Issue #91: Moth to a Flame
Talking about the music in this winter's J-dramas, the Phantom Siita show in Anaheim and the original "Choo-Choo TRAIN"
Hi! Welcome to This Side of Japan, a newsletter on Japanese music, new and old. You can check out previous issues here.
After a subpar fall season in 2024, I’m delighted to find a comedy I love as we begin 2025 in TV dramas. The promos for Hot Spot might introduce it as being wackier than it actually is—a suburban space-alien comedy!? It’s all about the hilarious tidbits found in the everyday, arising from conversations at the workplace or lunch among friends, with granular observations you might expect from someone like Bakarhythm writing the script. Maybe you’ve already experienced his work for Brush Up Life from a couple years ago? I actually have not yet, but his touch on Hot Spot is getting me more curious to check that one out.
Hot Spot unfortunately doesn’t have much music component of note, and so I couldn’t discuss it as an entry for this column on music in TV dramas. But it’s too good not to mention! There is another favorite from this season that does have a noteworthy song as its opening theme along with a few good songs attached to just-OK dramas.
Here are 4 songs from TV dramas this winter season.
“Wash Away” by Balming Tiger [AWAL]
…from Tokyo Salad Bowl (Tuesdays, 10 p.m.; NHK)
For their song for Tokyo Salad Bowl, Balming Tiger stow away their hip-hop beats for flashy jitterbug funk that gets as busy as their other odes to butt-shaking. Through their pinched-up yelps and equally nervy guitars rising from the woozy tones, the middle section especially reminds me of Yves Tumor at their most glam-rock mode. And it’s fitting a non-Japanese act like the South Korean band provides the opening theme for this particular show. Cases picked up by detective Koda (Nao) and translator Arikino (Ryuhei Matsuda) in the International Investigation Unit offer a jump-off point to discuss the life of immigrant workers from other parts of Asia and the mistreatment they face as minorities in Japan. Involvement from an act outside of the country like Balming Tiger adds a nice touch in spirit of the TV drama.
“Puppets Can’t Control You” by ONE OK ROCK [Fueled by Ramen]
…from Mikami Sensei (Sundays, 9 p.m.; TBS)
As someone whose popular rock music during their teen years included the likes of Paramore, Gym Class Heroes and Panic! at the Disco, I’m currently having a time trying to wrap my head around how the label Fueled by Ramen now has a song for TBS’s Sunday Theater production—FBR, in my J-drama? Perhaps less impressive of a feat when you consider the song in question is done by ONE OK ROCK but still: the band isn’t the first name you think of when it comes to acts part of the J-drama-music pipeline.
The vision, though, is there with the band’s arena-tailored pop-punk dropped in to elevate the high-school drama of Mikami Sensei into the big, serious production it aims to be. Sometimes, as it was at the end of episode two, the effort verges on self-seriousness. It’s as if the show wants to evoke a cool and intensity of a boxer’s walk-up to the ring when the song’s brooding riffs cues with titular Mikami (Tori Matsuzaka) slowly walking down the hall to see a jail inmate. This is a teacher fighting the good fight against a corrupt education system, it seems to say, in a manner as subtle as the title of its accompanying song. The seriousness was excessive that I had to find some humor in it.
“Eureka” by Gen Hoshino [Victor]
…from Madoka 26-sai, Kenshuui Yattemasu! (Tuesdays, 10 p.m.; TBS)
For his return as song provider1 for a TV drama since 2021, Gen Hoshino again grasps at the abstract. He reflects openly in “Eureka” about embracing the present moment over low-key R&B glazed over with warm, vintage synth chords that Tyler, the Creator could appreciate. His lyrics are full of rich imagery but also phrases so vast in meaning it can answer for nearly every little silver lining in times of duress: “Isn’t it ironic? / so beautiful yet rough as dirt.” Hoshino’s appreciation for life, even what appears to be the most mundane, shines through in “Eureka.” It can admittedly border into the cliche when paired with a hospital drama like Madoka 26-sai, Kenshuui Yattemasu! that deals with patients facing life or death. But if the moments that assure the titular medical resident Madoka (Kyoko Yoshine) she chose the right field of work inspire a gorgeous tune like this from the singer-songwriter, the effort wasn’t for nothing.
