Asuka: Gagaku for the 21st century

LONG-TIME FRIENDS know that I’m like iron filings for the magnet of modern Japanese roots music, including that goofy/funky mongrel known as chin-don, as well as Okinawan minyo. Hit the Music category on the left sidebar and you’ll find plenty of references to those styles, including one post about the Ryukyu Chimdon Band. That group combines both of them into a barrel of musical fun concealing a lot of sophistication behind the wackiness. (What better word to use to describe the use of Zairean soukous structures with chin-don instrumentation to play Okinawan melodies?)

Long-time friends also know that one of my avocations is informal research into festivals and Shinto traditions, and for proof of that all you have to do is get clicky with the Festival category on the same sidebar.

Somewhere in the Music category there are a few references to gagaku, the ancient music of the Japanese Imperial court. Both the music and the instruments of that style came primarily from China about 1,400 years ago, though some also crossed over from the Korean Peninsula. While that musical tradition has long been dead on the Asian mainland, it’s still alive here. Some musicologists say it’s the longest continuous musical tradition in existence.

Asuka me again and I'll tell you the same

So it should be no surprise that I had to grab my tongue to keep from swallowing it in excitement when I stumbled across news of a progressive gagaku band on the run that’s updated the tradition for the 21st century. How do you do, Flame, meet the Moth!

What I read was almost too good to be true. The group is named Asuka (明日香), and all the members are conservatory graduates. While at music school, they specialized in studies of Western jazz, pop, and classical music.

But that’s not the half of it–the male members of Asuka are legitimate Shinto priests and the women are miko shrine maidens. And two members are from families of musicians who perform in what is known as the “festival gagaku” tradition (祭典雅楽). Rather than playing for the Imperial court or related functions, these musicians play at Shinto shrines and village ceremonies. (This is the first I’ve heard of it, and there’s not a lot of information about it on the web in Japanese, either.) It’s considered to be more cheerful than the Court version of the music.

Asuka has presented more than 100 performances a year since they came together, but it’s only recently that they’ve begun playing in more commercial settings. Now comes word that they’ll be making their concert debut (on stage as a solo act before several thousand people) at the Japan Expo 2009 in Paris from 2-5 July. They’ll also give a short live performance during the Expo at the booth of the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry.

If that hasn’t grabbed you by the shirt collar and woken you up yet, this will: in conjunction with their Japan Expo appearance, they’ve formally created a branch of Osaka’s Horiage Atago Shinto shrine and will have a small shrine structure and torii shipped from Japan. They plan to set up what their record company is calling a “mini theme park” of a Shinto shrine and festival. It will have the amulets, fortunes, lotteries, and ema (votive pictures) that are part of established shrines for the edification and enjoyment of the Europeans.

Asuka has released a CD available at Amazon Japan called Tenchi Muso (天地夢想). Here is their page in Japanese at the record company’s site. They helpfully provide a link to a YouTube promotional video of a live performance. By the time I’d made it this far, I was nearly salivating. And here it is:

It broke my heart! Why oh why did they have to screw it up by using computers and a drum machine? What wasted potential!

This is my confession, mama: I’m a such a diehard that when I finally flip out for good, I might just turn into a musical Carrie Nation. Instead of taking an axe to saloons, I’ll track down record studios and destroy all their rhythm machines. If I had a hammer, I’d swing it in the morning, into those consoles, all over this land. Computerized drum machines are to music what inflatable rubber dolls are to sex. They miss the point entirely!

I’m OK with electric or electronic instruments, as long as they’re performed in real time using hands, feet, head, heart, and lung.

Before giving up on them, I was lucky to notice that YouTube has several videos by Asuka. The next one I tried was this:

Now that’s more like it. It combines a transverse bamboo flute, acoustic piano, and electric bass with a jazzy melody. OK, I thought, there’s hope for these guys yet. And then I discovered this:

All is bliss! Fans of Japanese music will recognize the man playing the Yamaha as Sakamoto Ryuichi, Japan’s first Academy Award winner for his work on the score of The Last Emperor. He’s been composing and performing cutting edge pop/avant garde music for decades, first as a member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra and then on his own. Those with longer memories will recognize this song as Tong Poo (東風), one of his better-known numbers from the YMO days–though this version is quite different (and much more to my tase). Mr. Sakamoto has always been ready to incorporate Japanese and Asian elements into his music, including Okinawan minyo. What a lovely performance!

