Vital stats:
Format: modern Japanese rock and modern Japanese rock talk
Episode duration: 35m-2h
Frequency: monthly
My friends who taught English in Japan in the nineties insist that the glory days have gone. They describe having stood in the blast radius of the last and most exciting flowering of Japanese popular culture, that which burnt out with the twentieth century. Of course, older Japanese scholars I meet insist that, on the contrary, the country stopped generating exciting works of art around the end of the sixties. I’ve never met him, but somewhere, a supercentenarian Japanophile surely insists that nothing of note has come out of Japan since before the Second World War. Each of these laments applies to a different facet of the culture: the music twenty years ago, the film and literature fifty years ago, and eighty years ago… oh, I don’t know, netsuke?
None of this rearguard action for the mind or minds behind It Came from Japan [iTunes], the music podcast of the eponymous music agency. It Came from Japan itself has the unusual and highly geographically specific mission of, and I quote, “bring the freshest, creamiest Japanese bands to the UK.” Rock bands, specifically. And yes, the UK, specifically. An unusual pairing, you might think, but upon reflection the countries have much in common: small, islands, bound by a vast and often tacit superstructure of position and obligation, valuing politeness yet incubating youth cultures of studied rudeness. In both lands over the past half-century, these last have tended to execute their rebellion in one form especially: rock music.
On It Came from Japan, you hear modern Japanese rock music, you hear an Englishman talk about modern Japanese rock music, and you hear that same Englishman interview the particular Japanese responsible for the modern rock music. If names like Hotel Mexico, Trippple Nippples, and Donkey Vegetable Voxxx already mean something to you, then read no further — here is the podcast you desire. The name Shonen Knife, to which the band attached gets a reasonable amount of play on this show, probably means at least a little to you. Though of a previous generation of popularity than most of the other bands showcased here, Shonen Knife does indeed represent several of their qualities: blunt simplicity with a counterintuitive edge of experimentalism, known in the west or trying to be, of a certain age, female.
While this show offers tracks from much more than girl-bands-turned-woman-bands, the interviews strike me as slanting in that direction. Tokyo-based host Daniel Robson regularly connects over Skype with Japanese rockers, usually ladies, who make or contribute to the records he spins. Often, he issues warnings to the listener beforehand: she doesn’t speak much English, I had to edit this down a lot, she had to memorize her answers, she read her answers off a card, she read the wrong answers off a card, etc. I take these conversations less as segments meant for information delivery as conceptual exercises, although the halting, quizzically toned English in which the guests speak (and the chuckle of quasi-comprehension with which Robson sometimes responds) makes for a much more endearing experience than the average conceptual exercise.
Still, even the least linguistically capable J-rocker here speaks English with a damn sight more mastery than I speak Japanese, although I’m working on it. Robson also seems to possess a far more comprehensive knowledge of Japanese rock than most mortals could hope to possess. If there exists an easier way to dive into any segment of the genre, I can’t imagine it. Japanese rock, like the Japanese cellphone, has spent quite some time evolving its own peculiar set of subspecies in Galapagosian isolation. It Came from Japan focuses on Japanese rock that sounds always mildly goofy, sometimes slightly harsh, often sonically adventurous, and occasionally aggressive, but not in an apparently angry way. You could do much worse to diversify your musical portfolio. Most of us do worse with every trip to Spotify.
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[Podthinker Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. Contact him at colinjmarshall at gmail or follow him on Twitter @colinmarshall.]