Marxy, interesting to read, but I wonder if you aren't missing a lot when you write 'The Japanese embrace of the Western counterculture started in the late 60s, after the Beatles had come to play at the Budokan', which seems just plain wrong.

In Kyoto the counterculture goes back to at least the Kamakura era when the center of power shifted to Kanto.

Joking aside, and restricting our discussion to the influence of western culture, how about the influence of Jazz during the Taisho period, and European literature even earlier than that.

Free jazz in the early sixties had a big influence. The events of 1968 in Paris and elsewhere had a huge influence on the Zenkyoto student movement which saw Universities like Todai and Kyodai closed down for months while young people battled with the police.

Before this, in the very early sixties there were huge, often violent riots by students and workers all over Japan over the continuing occupation of Japan by the USA.

A cafe I used to go to in Kyoto had been started in the 1920's or 1930's by a group of people who followed a certain literary circle in Japan (known as the "Shirakabe"). The daughter of the owners married the leader of the early 60's student movement. The cafe subsequently (from the mid 60's) became anarchist. Only people who proclaimed anarchism where allowed to enter. Some of these people ended up founding a famous art university in the North Kyoto.

I could go on ... but the point is, if this isn't a counter-culture, what is? And it certainly wasn't triggered by anything as trivial as a Beatle concert. If anything it was stimulated by action against the US occupation.

Yeah, you are right. I mean to say the countercultural influence on pop music. Though I don't think that the jazz-related counterculture had much to do with 60s rock politics. The Beatles always said, "Anything but jazz."

In terms of popular music, there was not much with counterculture underpinnings until the early 70s with the Folk Crusaders or so. To really get into a full history would take us farther from getting down to the meaning of Shibuya-kei, so I have redacted things a bit.

Well I think you want to be more careful about things like this. Because if a major point of your essays is that there is little opposition to the mainstream in Japan, and then you say that the counter-culture owes it's origins to a Beatles concert of all things, you are really insulting the intelligence of the Japanese people.

Then again saying completely assinine things about Japan may be a strategy to start some kind of flame war. If your goal is to get attention then saying things wrong, disagreeable things may be a good way to do it. There's a long history of that no matter which part of the world we're talking about.

Another odd point on this topic. In Saturday's Japan times, I read the obituary of a pop singer/composer (wish I had clipped the article) who had a big hit in the early 50's with a song about a soldier who is about to be executed for war crimes. His last words are "I want to come back as a clam, then I won't have to be a soldier and go to war." This is both anti-war and totally unlike anything one would hear in the west. It also disproves your point about the non-existence of Japanese political pop before the 1970's and your general concept that Japanese counter-culture is derived from the West. It would be interesting to find out more about that pop musician's career. Perhaps the article is still available in the Japan times online edition. Cheers,

Go listen to Japanese music in the 60s. Anything that sounds like what was going on in countercultural rock in the West was post-Beatles visit. Maybe some college folk had some political undertones and some Bob Dylan-influences, but the eleki boom was just a bunch of surf guitar. The student protests were surely countercultural but they didn't merge with rock culture until the later 60s. The main point I am trying to make is that rock music was not born in the Japanese counterculture, but started seperately in a product-based form like all the other Japanese popular music at the time. It never really had a "grassroots" period before being commercialized. It started as a commercial product and then was taken over by the counterculture.

(Yes, the Spiders were around pre-Beatles-visit but they don't strike me as very anti-establishment with the "Furi Furi Furi Furi Furi" bit. The Blue Comets were certainly mom-pleasers. The Tempters were all about the commercial pop dreck. Maybe the Golden Cups were for real, but they were post-66, no?)

Then again saying completely assinine things about Japan may be a strategy to start some kind of flame war. If your goal is to get attention then saying things wrong, disagreeable things may be a good way to do it. There's a long history of that no matter which part of the world we're talking about.

Whew! Watch it, there. My goal is not to say assinine things about Japan to get people angry. Go read up on 1960s Group Sounds and if anything I am just oversimplifying what's already been said. (I was trying to be unpolitical with this essay, but even suggesting that rock music started with the Beatles' arrival in Japan seems to piss people off!)

Interesting story about that songwriter. If that was an early 50s, Occupation-era hit, that makes sense because the Americans were still around. I don't think it was controversial to say, hey the war was bad, when the Americans were there to tell you that directly and everyone could feel the destruction in their daily lives. After MacArthur and Co. left, the conservative Japanese government set up strict content censorship standards on songs. I can dig those up if anybody is interested.