That sold me. The Asuka CD is going to be my next musical purchase, and I’ve got my fingers crossed that the tracks sound more like the second and third videos here than the first.

Afterwords:
The instrument with the vertical bamboo pipes is called a sho. It’s a mouth organ with 17 pipes that can play tone clusters of five or six notes at a time. The two longest pipes are silent; the sound of the instrument is said to resemble the call of the phoenix, and those pipes are the wings. It’s tuned using wax. For those who can read music, here’s some sho notation:

I can’t read music, but I do know this: I’d jam some clothes into a rucksack tomorrow, leave home for good, and become the love slave of either of those women playing it! Dip me in chocolate and turn me into a licking stick!

From chin-don in Nagoya to the Passage Choiseul in Paris

REGULAR VISITORS know that we sure love us some chin-don music at Ampontan. In fact, there’s a post about halfway down the page about Tchindon, a new French film in which the key element is this musical style/instrumentation/manner of presentation.

The musicians in the movie are played by the Adachi Sendensha group, but there are plenty of other working bands in the country that could have just as easily stepped into their shoes. Another important outfit is the Osaka-based Chin-Don Tsushinsha. Rather than being a single band, they seem to consist of a larger contingent of musicians that splits up and travels to different sites. How else is a band supposed to play 700 gigs a year?

As you can see from their English page (pdf), their calling card is their PR potential rather than their musical skills. That’s not to say they can’t play; it’s just that publicizing commercial establishments is how they make a living.

But in addition to their ability to attract customers, they also have the musical chops. They’ve taken first place 10 times in the annual national chin-don championships in Toyama, and performed overseas 22 times.

Their Japanese-language website has a link to a YouTube video of one of their performances in Osu, Nagoya, at a commercial fair this fall. Here it is, and it’s a classic!

And that reminds me!

The street scene in this video is of a typical Japanese shotengai, or pre-shopping mall-era urban shopping and service cores. These permanent commercial districts are packed with streets of shops; they could be just as easily be described with the words marketplace, bazaar, or souk.

As in the district shown in the video, some of the streets in the shotengai are open, but most of the area is occupied by a shopping arcade or gallery covered by iron beams with hard translucent plastic sheets that admit light and keep out the rain. That’s also the case with this neighborhood in Osu, as I confirmed after a bit of scouting around on the web.

I’ve had it in the back of my mind to do a post about the shotengai for a while now. For one thing, they’re unlike anything I saw in the U.S., where retail commerce has become increasingly mall-dominated. I grew up not far from a small American-style shopping arcade, but unlike its Japanese counterparts, it wasn’t as open to the outside, nor did the shop proprietors live on the premises.

The shotengai in Saga was the social/commercial center of the city when I arrived in 1984. The place was always filled with people, even during weekday afternoons, but it was ram jam city on weekend nights in August when they held their commercial fairs. It opened in 1964 and was in its golden age by the time I first saw it. Only a half-hour at most was required to walk around its circumference, but it had everything most people needed: a movie house with five screens; the city’s best grocery store, bookstore, record store, and Chinese restaurant; a French pastry shop operated by a man who learned his trade in Paris; the best drinking establishment I’ve ever patronized, and a coffee shop with more jazz LPs than a record company warehouse.

But the increased ownership and use of automobiles and the amendment of the Large Retail Store Law at American insistence put an end to all that. The American mall culture gained a foothold in my part of Japan about a decade ago and has been growing ever since. Meanwhile, the local shotengai is nearly dead. More than half of the shops have been torn down, and operations have been drastically scaled back at the ones that still exist.

A few of these centers are still thriving. I visited one in Nagasaki a few years ago that was quite crowded late one Sunday afternoon, and the big ones in Fukuoka City are still hale and hearty, particularly the one in Tenjin. (At one end of the shotengai near the Nakasu-Kawabata subway station is a relaxing Shinto shrine with plenty of trees, one of the unexpected pleasures of Japan.)

It’s encouraging to see that this shotengai in Nagoya seems to be doing well, but regardless of the few viable districts that remain, they have permanently lost their predominant position in the commercial life of Japanese cities. It’s a shame, because they were built and operated on a human scale that shopping malls will never have, and they were free of the latter facilities’ contrived, impersonal, and hard plastic edge.

