Issue #90: Lux
The first issue of 2025 highlights the new Suichu Spica album, Saki Kubota's "Ihojin" and some footnotes regarding the '80s hit and the surrounding Silk Road boom
Hi! Welcome to This Side of Japan, a newsletter on Japanese music, new and old. You can check out previous issues here.
The blog entry below will make more sense when you see the single we’ll cover in the Oricon section of the newsletter. There’s a lot of interesting context I gathered from my research that I couldn’t fit into the main body of the column, so I gathered some of it here as a supplemental entry. Maybe it’d be good to read this first? Anyway, here’s stuff revolving a Showa pop record inspired by a Silk Road boom that fully took off in Japan during the 1980s.
When producing what would become “Ihojin” for a Sanyo commercial, Masatoshi Sakai rallied around this supposed imminent arrival of a Silk Road boom. He drastically altered the original song written by a then-unknown Sayuri Kume — who would soon gain fame under the stage name Saki Kubota from this single — for the music and lyrics to fit his image of “The Theme of Silk Road,” the subtitle given to the resulting record. Understandably, it was more than a tall order for the young singer-songwriter to fulfill, if not a rather out-there inspiration to satisfy. Yet the producer’s insistence to evoke the image of the historical trade route into music would turn out to be a prescient one: Some months later, in April 1980, NHK premiered the first installment of its 12-episode TV documentary series on the Silk Road, sparking the public’s interest to head to the site as a travel destination throughout that decade.
To get a feel on Japan’s views on the Silk Road, albeit with a more focus on China than Eastern Europe and the Middle East, I recommend this academic article by musicologist Yasuko Enomoto on the Silk Road boom of the 1980s in connection with political relations between Japan and China. (It is, unfortunately, written in Japanese.) There, as the what first inspired national interest, Enomoto cites the torch relay of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which initially floated the idea of athletes running the Silk Road route from Greece to Japan. International travel started to take off in Japan from that same year; TV began to cover more about the countries crossing through the trade route, like Iran and Afghanistan. For music, she brings up Godaigo’s single “Gandhara,” the ending theme to 1978 TV drama series Saiyuuki, and its lyrics referencing the ancient Indo-Aryan civilization of the title.
Exotica was in as the media screened more images of foreign countries, and this idea of travel was at the forefront of Masatoshi Sakai’s creative mind. Start reading about the hits that Sakai helped make in that decade, and you’ll quickly find out about the Dentsu-sponsored mission that took media greats like Sakai out to Samoa all for the sake of creative inspiration. For what it’s worth, the producer got involved in the making of some of the biggest pop classics after this trip, records later dubbed as his “foreign world” series: Judy Ongg’s “Miserarete” on the Aegean Sea, Eikichi Yazawa’s “Jikanyo Tomare” on Easter Island, Momoe Yamaguchi’s “Iihi Tabidachi” on Japan. The latter two notably are advertising successes as well: Yazawa’s made good as part of a Shiseido campaign while Yamaguchi’s is immortalized as a Japanese National Railway image song. Kume’s “Ihojin” lives as part of this grand pop lineage, tapping into the locale that inspired the very interest.
While the documentary had been in production around the time when Sanyo plucked Kume’s song from CBS Sony as a candidate for its campaign, perhaps it’s worth adding that, despite its subtitle, Kume’s “Ihojin -Theme of Silk Road-” had nothing to do with the NHK TV documentary series. For its actual theme song, Kitaro gained accolades through his new age-y piece. For all of the campaign’s efforts to summon an ancient aura of the Orient from Mitsuo Hagita’s baroque arrangement to the now-questionable visuals set in Afghanistan, the pieces came together for a commercial promoting the newest state-of-the-art technology. “Big world, big screen,” touted the narrator as viewers peeked into an imagined Old World in high definition.
Welcome to This Side of Japan’s first issue of 2025! It hasn’t even a month into the new year, and it’s already getting busy for music in Japan. The music selected here, too, gets busy with some math rock, black metal, and hyperpop covered for this newsletter. Plus, as previewed from the above blog entry, we talk about the Orient as we check out the first Oricon number one of the 1980s.
Happy listening!
Album of the Week
Lux by Suichu Spica [self-released]
*Recommended track: “Spica” | Listen to it on Spotify/Bandcamp
In an endearing moment in an interview with Skream magazine, vocalist and guitarist Chiaki discovers she’s the odd one out when her and the rest of Suichu Spica is asked about the point in time that marked their creative shift going into the math-rock band’s new record, Lux. The songs released since 2022’s Osm certainly points to a newfound expansiveness. For its spark, she brings up “beyond me” and the writing process behind the sublime 2024 single; the other three instead went with “Pulsation,” a song completed before her choice. It was maybe for the best they didn’t decide on saying it together in the count of three.
