The Discovery

I noticed it back in 2018 when I accidentally pressed on the wrong recommended video while playing the board game Sorry! with my friend while music played through my earbuds. Very suddenly, Japanese singing disrupted the brief silence as I was placing down my piece. The 80s Japanese song “Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi was playing ten times louder than the previous song. It startled me to the point of accidentally launching my piece across the room. But beyond scaring me and making me do a walk of shame to my piece, I felt intrigued. I noticed how all the recommended songs were other unfamiliar tracks in different languages and from different time periods. And so throughout the board game night, I kept playing the songs recommended from that point forward. At least until we fell asleep around five in the morning listening to Ryo Fukui’s album Scenery.

Years later, I spend my nights listening to music to keep myself sane while doing classwork. One night I noticed the familiar sight of the woman in the thumbnail of “Plastic Love” in my recommended videos. I was transported back to a few summers ago when I was playing Sorry! And as I expected, many more old Japanese songs were being recommended to me now. I decided to click on another song and I just kept going from there, clicking onto the next unrecognizable song. Eventually, the recommendations were many old ambience and old jazz albums. And going further changed it to soul and early electronic music from the 70s.

The Beauty

There are a few commonalities between these songs. They almost all work nicely as background music to help set a relaxing mood. They also evoke a nostalgic feeling, even if I wasn’t born when it was released. Many creators on YouTube apply these songs to fantasies or memories. For example, it is popular to play city pop songs alongside clips from anime of previous decades. What really appeals to me is knowing I’m not listening alone as I read the comments on these songs. The YouTube algorithm has created a space for thousands of users of all backgrounds to relax and self reflect together. And with that, it creates something that can be quite beautiful to read through.

There is a lot of gold you can dig up if scroll through the many comments. I’ve seen vivid fiction and poetry, greetings left by people from around the world, and many stories of the past. Stories of unrequited love, deceased family members, or specific moments that stuck with someone for no particular reason. Reading these comments quickly became a way for me to calm down and reflect on things. So the next time you see an unrecognizable song in your recommendations, I recommend checking it out! And for those interested, I’ve included a link to a playlist of the songs I came across while writing this.

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Perhaps the paramount thing in my mind when I began this haphazard discussion (this column) of what it means to understand and be exposed to a culture, was my experience with 1970s pop music in Japan. I have no hesitation in saying that the strongest link that I constructed with Japanese culture in my childhood, was through this genre of music.

When I was little, my mom would play a dark grey cassette that contained hit songs from the 70s, to which I can remember dancing and singing to (remember, I was a kid) in our living room. We would also watch recordings of music shows and recaps of retro hits that my aunt would send us via VCR, and these were the songs that latched themselves onto my soul for the rest of my life.

These are not only some of my first memories, but also one of the first things I could touch and feel as I groped in the dark to try to understand (as one can when they’re a kid) this culture that I knew was different from the one I lived in, but of which I was somehow a part.

Many of the songs from the 70s, much like our own hits from the 70s in America, still hold a prominent place in music culture even now. You will still see shows that reminisce about the cultural importance of these hit songs, what they meant then, and what they mean  now.

The 70s have been hailed as the Golden Age of popular music in Japan. It witnessed the rise of the pop star, the conflagration of a specific form of pop called kayokyoku, and the emergence of Nyu Myujikku (literally “New Music”) which featured singer-songwriters, one of which was Southern All Stars.

These songs marked a decade of hope and aspirations, a call to be strong and look to the future, a reassertion of confidence, and the passing of a former generation.  And now let me list a few of my favorites, and a few objective hits.

1) Kamome ga Tonda Hi by Watanabe Machiko

This was one of those songs on that cassette tape I mentioned earlier. The title means “the day the gull flew away,” and tells of how a woman’s lover decided to leave her. Back in the day I just liked the melody (which I still think is awesome) but the lyrics are also neat, blending the protagonist’s sorrow with the marine scenery before her, and a noncommittal man between.

2) Mata Au Hi Made by Ozaki Kiyohiko

This. Is. A classic. It was Ozaki’s shooting star moment—he ruptured the sky one second, but it was the only time he shone. This remains one of the greatest classics in Japanese music history. Titled “Until We Meet Again,” it centers around a couple agreeing to separate until they, well, meet again. This song was also Aku Yu (the lyricist)’s subtle way of shifting the tide in lyric-writing. Until the 70s, women in song lyrics were almost always passive beings—they were abandoned, left, pining for the man that they lost, with an implication that life “ended,” in a way, after the tearing up of a relationship. Aku diverged from this trend. In this song, the sentiment to break up was mutual—what is crucial in the lyrics is futari (both of us) and (o)tagai (each other), which places both parties of the relationship on the same ground. No one is left, and both have a say.