I hadn’t given much thought to how the Japanese developed their concept of shotengai, except to vaguely assume that it had evolved organically. But here’s some serendipity: On the same day I saw the Chin-Don Tsushinsha video and wondered again about the possibility of a post, I stumbled across a reference to French shopping arcades called passages couverts. They were created in Paris in the 1860s and later spread throughout France. Then I searched a bit and found this recent photo by Clicsouris of the Passage Choiseul in that city:

That’s a shotengai, right down to the roof covering and the three-story buildings! (Except that the roof is glass and not plastic.) Double the width of the passageway and change the language on the signs, and that could be any one of hundreds of sites in Japan. The basic idea is obviously the inspiration for the Japanese version that took root and thrived a century later on the other side of the planet.

Now I ask you: Wouldn’t you rather spend your time at place like this–either in France or Japan—than at a shopping mall?

And why did we make that collective choice anyway?

Chin-don: The movie!

WORLD MUSIC MAVENS and street culture vultures will be thrilled to learn that the inspired good time goofiness and novel musicality of chin-don bands has at last made it to the silver screen.

Oooh la la!

Premiering at the Espace Culturel Bertin Poirée in Paris this week was the movie Tchindon, starring the Fukuoka City-based Adachi Sendensha, a chin-don troupe headed by Adachi Hideya; Frenchman Jean Christian Bouvier; a group of child actors; and a woman named Tomato.

Chin-don music combines Japanese percussion, bells, and shamisen with such Western instruments as accordions, trumpets, and clarinets. The performers are hired to dress in a comical exaggeration of Edo-period Japanese costumes and play just about any kind of music anyone could possibly want to hear to attract customers to commercial establishments. Long time friends know that we’re nuts about the stuff; inserting the onomatopoetic term “chin-don” into the site’s search engine on the left sidebar will turn up several posts with a cornucopia of links.

In keeping with this yeasty mélange, the movie Tchindon was shot in Fukuoka, directed by Shibata Yoichi, and has a largely Japanese cast, but is in French. Don’t ask me how that happened—I haven’t seen the movie yet, and nobody’s explained it.

The inspiration likely came from M. Bouvier. He has taught at Fukuoka universities for several years and is the organizer of the World CM (television commercial) Festival. The Japanese-language website for the film says it was produced to commemorate the 150th year of relations between Japan and France. M. Bouvier also says it is a tribute to the new age of Japonisme, which is probably a French phenomenon.

Several members of the production committee and two members of Adachi Sendensha, including Mr. Adachi himself, went to Paris on the 9th to attend the premiere. To promote the film, he and Higuchi Kazumi performed in costume on the streets of Paris on the 10th, which you can see from the accompanying photo. Mr. Adachi played accordion and Ms. Higuchi played the distinctive chin-don percussion instrument. (The percussionists in chin-don music are often women.)

One can only imagine what the Parisians thought when this apparition from Japan suddenly appeared on their streets, but then again, they did invent the word sang-froid for situations such as these. Some of the French offered tips of money to the musicians; others said they were intrigued by the combination of a street music performance with advertising. The best description came from the man who commented, “I have no idea what it all means, but it sure is a lot of fun.” That’s chin-don in a nutshell!

He might well have said that about the movie itself. An article in the Nishinippon Shimbun reported that the film was conceived in the French style to focus on the visual impact and the music. The reasons for that become apparent when one reads the plot summary on the movie website. Here it is in English:

One day, a young girl encounters a chin-don band. She is enchanted by the beauty of the sound, and follows the performers around. As she listens to their performance, the town becomes so beautiful it is as if she is seeing it in a daydream. That night, she has a dream in which a group of children meet, and then part from, a chindon band who use the street as their stage.
When she wakes up, she looks for the band throughout the town, but can’t find them…

It looks like what we have is a French vehicle to celebrate chin-don music and the often unseen corners of Japan. The movie itself was filmed in small towns in Fukuoka from February to September this year. One scene was shot in the Kaho Gekijo in Iizuka, a theater built in 1931 to resemble a kabuki playhouse from the Edo period. (The theater was partially destroyed during the Fukuoka earthquake three years ago and later restored.)

There are other surprises in addition to the combination of chin-don with the French language. One is the performance of a song by Saga Haruhiko, a throat singer in the Mongolian style who also plays the morin khuur, or horsehead fiddle. Throat singing involves the creation of two different sounds in the throat. In other words, it is a performance of polyphonic music by one person without a musical instrument.

Why is he in the movie? Well, it’s chin-don–why the heck not!

And long-time readers won’t be in the least surprised to find out that the Japanese society for throat singing has a website with an English page. Voila!

