"changing the world in japanese"
by tim rogers
02242005



I really don't get Mickey Mouse. I "don't get" him to the point where I'd go so far as to say I hate the grinny rat bastard. I'm not saying this because I hate Disney, because that's not really the case. I kind of like the movie "Aladdin," if only because so many of my fondest childhood memories involve stealing loaves of bread from stalls in Tokyo's Ueno Ameyayokocho ("Candy-shop Alley") and then high-tailing it down the train tracks with my pet monkey in tow. I'm not going to say that I hate the materialist establishment Disney represents, either, because that'd be a total lie. I don't give a fuck about the establishment. I honestly don't know enough details about what the establishment is to be able to say I hate it, or even that I want to bring it down. Let the establishment stay up. My issue is with Mickey: I don't understand what point he's trying to make, only that he's trying to make a point and many people love him without realizing he's a failure. He's a humanoid mouse with white gloves and trousers -- I'm actually thinking about the Mickey Mouse that stands on the float at the Disneyland parade, the one with the tuxedo and the big cardboard head -- and he's always smiling. His smile is big and cardboard, currogated to the point it doesn't move or bend. I don't like that kind of one-dimensionality in my cultural icons. If I see a girl with a little plush Mickey (or Minnie -- it works both ways) Mouse dangling on her cellular phone, I'm not going to be able to tell the truth to her. If she asks me what I had for dinner, and I had udon noodles, I'm going to tell her I had curry. It doesn't matter either way.

Which brings us to our second, most important point: I love curry. I love udon. Yet I hate curry udon. Isn't that fucked up?

This essay is about Japanese rock and roll music, and the revolution brewing therein. The world has forgotten Japan for a good two decades, and I wager the world is going to remember Japan again quite soon. I will begin this essay by talking about cars and Japan's "business is war" lifestyle, and then I will tell you about how I met a girl with a plush Mickey Mouse hanging on her cellular phone, and told her I had udon for dinner when really I had curry:

Two decades ago, Toyota dumped the Camry on the market, selling them for $2,000 each to willing customers; once every other person had one, they hiked the price up. When Mrs. Smith saw that the Mrs. Jones had a Camry, she told Mr. Smith she wanted a Camry too, and this is how Toyota earned back all their money, plus a little bit more. The act of dumping the cars onto the market was much like an army of samurai leading a charge against soldiers armed with muskets. Many will die; yet, at the end of the day, somebody, somewhere, is going to be moved by another man's action. Someone else will drive home in a new car. Japan thrived on this war-business for close to a decade, either oblivious or simply not afraid of the drought of resources that would follow. Businessmen read up on their Musashi Miyamoto -- the legendary samurai who had pioneered the two-swords fighting technique. His "A Book of Five Rings," with its "Fire," "Water," "Wind," "Earth," and "Void" chapters, though more or less a poetic ode to the five stances one can use to be invincible while holding two swords on a battlefield full of soldiers with one sword, was taken for philosophical face-value, and applied to selling transistors, heat lamps, and industrial chemicals to American men in khaki pants. Pearl Harbor was buried history; the days of Japanese launching initiative assaults were over. Now they waited and watched. The Japanese business goal, for the last two decades, has been "innovate." A little company called Sony made it big when they noticed cassette tapes were small and that people in Japan walked a lot. So they made a cassette player people can carry around wherever they go. Then they jacked up the price once everyone's big brother had one. Little brothers everywhere saved up their allowances for half a year to get their first Walkman.

Japanese business, armed with the knowledge of the five stances a two-sworded man can assume to defend flawlessly against ten thousand one-sword men, grew into a clashing metallic sea of men with two swords. People started, quickly, to lose hands, and eventually entire arms.