“Pseudonym” by Suisoh [self-released]
…from Call Me By No-Name2 (Thursdays, 1:30 a.m.; MBS)
Japan Program Catalogue straight-up calls what Kotoha (Ichika Osaki) pitches to Megumi (Mio Kudo) in Call Me By No-Name as “a strange bet”: for Megumi to be not her friend but her girlfriend until she can guess Kotoha’s real name. I’ve been putting trust in the show to tell more of what this name-guessing really means, along with nearly everything else about the two: motives, history, personal connection. It has explained little now five episodes in at the time of this writing, but the show hasn’t seemed like the explaining type since the beginning. Suisoh’s opening song for the show sets that cryptic tone. While their maudlin lyrics candidly speak of intense desire, the tense rock production isn’t so forthcoming with it seemingly hiding some unspoken darkness behind it. Call Me By No-Name attempts to adopt this cool mystique, but so far it seems more hazy with the details, my interest in it held on mostly thanks to the two leads.
Welcome back to This Side of Japan! This issue will be a bit different where in lieu of an Album of the Week, I have a show report. Maybe the newsletter will feature more this year given that I have about four more J-pop concerts lined up. There is, of course, new music to discover after as well as an Oricon flashback.
Happy listening!
Live Report: Phantom Siita at the House Blues, Anaheim
“The mics are on,” I heard a girl next to me say about the vocals of Phantom Siita at the idol group’s concert at the House of Blues in Anaheim. They bellowed as unwieldy in a manner not unlike their producer Ado, if her unpredictable ranges had been divided from one person into five people. But they also often left behind audible gaps in between lyrics presumably to catch a huge breath, which further confirmed the lack of a guiding vocal track, adding a rawness separate from the recordings.
Phantom Siita’s mics have been on since they’ve made their TV debut last August. There, performing live on morning variety-news program DayDay, you could hear them struggling a bit for air as they sang and danced their debut song, “Otomodachi.” Like their producer’s hits, their songs hardly hide their physical demand, the intensity of the vocals and music all making for gothic melodrama. But nearly half a year later at their Anaheim show, they’ve built more than enough stamina to work out those kinks. The occasional breaks more made to reinforce the presence of their mics.
What the group had yet to build in the span of these past five months since appearing on DayDay is a deep enough catalog to fill a robust hour-plus set list. They announced this American tour with only five songs under their name; their seven-track Shojo No Hi No Omoide EP, which tacked on two more singles with those five, wouldn’t be out for another month. A good run of cover songs made up for the middle of the House of Blues set, dedicating a song for each of the five members before reconvening as a group for a couple more.
If you took a look at the set list at the group’s Budokan show in November, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see a good half being made up of cover songs. And there, the covers didn’t just fill time; the choices served as proposed canon behind the musical concept of Phantom Siita. Also performed for the Anaheim show, Jun Togawa’s “Suki Suki Daisuki” hinted at it being the skeleton key to the group’s music from its new-wave sound to its bubbly yet sinister chorus. You could hear echoes of Akina Nakamori and Shiina Ringo in their music; Keyakizaka46 is a key idol-group ancestor in their dark twisting of the traditional school-girl image, if not the melodrama rising from a neo-Showa-pop mold. Their recent pop choices found a mutual connection with their producer either as actual collaborator (syudou, of “Ussewa” fame) or a contemporaneous vibe (co su nie’s “asphyxia”).
The cover choices for the House of Blues show, though, revealed less of the group’s personality than their perception of their audience’s tastes. The reckless vocals of Kenshi Yonezu’s “KICKBACK” tied with their style in the loosest of ways, but Hikaru Utada’s “One Last Kiss,” less so. If those two picks tested the crowd and their familiarity with anime songs, Yasuha’s “Fly-Day China Town” reached for their love for city pop. They completed their stretch of covers with “Mayonaka No Door~Stay with Me,” a city-pop classic that’s become a foolproof song to include for an American J-pop concert at this point. (Ado also included it for her Los Angeles show last year.)
Maybe it was foolish of me to expect a cover of “Silent Majority.” I nevertheless realized this show wasn’t really geared towards a listener like me for whom Japanese music, new and old, is part of their lives like oxygen in the air. The set list was built instead to win over someone like this fan I overheard who got excited that he recognized the songs despite their lack of familiarity with J-pop. It makes me wonder how fans like him discovered Phantom Siita without presumably interacting with any other J-pop artist besides Ado. If the cover choices can give me a clue, maybe it’s through algorithm-driven playlists. Because this run of songs have the feel of a streaming-service recommendation tab, drawing from what the listeners might already be familiar with rather than Phantom Siita’s own personal taste. By going too safe, they seemed so anonymous.
