One of the rewards of listening to the Gold(en oldies) on J1 Radio is hearing covers of songs you never expected. Flash back to the late 1950s and early 1960s when Japan's television stations were first going on the air. They licensed Hollywood productions to fill in the program schedules.

Westerns were a staple on American television at the time, and so the genre naturally became a staple on Japanese television. Rawhide was a big hit. During a February 1962 publicity tour, Clint Eastwood, Paul Brinegar, and Eric Fleming met the Japanese press at the Palace Hotel in Tokyo.


It was only a matter of time before Japanese musicians began performing Western music and rockabilly. Kazuya Kosaka & The Wagon Masters not only covered the hits but reinterpreted them as well.

Here's Kosaku's version of "Rawhide."


And his cover of "Jailhouse Rock."


Kazuya Kosaka (1935–1997) is better remembered today in Japan for his long career in movies and television.


There are also J1 Radio apps for Roku, Android, and iPhone.

Labels: japan, japanese culture, japanese tv, music, radio

I mentioned hassha tunes last week. These are the melodies played on train platforms in Japan that signal a train's departure. It's a nice way to hurry people along without ringing a loud bell or blaring a klaxon.

These tunes are particular to the train line and the station. A more universal melodic alarm is played at crosswalks to indicate when pedestrians have the right of way. Japanese are not ones to cross against the light.

Toryanse (通りゃんせ) is a traditional Japanese nursery rhyme (comparable to London Bridge is Falling Down). If you spend any amount of time in Japan, you will hear it. A lot. That pentatonic scale will soak into your brain.

Here is a vocal rendition of the traditional song.


If that's not melancholy enough, here is the actual MIDI melody that is played at crosswalks. Think of it as a kind of mental cattle prod to herd you out of harm's way before the light changes. Very Pavlovian, me thinks.


This crosswalk in Mitaka in Tokyo alternates Toryanse with the cheerier Comin' Thro' the Rye (which in Japan is well known as "The Sky over My Home Town").

Labels: japan, japanese culture, music, social studies, transportation

Train culture in Japan is so ubiquitous, so deeply entrenched, and so widely embraced that every time a line opens up or closes down, a new model of Shinkansen debuts or an old one goes out of production, a swarm of reporters show up and the fans turn out in force.


There is a whole genre of reality show on Japanese television that simply involves the host (and a couple of friends) hopping on a train and going somewhere. Japan Railway Journey is a good example. Episodes can be streamed (in English) at NHK World.

You can famously set your watch by a train's arrival time in Japan. But the engineering goes beyond the mechanical and reaches right into your head. CityLab describes the psychology behind what you hear over the loudspeakers.

Also known as departure or train melodies, hassha tunes are brief, calming and distinct; their aim is to notify commuters of a train's imminent departure without inducing anxiety. To that end, most melodies are composed to an optimal length of seven seconds, owing to research showing that shorter-duration melodies work best at reducing passenger stress and rushing incidents, as well as taking into account the time needed for a train to arrive and depart.

Thanks to the Internet, you don't have to go to Japan to hear them. The Sound of Station website has collected arrival/departure announcements from around the country, in some (not all) cases accompanied by the aforementioned hassha tunes.

You don't need to understand Japanese to navigate the site. Just click away. But to narrow it down a bit, here are the Japan Railway stations. Japan National Railway was split up and privatized in 1987 like Ma Bell but the distinction remains.

And here are the private railway stations (more hassha tunes in use here).

Labels: japan, japanese culture, music, nhk world, transportation

As I observe in my review of Frozen,

"Let it go" sounds like an anthem for the self-esteem movement. Except that, by the end, it's clear that Elsa "being herself" will kill her sister and destroy her kingdom. Elsa doesn't need to "let it go." She badly needs to get over herself.

Actually, it's worse than that. Strip away the family-friendly Disney animation and the lyrics read more like an anarchic scream.

It's time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me,
I'm free!

Hey, there's a nurturing moral code for all you youngsters out there! Nothing against Idina Menzel, but this cover by the goofy and talented Leo Moracchioli better fits the substance of what is actually being said.


What kid doesn't want to believe that the rules apply to everybody but himself? Except these days too many adults are singing that song as well. Yeah, we all do it. But let's not pretend it's a good thing.