Just over twenty years later, I am what the police call an "adult"; Sony's MP3 player was recently laughed off the shelves because all CDs released by Sony Music Japan came with free copy-protection that made it impossible to put them on any MP3 player or personal computer without built-in rocket thrusters; the all-male occupied internet cafe I'm using to write this essay (with guys like me coming in, it's no wonder girls never show up) has a sign outside that says "100 yen an hour," with tiny print reading "200 for men," and I know that when I pay my bill, if I stay more than sixty-one minutes, they're going to charge me 1820 yen, anyway. Also, if I were to go to the Denny's downstairs and order a Coke, I'd get a non-refillable glass that is seventy-five-percent ice; the waiter would make a face like someone was slitting his throat and apologize to me with the longest "fuck off" of any modern language "MOSHIWAKE GOZAIMASEN DESU KEREDOMO!" ("There is no excuse!!") The Coke would cost me just shy of eight American dollars.

Fucking Denny's!!

So this is what Japan has become. Everything is expensive because "Japan is expensive." Says my friend who works for Sony, a real educated woman who studied business and everything in college: "Look -- if, say, if Denny's Japan, a company that's been selling eight-dollar Cokes for thirty years (given inflation, yeah), suddenly dropped their price to a hundred yen [a dollar] and allowed people refills -- it'd be chaos. A thousand people would have to be laid off, maybe more."

I remembered her words when I was at Tokyo Disneyland. A certain British videogame magazine I write columns for, yet never receive money from, likes to taunt me by sending me to rich parties as a "journalist." I drink cranberry juice and watch sweaty white men hit on bucktoothed waitresses in textbook Japanese. I usually bring my guitarist, because I can't go anywhere without my guitarist, and sometimes he gets drunk and it makes me feel vaguely like I could really go for some killing myself right about now. My guitarist, Drew Cosner, drank a record thirty-nine complimentary Kirin beers at this party at Disneyland, and then he fell asleep in a lounge chair. I stared at the on-duty ballroom pianist, a Japanese woman in a red dress that made her look Chinese, ropes of muscle around her neck like she could kill me in one punch. The party was being thrown by Koei, a Japanese software company that is rich and famous for making increasingly graphically detailed games about old Japanese and Chinese historical romances. I ate free pancakes, and I don't think I ever wrote anything about the party. The pancakes had Mickey Mouse's grinning face burned into them. It was cute, and by cute I mean not cute at all. I was sweating like a head of cabbage and I had a terrible middle-ear infection in my left ear. I kept tilting all the way over to the left until a hot bubble burst behind my eardrum and I snapped back up. That morning, I'd fallen down the stairs at Musashi-Urawa Station and cracked my kneecap and busted open my chin. I hadn't shaved in like a week, which meant a little stubble -- nothing substantial, yet just enough to keep a band-aid from sticking. Drew had been pulling me up all day every time I almost fell over. I threw up maybe forty times. This is what you get for sleeping in the garbage. When Drew was passed out, I leaned against the wall. A girl half my height asked if I wanted some Camembert cheese sandwiches and I took the whole tray. In an hour me and Drew were released into Disneyland on a night pass. We couldn't move for shit. Packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, nose-to-back-of-head with a bobbing sea of Japanese, we processed toward the Magic Kingdom without feeling groovy.

"This place is packed, dude."

"Yeah."

"Fuck, six hours' wait for Space Mountain? The park fucking closes in two hours, and there's still motherfuckers waiting at the back of the line?"

"I'll be."

It was a hot September night. It felt like it was raining. It wasn't raining.

A month later, I told my Sony friend about this, just as she had defended the false-advertising at internet cafes with the resignation that "People see the sign, they think it's a good deal, they go in, they accept their fate, and they figure, well, hey, it's not so bad. Japan is about teaching people patience is a virtue."

"And taking their money?"

"Well . . . yeah."

(Now hear this: in the basement food-market of the Matsuya Department Store in Asakusa, Tokyo, a basket of strawberries is 945 yen. A "value box" containing two baskets is 1890 yen. I take the manager, a Mr. Aoki, aside, and tell him -- look, I've been to America a couple of times, and over there, they'd do something like, you know, cut the price a bit. That's what 'value' means, to an English-speaker. And, I mean, you're using an English word, here." He blinks his eyes at the explanation. Finally, he answers: "Well, you're getting the box for free.")