The quartet, though, agree on the new album’s essential song. “‘Oh, it’s self-titled,’ I thought, and a switch hit from there,” bassist Jun Uchida said when he received the demo for “Spica” from Chiaki. “I got to do a really good job arranging this.” The band’s most ambitious song to date, “Spica” grew from a three-minute track to a seven-minute epic, unfolding gracefully while the guitar retain its emotional rush throughout the sprawl. Time seems to go by in a breeze despite its length, though the band also hardly wastes a second. Fret-board trickery isn’t deployed just for trick’s sake with every bursting riff and extended jam dedicated to elevate their heartfelt lyrics. “Maybe I want to live with you forever,” Chiaki sings in the final refrain. “I want to brighten you more with love / because I want to still see you.”
While Suichu Spica share the riches of their new-and-improved math-rock toolbox in Lux, their core message shines even more. As the band further expand their sound and ideas, the lyrics stick to the theme at the heart of the band’s namesake: the light leading the listeners submerged in the dark depth of uncharted waters. If “Spica” showcased how they can successfully aim for the stars with their music in theme and composition, “Pulsation” and “beyond me” resonate by streamlining their strengths in compact forms. The latter builds toward transcendence with exuberance, each instrument restlessly at work. And the former marks the hard-won breakthrough: “From the rough breaths after your cries / you’re born stronger and tougher,” Chiaki sings as the battling guitars settles after crashing like waves against a cliff.
The utility of the band’s instruments goes beyond adding emotional color in Lux. Suichu Spica gets back to basics in “Miyako.” The song follows a rather standard verse-chorus pop structure compared to their other sweeping singles, but it pays off through the band doubling down on immediacy for one punchy banger: the chorus works in a sweet melody but not without showing off some wiry guitar work, resulting in a vibe reminiscent of their influences tricot. They also allow themselves to hang loose in “Both dinosaurs and humans drink water” after reaching for the skies, the song’s lack of whimsy veering its indie-rock arrangement closer to emo.
“There’s a part of me that threw away my pride,” Chiaki said to Skream magazine about writing “Both dinosaurs and humans drink water,” wanting what would become Lux to be heard by people who aren’t necessarily math-rock fans. “I wanted it to have the spirit of Suichu Spica without being too particular about it.” While the strongest songs are their most sincere, they hone their chops operating in different modes to add new dimensions to their personalities: “Dinosaurs” may be the album’s sole outlier from its lack of spectacle, but the song suggests a band with more humor to them than what their earnest lyrics paint them to be. As they expand their guitar-rock palette in Lux, Suichu Spica make the case their celebrations of human perseverance aren’t beholden to a certain sound or tone.
Singles Club
“Euphoria” by Pale [Tokyo Jupiter]
Pale break their four-year silence in “Euphoria” by summoning the brutal reckoning heard in the song’s hardcore-punk address. “Heretics and demons / justified pain / burn your faith,” vocalist NiiK delivers in a piercing screech as the blackgaze band brings on an assault of trembling riffs, blast beats and squealing feedback. As the first taste of their excellent new release, Our Hearts in Your Heaven, their primal scream doubles as a throat-clearing before taking the big plunge into the winding depths of the full-length album: “Euphoria” is followed by a set of two epics that look spiritually inward while musically searching beyond the borders of their genre. But first, before the deep reflection, comes this much needed wake-up call.
Our Hearts in Your Heaven is out now. Listen to it on Spotify/Bandcamp
See also: “Gate of Ultra Doom” by Abiuro; “Paranormal Wrath” by Corrupt Myth
“mifune” by Pygmy I’m cricket [tomoran]
While the songs teeter between a squint of emotional highs and lows, I still catch a sense of uplift from Pygmy I’m cricket’s new Can’t Swim EP. Just a slight change in angle and the glinting emo riffs of the band take on a pretty to melancholic hue. Yuta Mori intones in hardly more than a sigh, his vocals and lyrics also wavering in tone depending on how it hits with the perceived shade of the guitars. “If I collected the days you gave me / I hope it turns into a beautiful color,” he sings before “mifune” comes to an end. You can interpret the rest of his impressionistic lyrics from the EP’s lead track as defeatism—“Just fill what you lack, that’s all that’s to it”—though any bits of gloom brightens along the gentle drift of the twinkling track.