The Japan premiere of Tchindon will consist of three showings at the Ajibi Hall in Fukuoka City (at the Fukuoka Asian Museum of Art, also on the right sidebar) on Sunday the 21st. Curse the luck, but I’m going to be busy doing something else that day.

I searched around for a video clip on YouTube (or anywhere else), but couldn’t find one. Isn’t that odd for a movie promoted and produced by a man who has conducted a world TV commercial festival for the past 10 years?

I’ll guess we’ll just have to wait for the DVD!

Regardless of how it turns out, my congratulations go to Jean Christian Bouvier. He had a great idea, and he got it down on film forever.

Chin-don music Okinawan style

WHAT A LUCKY FIND! Long-time friends will know that I’m nuts about chin-don music, the urban Japanese street music that is more fun that the proverbial barrel of monkeys. (Try here, here, and here.) And I’ll stop anything I’m doing at any time to listen to the modern take on Okinawa minyo, a different style of music altogether. (Try here.)

Well, you can see where this is heading!

Yesterday I spotted an item on the web about a short segment broadcast on a Kansai television station featuring a chin-don band. I scouted around to see if a video clip was available, but unfortunately it was not.

But sometimes seeking allows you to find something better than what you were looking for to begin with, and boy, did I stumble on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The Ryukyu Chimdon Gakudan! They combine Okinawan music with chin-don orchestration, which is about as rare a pairing as the double-necked sanshin one of the band members plays. (Chimdon, the band explains, means to be excited, and was chosen because it sounds similar to the onomatopoetic chin-don.)

If you have anything approaching the blues, do not fail to click on this video! And you won’t even need that excuse. An eight-minute promo the band put together from tunes on their first CD, it is funkier than a five-legged horse and guaranteed to melt the snow on your roof. If viewing this clip does not bring a smile to your face and make the hills come alive to the sound of music, then your middle name is Grump!

And better yet, they have a website with English here!

Here’s another promotional video of the band’s more recent music. They’ve taken a step away from pure chin-don, but it’s easy to like the taste of Indonesian gamelan music in the first song.

Besides, come clean and admit that you’re dying to hear songs played by people with names like Bobzy, Yoda, and Yanba Run! (Yoda has a Mohawk and Yanba Run has a pigtail that stretches up vertically for what looks like 18 inches.)

They’ve even appeared on Okinawan TV providing the music for this short awamori (shochu) commercial.

For more bouncy takes from different bands of straight chin-don–if that adjective applies–try here, here, here, here, and here.

But brother, beware: you might bounce around so much you’ll have to pad your walls!

The Japan Wave in South Korea: It’s older than you think

THE SEOUL CORRESPONDENT for the Nishinippon Shimbun filed a fascinating report today that demonstrates the recent surge in popularity of Japanese culture in South Korea—the so-called “Japan Wave” (illyu in Korean)–is by no means a new phenomenon, and that interpersonal relations between Japanese and Koreans are more amicable than the picture the popular press in other countries (including South Korea) chooses to present.

The article is in Japanese and it’s not on line, so here is my quick and dirty translation:

I formed the Aimai Club(あいまい会), a language study group consisting of Japanese, such as me, for whom the Korean language is still hazy, and Koreans for whom the Japanese language is still hazy. But as you might expect, most of our time spent learning the unvarnished truth about each other occurs when we go drinking or mountain climbing together.

We held a year-end party at a karaoke room, and the mood was immediately enlivened by the performance of songs I didn’t expect to hear. One Korean sang “Gingiragin Sareganaku” the 1991 hit by Kondo Masahiko. Another club member, a 48-year-old Korean man, told me this number was so popular during his college days that people would spontaneously get up and dance whenever it was played at a Korean night club.

Other well-known Japanese songs sung during the evening included Buru Raito Yokohama, the 1968 song by Ishida Ayumi; Koibito Yo, Itsuwa Mayumi’s 1980 hit; and Endoresu Rein, released in 1989 by X Japan. The beauty of it was that every one of those songs was popular in Korea at the same time they were hits in Japan.

It’s been just 10 years since the South Korean government gradually began to lift the restrictions on the import of popular Japanese culture in 1998. For the Koreans to have been familiar with the songs they sung at the karaoke room, either their countrymen in Busan and other areas in the southern part of the country heard them from radio and TV signals coming across the Korean Strait from Kyushu, or they became hits after they were taped and smuggled into the country.