I told my friend about Disneyland, waving my hands and cracking my voice. "There should be a certain point where they tell people, 'Look, there's too many of you in here. The lines are longer than the park is even going to be open. We're full. You're just going to have to find something else to do.' It's common sense."

"It's not good business, though."

So there you go -- in Japan, common sense is not good business. Pray for us. And then hear this:

I have a friend whose cousin goes to Disneyland twice a month. She goes to Disneyland, my friend, a music critic, explains, because she "likes Disneyland." This girl is twenty-four years old. Her mother is a widow, and her mother's mother is a widow. Her father, and her mother's father, were in the auto business. The house of ladies is armed with a fat wad of stocks and bonds that will take them places (the younger widow takes weekly mandolin lessons, for example) probably until young Emiko's children spawn children of their own, children who will inherit little more than a half-sized mansion in Tokyo's oldest sex district, the Yoshiwara, where old Musashi Miyamoto used to live in the early seventeenth century. Those children will be confused, I take it, that they have an alright-nice house and no money, and they will be armed with the drive to stand the fuck up and do something with their lives, to "GANBARU," as they say in Japanese, and more power to them. I'll never meet a single blessed one of them; the thought makes me remember a certain Buddhist prayer I'd rather keep to myself.

So Emiko goes to Disneyland twice a month, thanks to a year-pass bought with her dead father's money. The pass allows her and a companion into Disneyland as many times as they want to go to Disneyland, whenever they want to go. Emiko, who works part-time at a printing company and will continue to do so until she gets married and then does nothing -- she's explained this plan to me; I do not exaggerrate -- can only manage to ride the train out to Chiba twice a month, so twice a month it is.

It feels, to me, like sacrilige. I remember the first time I ever went to an amusement park. I don't know why I went. My parents took me. What posessed them to do that, hell if I know. They took me, though. And then they never took me again. I grew up plotting a return to an amusement park -- a better one than the shitty one they took me to -- and eventually, once I got out of high school and into college and had a car and permission to leave the state, I went to fucking Ohio to ride rollercoasters with my large-breasted Korean girlfriend. She was great. She really loved me. I let her go for the dumbest reason, later realized my mistake, and then exiled myself to Japan, where I have been homeless for three years, one month, and twenty-four days. The rollercoasters are a nice memory. I like the sound, like whispering wind with teeth. I hear it sometimes when I'm alone and very, very sad, with an acoustic guitar and fingers too cold to play anything that's not kind of a Bob Dylan cover. The rollercoasters sprouted up on the horizon after two long hours of nothingness during which we tracked a tornado with our eyes way out across a corn field. We were headed out into the country, taking a long drive to see big things.

Tokyo Disneyland can be accessed by taking the Keiyo Line from Tokyo Station. It's a seventeen-minute ride. This country birthed the need for the Walkman; the average citizen spends one-third as many hours riding trains as they do sleeping. Sometimes there's even an overlap between the two, for God's sake. Seventeen minutes is four damn Avril Lavigne songs, not six repeats of a Rolling Stones mixtape while you track tornadoes over cornfields with the girl you really should love, until the rollercoasters slide into view. To work or live amidst such monolithic structures -- or, perhaps, to see them even twice a month -- just feels like too much.

Emiko went to Disneyland with her father when she was four. She went to Disneyland again with her boyfriend when she was sixteen. In between, she said, probably missing two or three front teeth, that if she could, she'd go to Disneyland every day. Shortly after her father died, her mother bought her the pass. It was good for just one year, though she renewed it when it ran out, for the initial price. Two years, she's been going to Disneyland twice a month. Her mother said her father would have loved to see her so happy.

It saddens me that she's so happy. I don't spite her. I don't have any kind of postmodern antiegoistic-ironic consumerist rage against her, because, for one thing, I'm not even sure all of those words are real words. Emiko is really, truly happy when she goes to Disneyland, and I can't take that away from her.

One day, Emiko asked me what I'd had for dinner. I told her I'd eaten curry, even though the truth was I'd eaten udon.