Labels: anime, movies, music

As I discussed last week, Popular Mechanics recently explained "Why You Can't Remember What Modern Movies Sound Like." My first reaction to the implicit challenge in that question was that I can sure remember what Chihayafuru sounds like.

I'm not just referring to an anime's opening (OP) and ending (ED) themes, though they are integral to the anime soundscape. The job of the OP and ED isn't just to keep your attention during the credit roll. They are key elements in marketing and promoting both the artist and the anime.

And perhaps most importantly, the OP establishes a mood and ambience that can fine-tune the genre before the story even starts. Think of how the Law & Order theme, together with the famous "doink-doink/thunk-thunk" sound effect, ties the whole franchise together.

In the Non Non Biyori OP, "Nanairo Biyori," Nano Ripe sounds just like Kotori Koiwai, the voice actor who plays Renge. Renge is a kind of Calvin & Hobbes character whose off-the-wall approach to life establishes the goofy yet endearing tone of the series.


At the other end of the emotional spectrum is Kalafina's dark and gothic "Magia" for Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The message is clear: this is not going to be just another cute magical girl anime.

And as far as ending themes go, Katsu Hoshi's arrangement of "The Rose" that closes out Only Yesterday revisits Bette Midler's Grammy-winning song (performed by Harumi Miyako) with a heartfelt interpretation quite apart from its original use in the 1979 Hollywood movie.

It's a perfect ending with the perfect musical accompaniment.

Chihayafuru does have a memorable OP ("Youthful" by 99RadioService), and an OP you like listening to is a nice reward when you're binge-watching a series. But when I say I remember what Chihayafuru sounds like, I mean the actual soundtrack.

First of all, though I'm sure the whole thing is rendered digitally, composer Kousuke Yamashita goes for a traditional classical orchestral sound (it's getting hard to tell the difference). Second, he develops a simple theme that comes to represent the entire emotional spectrum of the series.

Now, themes can go wrong. "The same only different" is the goal, not endless repetition.

Hikaru no Go suffers a bit from this. The "competition" theme is played on an electric guitar fed through a harmonizer with some backing percussion. That's not the problem. The problem is that the exact same riff is simply repeated in every big scene with no variation.

I suspect this was a budget thing, as it's a fairly low budget production (still a great story!). But it gets samey after a while, not evocative. (The matches of veteran players get more classical-sounding tracks, which are more effective.)

However, when done right, that "same only different" can really bury itself inside your brain. In a good way! The classic James Bond theme is a good example of a musical theme fully integrated into the cinematic narrative and all the more effective because of its familiarity.

Consider the first four notes of Beethoven's 5th symphony. Or the five notes from Close Encounters that John Williams builds into the soundtrack. For Chihayafuru, Yamashita starts with five notes too. By the time he was done, I was feeling like one of Pavlov's rats.

In a good way!

These five notes, revisited in hints, whispers, and variations, with different arrangements and instrumentation, trigger our brains to automatically recall the emotional cues we've already associated with them and prepare the brain for more of the same.

The soundtrack is available from Yes Asia.

Yes, this is "cheating," as Patrick Doyle's score to Kenneth Branagh's Henry V was described by one critic.

Except movies are all about manipulating the senses. The question is whether we enjoy being fooled or end up feeling conned. Every time we hit the play button, we are giving the director the same challenge Penn & Teller make every week to their magical contestants: Fool Us!

A good movie soundtrack is a magic wand that makes the fooling all the more enjoyable.

Related posts

Hearing what you see
Chihayafuru
Kalafina
Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Labels: anime, chihayafuru, movies, music, social studies, technology

Over at Popular Mechanics, Avery Thompson explains "Why You Can't Remember What Modern Movies Sound Like." Or rather, he presents the following arguments from the "Every Frame a Painting" blog and Dan Golding.



The former begins with man-on-the-street interviews, asking if anybody can hum a few bars from Star Wars. Everybody can. But what about the theme from any blockbuster Marvel movie made in the last decade?

Nobody can.

The culprit in this case is the "temp track." While a movie is being edited and the music is still being composed, the director uses excerpts from
existing compositions, often movie soundtracks, as stand-ins for what he expects the final product to sound like. Then he tells the composer: "I want it to sound like this only different."

When The Simpsons sets out to parody a musical but doesn't want to pay the royalties, the composer (usually Alf Clausen) will arrange melodies that are different enough legally while still being completely recognizable.

