Can you Japanese rock be Japanese and still be rock?

In Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, author Michael Bourdaghs asks the if Japanese rocks can truly be considered rock, considering that classic American rock is built on American folk tradition. Bourdaghs describes bands such as Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the genre of Japanese folk music which was not built around traditional guitar chords and 4/4 meter. From at first glance, a Japanese folk might appear to be emulating American folk. For example Yellow Magic Orchestra seems to mirror the Flaming Lips, an American Psychedelic rock band of the 1980s.Specifically, Bourdaghs discusses the phenomena of Japanese bands trying to to appear more authentic to the genre of rock through dressing and styling themselves in western fashion and singing in English because it was believed English would serve the music more appropriately . Yellow Magic Orchestra was wildly popular for this. Politics came into play through protest songs, which were increasingly popular in the 1960s- 1970s with the goal to educate or inform the listener of a particular political goal.

Happy End, a Japanese folk music group of the 1970s that was considered one of the first Japanese bands to sing in Japanese, combined the style of American folk and make it distinctly Japanese. In describing this phenomenon, Bourdagh states “This involved neither a blind yearning for American nor a nostalgic return to Japan (p. 259)”. The band is emblematic of a new wave of music that was neither traditionally Japanese nor trying to be American, but a new genre stemmed from a generation free of war and capitalism. However, they came up against the boundaries of nationalism, where they were faced with the challenge of identifying as a band that “globalized American culture ” or a band that “marked a traditional and local resistance to America. ” By “negating the negation” and choosing to not identify with either Japanese or folk music entirely, it gave Happy End the freedom to be creative and the courage to break the mold and incorporate Japanese lyrics in a folk style. However, this isn’t without a tradeoff, in doing so it perhaps alienated the group from a stable identity as either Japanese or American group. The reality was that they seemed to belong nowhere. On receiving hostility in the states, band member Matsumoto Takashi stated, “We had already long ago given up on Japan, and with [ that song ] , we were saying bye — bye to America too — we weren’t going to belong to any place. ”

In the film GO! the main character seems to share many of the same struggles, that Happy End’s members do. As a zainichi, Sugihara struggles to navigate the line as a Korean — Japanese in both his academic and personal life. He is asked to deny his Japanese self in Korean school, even as far as being shamed and beaten for speaking Japanese despite being in Japan. Yet in the face of his girlfriend, he cannot bring himself to mention that he is also Korean, for fear of judgement and rejection. He wants to be fully himself, even if that means owning up to being a zainichi, however alienating that might be.

In Spaces of Identity by Kevin Robins, chapter 8 focuses on US and Japan relations and introduces the idea of Techno Orientalism, which he describes as the technical prowess associated with Japanese enterprise in technology. The issue that Robins brings up is that modernity is rooted in Western identity, and if Japan is the new modern, it creates insecurity around the idea of Western modernity. This contributes to a dehumization of Japanese people as forever alien, barbaric and oriental despite being more advanced in certain fields. The tension between the center, in Japan and the West seems like an age old power play, “who is the most modern ?” seems to relate to cool in the sense that we ask “which country is the most cool?”. As more and more Americans view Japan as the new advent of cool, it threatens the west. Politics enter the conversation about cool in reference to cool as a commodity that Japan capitalized on after WW2 in order to remain a first world power. The importance of technology is central to the potency of modernity. However in a globalized age, technology is intrinsically tied to cool, to culture and to the countries ability to capitalize their coolness.