Hi Marxy, let's not flame - my comment was intended to serve as a warning that I think you are making some statements that will anger people. If you want to do that fine, proceed, if you don't then you may want to be a bit more careful.

And again, I'm a bit amazed at that last paragraph of your reply. It seems incredibly American-centric of you. So things were all rosy and un-censored under good ole' Douglas MacArthur? And it all turned bad after he and his boys went home?

Before even checking up on the counter-example of my 'clam-man', you've attributed any of his originality and sense of protest to the American occupiers. I pretty amazed if you don't realize just how incredibily chauvinistic that sounds.

It is pretty clear that it was MacArthur & Co. who set the LDP up, taking some pretty questionable right-wingers out of war-criminal jail and getting them into politics. It was the beginning of the Cold War, with war on the Korean pennisula flaring up. The Americans were desparate. Without MacArthurs actions, many think that Japan probably would have gone communist.

One more point - wasn't most of mainstream rock and pop in the late sixties West a commercial product? This could be argued about any band that toured internationally, got distributed by big labels, or enjoyed radio play. How many of these bands were really political and what, anyways, was there politics? Most of these bands sang about freedom, sex, drugs, alcohol - all good capitalist themes. How many of the really popular bands were trying to get the workers to organize?

I rather admired the less ethnocentric tone to this entry, which was more factual than judgemental.

That clam song sounds great, and reminds me of the French satirical tradition of the 50s. 'The Deserter' by Boris Vian and 'The Gorilla' by Georges Brassens are elegant little sardonic narratives, not 'countercultural' in any way. And yet they contain a massive 'fuck you' to authority, something that goes beyond anything we have in the Anglo-Saxon pop canon. 'The Deserter' is an open letter to the president of the republic, a refusal to serve in the army. 'The Gorilla' depicts a hanging judge getting his comeuppance by being anally raped by a gorilla at the zoo. Bob Dylan looks like a Sunday school teacher beside Brassens.

If that was an early 50s, Occupation-era hit, that makes sense because the Americans were still around. I don't think it was controversial to say, hey the war was bad, when the Americans were there to tell you that directly

I must agree with Sparkling that this is a pretty weird way to parse the situation. The 50s were within five years of American nuking Japan, for Christ's sake, one of the greatest war crimes in the history of humanity. And yet the Japanese were only capable of knowing that war was bad because the Americans were informing them of this fact? Wow.

Point conceded on the SCAP thing, but the Occupation was mostly staffed by liberal New Dealers who did their very left-leaning reconstruction work UNTIL the Korean War broke out and then had to let Sakakawa Ryoichi etc out of jail and all the blacklisteds back into the government. It's hard to imagine though that the LDP wasn't happy to reinforce cultural restrictions on Socialist-leaning untraditional culture once they had full control of the government again. This is a better way to say it: people had a lot more important things to do in the early 50s than to sit around censoring left-leaning songs (like feeding everyone or editing out right-leaning content, for example). Although by the late 60s, there was a crackdown on Group Sounds where any junior high school/high school student caught attending the concerts was kicked out of school.

Momus, the atomic bomb was awful, of course, but just today I say a cheerful display at my university of wartime photos and paraphenalia. I consider the Japanese atrocities during WWII to be as great as those done by the Nazis, just less "planned." But apparently you can celebrate your Japanese wartime heritage in Japan. Imagine an unpolitical show of "Our Nazi Summer!" in Germany.

The Japanese army did an awful wreckage to Asia, and while this may have not deserved an atomic bomb, I wonder why it is that Japanese kids learn almost nothing about the War in their schools while German kids spend two years studying the rise of Hitler. Ask any Japanese kid what the kokutai (國體) or Imperial Rescript on Education (教育勅語）is and they will have no idea. Is it because the same cheerleaders for the war became the LDP? If you want to read some real Japan-bashing, read Ienaga Saburo's The Pacific War.

Please don't let my Shibuya-kei discussion become either a diatribe on war crimes or an apology for Japanese military aggression! If it makes you feel better, you are all totally right and I am totally wrong. On everything. Ever.

About rock music in Japan, the Beatles were absolutely part of the British counterculture, if not the leaders, while the Tigers were a jimusho creation. I spent a good solid year listening to only old Japanese 60s music. and some of it is allright. But to make the Japanese and US/UK scenes equivalent is just not a reflection of reality.