Similarly, many temp tracks end up sounding like the finished version. And some careless directors even forget about the "different" part and end up using the original temp track "by mistake." Either way, the result is an utter lack of originality.

Then again, counters Dan Golding, maybe not. Artists borrow from each other all the time. Or as Picasso (and Steve Jobs) put it, "Great artists steal." For Star Wars, John Williams borrowed from classical composers like Holst and the scores from old Hollywood westerns. Golding instead points to non-linear editing as the root cause.

Instead of a composition composed for an entire cinematic work, soundtracks can be created and performed digitally, and inserted in discrete units: five seconds here, ten seconds there. The soundtrack thus becomes another sound effect, creating mood and ambience with orchestrated sound, not telling a story through melody.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Then again, memorable movie soundtracks that spring to my mind do often predate the fully digitized non-linear era that came of age in the mid-1990s. Along with Star Wars (1977) by John Williams, Patrick Doyle's Henry V (1989) and Last of the Mohicans (1992) by Randy Edelman and Trevor Jones.

Chariots of Fire (1981) and Blade Runner (1982) by Vangelis were unique in being mostly digital scores that mostly predated non-linear editing.

On the other hand, the music in the original Star Trek television series is, well, "noisy." And it was orchestrated the old-fashioned way. Yes, the opening theme is timeless, but the stuff in the middle is often too loud and intrusive, manipulative and simply redundant.

Given the choice, I'll take the minimalist mood-shaping approach, music that creates ambience without encouraging you to pick up a baton or choreograph a marching band, even it means composers aren't using all the emotional arrows in their musical quivers.

Producers have concluded that if they're not making a musical or doing the American Graffiti thing, where the movie accompanies the soundtrack, less is more. And most of the time, they're right.

But that sorely lessens the chance of a composer and director coming up with the perfect combination that hits you right in the emotional solar plexus. As with Patrick Doyle's score, slowly building beneath Kenneth Branagh's Saint Crispian's Day speech, the right movie music has the power to raise a scene to a state of transcendence.


And speaking of borrowing from the classics, here is Bill Pullman's "Saint Crispian on the Fourth of July" speech from Independence Day. You won't remember the music but it heightens the impact of the words without overpowering them.

Labels: art, criticism, movies, music, technology

The Galapagos syndrome refers to technological solutions native to Japan that evolved in relative isolation and with little external competition, and thus ended up incompatible with the rest of the world. Cell phones and ATMs, for example. Infrastructure mods and retrofits hope to insure that, come the 2020 Olympics, visitors can make phone calls and withdraw cash with their Apple gizmos.

But there is a positive definition that can be drawn from Darwin's observation of a species diversifying to fill every available ecological niche. I'm thinking here specifically of the way that art finds an audience, and specifically art that strives to be popular or at least "accessible."

There's the "big dinosaur" approach: put all your eggs into one basket and watch that basket. But there's only so much room at the top. Even before a wayward asteroid wipes out the big guys, a lot of little critters are scampering around in the undergrowth, making nests in tight and overlooked places, doing well in marginal environments that could never support the lumbering giants.

New York and Hollywood are giants in publishing and movie making, not only in the U.S. but around the world. No asteroids on the horizon. Well, Amazon is a pretty big rock, but as the whole self-publishing scene is proving, as long as you avoid getting stomped on, it's much easier for the little, furry animals to be everywhere the giant isn't.

Self-publishing has been alive and well in Japan for decades, in the doujinshi (self-published manga) market. Doujinshi made Comiket the biggest comic book convention in the world.

Despite the healthy amount of fan fiction involved, Japanese publishers generally refrain from pursuing copyright claims on not-for-profit IP, instead using doujinshi as the minor league teams of manga world and Comiket as the playoffs. The broad acceptance of manga as a literary form has kept the young adult book market in Japan alive despite the slumping population.

Manga attracts talent from across the spectrum, with a lot of cross-pollination. As with anime, low production costs (first-run broadcast and publishing rights break-even at best) mean that publishers can target smaller niches and experiment with marginal projects without breaking the bank. (I don't mean vanity projects where the editor is thinking "Newbery" and not "a good read.")

In other words, playing "small ball"—getting base hits—instead of trying to smack a home run every time at bat.

Tie-ins are famous in Hollywood, but in Japan they're a necessity: novels based on manga; manga based on novels, manga artists illustrating novels; television and movies based on novels and manga, fiction and non-fiction, in every imaginable genre. The anime series A Certain Magical Index alone has generated over 30 novels and spin-offs (Yen Press has picked up the print license).