Regardless of what actually happened, however, either way would have been fine. The important lesson is that things which resonate in the human heart resonate even when they are prohibited. The Aimai Club chair, a 37-year-old Korean woman from Busan, immediately designated Buru Raito Yokohama as the official club song when she was chosen, perhaps because it has stuck in her memory since childhood.

This sort of popularity of Japanese culture before the import restrictions were removed has been referred to as the ‘underground Japan wave’. Now a new Japan wave is at its height. Last year, 10 films based on original Japanese stories were filmed in Korea, including Kanna-san Daiseiko Desu! (written by comic book author Suzuki Yumiko). Also last year, Japanese works had a higher share of the Korean fiction market than did Korean works by a margin of 31% to 23%.

What was it that created the intense motivation to understand the real Korea during the Korean wave that hit Japan several years ago?

From my perspective, regardless of what happened in South Korea 10 years ago, Japanese-Korean relations–which had been capable only of creating a historical pattern pitting the victims against the victimizers—will thrive in the future.

Japanese-Korean relations at the person-to-person level are a lot healthier than some people would have you believe, and are likely to keep getting better.

Endnotes: Aimai is usually translated as “vague”. When the author wrote that the club consisted of people for whom their understanding of the other country’s language was hazy, the word he used in the original was aimai. I don’t think “vague” works well in that context, however, so I came up with “hazy” off the top of my head. There is probably a better alternative.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Koreans at the southern end of the peninsula can pick up Japanese radio or television without special equipment. The regulations governing broadcasts in the two countries are different.

In the U.S., for example, it is easy to pick up distant commercial radio stations at night. (I could regularly pick up stations seven to eight hundred miles away on a 10-transistor radio during my high school days.) The same is true for South Korean stations; the reception for KBS radio in Busan at night here in Kyushu is very good, and I can tune in even more stations if I’m driving out in the country.

Japanese radio stations broadcast with a lower wattage, however, so it’s easier for me to pick up stations from Korea than it is other Japanese stations even nearby in Kyushu.

That’s why I suspect music and TV programs were either smuggled in or picked up using satellite receivers.

One further note: Suzuki Yumiko’s website is in Japanese, but even those not fluent in the language might be interested in discovering the consuming passion of her life by paying it a visit and clicking a few of the categories at the lower part of the screen.

UPDATE: Reader Aceface reports that the reception of Japanese television is possible somehow in Busan and points south, and that many in Korea’s entertainment industry made special trips there specifically to watch it.

He also sends along this article in Japanese that says former South Korean President Kim Young-sam’s television channel of preference is Japan’s NHK. Mr. Kim says he tuned into Korean television for the first time in several years to watch the recent election day coverage.

Kawakami Otojiro: A tribute

IT’S INEVITABLE that the members of each new generation will behave as if they believe the world began on the day they were born. While it’s just a stage that people pass through as they mature, it can hinder the development of a balanced perspective on the nature of continuity in human affairs. Perhaps the only remedy is historical study of a sort that allows students to realize that new ideas are as old as the hills. Every generation has people who have been there and done that, as the saying goes.

An excellent subject for this historical study would be the life of Kawakami Otojiro, who was a pioneer in more ways than one. Kawakami was born in the Tsumashoji district of Fukuoka City in 1864, just at the end of the Shogunate. In 1878, at the age of 14, he boarded a ship in the Port of Hakata, sailed to Osaka, and then walked to Tokyo (a distance of 550 kilometers, or 342 miles). He continued his education in the capital, and among his teachers was Yukichi Fukuzawa, the founder of Keio University and one of the most influential people in Japan’s modernization during the Meiji Era. (Fukuzawa’s portrait is on the 10,000 yen note, worth $US 90.00 at present.)

He soon became involved as an activist in the Freedom and Peoples’ Rights Movement, a loose association of former samurai and commoners dedicated to the introduction of Western democratic principles in government. Kawakami left Tokyo after the government began cracking down on the movement in the 1880s.

The progressive philosopher Chomin Nakae suggested that he consider performing on stage, and Kawakami took up Nakae’s recommendation by combining Japanese-style vaudeville, called yose, with anti-government political activism. His performances became quite popular, and one of the songs he developed and performed, Oppekepe-bushi, took Japan by storm. The lyrics lampooned contemporary political conditions. One of the verses went:

“I’d like to give those who hate rights and happiness
A taste of jiyuto (a pun meaning both freedom tea/ Liberal Party).
Oppekepe, oppekepe, oppekepe, peppoppo.”