I am not trying to make fun of the Japanese here, I am just saying that countercultural music was not a natural outgrowth like it was in the West. There was no Haight-Ashbury in Japan. Maybe Shinjuku in the late 60s had a dark, student-movement kind of feel, but I have never seen anyone link that to a real grassroots movement of Japanese bands until the 70s. Unless you know a lot about the actual development of rock music in Japan, let's skip this point and move on.

Oops! Looks like the clam-song was imaginary. Somehow I thought that little 5 line obit was not about the composer of a song, but about a famous TV drama director. The name of the award winning TV program was "Watashi wa kai ni naritai". The director's name is Okamoto Yoshihiko and it is indeed about a war criminal who's last words are "I want to be a clam" (JT liberally translated "kai" (shellfish) as "clam"
probably because it sounds better).

I found the article via Google Japan News quite easily. Marxy, your Japanese is better than mine perhaps you can see if there's anything else of interest in the blurb below that I missed.

I'm going to turn off my computer now. While checking Google news I noticed an item reporting
research done in Japan indicating increased incidence of Glaucoma in long-term heavy computer users.

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「私は貝になりたい」岡本愛彦氏が死去
　名作テレビドラマ「私は貝になりたい」の演出などで知られる映像作家でジャーナリストの岡本愛彦（おかもと・よしひこ）さんが、１０月２４日に前立腺がんのため、神戸市内の病院で死去していたことが１１日、分かった。７９歳。鳥取県出身。遺志により、葬儀は親族だけで済ませた。自宅は公表していない。喪主は妻立子（りゅうこ）さん。

　５０年、慶大卒業後、ＮＨＫ入り。５７年にラジオ東京テレビ（現ＴＢＳ）に移り、Ｃ級戦犯に問われた庶民の悲劇を描いた「私は貝になりたい」（５８年）で芸術祭賞を受賞。テレビドラマを社会的、文化的に認知させた。６３年にフリーに。著書に「テレビよ、驕（おご）るなかれ」など。

　女優森光子（８４）の才能を見いだし、５９年には結婚したが、４年後に離婚した。大ファンだった長嶋茂雄氏が倒れた際は「必ず再起すると思う」などとコメントしていた。

［2004/11/11/07:45　紙面から］

There was no Haight-Ashbury in Japan.

This is an interesting point. The last time I was at Haight-Ashbury it was full of rather sad homeless people begging for money. I reflected that the whole 'tune in, turn on, drop out hippy thing in the west was a development from our belief that society can be opted out of. We think there's an 'outside' and we think we can live there. This delusion is shared by members of subcultures as well as by believers in a monotheistic god. It manifests as a kind of weird metaphysical mood all through the west. 'I'm not really here' (Radiohead emotion, I call it), or 'I follow God's law, not man's' or 'I've dropped out'. The results are half-heartedness and homelessness.

The opposite is the case in Japan. Nobody thinks they can drop out. Nobody is strung out in a conflict between God's law and man's law. Everybody focuses on what's real, what's in front of them, what's tangible, what's social. I think that explains why people in Japan are so much more interested in things like food, or their bodies, than Americans. And I think it explains why the public sphere in Japan is so far ahead of the public sphere in the US. This is it. Society is all there is. Fit in and enjoy fitting in.

This fits into my observation about Superlegitimacy. It may seem highfalutin to talk about metaphysics in a discussion of pop music, but I think the problem with Marxy's analysis in general is that it takes western attitudes to things like subculture as givens, as unproblematical, and then proceeds to find Japan lacking for having a different way of doing things. And to see why that's narrow and ethnocentric, you have to see the big picture.

I haven't turned off my computer yet, though I should have.

Indeed there were drop outs from Japanese society in the 60's and it's is unlikely they were just copying Western style hippies.

One of the central figures was Nanao Sakaki, a former member of the Japanese army in WWII who found he couldn't fit back into society after the war. He drifted around Japan teaching himself ancient Greek and reading voraciously. Eventually a tribe of other misfits, the "Bum Academy" gathered around him in mid-sixties Shinjuku. They set up back-to-land communes in parts of Japan.

Interestingly this may have had an influence on North American hippy movement via Gary Snyder.

I've met some of the people who were in the original Bum Academy at a little village in an island south of Japan that still doesn't use electricity and has no connection to phone lines etc... These people pretty much dropped out of regular Japanese soceity but they're now in a growing ill-defined zone which includes things like 'organic farming' and 'slow life'. This is a grass-roots Japanese phenomenon, which is in touch with similar movements in the west but is not an imitation of such movements.