In an odd but revealing way, there's an upside-down and backwards version of this at work in the U.S. market vis-à-vis Japanese media. The Japanese movie titles available on Netflix, for example, might suggest that all Japanese watch are perennial classics by a handful of directors (mostly Kurosawa), Studio Ghibli, schlock horror, budget samurai actioners, and exploitation flicks.

That's because either these titles have built-in audiences (thanks to John Lasseter, Ghibli films have no problem attracting Hollywood talent to do voice-overs), or, at the other end of the spectrum, can be licensed for dirt cheap because they're not worth much in Japan either.

Otherwise, Hollywood is so dominate that if GKids or Disney aren't interested, "general interest" family films like The Perfect World of Kai and The House Imp and The Great Passage end up nowhere to be found. The best-selling novel of 2014 in Japan was a YA adventure title: Daughter of the Murakami Pirates. It hasn't been licensed in the U.S.

The Japanese publisher doesn't want to license the IP for a song (and risk a quick and shoddy translation on top of that), and no American publisher yet wants to risk the investment.

The only way to make it work is to zero out the upfront costs. Digital Manga has been trying this approach with some success (although with "minor league" IP). The anime industry is heading in that direction in the streaming space. Publishers could likewise release titles directly as ebooks and cut out the middleman completely. In fact, emanga are currently more popular in Japan than ebooks.

Unfortunately, when it comes to digital, the big publishers in Tokyo are determined to stick their heads in the sand as firmly as the big publishers in New York. Observes Jason Thompson,

Most Japanese publishers have no coherent digital strategy, and the extra step of licensing them in America makes them even slower to react to change. Perhaps wary of creating an iTunes-like behemoth which could drive prices down, publishers haven't united in any reasonable way to create a consistent digital newsstand/bookstore format for their titles.

Welcome to the club. The bitter pill to swallow is that properties worth tens of millions in Japan are worth tens of thousands in the U.S. The music industry in Japan is only begrudgingly beginning to accept that fact. As Justin Sevakis notes:

The Japanese music industry is both ridiculously luddite, and ruled by thuggish talent agencies with delusions of worldwide grandeur. They want to hold back their precious artists from America until they're ready to make a big splashy debut, but when they do, they refuse to play ball with American media and expect their completely unknown artists to be able to throw their weight around like they do back home.

Little by little, legit DRM-free tracks from established Japanese artists are appearing outside the walled garden of iTunes-Japan. The upside of Japan's declining consumer base is the realization that something is better than nothing and thus the inevitable need to grow outside the home market. And there's always Amazon waiting in the wings to shake things up.

The model here is what Crunchyroll did a while back when it streamed all of Makoto Shinkai's films for a weekend. Because before the world can clamor for your product, it has to at least know it exists.

Labels: anime, business, gkids, japanese culture, manga, movies, music, publishing, shinkai

If you like Enya, then Enya times three (in Japanese) gets you Kalafina, a trio that performs New Age/pop rock in three-part harmony. Recently on Studio Park they extemporaneously sang the first verse of "Storia" a capella. Very talented.

I heard about them on Historia, an entertaining documentary series on NHK that explores the lesser-known turning points and quirkier aspects of Japanese history. Kalafina does the opening and closing songs ("Storia" and "Far on the Water").

Outside Japan, Kalafina is better known for the more metal "Magia," the ending song from Madoka Magica (their best-selling single in Japan too).

Kalafina's albums are available from Amazon. The digital downloads are reasonably priced; I hope this bespeaks a trend for music from Japan.

Labels: anime, japanese culture, japanese tv, music, nhk

When it comes to hard rock and metal, I really like about 10 percent of it 10 percent of the time. AXS shows Def Leppard Viva Hysteria Live on a regular basis. I think I've seen the whole thing by now, though not at one sitting. It's an experience best taken episodically. And some of those episodes are pretty good.

I place DragonForce in the same category. Fine fare in small doses.

Forging close ties to the video gaming universe, DragonForce consciously fashioned itself into the soundtrack of pop SF&F: pure pulp delivered in a hyper-digital medium. They're the 21st century version of Boston, doing with software what Boston founder (and MIT grad) Tom Scholz did with analog electronics in the late 1970s.