In performance, he wore a jimbaori (coat worn over armor), a headband, and a hakama (a divided formal skirt for men), and held a fan adorned with the rising sun.

Kawakami married the geisha Sadayakko in 1891, and together they established the Kawakami drama troupe. They barnstormed the country with plays ostensibly based on the kabuki tradition, but which were in fact in the avant-garde for Japan at the time. His wife thus became Japan’s first actress of the modern era.

After studying drama in Paris in 1893, he returned to Japan and switched to less controversial themes. Kawakami staged patriotic plays in support of the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95).

In 1899, his troupe sailed for the United States, where it presented the kabuki-based performances in New York, Washington D.C. (with President McKinley in attendance), and Boston. The following year, they were invited to perform at the Paris Exposition, where they were a huge success. The year after that, they toured 14 countries from Spain to Russia, performing before Czar Nicholas II, Emperor Franz Josef, and the Prince of Wales.

They created a sensation everywhere they appeared, partly due to their exoticism, but also due to their undeniable talent and enthusiasm. Sadayakko in particular captivated European audiences, who compared her to Sarah Bernhardt. Together, husband and wife made a recording of the Oppekepe-bushi, said to be the first phonograph record on which Japanese artists appeared.

Back home again, Kawakami became increasingly involved in theatrical production and became a pioneer in yet another field. He starred in his own presentations of Othello and Hamlet–the first professional Shakespearean productions in Japan.

A trouper to the end, Kawakami died during a performance on 11 November 1911. Today, on the anniversary of his death, a memorial service and other commemorative events were held at the Buddhist temple Joten-ji in Fukuoka City, the site where his remains are kept. (The temple is also famous as the point of origin for soba and udon in Japan, as well as the Gion Yamakata Festival.)

Another event commemorating Kawakami is being held in Tokyo–Osore wo Shiranu Kawakami Otojiro (The Fearless Otojiro Kawakami) is being performed as the first production at the new Theatre Creation in Tokyo’s Hibiya district from November 10 to December 30.

Kawakami Otojiro was a political activist, protest singer, Japan’s first recording star, theatrical idol, cultural ambassador to the West, and a show business entrepreneur. He was the man who brought Shakespeare to Japan on the stage, and, through his wife, created an opportunity for women to play a greater role in Japanese society. These achievements are all the more impressive because Kamawami accomplished them in a relatively short period of time—he died at the age of 47.

I don’t know if the Japanese educational system covers him in their curriculum, but he certainly wouldn’t be out of place there, or in the curriculum of any other country, for that matter. A younger generation would learn that other people already have been there, and done that—and that they could do it too.

Chin-don lives!

JAPAN’S INDIGENOUS URBAN STREET MUSIC, otherwise known as chin-don, is the subject of this brief AP article that appeared a few days ago.

But the AP is behind the curve! Ampontan has already featured posts about the most seriously silly music this side of Spike Jones. If the AP article whets your appetite, try our more detailed account, or this interview with a contemporary chin-don performer.

Karaoke: Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay

DRUMMER Daisuke Inoue was named by Time Magazine in 1999 as one of the 20 most influential Asians of the century—along with Mao Tse-tung and Gandhi—and received the Ig Nobel Peace Prize from Harvard University students in 2004. Yet he failed to patent his invention, and the business he established to sell it went belly up. Today, he lives outside of Kobe and sells rat repellant devices for a living.

What is Inoue’s claim to fame?

He invented the karaoke machine! Here’s the magazine’s story as it appeared at the time, which contains the astonishing information that it took Inoue 28 years to try karaoke himself after inventing it.

One thing the author fails to mention in the article is the importance of singing in popular Japanese culture. Learning songs is a core part of early education, and most adult Japanese remember the words to songs they learned in kindergarten. Many, especially women, start singing along when they hear them. The longest-running TV show in Japan (Kohaku Uta Gassen) is the special New Year’s Eve singing contest starring a selected list of the most popular singers in the country. Another long-running show is Nodo Jiman, literally “Confidence in (Your) Throat”. It’s broadcast simultaneously on TV and radio from a different location around the country every Sunday and features local people with varying degrees of talent who get the opportunity to show off their singing skills—or lack of them—to a national audience. (And thanks to the magic of YouTube, you can see a clip here.)

