Various artists - Nippon Psychedelic Soul

Time Capsule

£32.38

Format: 12" Vinyl
Catalogue No.: TIME018
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
Genre: Soul/World Music

A
1 Hiroshi Kamayatsu - Have you smoked Gauloise
2 Happy End - Haruyo Koi (Come, spring)
3 Yoshiko Sai - Aoi Galasu Dama (Blue Glass Ball)
4 Tadashi Goino Group - Jikan Wo Koero (Go Beyond Time)

B
1 Jun Fukamachi - Omae (You)
2 Momotaro Pink with Original PINKS - Hachigatsu No Inshow (August’s impression)
3 Vol.1 Chap.100 - Heya No Naka (In The Room)

Japan Is Entering the 1970s with Self-Confidence Restored and Economy Thriving”. So ran a headline in The New York Times on 5th January 1970, heralding the decade with a sense of unbridled optimism. Japan was entering its fifth successive year of “boom conditions”, becoming the strongest economy in the world behind the US and the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Eisaku Satō had been re-elected in 1969, and Japanese per-capita income had overtaken Italy’s, with living standards lauded as the highest in the non-Western world. And yet, as journalist Takashi Oka wrote at the time, lurking beneath the statistics was a sense of unease, a little harder to grasp. “The nation that has just renewed its mandate for conservative leadership blends the feudal past and the space‐capsule future in weird and wonderful combinations, unsettling to the outsider and disquieting even to many Japanese.”

Those perhaps most disquieted - to put it mildly - were students, but not for the reasons Oka had suggested. Satō’s re-election had come off the back of two years of civil unrest across campuses in Japan, as young people railed against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which sanctioned the presence of US military bases on Japanese soil, and its implicit support for the Vietnam War. Taking to the streets with guitars in hand and a sense of youthful injustice allied with socialist movements across Europe and the United States, the protests which emerged were both a political and a cultural event. Resistance anthems from the US were reinterpreted by a new genre of ‘College Folk’ musicians and rebellious or satirical songs were released and then censored by the mainstream media. Collective action was shaking the foundations of a country built on values of intergenerational respect, loyalty and obligation. Anything seemed possible. Until, of course, it wasn’t.

By the end of 1969, continued confrontations with the police and new legislation had quashed the resolve of the student groups, who had descended into factionalism. Rather than a country with its self-confidence restored, for many young people the prevailing feeling at the dawn of 1970 was one of disillusionment. The conservative mandate had prevailed.

Musically, however, this was only half the story. Perhaps the most significant outcome of the anti-establishment sentiment of the late 1960s for Japanese music was the creation of Underground Record Club [URC], co-founded by former communist party member Masaaki Hata in February 1969 as the country’s first independent record label. Central to the outspoken Kansai folk scene, which centred around the urban sprawl of Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, URC was a kind of magnetic north for the region’s iconoclastic young musicians. Among them was Haroumi Hosono and his first major project, Happy End.

Released on URC in 1970, Happy End’s self-titled debut album (also known as Yudemen after the sign featured on the cover) was the pivot on which the country’s musical trajectory changed for good. Embroiled in what was dubbed the “Japanese-language rock controversy”, Hosono and Happy End were experimenting with ways of incorporating Japanese lyrics into music which, in the hands of contemporaries like Flower Travellin' Band and Les Rallizes Dénudés, were firmly rooted in English. Written by drummer Takashi Matsumoto, Happy End’s lyrics were stripped back and authentic, both in content and cadence, to the Japanese experience. ‘Haru Yo Koi’, taken from that debut album, was a brooding meditation on loneliness and alienation in the city that grooved hard, full of distortion-heavy guitar and a firm and funky back-beat. In doing so it flipped the paradigm of Japanese rock music on its head, inspiring many others to find their voices too.

One such musician was guitarist Ippei Shimizu. In late 1970, Shimizu was sitting in a rock kissa – a jazz listening bar that embraced the country’s new-found love of rock – in Osaka, nursing a scotch and wondering what he was doing with his life. For Shimizu and many of his contemporaries, the self-confidence born of economic prosperity was complex and contradictory. Gone were the prospects of systemic change and the political idealism of the 1960s. Instead, there was capitalism, cold and efficient and here to stay.
In Osaka, this contradiction was expressed most fully in the arrival of the Osaka Expo in March 1970, which brought with it the promise of tourism, trade and a whole load of resistance from young people who felt the encroaching winds of corporate Japan more keenly than most. By the time the Expo arrived however, many of their reservations dissolved. Opportunities for work, a new-found internationalism and a degree of independence beckoned. Shimizu took a job in a bar run by a Canadian with a love of hippie culture. Other musicians worked in the many malls and supermarkets that were springing up around Osaka, able to sustain their creative lifestyles on ten days of shift work a month.