1) No clam song. I guess I can erase all this debate over hypothetical things. Nothing in the obit really illuminated the matter at hand.

2) Momus, please explain to me that all those dead soldiers blindly following the War leaders for a cheap piece of Emperor-related metaphysical candy were super "postmodern." I am getting creeped out by how much "cultural relativism" approaches war apologism.

3) Haight-Ashbury was indeed an awful place, but it was a moment in place and time where a certain rock explosion happened. There is no equivalent for H-A in Japan in the 60s. THIS IS NOT A CRITICISM.

4) And I think it explains why the public sphere in Japan is so far ahead of the public sphere in the US. This is it. Society is all there is. Fit in and enjoy fitting in.

If postmodernism is really this shallow and capitulating, shouldn't I fight against it?

You are also falling for the Japanese tatemae: the public sphere is not any better than the US, it's just worse in different ways. Get cancer in Japan and tell me how good the treatment is.

5) The opposite is the case in Japan. Nobody thinks they can drop out.

Nobody, eh? Now who's overreaching? I am sure that a large majority of the artists/writers you like in Japan had metaphysical inclinations of some manner.

6) the problem with Marxy's analysis in general is that it takes western attitudes to things like subculture as givens

There are subcultures in Japan, but they get turned into consumer groups so quickly that it's hard to divide the lines. The yankii are a legitimate lower-class subculture in the Dick Sebdige mold, but since there can't be social groups in Japan with low mobility, we have to make their culture into little cats who say Namen na yo!

I sometimes think that my views on Japan are extreme until I realize that I am arguing against someone who has no real facts for his reasoning but just a whole bag of political correct conclusions. My perspective may be skewed but I'm not just doing deductive magic tricks.

7) Like it or not, there is a group of standards that guide "pop music" and unfortunately they all were formed in the West. And call me crazy for trying to apply them to Japanese music. Trust me, if you started trying to do Noh theatre in Scotland, a Japanese person wouldn't let you get away with mediocrity under the banner of "cultural relativism." And wouldn't you feel patronized if he said, "Isn't that cute they're doing Noh!"

Maybe I should add a recommendation for a possible starting point for the kind of deconstruction of the west I'm talking about. It isn't all postmodernism. My views on this have been influenced by lots of people, from Freud to Adorno. But perhaps the biggest influence comes from Max Weber. His book 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism' had a huge impact on me. It's available free online here. Basically, Weber shows that anglo-american capitalism is not a system which transcends cultural values or can be applied anywhere in the world. It comes from very particular roots in Protestant Christianity in Holland, Britain and America, and ties up with religion in many, quite surprising, ways. (For instance, Weber shows the link between double-column accountacy and the kind of 'accounting' the protestant makes of the state of his soul in his prayers to his 'personal God'.)

Now, of course other cultures have capitalist systems too, including Japan. The Omihatchiman merchants, for instance, travelled all over Asia selling mosquito nets. They came back and built the fine wooden merchant's houses you can still see on the shores of Lake Biwa. The merchants were almost like Buddhist mendicant monks. They travelled very simply on foot, dressed in humble clothes, carrying their nets. But, just as Japanese religion doesn't evangelize, neither did these merchants. Contrast the typical one-two punch of the west, where Christian evangelists arrived alongside capitalists who had their governments gunships behind them should nations like China or Japan resist their terms and conditions.

I think it's to Japan's great credit that it resisted Christianity successfully, and I think it was very wise to limit foreign trade in the ways that it did. Japan's paranoia about foreign influence is one of history's more correct paranoias -- after all, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they aren't out to convert you, make you adopt their system of trade, or drop nuclear bombs on you. Japan continues to resist, albeit in subtler ways than it did. This resistance explains the strong cultural difference the foreigner in Japan senses. It also explains his sense that he will never be able to 'join' Japan and be a part of it. Those foreigners, like Kerr, who seem to have become exasperated by this have advocated harsh punishments for Japan for its clinging to its difference. They have used arguments ranging from economic liberalisation to aesthetic reproaches to tell us why Japan is 'wrong'. I'm particularly sensitive to these arguments, and I find them deeply offensive, which is why I've been a little harsh, perhaps, in my 'campaign' against this blog and some of the attitudes it seems to contain. I must say, though, that I'm still developing my views on Japan, and Marxy clearly is too, and I've welcomed the chance to bounce them off someone who feels so differently than I do. I doubt whether either of us will actually change Japan in any way. And that probably leaves me happier than it leaves Marxy.