PACIFIC RIM ARTS : Tokyo Pop Turning Japanese : Madonna and M.C. Hammer still rule, but the young and the hip are listening to a new Japanese roots rock, and adopting the urgency of rap music to explore their country’s own social ills

As night falls on this city of 11 million, the electronic billboards flicker into life, illuminating Day-Glo flying saucers and cups that scroll across giant screens, advertising a host of Japanese products. It is rush hour, and the subway disgorges waves of businessmen headed for bouts of ritual-like drinking.

But the youths milling in front of the Cay Club seem oblivious to their Blade-Runner-like surroundings. Wearing happi coats, ponytails and leather sandals, they are too intent on getting through the club doors to see Shang Shang Typhoon, a band that is igniting a modest cultural revolution here by mixing a campy, self-consciously Asian singing style with updated folk songs.

“Today in Japan we have many rock and roll, punk, heavy metal and reggae bands, but this is original Japanese music with a message,” says 32-year-old Yoshida Tabo, voicing an enthusiasm shared by many in the crowd. “I feel their Japanese spirit. We’ve been waiting for this music for a long time.”

After two generations of copying the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Rotten and Guns N’ Roses, young Japanese are for the first time delving into their own cultural roots for popular musical inspiration.

The last year has seen the emergence of a handful of bands that temper rock ‘n’ roll with traditional Japanese melodies and instruments such as the three-string, banjo-like shamisen and the shakuhachi bamboo flute. Some also resurrect the high-pitched Minyo singing style and Enka, the twangy Japanese country ballads from Okinawa. The result is a music that is as rootsy to the Japanese as Little Feat and the Grateful Dead are to Americans.

The Japanese are also putting their own stamp on rap music, that uniquely American phenomenon of the inner city, using it to explore issues relevant to their island nation. In Tokyo, such musicians as Tycoon Tosh and MC Kan are redefining rap, singing in mixed English and Japanese while sampling Japanese pop songs, Japanese TV jingles and Japanese movie sound tracks.

This rap movement, which Japanese record companies say is growing steadily, is spearheaded by Major Force, an independent hip-hop label started by five musicians, including a former Kodo drummer and an ex-punk rocker.

In roots music, the resurgence is led by bands like Tama, Shang Shang Typhoon, the Bo-Gumbos, Okinawan favorite Shoukichi Kina and Champluse, the Rinken Band and Qujila.

“I like the sounds of the Japanese language,” reflects 33-year-old Yasuo Sugibayashi, the lead singer and co-founder of Qujila (a play on the Japanese word for whale), a band that alternates between a swirling, romantic lyricism and a syncopated beat.

“Many bands sing in Japanese-English,” he said, referring to a trend in which English words are pronounced with Japanese flourishes, “and that doesn’t sound good for me, I want to sing in real Japanese. Maybe the lines of nations will disappear someday, but language is eternal. I want to preserve our language.”

Japanese record executives, who still place the bulk of their promotional yen behind Japanese power pop and Western-imitation rock bands, have been caught off-guard.

“Shang Shang Typhoon is taking off so quickly that even their management isn’t sure how to market them,” says Bobbie Sato, a marketing coordinator at Epic/Sony Records. The band, whose two female vocalists wear gauzy veils, balloon pants and lots of bracelets, dance delicately with fans and bow deeply to the crowd after each song. Their music blends strains of Okinawan, Chinese classical, Thai dance and Japanese pop music, to name a few.

An album released in late July, which includes several tracks mixed in Paris by world music producer Martin Messonier, has already sold 50,000 copies.

While that is a pittance compared to Japanese “idol” stars whose spun-sugar cute looks and bubble-gum pop records sell millions of copies, Shang Shang Typhoon’s new traditionalism mirrors the change in sensibilities among small but influential groups of Japanese young people who are rejecting the West and turning East in their search for cultural identity.

“Western culture has been very strong until now, but it is fading away and we feel a new energy coming from the East,” says Reiko Yukawa, a Japanese rock journalist and music promoter in Tokyo. “There is a very strong energy from Asia in these groups. We’re not sure what it is but we’re like a centipede, inching toward it.”

Acid House?

I’m talking about Acid Rain.

When we built a nuclear power station

On the earthquake island

Fact is simple it’s so dangerous

They say it’s safe but it’s ridiculous

Even a little child can understand

It’s not only a Japanese problem

24 hours later it’s a worldwide problem.

--”China Syndrome”

by Japanese rap artist

Tycoon Tosh

It’s Hip Hop night at Gold, a cavernous, three-story club that is the hottest club in Tokyo this fall, and Major Force mix-master MC Kan is moving smoothly from the Jungle Brothers to MC Hammer to Intelligent Hoodlum. When he lays on “The Power” by Snap, the floor goes wild.