3) UFO by Pink Lady (but basically all of their songs)

Mii and Kei, a dynamic duo, took Japan by storm and even encroached into America with their catchy songs and flashy costumes. Call it corny, call it what you will, but their songs took over the radio and, oddly enough, captured children’s imaginations. You could see little kids reproducing Pink Lady’s iconic dances on the sidewalk back in the day. I came along twenty years too late, but it still managed to become a part of my childhood.

4)  “Kita no Yado kara” by Miyako Harumi

Miyako Harumi is one of the most iconic enka artists, enka being a more hybrid version of traditional music and the blues. This epic song blasted off in 1976, fueled by a great melody, melancholy but subtly gutsy lyrics, and Miyako Harumi’s unequaled vocals. Lit. “From the Inn in the North” is a perfect song for a winter afternoon.

4b) If I’m going to talk about winter enka songs, I cannot leave out “Tsugaru kaikyo fuyugeshiki” (Winter scenery; the Tsugaru Strait), by Ishikawa Sayuri. She first performed this at 19 years of age, a beautiful song written again by Aku Yu about a woman leaving a lover and hopping on a ship back to the north. It gives me goosebumps every time.

5) “Minato no Yoko Yokohama Yokosuka” by the Downtown Boogie Woogie Band

The 70s was also a friendly battle site between lyricists. Aku Yu, a giant of this musical era, wrote that he was pretty much blasted off his chair by this song, produced by Aki Yoko and Uzaki Ryudo (also the lead singer), a husband-wife duo. Yoko would herself become a very influential lyricist from hereon. Aku admitted that he was almost envious because he hadn’t thought of writing a song like this, in all its gutsy glory and bravado, first.

6) “Champion” by Alice

A rock band trio produced this classic in 1978, an anthem that would leave its deep, visceral mark on the music scene. It’s fiery, following a boxing fighter into the ring and out of it, a champion–a champion that didn’t win the match, but a champion nonetheless, who whispers to himself that now he can go back to being “an ordinary man.”

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In this strange mall/visitor’s center that we stopped by, I found a bespectacled man in his fifties, his hair in grey spikes, sitting on a folding chair in front of a row of red, glowing goldfish lanterns, with a shamisen on his lap. Within a minute he shut his eyes and tucked in his lips, and began to play.

I joined the small crowd sitting in front of him, soon to become transfixed. I completely forgot about my grandparents, whom I had abandoned at that point, and gaped at the storm of sounds that he plucked, snapped, and strummed out of this one instrument. My amazement may be comparable to what people felt when Technicolor first came out. And so this random old man made me fall in love with the Tsugaru shamisen.

Generically speaking, the shamisen is one of the better known Japanese traditional instruments, aside from the koto or the shakuhachi. People often see it played in some sort of ensemble with the koto, shakuhachi, and maybe a taiko drum or two. You

sometimes have a group of shamisen players with drummers and flutists, who perform nagauta, a style of music, often accompanying narration, that originated with kabuki theater.

But it is more often than not played solo–even here you find a lot of variation.

A little about the shamisen family in Japan—the mainland shamisen has an uncle in Okinawa, called a sanshin (三線). It has a smaller, rounded body and slender neck, characterized by it’s warm, twangy sound. Think “tropical banjo.”

The sanshin has a number of nephews on the mainland. One oddball, which originates in Kyushu in southern Japan, is called the gottan—it’s basically a naked shamisen, consisting only of wood and the usual three strings.

The rest of the mainland shamisen are pretty similar, all having a square face and longer neck, played with a fan-shaped pick, or bachi. The relative thickness of the neck varies between thick, narrow, and in-between, depending on which type of music you are playing.

The Tsugaru shamisen, named after its home of Tsugaru (present-day Aomori), is one of these thicker versions. The sound is earthy and sinewy, unlike the more liquid, ethereal tones of its shamisen siblings.

It sounds as if someone decided to twist air molecules into strings and pound on them with a paddle. It’s reminiscent of moist dirt, dusty sunshine, grassy fields, and the midday ocean all at once, to the point that I can feel the scene like a film on my skin.

This earthiness/physicality also bleeds into the style. In a word, it’s violent—not what you generally expect with Japanese traditional music. When I watched this guy in Aomori play, I couldn’t close my eyes and relax for fear that at some point he would break all three strings or punch a hole in the shamisen (and I didn’t want to miss that moment).

While the left hand skates, leaps, and tap dances along the bridge, the right hand dexterously plucks and slaps both the strings and the surface of the shamisen with the bachi. Yet some of them do it with such force that you wonder if they have a score to settle with the shamisen. It’s as much a performative art as it is a listening art.

I may also like the Tsugaru style, because it’s a lot like jazz. It sounds nothing like jazz—but it’s also a product of improvisation within a set of conventions. The players have no sheet music, but riff off these conventions to make the piece their own. Thus the same “song” will follow the same procedures, the same start and finish, but allows a very flexible middle section, where the players have free rein to do whatever they want as long as they want. It thus changes from person to person, like oral tradition, in the process accruing a human quality itself.

Here’s a video of a Tsugaru shamisen artist completely owning it.

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