(Flipped) Issue #43: Sa-World
Exploring SAWA's debut LP, AKB48's latest number one and Folder 5's cover of an Ayumi Hamasaki classic (plus guest song selections!)
Hi! Welcome to This Side of Japan, a newsletter about Japanese music, new and old! This issue is a flipped edition, meaning we’re doing the opposite of the original format: we cover an older album and three older singles plus the newest entry in the Oricon. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
Countdown music show THE Yoru Mo Hippare centered on a fun, novel concept with the guest artist of the week doing cover performances of some of the charting hits. The program created some one-of-a-kind combinations of artist and song during its airing from 1995 to 2002, like Namie Amuro singing other Komuro Family hits or first-wave K-pop group S.E.S. tackling Morning Musume’s “Memory ~Seishun No Hikari~.” I can lose a good day revisiting past episodes on YouTube, and one I keep returning to is Folder 5 covering Ayumi Hamasaki’s 2001 hit “Evolution.”
I like to think of the Folder 5 performance as part realization of a fan-fiction-like idea: What would it be like if Ayumi Hamasaki wrote a single for an idol group during her commercial reign in the 2000s? We can argue whether or not 2001 is a year in which we find Hamasaki at her absolute peak; I’d posit that she would get even bigger few years down the line with the releases of I Am… and RAINBOW. But the singer was undeniably a dominant force in J-pop in 2001, penning top-ten hits that only grew progressively bigger in scale.
“So it seems like we welcomed a brand new era,” Hamasaki opens “Evolution,” backed by an explosive drum ‘n’ bass/stadium rock hybrid fitting to sync trailers for an action film. She had already spoken as the representative of a new generation a few years prior in the genre-defining “Boys and Girls.” But if her previous hit anticipated the unpredictable times ahead, “Evolution” poured over the held-in anxiety but also the enthusiasm for the future after crossing over to the other side of the millennium: “The day we were born on this star / We were probably in joy / probably in sorrow / we were all in tears,” she proclaims in the chorus, followed by a mad electric-guitar solo.
Who better to have sing an them heading into a new millennium than a teen idol group like Folder 5? An average age of 15, the girls of Folder 5 are well-suited singers to have embrace sentiments about living in unprecedented times, as representative voices of a new generation. When the five take on Hamasaki’s “Evolution,” they resemble the idol group SPEED with them belting out such ambitious lyrics with gusto and conviction. The audacious chorus goes down easier when filtered through a band of teenagers, whose naivete allows them to express intensely earnest claims of epic proportions without an ounce of self-doubt.
Hamasaki continues to attempt to address a message directly to you, the listener, in “Evolution” as she has since her debut LP, A Song for xx, by speaking in behalf of a grand “we”: “We were born into a time like this / but we manage to keep on moving,” she sings in the final chorus in unity with her fellow millennials. “So we manage to keep on standing / and we go about today.” But the titanic, flamboyant music can create a distance as though the singer stands on an elevation beyond us. I don’t blame a cynic for perceiving this as self-indulgent, if not megalomania with her celebrity adding more external baggage to the song.
An idol group like Folder 5 can balance it out by dispersing some of the ego placed on the song. Anonymity can seem counter-intuitive for a singer like Hamasaki who’s hands on with both the lyrics and production of her own music, but handing the song over to an idol group can also relieve the music from some of the weight of her own superstardom. The “we” also sounds more natural coming from a band of five teenagers, referring to their own collective ambitions as they begin to take charge of their own world. While Folder 5 make “Evolution” sound more like a personal anthem about their future aspirations, they entice you to follow along and witness their growth as they step into a new, unforeseen era.
We got another Flipped issue of This Side of Japan! And I brought another round of wonderful guests, this time from the writer’s panel of the experimental-music newsletter Tone Glow, where I also sometimes contribute. They’ve shared tracks for the Singles Club section that I would’ve never stumbled upon otherwise, so I hope you’ll make some great discoveries too. Meanwhile, I kept it pop for the other parts of the newsletter, so there’s a good balance of stuff for this one. Did you want another long piece about AKB48? Well, I got it for you, plus a whole lot more.
Just a heads up: I will be taking a week off from the production process of the next issue. (It’s my birthday next week, so please, if you can give me a brief break as a birthday gift…) So issue #44 will arrive three weeks from now, on Nov. 10. That will also be the last issue of the year before we get to the year-end special issues—time flies! Idol Watch and Monthly Listening will be up later this month as regularly scheduled.