Hip Japanese kids have hopped all over hip-hop culture, which they learn about from music videos and films like “Wild Style” and “Colors.” At Yoyogi Park each Sunday, the enlightened set up shop with a generator, stereo equipment and their U.S. import records, dancing and scratching to the same sounds you’d hear at any L.A. club. And soon it won’t be make-believe: The Los Angeles-based hip-hop club United Nations is expected to open a branch in Tokyo this fall.

At Yoyogi Park and Japanese clubs, it’s not unusual to see Afrika medallions, L.A. Raiders caps worn backward, bold striped shirts, overalls with one strap hanging off the shoulder, dreadlocks and hair carving. For good measure, a hip-hopper flashes a gang sign at a photographer.

But rap and its concerns seem utterly divorced from its original context in homogenous, high-tech and low-crime Tokyo. What do the Japanese know about the bleak reality of America’s ghettoes? Or families that sleep in their bathtubs to avoid stray bullets from feuding gangs? What do they think about the racist comment made recently by their justice minister, who likened prostitutes to blacks, saying that both groups ruin a neighborhood when they move in?

“The U.S. says Public Enemy is big so it became big here in Japan,” says Isaac Sakanishi, who produces a music video show for Japanese TV. “But if you ask Japanese if they understand the lyrics, they don’t. The things that Public Enemy is singing about are so outside their experience.”

More progressive labels like Major Force are moving beyond American rap to forge a uniquely Japanese style. And Major Force rappers are beginning to rap about Japanese issues.

“Japan as No. 1 GNP is getting higher,” sings Tycoon Tosh. “Really means nothing just rich and poor / Drink sake after 5 throwing up everywhere / Kam pai (“here’s to”) the Big Business.”

While these lyrics may never dislodge MC Hammer from the top of the rap charts, it does show that the Japanese are trying to establish their own identity.

“Five years ago, we were just copying you. Now we’re becoming very original,” says Tosh, whose Major Force logo bears the motto “Strong Force From the Orient. May the Force Be With You.”

Tosh is a one-man music phenomenon. In 1977, he founded the Plastics, one of Japan’s only punk bands ever to find fame abroad. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the quirky Plastics, who he says “mixed punk with Kraftwerk,” toured England and the United States with the Talking Heads and the B-52s. In the mid- and late ‘80s, Tosh explored world music, house and dance mixes at his own Tokyo club, Pithecanthropus erectus.

Today, the Major Force posse includes MC Kan and his crew Tiny Panx (“Punk Inc.”), a female rap duo called the Orchids, Tycoon Tosh and his Terminator Troops, ragamuffin artist Chappie (who played Harlem’s Apollo Theater in New York last year) and Sexy TKO, billed as “after hours homeboys homegirls lovemaking sexy music.” For the last two years, the posse has headed to the New Music Seminar in New York to debut its newest sounds.

The Tokyo sound machine has its work cut out for it at home. Tosh says it’s hard to rap in Japanese--there aren’t many rhyming words. And while Major Force artists have achieved a small cult following among some London DJs, Tosh says most Japanese kids today still prefer American rap to Tokyo home-grown.

Eventually, predicts one cynical Major Force aficionado, Japanese kids who follow London and U.S. alternative music scenes almost fanatically will hear about Major Force artists from the West. At that point, Japanese-generated hip-hop will find a larger audience at home.

For now though, the Major Force label is saying it loud: I’m Japanese and I’m proud.

“We gotta have a label that can out-put our contribution toward the new music movements,” Tosh says, “and not simply consume Western in-put. “

----

“Japanese are treated by their school system and their superiors in the way a landscape gardener treats a hedge; protruding bits of the personality are regularly snipped off.”

--Karel van Wolferen in

“The Enigma of Japanese Power”

Despite its outward social harmony, Japan can be an oppressive and alienating place for those who don’t fit in. Deep undercurrents of anger and frustration pulse below the surface and explode occasionally. Last month, for instance, disenfranchised youths and day laborers in a seedy district of Osaka staged several days of rioting that led to burning, looting, 55 arrests and 186 injuries.

Those who follow youth culture say a backlash is growing against the conformist Japanese culture and its 15-hour workdays. While it’s unclear how large their ranks are, young people are beginning to drop out of their over-programmed society, working odd jobs for spare cash, tripling up in tiny apartments and spending their free time making music and hanging out. The Japanese call them “freeters.”

“Now we have many, many freeters over 25 and 30 years of age,” says Yukawa, who has chronicled the music scene in Japan for more than 30 years. “They don’t want to work hard and join a good company.”

