Japanese Rockers in Shades of Gray

Toru Shioiri pauses to catch his breath while he adjusts the strap on his electric bass guitar, drawing laughter from his band mates -- who are wheezing just as much.

The Tora-no-ana band has finished only its fourth song -- the Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove” -- at the Shibuya Gakki music shop in Tokyo, and they already look exhausted.

“Hey, this is an event for old men,” Shioiri, 45, jokes to the few dozen spectators. “We need oxygen breaks.”

Shioiri and his mates might feel a little long in the tooth to be sweating out Cream medleys and Eagles tunes on stage, but they are riding a growing wave on the Japanese music scene -- the middle-aged amateur rock band.

Concerts featuring older-guy bands -- known in Japanese as oyaji bands -- are increasingly popular, with support coming from music equipment makers, cable music TV, and department stores and other businesses hoping to attract new customers.

The boom in older amateur bands signals the musical coming of age of the generation that grew up to the sounds of the ‘60s and ‘70s, then dropped their dreams of a rock ‘n’ roll life to put in hard hours for corporate Japan.

But with the approach of middle age or even retirement, those dreams have resurfaced -- and Japan’s increasingly gray crowd is plugging in its amps again.

“In recent years, we’ve gone from holding the event once a year with maybe a band of 60-year-olds ... to running it monthly with three or four bands of people in their 40s to 60s playing all types of rock and pop,” said Gen Fukushima, sound engineer at Shibuya Gakki.

Middle-agers eager to climb the stage again are finding conditions inviting.

There are more older people in Japan these days. The country’s record low birth rate means the median age is in the low 40s. Graying would-be rockers also have a lot more money to buy that long-wanted pricey Gibson Les Paul guitar than they did at 16.

They also find they have more time than they did in their corporate ladder-climbing days of their 20s and 30s.

“The topic of conversation has changed at my high school reunions,” said Seinosuke Kohno, a 49-year-old bassist for a group that won a prize at an oyaji band contest last year.

“At my 20th, it was all about promotions at work,” said Kohno, who is a government bureaucrat by day. “At my 30th, though, all we were interested in was what we do to relax.”

The Internet is also playing a role in bringing people together.

The Tora-no-ana band met through a Web-based automobile fan club, then members realized they shared an obsession with music, said Satoshi Suzuki, a 42-year-old systems engineer who founded the band last year and plays lead guitar.

Among businesses hoping to see the trend turn into sales, music equipment manufacturer Roland Corp. linked up with Music On! TV, a cable television station, to co-sponsor a festival last year -- the one in which Kohno’s band won a prize.

Though sales may have been a driving force for the Tokyo-based Music On!, another factor was at work: oyaji solidarity. The station’s president and the program’s producer are in their mid-50s; so is the owner of the nightclub hosting the festival.

“They’re the same age as a lot of the people in these bands, so they wanted to lend them a hand,” said Sotaro Otani, vice president of programming at Music On! TV. “It gave these bands a chance to play on the same stage where the pros perform.”

Age provides plenty of grist for jokes between numbers. Shioiri introduced Tora-no-ana’s members at Shibuya Gakki by listing their instrument and the various ailments each member supposedly suffered from.

The genres these bands play run the gamut, including note-for-note covers of favorite Western or Japanese rock songs, their own arrangements of folk or jazz fusion numbers, and original compositions.

Though oyaji players have followed the careers of stars such as Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney into their 60s, they’re not imitating their heroes. Japan’s older musicians see music mainly as an outlet for expression and enjoyment they might not have otherwise.

“I didn’t think I would still be playing music at this age,” said Tora-no-ana keyboardist Masahisa Okuda, 38, the band’s youngest member.

“If I didn’t have this band, I might have wound up being a depressed and boring man spending my free time sitting in a bar somewhere.”