Happy listening!
Album of the Week
Welcome to Sa-World by SAWA [Epic, 2010]
*Recommended track: “MerryGoRound” | Listen to it on Spotify
After a few songs into SAWA’s debut LP, Welcome to Sa-World, the album’s guiding voice puts a pause on the record to observe a woman humming in solitude as though we spotted a precious creature in the wild: “This is SAWA, writing lyrics to a song—quiet, please! Don’t let her notice you.” The safari-tour-like look into the fantasized life of the singer-songwriter sounds comical yet essential, if not prescient in hindsight to her later achievements. She’s responsible for writing anthems for outside acts, including idol acts like Especia, Yufu Terashima, and KOTO, while crafting her own impressive solo discography throughout the 2010s. Self-covers of her work for other outlets tend to make up a good portion of her subsequent full-lengths, re-arranged to fit within her own electro-pop universe.
SAWA in 2010, however, had yet to dabble much in commissioned work, with outside acts propping her up instead. The singer-songwriter moved to Epic a year prior with the release of I Can Fly, and Welcome to Sa-World collects some of the singles since signing to the major label. The biggest support came from m-flo’s Taku Takahashi for the title track of the Swimming Dancing EP, which continued the label’s push for SAWA as a pop-club crossover with the EP tacking on extended club mixes from the likes of arranger unit Jazzin’park and Avex Trax DJ Kentaro Takizawa. The artist in Welcome to Sa-World relished in the spotlight placed upon herself as an up-and-coming pop singer, the foundations for her future work apparent more in retrospect.
While her path would eventually divert away from that environment, the club angle seemed practical when SAWA just got on. The remixes were a logical extension to the electro-pop defined in the singer-songwriter’s 2008 indie debut, COLORS, which stands as a stylistic peer to what Yasutaka Nakata had been exploring around the same time with Perfume and Capsule. House producer FreeTEMPO wrote a hyper-sleek dance cut in “Many Colors” reminiscent of the retro-future disco of Kylie Minogue’s Fever while SAWA embraced the dreaminess of the music with her vibrant lyrics. The four-on-the-floor drum beats as well as the glamorous electro bass lines more than suggested their potential as proper club material.
The latter half of Welcome to Sa-World, where it compiles the singer-songwriter’s previously released major-label singles, looks to the discotheque for inspiration in tandem with Epic’s direction. Advertising itself as such already from the title, “Swimming Dancing” finds SAWA responding to the flashy electro-house seemingly in real time: “I’m waiting for / my favorite songs,” she calls out as the beat intensely builds up. “Like a fish finally in water / So Mr. DJ play that songs.” The subsequent tracks get as explicit about their dance-floor ambitions. Another obvious title, “Friday Night” brings in some celebratory strings to welcome a carefree night out. And “Planet-T” romanticizes Tokyo as the center body of a disco star system to the tune of an infectiously buzzing electro riff.
For all the idyllic daydreaming that takes place about it, the club makes up only a portion of Sa-World. SAWA packages the singles and new material as a panoramic view into the mind of the singer-songwriter herself, interspersing interludes as though she’s the omniscient tour guide accompanying you through the journey. The breaks also loosely section off the album. “Danger Zone - Nigero! Ayaushi Sa-World!” (Danger Zone - Run! Sa-World in Danger!) kicks off the clubbing tunes, and “Eat It All - Live in Sa-World” prefaces her other, more head-in-the-clouds singles, “I Can Fly” and “Ai Ni Ikuyo.”
“I can go / Can I fly even by myself? / Get away, there is only now,” SAWA thinks to herself in “I Can Fly.” These self-improvement sentiments would inform her work more than her disco getaways after Welcome to Sa-World, like her next release, Soprano Rain EP, with one of its tracks gracing a nightly weather program. But the section of Sa-World that best showcases SAWA as a self-defined individual is led off by “Chocolate Zone - Yasei No SAWA,” the aforementioned interlude which observes SAWA in the wild, coming up with lyrics in her natural habitat.