Can’t Swim EP is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “Amarikaze” by AprilBlue; “dull” by mukeikaku
“turn me up” by Ru-a & cat biscuit [G2BG]
For a joint track facilitated by a new collaboration series and label G2BG, cat biscuit roughens up their delicate synth-pop to resemble more the gaudy electropop of Ru-a. Clattering percussion and buzzsaw electro bass lines burst out the seams like the shaken-up soda feel found in early hyperpop. On their own tracks, the producer’s bashful musings are the tonal opposite to the self-satisfied obscenities of the singer-songwriter’s “I Cuckold Your Boyfriend.” But their soft-spoken tracks find connection with the latter’s output through a mutual closed-doors intimacy that invite private thoughts on record—they both craft “bedroom pop” in other words, like in the atmospheric sense. And so cat biscuit’s production makes for a natural home for Ru-a’s blunt, spilling lyrics that reads awfully personal: “I want to make a song / with your favorite rapper,” she sneers one of her many vengeful disses over the restless beat. If “turn me up” sounds ugly and messy, just imagine the falling-out that inspired this acidic anthem.
Listen to it on Spotify/Soundcloud.
See also: “Future-core” by gaburyu; “Yoru Wo Nukete” by Lil Soft Tennis & swetty
This Week in 1980…
“Ihojin -The Theme of Silk Road-” by Saki Kubota [CBS Sony, 1979]
No. 1 during the weeks of Dec. 10, 1979 - Jan. 21, 1980 | Listen to it on Spotify/YouTube
Riding the Chuo Line from her college, Sayuri Kume jotted down on a notebook of the scene that eventually became the opening lyrics to her debut single under the stage name Saki Kubota: “The children / open their arms / towards the sky.” Originally titled “Shiroi Asa,” it was initially just another song that she submitted to CBS Sony during what she called “a trial period” with the label. After it caught the interest of Sanyo for a TV-commercial tie-in, however, the record now had the working title of “Ihojin” — foreigner 1— but also got subjected to a creative overhaul to adapt its sound and lyrical theme to suit its given subtitle of “Theme of Silk Road.”
“I was feeling ambivalent about it, but so began my imagined journey from the Central Main Line to Central Asia,” Kume wrote for Fuji Koron in 2019 about the huge change in direction of her debut single. “From the postcards and turquoise stones from Tehran sent from my father to the photobooks I flipped through at bookstores.” The young singer-songwriter needed to expand the imagery from her train ride home into a grand narrative unfolding in a far, foreign land. Pulling from whatever mental image she could, her lyrics of arms reaching for the sky tied into otherworldly scenes: a great beyond where earth meets sky, a town built from stone with sounds of prayers and horseshoes, clacking in the distance.
But much of the song’s exotic aura came from the arrangement by Mitsuo Hagita. Producer Masatoshi Sakai had already known Hagita made for a great fit to bring his vision of the Theme of Silk Road to life: he had previously tapped the arranger to conjure the splendor of the Aegean Sea in Judy Ongg’s classic “Miserarete,” his collaborator supplying an awe-inspiring intro to match the sublime of the record’s subject. While the melodramatic intro of “Ihojin” recalls Ongg’s as a kind of spiritual sequel through its grandiosity, the hysteric strings in Kume’s song is more foreboding as if to signal the entrance of evil.
As for the singer herself, Kume stands as a rather small presence in the vastness of Hagita’s arrangement. The smallness partly reflects the emptiness felt by the singer-songwriter in the narrative at hand. “To you / I’m just a passerby,” she sighs in the titular chorus, resigned from her being a mere speck in the crowd in the eye of her desired. “Just a foreigner / you caught peeking back.” She’s crushed from her own insignificance, and the intro motif dramatizes it through the contrast in size.
That said, Kume’s also outdone by the arrangement’s flourishes. Her comparatively meek performance does not quite live up to the scale of devastation suggested by the music. Given the circumstances of the record’s creation, it’s no fault to the singer-songwriter for any unmet expectations in “Ihojin.” In her own hands, the song may have been more of the hushed folk-pop tune it assumes to be after the intro quiets down, perhaps like the softer acoustic folk of Yumi Matsutoya, who Kume counted as an early influence.
Without Sakai’s Silk Road vision (and the Sanyo TV commercial), “Ihojin” certainly would’ve missed out on its earned number-one spot on the Oricon. Kume, though, didn’t enjoy her brief time in the spotlight. “I became so exhausted, and before I knew it, I didn’t enjoy music anymore,” she wrote in Fuji Koron. “I was soon the foreigner in this glamorous world of entertainment.” The more you dig into its history, “Ihojin” seems to grow into a cautionary folk tale. Its sense of being lost in the world becomes more chilling and real as the defining intro motif starts to hint at something far more sinister.
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Next issue of This Side of Japan is out February 12. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
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Kume apparently suggested an English title of stranger but was turned down with producer Masatoshi Sakai insisting the Japanese word for “foreigner” better establishes the wanted oriental feel.