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.

Otojiro Kawakami: 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 Otojiro Kawakami, 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.

Otojiro Kawakami 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 Shokichi Kina.

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 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.

Ave atque vale: Ueki Hitoshi, Japan’s premier comic actor (1927-2007)

Sad news: The foremost Japanese comic actor of his–and perhaps any–generation, and my hands-down, all-time favorite Japanese show business personality, Ueki Hitoshi, died this morning in a Tokyo hospital of respiratory problems. He was 80.

Ueki was a multitalented performer who started out singing in a band (called the Crazy Cats), turned to comedy with the other band members, and won respect as a serious actor later in life. If he is known abroad at all, it is for his appearance in Kurosawa Akira’s Ran in 1985. In 1993, he was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon for his contributions to culture, and in 1999 he received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette.

But it was as the lead in the comedy Nippon Musekinin Jidai (Japan’s Irresponsible Age) in 1962 that he made his name. The movie was a huge success and morphed into a series of films throughout the 60s that used in their title the phrase Nippon no Ichiban — Otoko (Japan’s Most – Man). Both Ueki and the films had a brash, energetic, and positive quality that paralleled the developments in Japanese society at the time, as the country’s economy and confidence skyrocketed during the period of rapid growth. He became enormously popular, particularly among salarymen, both for his films and his comic songs. The title of one of those songs, Wakattchairu Kedo Yamerarenee (I know, but I still can’t stop) became a national catchphrase in its own right.

There was no one quite like him in Japan, and no one quite like his character in the West, either. He was brassy, exuberant, zany, slightly roguish, yet perpetually bright and cheerful, and audiences loved him. To describe him in Western terms, think of Bob Hope in the early Road movies with Bing Crosby, remove the cowardice, add an irrepressible cheerfulness, and that puts you in the ballpark.

There’s also never been anything quite like those movies he made during his peak years, either. They were comedies that appealed to a mass audience, but they also had a touch of the freewheeling and slightly surreal that was also a part of popular culture throughout the West in the first half of the 60s.

My favorite of his films was one of the last of the Nippon no Ichiban — Otoko movies: Nippon no Ichiban Uragiri no Otoko (Japan’s Biggest Backstabber). In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine that it got made at all, and it’s proof that the Japanese can make black comedy as well as anyone. In fact, the first scene is one of the most astonishing I’ve ever seen in any movie.

Here’s some quick background—there are two subjects in modern Japanese film and television that are always used to create the ultimate tragic mood. Those are the tokko butai pilots (kamikazes) and the Emperor Showa’s radio broadcast to the nation on August 15, 1945, announcing Japan’s surrender. No one would dream of parodying these two subjects.

Except Ueki, and he took on both in the movie’s first five minutes. He plays a kamikaze pilot about to leave on his last mission—this is a comedy, remember—and he and the other pilots are mustered to listen to the Emperor’s broadcast before they depart. But the reception of the radio broadcast is poor and filled with static, and they ask their commanding officer what the Emperor said. The officer answers that the Emperor asked them all to die for their country, so they climb into their planes and take off.

Ueki crashes his plane into an American battleship, but it doesn’t explode and he survives. The American sailors are curious about this Japanese pilot sitting on the deck of their ship, and they wonder if he’s going to commit hara-kiri. Ueki at first defiantly announces that he’s going to do it, but keeps coming up with new conditions that prevent him from going through with it. The helpful American sailors then find ways for him to satisfy those conditions. The pilot warns them it’ll be a bloody mess, so one of the sailors thoughtfully rolls some toilet paper in his direction. Finally, Ueki says tradition demands that ritual suicide requires the presence of a registered nurse.

And then the opening credits start.

He was probably the only actor in Japan who could get away with a scene like that, and he knew it, too. In a newspaper interview published 18 years ago, he remarked about the series in general, “I just made up my mind that I would be the only person in Japan capable (of performing that role), and I ran with it. In the end, no one’s been able to make anything like them.”