“Chocolate Zone” turns out to be a fictionalized behind-the-scenes look into the writing of the album’s following track, “Throw Him Away!” The kitchen-sink, Shibuya-kei-esque pop feels like an outlier compared to the electro-house escapades that commences further down the track list, though SAWA writes for it a much more singular personality not found so explicitly anywhere else. She pouts about how dating is a sham, and she vows to run away soon as a playboy dares to make a move. The childish stubbornness sticks out more than the tales of carefree weekend warriors while the jangle-pop further ensures its place as an anomaly in an otherwise dance-pop album.
That humorous side of SAWA sounds somewhat compromised in Welcome to Sa-World in an effort to makes sense of the many moving parts. While the interludes allude to aspirations for more colorful world-building from SAWA, their practical function to glue together her disparate ambitions overshadow their potential as a showcase for personality. Whimsy comes up time to time in her disco-minded songs, though they appear rather subtly in her lyrics, like the wide-eyed earnestness on the page of “I Can Fly.” It’s bittersweet to hear many tracks with her dreaming to see what’s on the other side, like she has more to show for herself than what’s allowed on record.
SAWA wrapped her current material, new and previously released, in Welcome to Sa-World under a loose narrative of a big dreamer living in the big city. But despite the ambitious concept, the singer-songwriter remained rather low key throughout the following decade. Though she continues to indulge in her established sound to this day, her signature electro-house sound defined in her 2010 debut LP feels specific, if not nostalgic to the period in J-pop right before the dawn of EDM. What continues to elevate her as a singer-songwriter a decade later is her playfulness on the lyrics side: the title track to her most recent LP laments office life to the tune of deceptively bouncy electro-pop. SAWA expressed in Welcome to Sa-World her ambition to present a new angle to high-energy synth-pop. She presents a seemingly complete package, but in hindsight, she dreamed to engage in so much more than a glamorous night out.
Singles Club
This issue’s Singles Club features guest song selections from a few wonderful friends of This Side of Japan! I am excited to invite great writers from the experimental music newsletter Tone Glow, where I also sometimes contribute. They wrote some great blurbs for their picks as well. Please enjoy!
“Hawai’i Aloha” by Yuki Alani Yamauchi [Respect, 1996]
Yuki Yamauchi’s status as Japan’s ambassador for Hawaiian music is, in large part, the result of a string of fortunate events. The son of a shamisen musician, he first recalls hearing Hawaiian music from the Hawaii Calls radio show at the age of seven. From then on he was hooked, forming a Hawaiian music trio with friends in his middle-school years and learning to play the ʻukulele and steel guitar. While studying architecture at the prestigious Meiji University in Tokyo, he discovered that there was a Hawaiian music club full of like-minded lovers of sounds from the pacific islands; he would deepen his interest and knowledge further during his time there. Yamauchi entered the workforce as an architect after graduating, but wouldn’t keep at it for long. Hawaiian music was tugging at his heart all the while, and he quit drafting boards to retreat to his family’s konnyaku business, which gave him more free time to pursue his passion.
Yamauchi would take an extended trip to Hawaiʻi in 1970, with the intention to learn slack key—a style of open-tuned guitar playing indigenous to the Hawaiian islands— and immerse himself in the culture. Once he settled in and got his bearings, he began to network and met with Gabby Pahinui, the guitarist credited with introducing slack key guitar into the Hawaiian mainstream. Through Pahinui, he would also be introduced to pioneering slack key players Sonny Chillingworth and Raymond Kāne, the latter of whom would end up taking Yamauchi under his personal tutelage. Yamauchi arrived in Hawaiʻi at a time when the first generation of slack key revivalists were just beginning to loosen their grip on fiercely guarded slack key tunings and playing styles. They allowed him to sit in and observe the now-legendary jam sessions that took place in Pahinui’s backyard. “They were open. Just for me. I was so lucky, yeah?” Yamauchi said in a 2010 interview. Raymond and his wife Elodia Kāne considered Yamauchi a member of their family during his stay, christening him with the Hawaiian name ʻAlani—which he’s performed under ever since (though he prefers to spell it without the ʻokina).