Emiko might very well be a good person. As Matt Damon once said, nobody ever thinks they're a bad person, except maybe me, or maybe you. Emiko is probably a good person. All my contempt for Mickey Mouse can't take away the fact that she feels a kind of physical inflammation of happy every time she looks on his cardboard smile. She's like a little girl in love who just happens to be my age. It makes me realize that, if I had a dog -- let's say a little Welsh corgi in a camouflage dog-sweater, with a big pink tongue -- and some bastard in a Toyota Camry ran over it, struck it flat with a yelp, even though I know full well a corgi has little short legs and there's no way that guy could have seen Tuffy -- that'd be his name -- at the perfectly legal speed he was going, when the guy got out and said "Man, it was an accident!" I'd still probably hate his guts, even if, provably, it was indeed and accident and, secretly, he enjoys waffles with a brand of blueberry syrup that I'd like immensely if I had the money to buy it. Most importantly, it does not change the fact that the man who killed my Welsh corgi might be a legally, indisputably good person.

That's the conclusion I came to about Emiko. It was decided in my head from long ago. It was not shaken, even on the night I met her for the third time, during the famous Senzoku Festival in Yoshiwara, where me and my friend bumped into Emiko and her boyfriend Toshio, like characters in a sitcom, right in front of a little knick-knack shop selling porcelain cats imported from America while the yakuza roamed in force, trading their traditional black velvet track suits, sunglasses and toothpicks for more off-kilter gray kimonos and wooden sandals. Toshio -- big rock and roller, rides a sweet Honda bike -- as new to the Senzoku and fascinated by its science-fiction-movie-esque seediness as I am, gave me a hug and, kissed me on both cheeks, and called me "Antonio!" My friend talked to Emiko. Eventually, my friend backhand-slapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, Emiko here likes rock and roll." This got my attention. There's pretty much nothing I like more than rock and roll; talking with other people who like rock and roll is a close third.

"You never told me that. What bands are you into?" I asked her.

She replied that she'd just bought the new Bump of Chicken CD. Bump of Chicken is a tragically-named Japanese rock band that has ceased to do anything interesting for five years, yet, thanks to an advertising push, was, at that time, the number-one band in Japan. They have wonderful, wonderful hair.

Their new CD costs the same as all new CDs in Japan. Which is about forty dollars.

"I like Avril Lavigne."

"You -- you do? You probably wouldn't if you understood the lyrics."

Emiko giggles. I've just said something sincere and, quite frankly, kind. Marvel.

"I don't need to understand the lyrics. She's cute."

This is where my friend -- a bit of an Avril-hater -- butts in, hands on her hips.

"So, have you heard this new band, Sambo Master?" She elbows me in the flank. "He introduced me to them. They're damn good."

Emiko screws up her face. "Oh yeah? That's not what I heard."

"What did you hear?"

"I hear that they kinda suck."

"Oh? Well, they don't. They're probably the best rock and roll band in the world right now." She has a flair for dramatics.

"Oh? Well, I heard that the lead singer is kind of . . . chubby."

Oh, Emiko, you really are a good person, aren't you? You're beautiful, and you're making me cry. In the words of Sambo Master's frontman Takashi Yamaguchi,

"IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!! YOU MADE ME DO THIS!! I'M GOING TO DO SOMETHING I CAN'T UNDO!! I AM GOING TO SHOW YOU MY AND YOUR SADNESS!! I WILL SCREAM ABOUT OUR SADNESS UNTIL I'VE DRIVEN AWAY ALL THE SADNESS!! ONLY IT IS SOMETHING I CANNOT DO ALONE. I CANNOT PUT IT INTO WORDS; THEREFORE, STARTING NOW, I AM GOING TO PLAY THE GUITAR!!"


sambo master's takashi yamaguchi live at shibuya club quattro, february 9th, 2005