No one anywhere has been able to make anything like them because Ueki was a true Japanese original. Here’s how the newspaper interview concludes:

“I (the interviewer) suggested to him that he had an upright and steadfast character, but he became embarrassed and let out a loud, boisterous laugh—‘Iya, uhhihhii’. It was the same laugh that delighted so many people over the years.”

Anyone who has seen any of Ueki’s movies will recognize that laugh immediately and hear it in their mind’s ear.

We’ll all miss it.

Easier than a koto: The Do-re-mi Popcorn!

Have you ever wanted to play a traditional Japanese koto, but been put off because:

• You’d have to learn to read Japanese and to decipher the instrument’s unique notational system?
• It’s not possible to play a koto in the diatonic (do-re-mi) system?
• You’d be stuck learning to play such tunes as Kojo no Tsuki and Sakura, Sakura, when you’d rather open up your repertoire to include pop hits, jazz, and samba?
• The instrument is too big to lug to somebody’s party and jam in the living room with the guitarists?
• You’d have to wear formal kimono and sit on the floor when you play?

Well, now your problems have been solved, because here’s the Do-Re-Mi Popcorn!

Yes! You can learn how to play the new Do-Re-Mi Popcorn using traditional staff notation! It’s two-thirds the size of a traditional koto, and you can put it on a stand and play, making it easy to take to friends’ homes or really shred with a band on stage! The Do and So strings are colored green and yellow, allowing beginners to jump right in! And, it comes in a wide array of pastel colors!

There’s even a website!

You can see photos of a command performance for Prince Albert of Monaco! You can order a CD to hear a band led by Do-Re-Mi Popcorn inventor Masako Naito perform such songs as The Beatles’ Yesterday and And I Love Her, Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll, Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Agua De Bebel, and the well-known surf guitar instrumentals, Diamond Head and Pipe Line!

You also can see videos and hear sound clips of the Do-Re-Mi Popcorn in performance!

As the website states,

“Doremi Pop-corn is the poptaste koto flapping to the world. It’s the newest koto with a poptaste breaking the image of frodition. Now, let’s create a sensation Doremi Pop-corn in Japanese music world!”

If you become proficient enough, you can go to Japan and become a licensed Do-Re-Mi Popcorn instructor!

You can even order one from Lark in the Morning in the U.S. for only $1,125!

Get one today and astonish your family and friends with:

The Do-Re-Mi Popcorn!

Japanese urban street music: The chin-don interview!

It’s a shame that more people—especially world music mavens—aren’t aware of the musical style of chin-don, a deliciously goofy hybrid of Japanese and Western music and instruments. There’s been an Ampontan post on chin-don in the past (try here), but the Nishinippon Shimbun recently ran a short interview with Atsuya Kitamura (35), one of the few full-time professional chindon performers left in Japan.

Since the interview is in the print edition in Japanese only, I’ve taken the liberty of unofficially translating it here.

What kind of work does a chin-don performer do?

Originally, we performed to advertise and publicize new shops and companies for the people that hired us. Now, however, advertising and publicity work account for only about 10% to 20% of our work. Most of our performances are at festivals sponsored by local governments or companies, or at parties or other events.

Why did you get involved in this kind of work?

Well, I started out in a band. When I was 27, I heard that Adachi Sendensha was hiring musicians. I thought it would be great if I could have a career playing music, so I applied for the job. I had a hard time of it at first. It’s really difficult to perform with a smile on your face, sing, and talk all at the same time.

Do you like being the center of attention?

No. In fact, I’m more the reserved type. Contrary to what you might think, the people who enjoy being the center of attention don’t last long in this business. The job of a chin-don performer is to make everyone happy—the employers, the event organizers, and the people watching you. Sometimes it’s necessary to be a show-off, but the most important thing is that the role demands the group create a pleasant atmosphere at the performance site.
The role required of us changes depending on different factors, including the season and the employers. That’s why the people most suited to this work are those who are adaptable to different circumstances. I think.

Note:
Kitamura works as a musician in Hideya Adachi’s chin-don band, but the band leader calls his company Adachi Sendensha, which literally translates as the Adachi Publicity Co. That might give you an idea of which business Adachi thinks he’s in.