Since returning from that first formative trip to Hawaiʻi, Yamauchi has been paying the knowledge forward ever since. He’s taken in students of his own, written books in Japanese about Hawaiian culture and music—his first, published in 1979, was the first of its kind and remains a foundational text—and has recorded a number of albums showcasing the vast repertoire of Hawaiian music. One of the standards Yamauchi introduced to Japan is “Hawaiʻi Aloha,” a song repurposed from the Christian hymn “I Left It All with Jesus” and given Hawaiian lyrics by the request of King Kamehameha IV because he found the song to be beautiful. Joining Yamauchi on the track are his friends Makoto Kubota and Sandii (musicians from Japan with their own connections to Hawiian music, and his bandmates in Polynesian tribute group Ambient Hawaiʻi), fellow second generation slack key student Ozzie Kotani—and, of course, his teacher Raymond Kāne. It’s a potent representation of Yamauchi’s life work of bridging the two cultures together; as every voice sings together “E Hawaiʻi aloha e” (I love you, Hawaiʻi), you get the feeling that they all really mean it. —Shy Thompson
...from Hawaiʻi Aloha (1996)
See also: “Slack Key #3” by Ambient Hawaiʻi (1998); “Hawaiian Vamp” by Lisa Ono (2001)
Shy’s writing has also appeared on the Bandcamp Daily and Pitchfork.
“JoJo” by Chikara Ueda & The Power Station [Columbia, 1980]
One of the coolest things about Japanese music in the early ‘80s was the pervasive cross-cultural pollination. Before city pop became the genre of the moment, the American and British influences poured into Japan’s soft-rock and jazz-fusion scenes, culminating in some truly remarkable records. This is an era of “playing,” of love of the studio jam, where Huff & Gamble and the Rippingtons could be found side by side. It’s in this space that Chikara Ueda & the Power Station operated.
Track 4 on Flying Easy is “Jojo,” a cover of Boz Scaggs’ easy-going classic. This version, however, ditches the radio AOR sonics in favor of cruising jazz instrumentals and delectable arrangements. Ueda surrounds himself with absolute aces, including Harvey Mason of Fourplay and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, and Masahiro Ikumi, who went on to do the Perfect Blue soundtrack. These indelible grooves are the work of musicians at the top of their game, with the love of playing in their hearts. —Eli Schoop
…from Flying Easy (1980)
See also: “Speed of Love” by Masayoshi Takanaka (1981); “Cpt. Chaos” by Yoshihiro Naruse (1982)
Eli’s writing has also appeared on the Bandcamp Daily and Tiny Mix Tapes.
“Cosmic Love” by Yurie Kokubu [Air, 1987]
Ten years ago, I fell into the world of Japanese city pop. More than anything, this intense period of vinyl hunting, internet scouring, and Google translating was enthralling because no English-language site had yet provided a definitive primer on the genre (and to this day, the numerous compilations that have arisen are largely poor). While various blogs, notably the Convertible to Yokohama site started by a Hipinion user, hipped me to the scene, there was a world of music I was free to explore with little guidance. It reminded me a lot of my foray into jazz, where RYM lists and Penguin Guides were useful starting points, but where real joy stemmed from looking at liner notes to use credited musicians as jump-off points.
Enter Yurie Kokubu, an artist I had first heard through her connection with Toshiki Kadomatsu. The two released a duet together, “It's Hard To Say Good-Bye,” on her 1990 album Silent Moon. (I was on a private music-sharing blog dedicated to Kadomatsu’s work, which lol.) Kokubu’s debut album, Relief 72 Hours, remains the album fans cling to most. Produced by Omega Tribe’s Tetsuji Hayashi, it has all the funk-lite grooves and sensitive balladry of a city-pop album from 1983. It’s a bit too by-the-numbers for me, though, and what caught my attention instead was Steps, her radiant, inspiringly bombastic 1987 album.
“Cosmic Love” was the one: here was a song from a world I had grown so familiar with that was surprisingly, deliciously theatrical. Its nimble piano chords and snares hold down a groove so firm that the only images that pop in my mind are the classic arms-swaying dances of the ’80s. As Kokubu sings of her anxieties, she lands on a chorus that finds her pining for a true, all-encompassing love. When she sings the titular line, everything coalesces as a fog: the piano’s punchy presence is gone, and the remaining instrumentation—bright synths, cooing background vocals, wailing saxophone (from Haruo Sakai, who performed on Noriki’s albums)—become nothing but swirling, euphoric wish fulfillment.