Some of my cynicism went away when Phantom Siita began their encore. The group returned with “Tot Musica,” paying homage to their producer while nailing every one of her wicked vocal turns, and they followed it with “Moonlight Densetsu.” A more obvious anime-song classic than what they played before, but the Sailor Moon theme’s shadowy string arrangements felt musically aligned to their own songs than, say, the sleek EDM of “One Last Kiss.” Besides, I couldn’t resist a chance to hear my favorite lyric from the song sung by a group of idols who could deliver. Phantom Siita can sing for certain. The next show hopefully will share more of who they are.
Singles Club
“on me” by DAFTY RORN ft. goku sasaki [self-released]
DAFTY RORN links up with like-styled digicore fellow goku sasaki to mumble flex chants on a haunting beat. The two wander along the ominous haze like the undead, reciting oblique, clipped bars. Caught in a bleary daze, DAFTY joins many other rappers dwelling in the deep web recreating the claustrophobia of an exiled Chief Keef. But while the production in last year’s #room was busy firing off sputtering drums and spaceship synths, the hollowed-out beat of “on me” gives the creeps of an abandoned mansion: It’s so spacious yet so vacant, you might start imagining a presence that’s not actually be there.
Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “#NP” by goku sasaki; “TESLA” by kegøn ft. Billionhappy & Effie
“Gasoline” by Genick, Jacotanu & The Deep [SPRAYBOX]
Genick and Jacotanu kick off the new second edition of SPRAYBOX’s THE RAVING SIMULATOR with “Gasoline.” The five-track compilation links producers in the label’s roster with pop vocalists for a series of great club-pop collaborations, and the two got to set the bar: they run the garage and bass imprint after all. The two get help from guest The Deep, importing her bratty electroclash for the hard garage tune. Handed a track from the two that’s all deep bass and an incessant oontz oontz drum loop, the Korean singer rides the beat to indulge in trashy fun: “I love these issues: K-drama / but I like your lies,” she goes as she spins her full-of-herself laughter into a hook. Fortunately for everyone involved, the party is just getting started.
THE RAVING SIMULATOR 2 is out now. Listen to it on Spotify/Bandcamp.
See also: “Beef Noodle” by Kush Jones & Oyubi; “dark coco” by tamanaramen
“Passing” by Satoko Shibata [IDEAL MUSIC]
Satoko Shibata saves the heaviest lyric here for last: “I want to fall in love.” The singer-songwriter sighs those words in passing, but damn, do you feel her exhaustion. The once-sunny and ornate arrangements of the singer-songwriter’s recent album, Your Favorite Things, dampens into one gloomy soul. But rather than the initial devastation of heartbreak, the achy music recalls the numbing melancholy that lingers afterward for what can feel like eternity. If her lyrical recounting of her depression throughout scans as too roundabout, it’s only her attempting to downplay its aftereffects: “‘Have you been so busy these past 2 months, enough for your fingers to be so thin?’ / You saw right through me, but I wanted to look tough in front of you,” she sings. After being resigned to nothingness, the final lyric cuts deep in its candidness: stuck at rock bottom, she wholeheartedly believes falling in love would do her some good.
Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “Eureka” by Gen Hoshino; “Ai Wo Sawaretara” by STUTS x SIKK-O x Mamiko Suzuki
This Week in 1991…
This section is usually dedicated to the Oricon number ones throughout the chart’s history, but for this issue, I’ll write about a hit that did not make it to the very top.
“Choo Choo TRAIN” by ZOO [FORLIFE, 1991]
Highest position at #3 during the weeks of Jan. 20 - Feb. 3, 1992 | Listen to it on Spotify/YouTube
By some great coincidence, a student in ZOO’s dance school also happened to work for Japan Railway. In 1991, JR’s company chairs were asking for ideas from younger employees for fresh music to go with a new travel campaign eventually named JR SKISKI drawn to capitalize on the country’s ski boom. “He really put effort introducing us to them, telling them, ‘right now hip-hop dance is getting popular with the young crowd, and there’s this group called ZOO,’” said NAOTO, former member of the now-defunct dance collective, to Bunshun Online in 2020. The resulting record, “Choo Choo TRAIN,” kicked off this new commercial campaign that would come to inspire a whole catalog of J-pop hits3, further spreading the group’s hip-hop dance with it.