Sambo Master are three Japanese men. Takashi Yamaguchi is the only name that I remember of the three. I have one of their CDs close on hand. I suppose I could look up the names of the bassist and the drummer, though what's the point? If I don't remember their names before writing this, what are the chances you'll remember them after reading it? Words are mysterious and difficult things, as Yamaguchi notes in his song "Tegami" ("Letter"). You need to validate them with your presence. If you ever meet Sambo Master's drummer and bassist, shake their hands and introduce yourself. They'll introduce themselves right back, because they're nice people. They have to be nice people. I'd bet all I'm worth (about negative $28,000, actually) that they're nice people. I've seen them play a live show. While Yamaguchi goes nuts and falls over onto his back three seconds into the first song on February 9th, 2005 at Club Quattro in Shibuya, Tokyo, they both close their eyes, play with their eyes closed for five seconds, and then open their eyes to see if Yamaguchi is back up. He isn't. He's still on his back, beating at his guitar. He gets up about thirty seconds in, just in time to belt out the soulified lead-in to the jazz-punk-pop chorus:

"The day you betray a fellow man is the day I commit murder."

That damn near stopped my heart.

Spake a member of a blues-rock band who met Yamaguchi years back and gives the benefit of the doubt that he's pretty much unchanged until now: "He's afraid -- morbidly -- of playing guitar solos while standing. Chords are alright. It's just -- sequences of notes really mess him up."

Takashi Yamaguchi stands five-foot-three inches tall. His legs are about half the length of his yellow Gibson Les Paul Special. On stage, he bear-hugs that Les Paul and hybrid-picks it like he's abusing a cello. On the jacket cover for the single "Seishun kyousou kyoku" ("A song in wild praise of bygone youth"), he's wearing a "Starfleet Academy" T-shirt. The Trekkie T-shirt is not a gimmick. It doesn't qualify him as a "nerd," nor does it slot his music into a genre "by nerds." It's just a T-shirt he wears a lot. He has close-cut jet-black hair with sideburns that look like Steve McQueen's in "Bullit" for a damn good reason. His silver-framed glasses hold Coke-bottle lenses. When he sings, his voice builds from a buttery Aretha Franklin imitation to a rough artist's rendition of what Bjork would sound like if she had a penis and fronted a death-metal band. When the scream hits its high note, the voice curls in on itself and pops with a little Daffy-Duck-ish cat-hiss, and the place where Yamaguchi's cheeks meet his neck becomes obscured and wobbly. The drums rat-a-tat-tat and the bass keeps chugging -- if one pays attention to the bass, one will find that this revolution is really just three chord punk-rock with lots of clean-tone-shredding and Django-Reinhardt-learned jazz finger tricks, topped with raw, screaming soul vocals. Yet a revolution's elements, as Leo Trotsky would tell us, are less important than the spread of the revolution itself. And Sambo Master's revolution is spreading. Early television broadcasts showed quite-chops-endowed frontman of beloved Japanese pop-punk three-piece gagagaSP, Gozak Maeda (who really needs to lose the Fu-Man-Chu already), walk into the fest of forty or so sausages that was a basement Sambo Master show in Nagoya, only to drop his jaw and pray to Eric Clapton as Yamaguchi belted the solo in "I have need of your warmth," head nearly glued to the microphone, mouth clicking like with epilepsy, eyes vomiting tears until the front of his "gagagaSP" T-shirt was dark with wetness. (Yes, they have reality television shows, on normal stations, about independent rock and roll, in this country. They're had them since around Nirvana. People don't seem to mind them.) "I . . . I've never seen anything like this before," quoth Maeda. A year and some months later, nine-hundred male and female people crowded into the little Club Quattro, elbowing each other in the groins. As the only white man, I stood at the edge of the mosh pit and watched the encore performance of "Lovely Days." The combined voice of the crowd dwarfed even the too-loud, horror-strikingly out-of-tune now-four-stringed guitar, singing like children in a school choir, "And we will roll forward, asleep as we are, feeling nothing; Shall we go on a journey? The desert at night is somewhat refreshing; Who are you? Who are you? Where am I? Where am I? Where am I?" It was like someone had snuck backstage behind the current bullshit global political climate and flipped the "Rock and roll" switch back to the "on" position, and only 900 Japanese people wearing T-shirts reading "I CARRY WARMTH" were able to notice. The important question, and the central question of this piece, is this: will anyone who doesn't know the meaning of the word "NUKUMORI" be able to care?