Steps was produced by Kokubu’s husband, Masaki Iwamoto, so maybe she did find such cosmic love after all. Or maybe it came in 1996 when she converted to Christianity, a decision that would find her musical career forever changed—she’d spend the years after rewriting hymns in contexts accessible to contemporary audiences. Whatever the case, I remember the first time hearing “Cosmic Love” and being lit up by its liveliness. If its verses are camp, then the chorus is when the song gets grounded in reality. What Kokubu does is form a bridge between the two, revealing that truth is found in exaggeration, and that pop music is all about excavating the desires deep inside of us, and making the impossible feel attainable. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
…from Steps (1987). Listen to the album on Spotify.
See also: “Misty Love” by Miho Nakayama (1988); “On the Earth” by Shambara (1989)
Joshua’s writing has also appeared on The Wire, Chicago Reader and Pitchfork.
This Week in 2021…
“Ne Mo Ha Mo Rumor” by AKB48 [You, Be Cool! / King, 2021]
No. 1 during the week of Oct. 11, 2021 | Listen to it on YouTube/Spotify
“In the short time we missed each other / I can’t believe they call you / a girl suited in lipstick / it’s like you’re someone else,” AKB48 open their 58th single, presumably from the perspective of a boy shocked at the complete makeover of a past crush. “Back then, you still / tied your hair back in a ponytail.” The latter line in particular loses its punch when directly translated as they instead use the phrase ponytail to shushu, a callback to the idol group’s 2010 hit of the same name. With the reference plus added details about her past of short bangs and running in skirts, it tempts me to read the subject of “Ne Mo Ha Mo Rumor” as also the idols in AKB48 themselves.
Changes have been plenty for AKB48 within the past five years, enough to rightfully gasp like the song’s protagonist. The group’s involvement in the 2018 idol-survival show Produce 48 and the resulting group IZ*ONE brought them a new kind of attention. But while they began to explore what a post-Produce AKB would be like, some of the biggest members in the franchise announced their graduations. The turnover has pulled them back to square one, returning them to the orthodox idol sound of their early days or a straight-up farewell letter to the parting members.
The upbeat R&B sound of “Ne Mo Ha Mo Rumor” as well as the renewed focus on the performance aspect of the group, then, seems like AKB finally moving forward with the energy inspired by Produce 48. Their investment in dance and choreography recall the promotion of 2018’s “No Way Man,” their first post-Produce single which its dance-centered PR felt like a response to the video compilations highlighting the difference between AKB idols and K-pop trainees. But this single hardly feels as laborious in effort, partly thanks to the jovial brass-funk lightening the mood and offering more room for playfulness. “Hey, what’s up!” The idols shout in the intro of “Ne Mo Ha Mo Rumor.” You can audibly imagine their goofy hip-hop stance, and that’s the first impression they set before diving into the rest of the track.
All that said, any freshness in approach from AKB found in “Ne Mo Ha Mo Rumor” is more relative within the time frame of the group’s own post-Produce era. Step outside and consider the group’s full 15-plus-year history and it starts to feel cyclical. The “we can dance too!” angle was done an entire decade previous with “Beginner.” We already discussed in length in this column about 2013’s “Koi Suru Fortune Cookie” and its insistence to will the meme-ness of its dance to existence, not to mention its establishing of tone and atmosphere via funk music. Look outside AKB to the current trend in idol at large, too, and you can observe dance-shot versions have become a standard, if not necessary industry practice. “Ne Mo Ha Mo Rumor” is course correction to a degree but doesn’t apply an entirely new strategy.
Perhaps this lesson of “more than meets the eye” can be best embraced by the song’s protagonist. He’s1 so caught up in the drastic change in the appearance of his former crush that he fails to consider her actual personality, led on by a negative speculation of her current reputation. After the idols include a lyrical reference to their past hit, his object of desire can mirror the AKB idols themselves: “And you changed your hair color so much / how many times have you been in love?” He sourly asks, his illusion shattered like he overheard a dating rumor of his favorite member. Yasushi Akimoto writes from a deceptively selfish perspective, masking the self-centered voice of “Ne Mo Ha Mo Rumor” with disco ad libs and peppy funk. The girl of his dreams can’t remain innocent forever, and that tough-to-swallow truth can apply in more ways than one.
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Next issue of This Side of Japan is out November 10. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
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For my choice in pronouns here, please refer to the footnotes of my entry on Hinatazaka46’s “Kimi Shika Katan.”