Commercial karaoke in drinking establishments started out with a sound system, a set of tapes, and a book of lyrics. Improvements soon began to appear, however, and these included laser disc (now DVD) karaoke with filmed skits accompanying the music and the lyrics displayed on screen as subtitles. Shops sprouted up devoted exclusively to patrons who wanted to sing. Usually a town will have one or more shops that develop a reputation as the one where the talented amateurs hang out, and it can be fun just to go and listen. (Honest!) There are facilities called karaoke boxes where groups can rent karaoke rooms for their exclusive use. These are quite popular with high school students for after school recreation. There is on-line karaoke and a karaoke channel on cable TV. Many people have karaoke equipment at home they use for instant parties.

Most of the Westerners in Japan I know don’t enjoy karaoke very much (including me), which presents a challenge for accommodating oneself to this aspect of Japanese society. The Japanese often invite new foreigners out for a night on the town, and this inevitably means going to a karaoke establishment and being asked to sing. I soon adopted the solution of those Japanese who don’t care very much for karaoke—I settled on one song I liked and could perform reasonably well, and used this as my contribution for the night. Usually only one song is required; more than that is optional.

When I first came to Japan, I hung out with a Londoner who went back to England after two or three years. A few years later, he came back for a visit and hornswoggled two Japanese friends and me into a night of karaoke. He had been practicing in London clubs that catered to Japanese and wanted to show off.

We wound up in a bar with laser disc karaoke. It was fascinating that the pub’s clientele was rather blasé about seeing two Westerners and two Japanese out together singing, though there were few foreigners in town then. My London friend sang several Japanese songs that he memorized and had down very well. There was no reaction from the other customers. I hadn’t memorized any songs, but sang my contributions in Japanese from the subtitled lyrics shown on the video as the background music played. It is rare for Japanese anywhere to see a foreigner reading their language spontaneously, but the customers in this joint acted as if it happened all the time. In contrast, our two Japanese friends stuck to popular Western songs, and they sang entirely in English. The other customers continued to pay us no attention.

Just as we had decided to call it a night, one of the Japanese guys asked me to sing an American song before we went home so they could hear “what it really sounded like”. We discussed the possibilities and settled on Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode. Then I belted out a version at the top of my lungs. It was more shouting than singing.

It brought down the house. Cheers, applause, and rounds of drinks from total strangers! People who had ignored us for two hours all of a sudden wanted to strike up conversations and visit other shops for another round of singing. I’m still amazed whenever I recall that night.

Essential Korean music reference

World music mavens take note: there’s now available what seems to be an indispsensable guide to Korean music in a two book, two CD package written and compiled by Keith Howard. The author lived in Korea for many years, is fluent in Korean, and now teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll just quote from the review that appeared on MusicWeb International:

This is an encyclopaedic panorama of Korean music: there’s no equivalent in the English language. On these terms, it will be an indispensable standard reference for anyone without access to Korean language sources. It covers the entire range of Korean music that has been documented, from the post-colonial period to very recent times. It covers what has been retained of ancient Court ritual, and folk music, popular crossover and modern contemporary music. There’s even a reference to the famous and exceedingly cute Little Angels children’s dance and song troupe! Nowhere else will a reader find so much detail.

Those interested can buy the package through the site, based in England.

Kina Shokichi: The man who put Japanese roots music on the map

YOSHIO WAS my first friend in Japan. He had hair down to his shoulders, which he wore under a red, gold, and green Jamaican knit cap. He worked in a coffee shop that offered free refills, unlike most coffee shops in Japan at the time.

I would go to the shop, buy one coffee and get several free refills, practice my Japanese with the customers and staff, and hang out with Yoshio. We were both Bob Marley fans and hit it off right away.

One night, a few weeks after I met him, Yoshio had a suggestion. “You know, if you like Bob Marley so much, you’ll probably like this guy, too,” and handed me two LPs.

He was right. I did like that guy’s music, and still do. The LPs were by one of the few naturally funky Japanese musicians I’ve ever heard, Okinawan Kina Shokichi.

Kina is the man who put Okinawa minyo on the map. The literal meaning of minyo is folk music, but it’s different from what Westerners usually call folk, the music produced by singer-songwriters or interpreters on acoustic guitar. (The Japanese call that fuo-ku.) Minyo is people music that’s been performed throughout Japan since at least the 16th century. The version played in the main islands, while still alive and well today, sometimes seems a bit stiff and cold to Western ears.

