A CULTURAL TRIUMPH FOR JAPANESE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

Minoru Niihara, the diminutive lead singer for the Japanese heavy-metal band Loudness, was feeling good.

Having polished off a sushi lunch, Niihara bounded about a Sunset Strip management office the other day, singing under his breath to a Loudness video playing in the background. It was the vocalist’s 25th birthday, and his band’s first U.S. album, “Thunder in the East,” had just broken into the Billboard magazine’s Top 100 sales list.

For Loudness, chart success in the prized U.S. market isn’t just a victory for the band; it’s also a cultural triumph for Japanese rock ‘n’ roll.

Although Japan is the second-largest record market in the world, only a handful of its pop artists have managed to garner attention in America. The last rock outfit from the Land of the Rising Sun to be signed to a major U.S. label was the cult synthesizer band Yellow Magic Orchestra, which last recorded for A&M; in 1981.

Niihara is aware that the Japanese pop community is watching Loudness’ progress across the Pacific with more than passing interest.

“Yes, there’s more pressure,” said the soft-spoken but enthusiastic Niihara. “But we may just be pioneers. I think if we succeed, the American people will start watching more carefully what’s happening in Japanese music. They’ll look for the next good Japanese band.

“We don’t mind being cultural ambassadors for Japan. We want to show the younger-generation Japanese that Japan can export more than just Sonys, kimonos or radios. We grew up with Western rock music and we want to prove that (we can play it well).”

Before “Thunder in the East,” Loudness had already released three albums in Japan since 1981. The first two were recorded with Japanese lyrics, but the last two have been in English--a sign of the group’s eagerness to reach out to fans in this country and Europe. The group also did a few West Coast dates in 1983 and found U.S. audiences receptive, but this tour represents the band’s major U.S. push. It headlines the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara tonight, the Hollywood Palladium on Saturday, Pomona Valley Auditorium on Monday and the California Theater in San Diego next Friday.

Switching languages was no small feat, considering that none of the band members spoke English at that time. Niihara now has a fairly good grasp of English, but he had to sing the lyrics phonetically when Loudness recorded its first English album.

“For us, the biggest problem has been the language,” Niihara said. “If we could sing in English perfectly, I think we’ll make it. We play high-quality rock music, so we don’t worry about that.

“It’s important to sing in English for the American and European people. It bothers me a little bit (that we have to do it), but it sounds good. If you play rock music with Japanese words, it sometimes sounds funny. You can’t sing an English melody line in Japanese.”

The main difference between Loudness and its Western heavy-metal counterparts is Niihara’s occasional inability to articulate his English phrases clearly. Otherwise, the band’s sound differs little from that of the average head-banging American or English metal monster. Its influences, predictably, are groups such as Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.

The band’s eagerness to win Western fans was tipped off when the foursome brought in British producer Max Norman to work with them on “Thunder in the East.” One result was a slower tempo than on their Japanese-language LPs.

Loudness may be trying to Anglicize its sound, but the singer believes that the group will always be unmistakably Japanese: “There is a Japanese quality to our music. Since we were all born and raised in Japan, the music can’t help but be Japanese in some way. It’s like when a white singer tries to sing like a black person--it can never quite be the same. It’s something like that.”

According to Niihara, Loudness isn’t the only hard-rock band in Japan that has the ability to do well in the Occidental record market.

Given the chance, he said, there are quite a few Japanese rock outfits that would provide pretty fair competition for American and English groups. He isn’t quite sure why Japanese bands have had such a difficult time signing with American labels, but he believes it has more to do with the language barrier than with racial trepidations on the part of image-conscious record executives.

Ironically, Loudness’ ability to appeal to European and American rock sensibilities played a significant role in the quartet’s increased popularity in Japan.

“It’s fantastic,” said a beaming Niihara. “Since Loudness is being listened to in America and all over the world, the (Japanese audience) has begun to listen to the band more.”

Despite lofty commercial objectives, Niihara insists that Loudness would never do anything to compromise its artistic aims: “It’s important to keep on rocking. I don’t know what’s in the band’s future, but we would never change our sound just to be popular. We’re not going to do an easy pop song for the radio. We are going to do what we believe in.”