patterns: anything written, produced, or performed by Haruomi Hosono was likely to be really good. Indeed, his debut album from 1973, Hosono House is considered the alpha and omega of vernacular Japanese rock, one of the first not entirely derivative of American and British rock. The Seattle label Light in the Attic, has also released both Hosono House and his Cochin Moon album on CD. It has also put out some nifty compilatons of Japanese "City Pop" from 1976-1986. Here is a link to the article I wrote about Pacific Breeze https://www.psaudio.com/copper/article/pacific-breeze/ Later in the 1970s, Hosono would crossover to worldwide listeners with the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Harry Hosono photo 1973, courtesy of Mike Nogami

Some of the band names and cover art spoke to me immediately. The Bad Boys album cover was a replica of Meet the Beatles, and their album Meet the Bad Boys was a perfect imitation of the same record. The Sadistic Mika Band was kind of irresistible. I think Mika was the singer, and wife of the guitar player. I think they made one American album for a U.S. label.

But my favorite Japanese record, no second thoughts, came wrapped in brown paper. The band was Speed, Glue, and Shinki, a power trio like no other, an album to be listened to only under the influence of a powerful dose of Seconal. Loud and lumbering, Speed, Glue and Shinki seemed fond of achieving the inverse of satori, the enlightenment that the Ramones would find by playing hard, fast, and singing, "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue."

Speed, Glue & Shinki played like they had already sniffed some glue, kicked it up with speed, chased it with codeine cough medicine, and a snoot full of whatever powder was on hand, from smack to dishwashing detergent. They were great.

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Often before a Radio City Music Hall concert, I would eat and drink at Restaurant Yamaguchi on West 45th Street. It had a large, nice standalone barroom, unusual for Japanese restaurants. I used to look at the VIP bottles of expensive Scotch (most often Chivas Regal, or Johnny Walker Black) that were the private stock of Japanese businessmen. I also noticed the anomaly of Japanese businessmen drinking Budweiser in the dining room, while Americans drank Kirin or Sapporo. I sat down at the bar of Yamaguchi once and ordered, because I liked to drink native, a Japanese brand, Banzai vodka, on the rocks. The bartender looked at me like I was nuts, shaking his head like, "why would anyone want to drink that?" I felt like the tourist of legend who supposedly walked into the Carnegie Deli and ordered "corned beef on white bread with mayonaisse." Leo, the owner of the Carnegie Deli, supposedly chased the man out the door with a meat cleaver, and told him to take his white bread and mayonnaise back to Iowa, or wherever. I can't vouch for the veracity, but it is a good story.

A New York deli story I can vouch for is having a midnight sandwich at the Stage Delicatessen with the late great publicist Paul Wasserman. We had just taken a limo back from seeing his client James Taylor perform at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Interesting cultural moment, 1975. As we are getting up to go to the cashier, a man in the dining room starts shouting, "Robber! Thief!" We thought it was an indoor mugging or pickpocket. But it was comedian Henny Youngman, yelling at the waiter, having just been handed his check.