In the Office by Day, in the Club by Night : U.S. Executive in Japan Tries Hand at Country Music

Garrett M. Flint’s day often starts with an overseas telephone call. As an American executive living in Tokyo, he makes decisions involving tens of millions of dollars. And his day often ends at one of Tokyo’s country music nightclubs.

Flint, 53, is a vice president of Brunswick International, the overseas branch of the Skokie, Ill., company that makes recreation equipment. At the office, as at the club, he is the main attraction.

Flint is the lead singer--sometimes the only singer--of the “Yankee Cowboys,” a pickup group of about 10 country music singers and musicians. “The number changes, depending on scheduling,” he said.

The group includes such diverse individuals as a New Zealander who studied the cello at the Melbourne Conservatory of Music and a Japanese who not only plays steel guitars but builds them as well.

No Easy Task

Performing country music in Japan is about as hard as doing business here, but Flint has overcome some obstacles, tolerated others and has turned both activities into a success. He is now in his 21st year here with Brunswick.

Flint appears on stage at least once a week, singing such personal favorites as “I’ve Got a Couple More Years on You, Baby--That’s All” and “Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown.”

The group’s other members are in it to make a living, though not a very good one. Flint said the band gets a bit more than $330 for a nightclub appearance and about $970 for a dance, usually for Americans.

Since January, the American Club in Tokyo has had a monthly country music night, and the Cowboys play at square dances sponsored by the Japan-America Society. They are booked, without Flint, for a Fourth of July celebration in Yokohama.

Helps Relax Him

Flint says the music helps relieve the strains and frustrations of the office, and these often develop not here but in the United States.

He cited a U.S. Federal Trade Commission ruling that forced Brunswick to divest itself of its shares in a highly successful joint venture with Yamaha making outboard motors. Brunswick and Yamaha had bought out a small firm that made outboards and, in eight years, with the help of Brunswick technology, had increased its sales tenfold, Flint said.

“Although Yamaha also was ostensibly a guilty party (to the restraint of trade ruling), the Federal Trade Commission forced us to sell our shares to Yamaha,” giving the Japanese partner all of the company’s gains and Brunswick’s technology to boot.

But such concerns fade into the background when Flint picks up his guitar, on the road as well as here in Tokyo.

Always Takes Guitar

“When he travels,” his wife, Amy, said, “he always takes his guitar with him. He spends the nights playing and singing by himself in his hotel room.”

Flint said he has been doing this for years. “It gives you something to do in other countries at night,” he said. “The worst year, I traveled 240 days outside of Japan.” He gets back to the United States three or four times a year.

According to his wife, he knows the lyrics to about 400 songs. But occasionally, in response to a request, he will say, “Yes, I know that song, but we don’t play it.” His favorites are ballads, particularly sentimental ballads.

“I like songs that have a story,” he said. And he likes songs that have not “crossed over” into popular music. Willie Nelson is one of his favorite singers. Nelson, he says, is “clearly a country singer, a great poet, a writer of story verse.”

Written Dozen Songs

Flint has written about a dozen songs, none of which he has taken the trouble to copyright. One of them is called “Pacific Basin Cowboy,” which he says is “about a cowboy who sings in bars in the Ginza (Tokyo), Wanchai (Hong Kong) and Patpong Road (Bangkok), who has been out here too long. It may be a bit autobiographical.”

Flint and his wife came to Japan in 1955, on a freighter. They were “a year out of college and wanting to see Asia,” he said. Except for three years on Guam and Okinawa, they have been here ever since, and have reared three children. Flint joined Brunswick in 1965.

He played clarinet and saxophone in high school and college, with a swing band and a Dixieland band. His wife plays the piano and “all the children are good musicians, better than I am,” Flint said.

Flint, the only American businessman in Tokyo who sings in public, finds similarities between being a country music singer and doing business in Japan. The “old boy” ties that characterize the business world are also found in the world of country music, he said.

Can’t Always Get Gig

“Sometimes,” he said, “we can’t get a gig” because the competition is keen and there are only about a dozen country music clubs in Tokyo. The average American businessman faces the same obstacle, he said. He described Japan as a big market with strong, established relationships and said that the “outsider coming in has a very tough time.” American firms trying to penetrate the Japanese market face what he said are prohibitive start-up costs. Many, he said, “just can’t afford it.”

Brunswick enjoys an advantage because of its “very diversified businesses” and its 25-year record here, said Flint, who is the only American on the staff. The firm makes everything from aircraft parts to automatic pinsetters for bowling alleys and is regarded as highly successful.

“We found ways to participate (in joint ventures) very effectively within the restrictions imposed upon us by the Japanese government,” Flint said. Many of those restrictions have been removed, but “in many ways it’s more difficult to get in today than it was a few years ago because industries are so strong and competitive now.”

Once More Popular

Country music also used to fare better in Japan. The American servicemen who came to Japan from 1945 to 1952 during the U.S. occupation that followed World War II brought country music with them, and the Japanese musicians who learned it played it widely throughout Japan. Songs like “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Tennessee Waltz” became big hits.

Today, country music is a minor factor in Japan’s entertainment world. It is a wonder, though, that it exists at all, for country music is to popular Japanese music as ancient Japanese court music is to modern American music.

Country music is almost never heard on television. Albums by Kenny Rogers, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Ricky Skaggs seldom show up on the lists of hits.

Even when an American country star like Nelson or Rogers comes to Japan, his apparent popularity (judged by what it costs to hear him at a hotel dining room--about $330) is misleading.

“The average Japanese likes whoever is popular in the United States,” Flint said. “Whether they understand the music or not has nothing to do with it. They come out to hear him because he is billed as a top star in the United States.”

Teen-Age Idol Big Seller

A spokesman for CBS-Sony, which handles Kenny Rogers records in Japan, said that about 80,000 Rogers albums are sold every year, a small fraction of the half-million albums sold by Seiko Matsuda, a teen-age idol. Still, two years ago an album that includes two Rogers songs, one of them the theme from the movie “Footloose,” sold more than a million copies and became a smash hit, he said.

On a recent night at the Restive Horse, a club that seats only 30 in the Roppongi section of Tokyo, about half of the audience were personal friends of the Flints--and only half of them liked country music.

But Flint said there are “lots of cultural pockets like this in Japan.” He said country music shares at least one thing with enka, the traditional music of Japan: Both tend to tell stories about lower-class people.

The fortunes of Brunswick’s bowling equipment have roughly paralleled those of country music. The recreation centers Brunswick set up in Japan in the 1960s provided what Flint called “the first large-scale, mass-participation leisure industry” in Japan in an age when “the average Japanese didn’t have much money to spend on recreation.”

In 1961, when Brunswick moved in, there was not a single bowling alley in Japan. By 1972 there were 125,000, nearly half of them installed in 1972, the year the bubble burst.

Sales of pin-setting equipment stopped almost overnight as bowling alleys across the country went bankrupt one after another. The bowling mania that had hit Japan vanished. Today, there are only 31,000 lanes in the country, Flint said.

He said the Japanese have a tendency to take up fads: “If something comes into style, everybody wants to do it.”