It wouldn’t be surprising if this had troubled Shimizu. A politicised teenager, he had joined the anti-war protests, went to URC concerts and played his part in the student movement. The question of how to remain radical in the face of economic realism was one which faced many young people at the start of the 1970s. For Shimizu, the life of a Salary Man on which Japan’s economic prospects were being built did not appeal, but alternatives were not obviously forthcoming.
Perhaps Shimizu asked for another whiskey – or perhaps it was just a coffee – but whatever he was drinking that day in 1970, he might have spat it right back out. The owner of the rock kissa put on ‘Haru Yo Koi’ by Happy End, and by the end of the first verse, Shimizu’s life has changed for good. If it wasn’t possible to fight the system in the conventional sense, perhaps embedded in Happy End’s Japanese lyrics was an implied resistance to cultural imperialism and the commercial mainstream that had defined Japanese rock music for the last ten years. Perhaps you could just do things your own way. Perhaps a new way was possible after all.

Towards the end of 1970, Shimizu was again hanging out in a rock kissa when he met Minenao Momoya, a singer otherwise known as ‘Pink’, with whom Shimizu would start the band Momotaro Pink. Playing live, touring and recording around Kansai, the group eventually landed a deal with URC to release their debut album, but by the time it was due to go to press, URC had collapsed under the weight of mounting costs. Buying out their masters, Momotaro Pink subsequently self-released With Original Pinks, from which the track ‘Hachigatsu No Inshou’ is taken. Having succeeded in pressing only 300 copies, the group split up in 1978, taking with them the last vestiges of URC’s extraordinary legacy.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Happy End’s debut album sent shockwaves across Japan. Over 1,000km north of Osaka in Hokkaido, local radio DJ Kazushi Inamura was also busy having his mind blown by ‘Haru Yo Koi’, and by the end of 1970, he had formed his first band, the snappily named Vol.1 Chap.100. By 1971, the four-piece made it into the top 5 of Japan’s prestigious National Band Contest, and two years later went on to self-release a self-titled album from which ‘Heya No Naka’ is taken. Complete with flute solo, it was the band’s only foray into this rolling, psychedelic soul sound. By 1977, Inamura had embraced the soft-centred City Pop aesthetic instead, releasing an album called Free Flight which might have propelled him to greater heights, had Inamura been based in Tokyo not Hokkaido.

Like Inamura, Jun Fukamachi would start his career in the strident milieu of Japan’s rock scene, only to go on to make his name in another sphere entirely. Back in 1971 though, Fukumachi was flying his freak flag as a psych soul troubadour, lacing sophisticated arrangements and a driving sense of rhythm through the very heart of debut album, Aru Wakamono no Shouzou. ‘Omae’ employs shakers, carnivalesque trumpets, phased drums and a Hammond organ on what would be the first and last time Fukamachi committed his voice to record. What followed was firmly rooted in the world of jazz-funk and fusion, as Fukamachi began to experiment with technology that would come to form a central part of his life as a musician. By the end of the ‘80s he had produced ambient records and secured a professorship at Senzoku Gakuen College of Music where he initiated the country’s first synthesiser course.

While some artists were directly influenced by the release of Happy End’s Yudemen, others had always done things their own way. One musician who’d been around the block by the time the ‘70s rolled over was Hiroshi Kamayatsu. The son of famous Japanese-American musician Tib Kamayatsu, Hiroshi was born in Tokyo in 1939, and grew up in a household immersed in the cultural exports of the United States. Playing in country music bands through the ‘50s, it was perhaps inevitable that Hiroshi Kamayatsu would find himself fronting Japan’s first and most important Group Sounds band, The Spiders the following decade.
A flamboyant character with a sartorial flair and a fine bonnet to match, Kamayatsu embodied the image and lifestyle of a rockstar. (He is one of several musicians – including Haroumi Hosono – who have at one point or another been labelled as the “Brian Wilson of Japan”). In 1970, Kamayatsu released his debut solo album, Monsieur, a title which he had adopted to add a certain European mystique to his image. The album made a point of the fact that Monsieur had composed, played, sung and produced the whole album himself, experimenting with multi-tracking at a time when studio trickery was still in its infancy.