I respect talented artists who hone their craft while resisting the siren call of solemnity. DragonForce features dual lead guitarists with extraordinary skills. They take themselves seriously enough to create the best product they're capable of, but not so seriously they spoil the effort in the name of "art."

As far as I can tell, DragonForce aspires to be the musical equivalent of the syndicated science fiction franchises that pack 'em in at conventions, conventions that no high-brow critic would dare set foot in. Good for them: we need more producers of high-quality camp.

Consider the Castle episode in which an actor who owes her fame to a schlocky SF series now wants to (literally) kill her past. The Oscar-nominated Birdman has Michael Keaton essentially playing himself as Hollywood action hero trying to reclaim his "art" on Broadway. Moral of both stories: no good comes from angsty artists.

On the other hand, we have wonderful nostalgia of Galaxy Quest. Being a pop-culture star is a literal adventure! As Leonard Nimoy discovered, there's nothing wrong with being Spock.

DragonForce came to my attention because guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totem cut a track with with Japanese metal-band-slash-idol-group Babymetal. It's hard to take seriously a metal band whose members aren't old enough to drive. But true artists can do silly stuff just because it's a hoot and everybody goes away smiling.


"Heroes of Our Time" is quintessential Dragonforce, hitting every tried and true meme right on the head, and doing it with exquisite skill. Like I said, it's the kind of thing that just makes me grin.


Power anthems don't get any more power anthemy than "A Flame for Freedom": the chords alone practically write the script for the next big-budget space opera, with Will Smith saving the world in the final reel.

Labels: japanese culture, music, pop culture, science fiction

No, analog music playback technology isn't "better" than digital. Dylan Matthews points out in Vox that the "warmness" of vinyl is a byproduct of the noise, bandwidth limitations, and mechanical dampening that playing a record involves.

A record needle is shaken back and forth many thousands of times a second to produce a piezoelectric or electromagnetic signal (it's a little electrical generator). Without artificial filtering known as "RIAA equalization," the needle would jump all over the record.

Add to that the noise produced by the motor and bearings spinning the record. "Vinyl" reproduces music by dragging a needle down a groove of serrated plastic. Okay, not fingernails across a blackboard but the same basic concept. It's amazing that it works as well as it does.

The same audio illusion is promulgated by vacuum tube amplifier buffs. The "warmness" of a vacuum tube circuit is a byproduct of the electrical noise (hum) and dampening that are an inevitably byproduct of the electronics and can never be eliminated.

Even with expensively-filtered filament current, you can never get rid of the thermal noise. Isolating the plate voltage (to keep the listener from being electrocuted) requires big transformers that also effectively filter out any high-frequency overtones.

I'm totally down with the assertion that it makes for a great sound, but there's nothing "natural" about it. (The same goes for "organic" food.) As Matthews puts it, "[Vinyl and digital] sound different, and that's exactly the point."

Christopher Montgomery explores in more rigorous scientific terms what Matthews is saying (and shows why Matthews had to correct his article to state that digital recordings do, in fact, replicate the whole audio wave). "Better" digital quality often isn't:

Neither audio transducers nor power amplifiers are free of distortion, and distortion tends to increase rapidly at the lowest and highest frequencies. If the same transducer reproduces ultrasonics along with audible content, any nonlinearity will shift some of the ultrasonic content down into the audible range as an uncontrolled spray of intermodulation distortion products covering the entire audible spectrum.

The quality of digital converters does make a difference, and have improved dramatically in the past decade. But just as a professional can take a good picture with a cheap camera and high-end equipment won't help a talentless amateur, the human element matters a lot.

The human element is really what this whole debate comes down to. Stuart Andrews pops a hole in the balloon of our sunk cost-inflated egos. At the end of the day, what investing the big bucks in high-quality MP3 players and headphones can really do is

give you more convincing arguments as to why one version sounded better than the other. In effect, they had better tools with which to convince themselves that their subjective impressions were correct, even when those impressions were entirely misleading.

Convince people to pay more for an object with the same performance specs and they'll value it more because of the sunk costs, the replacement costs, the invested self-image, and the good opinion of their fellow devotees. This is otherwise known as Apple's business plan.

And, yes, it's also true that the price/quality curve is generally positive. Though when it comes to modern electronics, the curve flattens out much closer to the low end than to the high end. Which is why you can get a decent LCD HDTV for $120.

