Japanese Music and Me
Like everyone who comes to Japan, I’ve taken an interest in Japanese music and have made a hobby out of trying to find cool songs and cool groups.

The problem with Japanese music is that so much of it is crap. But with a little digging you can find cool stuff. In Japan, as in America, I’ve taken an interest in the oldies.

Oldies are relatively easy to get into in Japan for a number of reasons. For one you can rent CDs in Japan at video rental shops. So it’s a very cheap way to build up a music collection. Secondly, Mini-Discs are very popular in Japan. I understand they haven’t really taken off yet in America. But it’s a very easy way to copy CDs without having to buy a CD burner. Just a normal stereo will usually allow you to copy from CD to MD.

And thirdly, there is a series of CDs in Japan that chronicle the best hits of every year. It’s not terribly consistent. For instance, during the 1950s there is only a “greatest hits of the 50s” CD set available. From 1960 on, every single year has a two CD album, giving the best 30 hits of that year. And then from 1970 on, a bonus CD is also available, giving another 20 songs. So from 1970 on you can collect the top 50 songs of every year. And then the collection stops at 1990, I suspect because the rights for newer songs are more expensive. Although, just as with the 50s, there is a “greatest hits of the 1990s” CD set available.

It took me a bit of time, and a small amount of money, but during my second year in Japan I went to the video rental store every week and rented, year by year, all the collections of old songs. I then copied them onto MDs back at my place. I even rented all the bonus CDs with extra songs on them. And now I have a music collection that is the envy of…..

Well, no one really. I think it it’s pretty cool that I have the top 50 Japanese songs from any given year at my finger tips, but no one else I’ve met seems to be that impressed by it. I’ve often told my friends, “You can do it too. With just a little bit of time and dedication, and a lot of blank MDs, you can build up the same collection by going through all the years at the CD rental shop.” No one has yet expressed any interest in following in my footsteps.

Most of the time I just use my collection as material for mixed tapes. I comb through it looking for catchy songs that I put on a tape to listen to in the car. Sometimes I’ll go through and listen to all the years in order. It takes me about 2 months to get through the collection, but it’s a fun journey. It’s cool to hear the music culture progress.

The music from the 1950s sounds really old. I mean it is really old, but you can hear the static off of it a lot more than songs from the same period in the US. Japanese music is pretty consistently a few years behind the US in any given period. In the 1950s there are a lot of songs like, “Tokyo Boogie Woogie”.

The early 60s were the heyday of Sakamoto Kyu, whose most famous song, “Ue o muite aruko” (known as “The Sukiyaki Song” in the US), was the only Japanese song to ever make number one on the US pop charts. In fact to my mind the only Japanese song to chart in the US period. It’s a tremendous culture achievement that the Japanese are still very proud off.

In the late 60s was the time of the “Group Sounds” as they are known in Japan. A bunch of British invasion imitation garage rock bands. There are some catchy songs from this period. Nothing that broke the US charts, but “The Spiders” had a hit, “Sad Sunrise” that charted briefly in Britain.

The late 60s to mid 70s were a big folk music scene in Japan. And it’s actually pretty good. It’s sort of electric folk, more in the tradition of Paul Simon than Bob Dylan, but really a lot of it is quite good and in my opinion superior to the folk music from the US during the same period.

By the 1980s much of it is crap. I copied the 1980s CDs just for the sake of completeness for my collection. There are a few good songs in the 1980s CDs if you comb through them enough times. I rescued a few songs for my mixed tapes.

There are occasionally covers of Western music, which are fun mostly for their camp value. My particular favorites are the Japanese versions of “Rawhide” (#15 on the Japanese charts in 1960), “Tie me Kangaroo Down　Sport” (#19 in 1963), and “Locomotion” (#29 in 1962).

And then there in any given year there is always Enka. Enka has been called “Japanese Soul” or “Japanese blues”, the idea being that it is distinctively ethnic Japanese music like Soul or Blues was once distinctively African American music. The most common description, and one I tend to agree with, is that Enka is “Japanese Country.” In the sense that it is popular in rural areas, in that old people love it and young people hate it, and in that it is always popular and always on the charts but the sound never seems to evolve from year to year, Enka is perhaps most similar to Country music.

Of course all of these descriptions are based on Enka’s place in Japanese culture, and not the sound of the music itself. It is always difficult to describe a musical sound with words, but the best description I can give is to imagine traditional Japanese music fused with the big band sound of the 1920s. I’m told Enka actually originated in the 1920s, and that before it degenerated into sappy love songs, it was actually a form of protest against the imperialist government of the time. But that’s in the past. Just as country music in the US, Enka is only sad love songs today. Japanese young people hate it, but many foreign people, including myself, find ourselves strangely drawn to the distinctively Asian sound, which, if one can forgive the sometimes over the top big band sound, has a sort of mystic beauty to it.

The most interesting thing about exploring Japanese music is learning that there was a whole world of music out there I didn’t even know about. I think it is one of those truths we all know but sometimes don’t think about, that there is more out there than American culture. I knew many people in college who might resemble the record store music snobs in “High Fidelity”, and prided themselves in their knowledge of American (and British invasion) music. But sometimes we forget just how much music is out there. After listening to Japanese music, I’m now curious, what were the top songs in India in 1976? What were people listening to in France in 1967? Or in Israel, or South Korea, or West Germany? Imagine all the good music out there that we’ll probably never hear.