It must be said, first and foremost, that Takashi Yamaguchi is kind of a weirdo. He did an interview on television, talking to one of Japan's most famous music critics while sitting on a bench in Sugamo, a slightly famous street where old ladies come to donate ten-yen-pieces to local temples and/or buy discount gardening gloves. Yamaguchi was wearing a "Colombia University" sweatshirt that he probably bought at a used clothing shop. I wonder if he thought it was ironic. I can't speak for the man.

I'd say it was ironic because Yamaguchi was, quite relaxedly and affably, railing against Western music. A recent magazine interview that exposes the contents of the tiny apartment Yamaguchi's lived in in Sugamo for seven years shows us that he has quite a well-rounded CD collection, complete with all your Stones and Dylan; it's not like he dislikes Western music at all. He's just saddened by a trend.

"You hear people say things like, 'I don't listen to Japanese music,' or 'I only listen to Western music,' and it's really sad, because these are Japanese people. They'd rather listen to music they don't understand than listen to music they can understand. It's . . . foolish."

He's being very careful to protect something. He doesn't want to lash out and go nuts, I detect. I'm eating a big bowl of udon or curry at a punk-rocker friend's house, the night before a big show, and we're all crowded around the thirteen-inch TV to see what Yamaguchi has to say about anything worth saying anything about. It marks the first time we've seen the guy . . . talk without a guitar in his hands.

With a guitar in his hands, he can't contain his need to play it. Between songs in a live set, he keeps strumming diferent pieces of this one thirteenth-fret Barre chord I can't make out -- his digits must be toddler-finger-length; he holds the guitar upright, so all you can see is the back of his wrist and his thumb pointing to the roof. He noodles around on that chord, talking in a sing-song-y voice about the next song he's going to sing -- he doesn't do the set-list thing, it seems, and his bandmates (best and only friends since college) stand and sit there sweating until he finally decides, and screams the name of the song into the microphone. Sometimes it takes five to ten minutes to get into this. Yamaguchi will strum around on that chord, sing-songing about you, me, him, the future of the world, all the evil things that happen, and how he feels very good, and secure, when he's on a stage singing rock and roll music. Then he'll stop strumming that chord, like he did in the middle of the show on February 9th, and his voice will take on an edge. I have no desire to villify this man, because I for one have seen him perform and think him a demigod, yet I must go on with this metaphor: that chord stops, his little pleasant fantasy song ends, and he begins to rant at you in the voice your uncle would suddenly use when your aunt left the house to go to the mall in her minivan, you were a little girl, and he was about to rape you violently. The audience is held captive. People stand gasping for breath. Women put their hands in front of their lips; their nostrils dilate with something resembling fear. Tears flow. Yet -- what's he talking about? He's talking about how you have to cooperate with him. You simply must sing along with this song, or his sadness will never go away. Everyone will be sad forever if you don't sing at least the chorus. We'll never destroy human sadness if you people don't cooperate please for the love of God help. His voice acheives the pace of a little boy telling his mother about how he's going to be an astronaut, and go to space, and be a hero to the people, when he rants for six minutes about "I'm going to change the world with rock and roll music." Then he says, "I want people to call me a soul musician, though, I think that'd be really great, because soul music is about singing what you believe in, straight from your soul; 'soul' is English for 'tamashii,' and that's what I want to show you, my rock and roll 'tamashii.'" Around right now, the drummer starts stomping the kick and clicking the snare rim. The telltale beat is the beginning of their grunge-y soul tune "Futari" ("Two People"), the studio version of which begins with a short Yamaguchi rant, spoken like a supermarket manager to a five-year-old he just caught stealing a candy bar: "We're one and the same, you know! You and me! You and me! You and me! All of us! You know? It all starts from there! Remember that!" On-stage, Yamaguchi is quieting down and stuttering. "I -- I think we'll sing a song now, it's a rock and roll song and it's called ------------ 'FUTARI'!!" The crowd explodes. They love this guy the way a mother loves her wheelchair-bound son.