In 1975, Kamayatsu was bid by his record company to release a College Folk single. Unimpressed, he took the gig on the promise that he could do whatever he pleased with the B-side. On a wing and a prayer, he reached out to Tower of Power who were performing in Tokyo at the time and succeeded in coaxing them into the studio, even though he’d yet to write the track. Ever the maverick, the story goes that Kamayatsu simply scribbled a few chord progressions down for Tower of Power to play, cutting the funky, in-the-pocket groove for what became ‘Have You Smoked Gauloises?’(A1) from scratch in a matter of hours.
As much as the lyrics, something which defined this brand of Japanese psychedelic soul was the often lavish and impressive arrangements, that felt like they had more in common with the strings-led orchestrations of Rotary Connection or David Axelrod than the politicised acoustic guitar music of URC. One singer to really push the bar in terms of arrangements was Yoshiko Sai, whose collaborations with producer Yuji Ohno can be heard across her
first and third albums. While Ohno would go on to become most famous for scoring anime series Lupin III, his work with Sai was more about complementing the singer’s expressive and carefree imagination.
While suffering from a kidney disease at university, the young Yoshiko Sai returned to her love of books and writing, penning a series of poems that would form the basis of her debut album Mankakyo in 1975. By the time she came to record her third album Taiji No Yume in 1977, her love of fantastical and gothic stories had gone even further. Drawing heavily on Japanese novelist and poet Yumeno Kyusaku, ‘Aoi Galasu Dama’ (Blue Glass Ball)(A3) sounds like a Philly soul-meets-James Bond theme tune, all smokey vocals and grand strings, which under the guidance of Yuji Ohno seem to soar higher than ever. Later that year, Sai released a collection of her poetry under the same name, producing the dreamlike paintings that would become the artwork for her albums.
If anything, the diversification of Japanese folk and soul exemplified by Yoshiko Sai was a sign of just how quickly the will to individual expression was filtering through into the music, a sense of experimentation unshackled from generic expectations of Group Sounds and College Folk which had dominated the airwaves just a few years earlier. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this individualism on this compilation is the contribution of Tadashi Goino, whose 1979 album Messenger from The Seventh Dimension came adorned in cover featuring guitar and flute-playing deities, satellite dishes, lotus leaves, third eye energy, a circle of galaxies and at least six flyer saucers.
Tadashi Goino was a science fiction writer, musician and activist with a somewhat inflated sense of his own mystical and earthy powers. Born in 1950 into a household where strong beliefs were the norm, both his parents were members of Soka Gakkai - a controversial Japanese Buddhist religious movement founded in the 1930s (whose political arm Komeito came third in the 1969 elections in which Eisaku Satō was re-elected), and which counted Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter as devotees.
In 1974, Goino headed to the woods near Mount Fuji to set up what he called the Whippy Research Institute, which would, among other things, stage interventions aimed at boosting recycling in cities. Claiming to be a scientist and an artist, he garnered numerous “honorary memberships” to arts and science organisations across the former Soviet Union. According to the website of the Russian Academy of Arts, as recently as 2013 Goino presented a portrait he’d painted of Alexy II to the Russian Orthodox Church amid great fanfare. Some information online suggests that he was the most famous Japanese man in Russia, in part for having invented a cure for both AIDS and cancer, which, one assumes, was not widely adopted.
Nevertheless, when in 1979 he decided to set his sci-fi epic Messenger from The Seventh Dimension to music, Goino went deep. ‘Jikan Wo Koero’, which translates as ‘Go Beyond Time’ seems to do just that, stepping outside of any recognisable contextual framework to assemble a kind of operatic, prog odyssey that feels at once strangely timeless and like it could have only ever been made in the 1970s.
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Having spent much of his New York Times article extolling the economic benefits that lay before Japan, Takashi Oka ends the piece on a curious note. Lamenting the loosening of traditional family ties, Oka meets an 18-year-old called Kiyoshi who has run away from his parents in the countryside “with the equivalent of $90 and a small suitcase” to make a life for himself in Tokyo. In his concluding remarks, Oka suggests that Japan as a country is confronting the 1970s in a mood similar to that of the 18-year-old Kiyoshi. “The Japanese know they belong in world society ... But they have not yet worked out for themselves what they really want to be or do.”
Viewed from 1979 and through the lens of the music collected on this compilation, Oka’s sentiments ring true. Much of what typified not the music was a desire, conscious or otherwise, to shed the expectations of genre and industry, to follow a path that reflected the experience of the individual, to reach for the fantastical or the occult, the poetic or the rebellious and forge a sound that was no longer defining itself in relation to the United States, Europe, or even Japan’s own musical history, but instead could be unique and true to each artist on their own terms. If the nation was yet to come of age, then maybe so was the music.
In that sense it is less a compilation of a scene, as a compilation of a sentiment - of exploration and discovery and the will to self-expression. Maybe Oka was right here too. When the journalist finally asks the 18-year-old Kiyoshi what he intends to do next, Kiyoshi replies: “Someday I'll go home. But I've got to find myself first.”