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Not East Not West, Not Old Not New: Trends and Genres in Japanese Popular Music
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16527 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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11 / 1989 |
4,030 Words |
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James Stanlaw
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The radio station called itself KIDS Radio. It caught my attention because it was English. Sort of, at least, sometimes. This was something…well, something that I knew well but, at the same time, something very different.
KIDS Radio, in Aoyama, Japan, was not a full-fledged professional station and was certainly not the famous FEN (Far East Network) broadcast by the U.S. armed forces and listened to everyone to catch the latest hits from America. KIDS only transmitted a rather weak signal during weekend afternoons, and its personnel consisted of young, college-age Japanese who called each other by Americanized first names or nicknames: Karen "Cutie Pie" Ushijima, Mike "Dance-able" Fujiwara, "Candy" Ohtomo.
The station name presumably was based on the America custom of assigning K-prefaced call letters to broadcasting transmitters west of the Mississippi. The music played was a 1960s Southern California sound; some of the songs were unabashed copies of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and other similar types of American music, altered in only a minor way.
But what was most amazing was that these KIDS kids did not just want to play surf 'n' roll records. They wanted to create a whole new milieu, based on images connected to Western music. The KIDS Radio people have tried to alter conceptions of their immediate environment in various ways. For example, they have "renamed" many geographic features close to the station, including several of the main streets running through the business district (e.g., Raspberry Ave., Flamingo St., and Epstein St.). This imagery is also used in their advertising slogans and bumper stickers, such as "Ride on raspberry sound with surf 'n' snow!" (a common image that refers to playing on the beach or skiing in the mountains).
The phenomenon of KIDS Radio is but one example of the widespread influence of American and European pop music, especially rock and roll, in Japan today. Western pop is played together with Japanese music on every Top 40 radio station. Obviously listeners are aware that Madonna is American and Mattchi is home grown, but this does not preclude the two being played on the same program. In fact, even before MTV really caught on in the United States, Kobayashi Katsuya was playing the latest music videos from America on his Countdown USA television program on Saturday nights in Tokyo. Kobayashi speaks impeccable English and can do an almost perfect imitation of the famous California disc jockey Wolfman Jack.
Certain foreign genres can also be more popular in Japan than they are in their own countries. The Japanese buy twice as many jazz records as do Americans, and the number of new releases, as well as the reissuing of older unknown and classic recordings, is truly amazing. Each time I go to Japan, my American friends give me lists of (American) jazz records to buy that can only be obtained there. Currently, Japanese CD companies are in the process of reissuing whole catalogs of blues and jazz labels such as Blue Note or Chess. Western classical music is also quite popular; again, more popular than in the United States.
It is said that almost any group from the United States will be loved in Japan and that their Tokyo concerts will always sell out. And some Japanese musicians have also told me that some Japanese feel musically inferior to Westerners.
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