Labels: music, science, social studies, technology

As previously mentioned, singer Aska's arrest for meth possession had the silver lining of reminding Hayao Miyazaki fans of a music video he directed for Chage & Aska back in 1995. Alas, this flurry of publicity resulted in the video getting pulled from an upcoming box set.

The video was originally released with two Chage & Aska tracks: "On Your Mark" (Japanese lyrics) and "Castles in the Air" (English lyrics). "Castles in the Air" strikes me as much more relevant to the specific content and was probably written with the video in mind.

Miyazaki tells a complete story, albeit in a non-linear fashion. There are echoes of Castle in the Sky and the flying gunships go back to his first Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and even Blade Runner (that had a profound effect on the anime aesthetic).

Perhaps most tellingly, in the opening sequence of Nausicaa, a similar girl with wings appears in the "prophesy scroll."


All fused with the time-rewind plot device that dominates the Tom Cruise sci-fi flick, Edge of Tomorrow. (Incidentally, Edge of Tomorrow is based on All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, illustrations by Yoshitoshi ABe. Yes, there is an official translation.)

It's tempting to interpret the opening sequence in the video as a commentary on the March 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult and the subsequent police raids. But production of the video had already been completed by then.

In this interview, Miyazaki points to the 1989 Chernobyl meltdown (the massive sarcophagus looming above the abandoned town). He would have been aware of the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. (If it bleeds in the U.S., it leads in Japan too.)

Of course, Occam's Razor also suggests that Miyazaki stitched the script together with whatever spare narrative parts were lying around at the time. He admits to sifting through the lyrics and making them mean what he wanted them to mean.

But for those of us who delight in deconstructing pop-culture sci-fi texts (regardless of authorial intent), you can find a summary of the story here and way too much analysis here.

There are several versions of the video floating around the Internet. You can find versions of "On Your Mark" on YouTube. Even if you don't understand Japanese (and frankly that doesn't help much either), it's a heckuva performance.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, criticism, miyazaki, music, personal favs

The two social upheavals that ushered Japan into the modern age—the Meiji Restoration (1868) and the Occupation (1945-1952)—were imposed upon and accepted by the populace with such efficiency and acquiescence that the existing status quo was never truly displaced.

It simply stepped to the side to make room for yet another political order, as it had several times before. The result is a society simultaneously running multiple operating systems, a living paradox that few Japanese feel compelled to settle or resolve.

The traditional adorns the post-modern, the very old lives beside the very new, with no fear of the one displacing the other. Japan's economy presents a model of "flattened" capitalism dreamed of by Piketty and his peers, that at the same time preserves the baked-in social stratification left over from 250 years of Tokugawa rule.

Extreme permissiveness thrives alongside extraordinary conformity. In a society that at times appears devoid of moral limits, a police force with almost unfettered powers ruthlessly enforces the lines that must not be crossed. With few checks and balances, the accused are presumed guilty until predictably found guilty.

The most recent case of a crossed line is Ryo Aska, the "Aska" (on the right) in the popular rock duo of Chage & Aska. When he got busted last month for possession of ecstasy and meth, the boom was lowered on him like a battered ram.


It's a case that might bring to mind the travails of Robert Downey Jr. from a decade or so ago. Except that when Robert Downey Jr. ended up behind bars, Walmart didn't immediately sweep the shelves clean of any movie or television series in which he had ever appeared for fear that his sins would taint their good name.

Aska should be so lucky if he only had to worry about the ire of the retailers. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

Chage and Aska's label, Universal Music LLC, released a statement Monday saying it would halt shipments of all of the duo's works and retrieve all previously distributed products from stores.

Yes, there is such a thing as bad publicity. The way the Japanese media treats it—including the stolid NHK—you'd think Eliot Ness just nabbed Al Capone (and all before any formal indictment or arraignment). Michael Cucek sees this laissez-faire-meets-iron-fist approach as part of a nationwide scared-straight strategy:

By selectively, infrequently, but mercilessly applying themselves to cases, the police and the courts [in Japan] create strong incentives for the citizens to police themselves . . . Tak[ing] note of what happens to those who become trapped in the pit of the law (don't call it "justice") system, [they] will strive, of their own volition, to never, ever become trapped in that system themselves.

On the other hand, do keep in mind the words "selectively and "infrequently." The incarceration rate in Japan is 55/100,000 population, compared to 149/100,000 in Britain and 716/100,000 in the U.S. Unless he's an idiot, Aska is unlikely to do "hard time."