The fun-loving Okinawan version, however, is a different story. Like Jamaica, Okinawa is an island in the sun, and like the best of reggae, Okinawa has an infectious beat, an irrepressible bounce, and a grinning-from-ear-to-ear affability that will get you dancing on even the hottest summer day.

The main instruments used in the Okinawan variety include the sanshin, a three-stringed, plucked instrument whose body is covered with snake skin. It resembles the shamisen of the main islands (and probably shares a common ancestor with the banjo). They also use taiko drums of various sizes.

Kina was the son of a musician who played traditional Okinawan minyo (see photo with his family; Shokichi is on the left in the front row). His stroke of genius was to form an electric roots music band, with drums, bass, and electric sanshin. As a teenager he already was fronting the house band in a nightclub in the entertainment district adjoining the military bases on Okinawa. His first hit and signature song today, composed at the age of 16, was Haisai Ojisan (Hey, Mister!), which climbed the charts when he was in jail serving time for a pot bust. The song was about a bum who panhandled for sake in the street near Kina’s neighborhood.

He recorded four discs from 1977 to 1983: the first two were an eponymous (in Japan) debut, recorded live in his nightclub with his then-wife Tomoko sharing vocals, and Blood Line, with guest Ry Cooder adding slide guitar on some tracks. These were the discs Yoshio lent me. Kina followed them up with the slightly overproduced but still worthwhile Matsuri (Festival), and Hana (Flower),

After a seven-year drought with no releases, Kina came roaring back in 1990 with the excellent Nirai Kanai Paradise, the tough and funky Earth Spirit in 1991 (recorded partly in Europe), the superb departure In Love in 1992, and a greatest hits compilation in 1993.

If you like roots music reworked for the modern audience with electric instruments and drums, you won’t have any problem getting into Shokichi Kina. Broadly speaking, he belongs to the same overall tradition as people like Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf in the 50s, Stax or reggae in the 60s, and other modern roots blends of the 60s and 70s in the Caribbean and Africa. Modern Japanese music tends to be synth-happy, but he avoids that trap for the most part, so you seldom hear any of the computers, drum machines, or the other digitalia that are a blight on pop music today.

The first (mostly) live album is essential with a capital E, and is in print in the West from a British label under the title Music Power of Okinawa. David Byrne also released a compilation album still in print called Peppermint Tea House on his Luaka Bop label. He unfortunately included some tracks from a collaboration with a guy who plays synthesizer. I don’t know why; Byrne displays a better roots sense on some of his other Luaka Bop compilations. Also, judging from the sound clips at an Internet merchant site, that’s also a studio version of Haisai Ojisan rather than the definitive live version.

Try these capsule reviews by Cliff Furnald on Rootsworld for an overview of his work except the discs of the latter 90s. I agree with most of his comments, with a few reservations: Nirai Kanai Paradise is good and includes several reggae-influenced tracks that work well, but I think he should have stuck to closer to his Okinawan roots on this disc. Sometimes even our favorite musicians record tunes that make us roll our eyes and groan. Furnald likes the tune Gaia, but I’m sorry–the English-language “Don’t cry Gaia” is one of the few times Kina makes me roll my eyes and groan.

Comparing the female background chorus in minyo to cheerleaders is a bit silly, even though they are more energetic than the ladies heard on the home island variety. Earth Spirit was recorded both in Tokyo and in Paris, and he used some African musicians for the latter sessions. Those are exceptionally solid tracks and as funky as the dickens. Unfortunately the Tokyo tracks don’t work as well for me, and you can immediately tell the difference. Furnald hears soukous guitar licks in In Love. I don’t, and I know soukous when I hear it. (There’s a nice soukous-influenced tune on Earth Spirit, however). It’s Furnald’s turn to roll his eyes with In Love, but I like the disc a lot. I think Kina displays a lot of originality here, despite the lame English lyrics on the title track.

Since these discs were recorded, Kina’s goofball tendencies have grown. He wanted to sail to the U.S. in a white ship (reversing the course of Commodore Perry’s black ships), but was refused permission to land. He also wanted to jam with Bill Clinton playing saxophone. And goofball or not, he was elected to the Upper House of Japan’s Diet a couple of years ago as a member of the main opposition party; that’s him in the photo attending his first Diet session in traditional Okinawan garb. He’s a strong advocate of Okinawan independence, but the trend amoung younger Okinawans is running against that idea.

He’s come a long way since doing time for reefer, running a Naha nightclub called the Chakra, and becoming the foremost roots musician in Japan. I wonder what Yoshio would think.