While many freeters will probably live out their fantasies for a few years, then swap their tinted locks and rebel gear for short hair and a business suit, new ones take their place. The freeter phenomenon fuels the estimated 10,000 bands that play at hundreds of “Live Houses” throughout Tokyo each night.

There is a pervasive sense, when talking to young, self-aware Japanese today, that they are held in check by society as surely as young Eastern Europeans and Soviets until recently were denied self-expression by their governments. While the punk movement certainly isn’t new to Japan, the wistful search for identity has introduced a new dimension, one that roots bands such as Shang Shang Typhoon may be able to tap into: Despite their embrace of Western trends and musical styles, freeters seem to be searching for something that Western music can’t provide.

“Japanese young people today have too much cultural information, too much money,” says Sakanishi, who hires freeters as extras for his music videos. “We have nothing happening here. We’re too satisfied. And satisfaction makes people stupid.”

Many creative people believe the antidote lies in rediscovering their Japanese heritage. “We’ve got to keep looking for our roots,” Tycoon Tosh says. “I think young bands should be more like Shang Shang Typhoon or Tama. It’s better than copying the Rolling Stones.”

Concerned Japanese say it’s time for Japan to pay better attention to world issues. And one topic that resonates loudly in this nation that reveres homes and items made of wood is the destruction of the Amazon rain forest.

In the song “Greenhouse Effect,” Tycoon Tosh examines his culpability as a Japanese consumer:

“I went to the noodle shop

I use disposable chopsticks, stick, tick

Wondering where it came from

You know, it came from New Guinea, it came from the Amazon

Oh no, red zone, the rain forest is dying, crying, cuz somebody’s buying

Economic animal in the rain forest.”

Japan is looking east for its inspiration, to Asia. Japan is tired of copying the West. One hears that over and over again today when talking to artists, designers and musicians.

“I’d like to remind people that there is a traditional culture,” says Shang Shang Typhoon guitarist Kohryu, which means “Red Dragon.” “We’re trying to raise Japanese consciousness.”

Or consider Elephant Kashimashi, whose 22-year-old lead singer wails in an anguished, post-punk style. Kashimashi writes in a style of poetic, old Japanese that dates back 400 years and isn’t even spoken any longer:

The wind of this world is so heavy

But I go on fighting

The lonely wind of this ephemeral world

Begins telling on me

It begins penetrating my skin

And it’s hard for me to look so composed

But we should be free men. Right?

With Japan’s militaristic history, the resurgence of strong cultural awareness brings up specters of nationalism. When asked about this however, most of the rap and roots artists working today say their goal is just the opposite: They want internationalism and a reckoning with Japan’s role in World War II.

“In education here, we never teach the kids what we did to other Asian people during the war, and that’s a big problem,” says Motoharu Sano, a 33-year-old rock star with a social conscience whose records sell 300,000 copies each. “If you pretend not to notice what is happening in the world, there will be new violence.”

Sano, who has written a song for a record he hopes to make with Sean and Yoko Ono next year called “Asian Flowers,” alludes to his conflicting feelings about Japan’s aggressive military actions during World War II in a song called “Shame”:

“Coercion

Plunder

Ouster

Malice

Domination

It’s a shame

It is wrong

Or it’s not wrong

Don’t wanna hurt anybody

Don’t wanna be hurt by anybody.”

The 10-year musical evolution of the band Qujila also mirrors this soul-searching. A decade ago, the band played Western-style rock. Then they moved to acoustic and Japanese folk music. Later they got into funk and reggae. Now their music is a pastiche of them all.

“We had been suffering a lack of identity in our music so we started playing old Japanese-style folk songs and pre-World War II Japanese popular songs,” says Qujila bassist Kioto Tanahashi, 33. “It was exotic for us. We called it ‘rehabilly’ music.”

Qujila guitarist and lead singer Sugibayashi says their inspiration came from childhood lullabies and Japanese mythology.

“I want to see spirits in our city,” he says. “I want to use TV and video to create a new folklore. Old but new spirits live in our cities and our TVs and of course in our music.”

Sugibayashi sits, with almost preternatural calm, sipping green tea in a recording studio. He wears a purple and black striped shirt, baggy red pants that tie at the ankles and shamrock green topsiders. Shyly, he smiles.

“When we were younger, we wanted to be like Americans and we fought against our spiritual heritage,” Sugibayashi says. “At that time, it was a big deal to take a trip to a foreign country. Now it’s very easy to take a trip abroad but it’s much more difficult to take a spiritual trip, a trip inside.

“We’ve been given many presents from Western culture,” he says quietly. “Now it’s our turn to give something back.”