A silver lining briefly glimmered as the scandal brought to light the obscure "On Your Mark" music video Hayao Miyazaki created for Chage & Aska back in 1995. But it only came to light because the release of a box set of Miyazaki's films was delayed so—you guessed it—the offending title could be removed from the collection.

Appropriately penitent.

If Ryo Aska is a good boy and plays according to the script, he'll eventually be rehabilitated. Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, a member of the aging boy band SMAP, could give him some pointers. Back in 2009, Kusanagi was arrested in Tokyo's Hinokicho Park at three in the morning, drunk as a skunk and buck naked.

Kusanagi only had to spend a month in the wilderness. He donned the requisite sackcloth and ashes and "Tokyo prosecutors decided against indicting Kusanagi because he had expressed regret and had already suffered social embarrassment."

Aska, however, is accused of a more serious felony. Robert Downey Jr. ended up sentenced to an "extended stay in rehab." Aska can at best hope to follow the example of singer Noriko Sakai.

In August 2009, Sakai received a three-year suspended sentence for drug abuse (a tiny amount of meth). Even before sentencing, she had lost all of her endorsement deals, her clothing line was pulled from stores across Japan, and her record label withdrew her CDs from distribution and suspended downloads of her songs.

Her entertainment career didn't resume until November 2012.

Right now, the big decision before Aska is making the carefully-timed transition from proclaiming his innocence to bowing and scraping and publicly atoning for his personal failings. And then figuring out what to do until he can start working gigs again.

Related posts

On Your Mark
Lawyering up
Justice for all (Japanese)
(Less) crime and (less) punishment

Labels: japan, japanese culture, law, miyazaki, music, nhk

Kouya (夜更) is the Chinese (on'yomi) reading of yofuke (夜更け), which means "in the middle of the night" or the "small hours" (see the first definition offered by Eijirou).

Labels: 12 kingdoms, music, poseidon

Meat Loaf is a singer (and actor) with plenty of talent but not tons of range who found his musical niche (thanks to Jim Steinman) and does very well by sticking to it like a magnet. As he explains in this mini documentary, he chooses writers who can write the "goth rock" ballads that define his oeuvre.

Here's a lesser-known Meat Loaf classic by Diane Warren (from the 1995 album Welcome To The Neighborhood), who does a good job channeling Jim Steinman.

There's not a dry eye in the house
After love's curtain comes down
Listen and you'll hear the sound
Hear the sound of a heart breaking
Not a smile left on my face
The ending's just too sad to take
And there's not a dry eye
Not a dry eye in the house

Related posts

White Flag
World Order
Glass
Border Reavers
Too Late to Apologize

Labels: music, musical metaphors, personal favs

Another in my occasional series featuring cool musical metaphors that make for compelling lyrics but aren't too clever for their own poetic good.

"White Flag" by Dido (the video features David Boreanaz in angsty Angel mode).

I will go down with this ship
And I won't put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
I'm in love and always will be

Related posts

World Order
Glass
Border Reavers
Too Late to Apologize

Labels: language, music, musical metaphors

The International Space Station is the best waste of money any bunch of governments (the U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency) has ever come up with. And perhaps the most harmless accomplishment of international diplomacy in history.

Though the challenge of safely deorbiting all 500 tons of the ISS when it reaches its end-of-mission may put that achievement in jeopardy.

In the meantime, the ISS keeps armies of bureaucrats busy not bothering the rest of us. Now, you could argue that our best and brightest should be focusing their attention on more pressing problems than circling the globe 250 miles above the Earth every 90 minutes.

Except that when it comes to politics, as William F. Buckley famously observed about whom he'd actually prefer to be governed by, putting the best and brightest in charge tends to just makes things worse in more ingenious and complicated ways.

Paradoxically, the utter uselessness of the ISS turns out to be its greatest strength. Government agencies around the world continue to pump gobs of money into the thing with barely the glimmer of a political agenda in sight. It's the biggest vanity project in history.

Well, except for not allowing China into the clubhouse (dumb). And Russia's very successful agenda is siphoning off gobs of money from the U.S. Treasury in exchange for ferrying human beings up there.

But the true (and mostly hidden) cost of the ISS is all the real science NASA has cannibalized for decades to keep this roadshow going. Now and then, though, the ISS folks dream up a new and interesting way to extravagantly waste money that just make you say, "Awww."

