Hidden History of Japan’s folk-rock boom

WHEN the Japanese singer-songwriter Kenji Endo first heard Bob Dylan’s

as a young student in Tokyo in the 1960s, he was perplexed — offended, even. Aren’t pop vocals supposed to be pretty? But by the third listen, Endo remembered that he was in awe: “This guy is creating something that has never been created before.” He had found his calling.

And what about Dylan’s lyrics? “I had no idea what the hell he was singing about,” Endo said in a recent Skype interview.

His experience was, in one sense, a typical story of rock ‘n’ roll inspiration in the 1960s. Yet it is also a window into a vital period of Japanese musical history that is only now getting a close look in the West, through a series of archival albums that document some of the innovative work developed along the fringes of Japan’s tightly controlled pop industry.

released recently by the eclectic American label Light in the Attic, is a primer on how Japanese musicians absorbed the influence of Dylan, the Band and Joni Mitchell, as well as a portrait of a post-war generation that explored its own identity through an imported sound.

Aside from Happy End, the groundbreaking band that had a song on the

soundtrack in 2003, most of the figures in Light in the Attic’s new Japan Archival Series have never had their music released in the West before.

But for years an avid collector community has been circulating their work and gathering string on the cast of characters: the enigmatic, smokey-voiced Maki Asakawa; Hachimitsu Pie, whose name (which means “honey pie”) was a bilingual nod to the Beatles; and Sachiko Kanenobu, a songbird who ended up in Philip K. Dick’s circle in California.

After Light in the Attic plans further volumes focusing on ambient music and the 1980s genre known as city pop.

“It’s an entire kingdom of music,” said Devendra Banhart, one of the handfuls of Westerners who has championed these artistes.

In the 1960s, collegiate folkies and Beatles-inspired guitar bands swept the country. But by the end of the decade, a circle of ambitious songwriters who were obsessed with American roots music started to emerge. Many were associated with a small record label, URC, that evaded the Japanese music industry’s strict censorship rules by selling records through the mail.

Happy End transformed the rock scene with poetic Japanese lyrics that somehow fit the cadence and rhythms of Americanstyle rock.

The band’s 1971 album a classic of the genre, describes with a shrug how the Tokyo of their childhood was being swept away and replaced by a high-tech metropolis.

The song with echoes of Neil Young, is a wistful idyll darkened by storm clouds and a disaffected narrator:

Endo’s shows how some songs wedged political hot topics into scenes of everyday life. The aroma of curry on the stove fills a small apartment while the TV carries a news report about the death of Yukio Mishima, a literary star who shocked the nation by staging a failed coup and committing ritual suicide.

The juxtaposition of death and hunger Endo felt in that moment, he explained, led to a “mysterious” feeling and then to an understanding of “what it means to be human.”

On other tracks, Takuro Yoshida, from Hiroshima, plays a sunny, fast-picking tune that could almost be by Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Tetsuo Saito, the “singing philosopher”, sounds like the wild man in the meditation room as he cries in Japanese: “We strip off