Perhaps the student has ZOO to thank for getting him into hip-hop dance in the first place. Assembled in 1989 through late-night TV program DADA L.M.D., the group’s showcase of hip-hop and New Jack Swing in particular proved to be one of the early gateways to the then-bubbling dance and music styles for viewers in Japan. They soon recorded music, too, cutting their debut record, “Careless Dance,”4 as the theme song for a successor show of DADA L.M.D. But they couldn’t quite make ends meet solely from their TV gigs, and hence the dance school, where it perhaps attracted the very amateur dancers they inspired through their TV appearances.
“When I got the chance to work on a ZOO single again, I really wanted to make something with impact,” Keizo Nakanishi, composer for ZOO, recollected about the making of the group’s third single, “Native,” to Hiroshima.FM in 2012. “So I thought of making a song that’s fun to sing and dance to like Bobby Brown’s, who was covered closely in Japan’s dance-music scene at the time along with MC Hammer.” The single ended up being the song the JR representatives would check out as a preview before officially commissioning ZOO and Nakanishi for the song to go with their first JR SKISKI ads.
The influence from Bobby Brown also trickles into “Choo Choo TRAIN” as seen in the shuffle-step choreography highlighted in the promo clip. Musically, though, it’s a looser take compared to “Native” and its brash arrangement built out of sharp angles and machine-made stutters that’s more exemplary of the sound pioneered by Teddy Riley. “Choo Choo TRAIN” bears its influence’s key components enough for the music to gel with the dance to get what the project is going for as a whole. But smoother in groove, the shiny funk also stylistically recalls the lavishly-arranged R&B available on the contemporary charts, lying in equal distance to the music later made by ski-boom beneficiary Kohmi Hirose as much as Boyz II Men.
The origin of “Choo Choo TRAIN” as essentially a commercial jingle answers for its mindless yet delightfully infectious chorus. JR explicitly asked Nakanishi to include “choo choo” as a lyric, and a similar onomatopoeic focus comes through elsewhere in the writing: “Heat heat beats like a skip skip,” ZOO sing a hook that melt into pure, sweet rhyme seemingly by design. And the song hinges upon the chorus like how an ad lives by the strength of its tag line. Functioning as glamorous scene-setting at best, the verses meander until it dives back into the elated chorus. “To the paradise, take me please”: from its funky beats to aspirational lyrics, it’s all to deliver that escapist feeling embedded in those penultimate lyrics.
ZOO continued to provide songs for JR SKISKI after the campaign took off with “Choo Choo TRAIN.” But their successes from being part of the launch were later eclipsed by million-sellers like globe or GLAY later commissioned by JR. And embracing a style such as New Jack Swing that’s tied to a certain pop era, “Choo Choo TRAIN” seemed destined to be remembered as a novelty of its time. That is, until a decade later in 2003 when ZOO’s former member HIRO covered it with his then-new R&B group EXILE. “That’s our crown jewel, so let’s the make the best of it,” NAOTO told HIRO, he said, when the latter asked if his group can cover it. While “Choo Choo TRAIN” has been born anew, it lives the life it has always lived: spreading R&B in the J-pop scene through one pioneering crew to another.
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Gen Hoshino also returned as an actor on a TV drama at the top of the year, for the 2-hour one-off special Slow Train. Spoiler alert: He plays a novelist whose dating the younger brother (Tori Matsuzaka) of his editor (Takako Matsu)—that is supposed to be bit of a twist, so apologies. It’s more about his partner’s family and their bond together as the brother readies to leave the nest while their younger sister (Mikako Tabe) is about to move to Korea. It’s a cozy watch for the New Years holidays, written by Akiko Nogi (Nige Haji, MIU 404, if we’re talking shows with Gen Hoshino in them).
The show also has yonige doing the song for the ending, titled “without you.” Great song!
For a lot more on the JR SKISKI campaign and its history of inspiring J-pop hits, I recommend checking out Patrick’s newsletter over at Make Believe Mailer.
"But Dance Music had this underground image in J-pop back then,” Keizo Nakanishi said to Hiroshima.FM. “Most of the music made by artists who represented that style at the time like Toshinobu Kubota, Bubblegum Brothers, and m.c.A-T were more funky in their rhythms. If I was going to make Dance Music, instead of following their lead, I thought it’d be better to reference Philly soul since [DADA L.M.D.] modeled itself like Soul Train.”