So, yeah, I know. This is going to sound like a joke. But it's not! It not only sounds pretty good but is quite real: ISS Commander Chris Hadfield does a duet-from-outer-space with Canadian alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies.

Hadfield is one of those Jacks-of-all-trades who's a master of all of them. Good grief, he just doesn't sing, he sings well. He plays in a band when he's not doing the astronaut thing. He's great on TV. And his Twitter feed is definitely worth following. Thanks, Canada!

I do have to wonder how they overcame the half-second latency in the relay to the TDRS satellites in geosynchronous orbit and down to the terrestrial links. My theory is that Hafield played to a local recording, which was then used as the beat track in the studio.

Then they remixed the whole thing in post. At any rate, as I said, it's a nice song. And it only cost $150 billion dollars to make!

Labels: music, pop culture, space, technology

What does a mixed martial artist and kickboxer do with those unique skills after he retires? Well, if he's Genki Sudo, he forms a quirky band/dance ensemble called "World Order." It feature seven men in business suits moving in precisely choreographed routines, often in public venues. In this music video, Sudo starts out in front (i.e., the one who fills out a suit quite unlike the typical "salaryman").

Labels: business, japan, music, musical metaphors, pop culture

The premise of Sano Motoharu's NHK interview series, The Songwriters, is that lyricists are the true bards of the modern age. Orson Scott Card recently echoed this sentiment:

[It's] a shame that we do not give our schoolchildren any understanding of the craft of poetry outside a narrow range that misses most of what makes the art so powerful. Fortunately, popular music has stepped in to fill the gap left by the literature professors and the brainwashed schoolteachers who got A's in their classes. Most songwriters, you see, still learn a bit about rhyme, and a few of them aim for and reach the sublime.

Card is describing what's known as "physics envy," a desire among professors of the humanities to make themselves the high priests of an esoteric religion that can only be accessed by the privileged few (who, thanks to this intellectual rent-seeking, can get tenure and demand high prices for their services).

The lyricist, by contrast, can certainly be clever, he can be deep, but he has to get to the point and make sense in about three minutes. This is harder to do than it sounds, the same way that writing "simple" prose is more difficult than being long-winded, especially if you don't have to strain to hear what the singer is saying.

Country music, for example. A while back, while channel surfing over to the Country Network (on a local digital side channel), I caught Thompson Square's "Glass," written by Ross Copperman and Jon Nite (Card cites Mary Chapin Carpenter). Here's the refrain:

We may shine, we may shatter
We may be picking up the pieces here on after
We are fragile, we are human
We are shaped by the light we let through us
But we break fast
Because we are glass

There's nothing complicated about this metaphor, the antecedents or the references. Nothing is draped in self-important gauze. Yes, sometimes the words really don't matter and that's fine too. Art can be abstract, realistic, profound, sublime, and just plain pretty without "meaning" anything. The cigar is a cigar.

But if the words are supposed to matter, then the meaning has to be transparent. Like glass, "shaped by the light passing through us."

Labels: japanese tv, literature, music, musical metaphors

Eikichi Yazawa debuted on the pop charts in the 1970s and rekindled his career in his sixties. He has performed live at the Budokan over a hundred times, a unmatched record.

Incidentally, the Beatles were the first rock group to perform at the Budokan, but the name really entered the pop culture lexicon with the release of Cheap Trick at Budokan in 1978.

Here Eikichi Yazawa appears with guitarist Tomoyasu Hotei.

Related posts

Anzenchitai
Border Reiver
Kazumasa Oda

Labels: aging rockers, japan, music, pop culture

I bought my first Off Course (オフコース) album way back in 1980. Off Course was a folk/rock duo featuring Kazumasa Oda and Yasuhiro Suzuki. A sort of Simon & Garfunkel, though in this case, it was Oda and his pure Art Garfunkelish high tenor whose sole career continued on strong when they split up in 1989.

Yes Asia has an authorized Hong Kong release of his Best 2 collection at a very reasonable price (meaning what you'd normally pay in the U.S.). He divides the tracks between covers of his Off Course hits and and more recent singles. If you want to mellow out, Kazumasa Oda is about as easy as listening gets.

Related posts

Border Reiver
Anzenchitai
Eikichi Yazawa

Labels: aging rockers, japan, music, pop culture