"I decided to write music," he tells the music critic on television, "because . . . because I want to talk to people." When he was in school, no one liked him, he says. A picture his grinning, normal-looking father supplies shows that Yamaguchi was a little fatty in middle school. He suffered from depression, and had essentially no friends. He met his drummer through a club in college. The drummer had picked up drums because he thought it would help him make friends. It ended up not working. He convinced Yamaguchi to take up guitar. He tells the interviewer that playing guitar for the first time made him feel free. I'm reminded of something Bob Dylan said about the first time he heard Elvis, how it made know he was free, and that from that day on, no one could ever tell him what to do. It sets up an interesting comparison between Bob Dylan and Takashi Yamaguchi, one I won't dare to pursue further because it's quite early in Yamaguchi's career, and music lovers would lynch me for saying too much too soon.

So yeah, he wants to "talk to people." He saw people on the street, and thought, "'I want to talk to them.'" In this world -- and especially in Japan -- it's not so easy to just walk up to someone and introduce yourself for no reason. When a guitar at last found his hands, Yamaguchi decided that if he became a rock and roll star and everyone on earth listened to his music, then he would realize his goal.

This forms a lyrical motif that dominated much of Sambo Master's early recordings. The more-than-slightly disturbing, yet altogether-beautiful "Sayonara, Baby" starts with a smooth croon and accelerates into a screamed "SAYONARA": "Even if I love you; even if I love you; You will disappear; You will disappear; Even if I believe in you; Even if I believe in you; You will die; Yet, at this moment, you are one of many people I will never so much as introduce myself to; into my chest flows a sadness that ought to scare the hell out of me; to you, I say 'Sayonara, Baby'; Your nostalgic memories; All those you love; Everything that makes you happy or sad; I say 'Sayonara Baby.'"

Yamaguchi's lyrics are like a magic trick to the ears of people who've grown up listening to Japanese rock music since The Beatles stormed in and inspired kids the world over to pick up guitars. Wielding his love of the work of the poet Chuuya Nakahara, Yamaguchi set about writing what he called "New Japanese Rock." The bold title of his first album -- "The Way and the Light of New Rock and Roll Music in the Japanese Language" pretty much summed up Sambo Master's agenda. They were going to do something "new." What is new about their music? Why is it new?

A woman who works for Sony Music, Sambo Master's label told me that one of her colleagues said she "Just doesn't get" Sambo Master. She hasn't listened to them yet; she has, however, looked at pictures of them in a magazine. "What are they going for? Anti-visual rock?"

Sambo Master's second album, "Sambo Master Wishes to Speak to You," peaked at number three on the Japanese Tower Records charts. Let it be known that the Japanese buy a hell of a lot of music; when CDs are about thirty dollars each, Sambo Master's reaching third place in this town where water bills exceed two hundred dollars a month if you take a shower every day is a sign that the revolution is, indeed, being fought, even if you don't see the banners waving in the street yet. This miraculous sale occurred after a total of about $10,000 was spent on advertising. The number-one band, also from Sony Music, happened to be Orange Range, whose light guitar, flat hip-hop beat, and whisper-sung vocal melodies of zero gusto epitomize what my sister means when she says you only need to know six Japanese words to write a hit pop song. The Nobel-Prizewinning novelist Yasunari Kawabata once noted that Japanese people reading his books while riding the train probably wouldn't read those books at home. Kawabata's gift was that his sensitive, shimmering prose was also quickly readable in places like trains. Decades after Kawabata's death, Japanese people have more complicated jobs, and they also have the ability to privately listen to music while walking. The average person likes to listen to music on the train, usually while reading the sports page, or else a fashion magazine. When you ride a train more than two hours to work, and you desperately must ignore all your surroundings, you need that music. Six-word Japanese pop fills the morning commute well; people are tired; they don't want preaching or world-changing going on in their ears; they might spit up their miso soup. Though Sambo Master's music has shifted in one year from hardcore-yet-jazzy punk rock to something I would best describe as "superpowerpop," and though their sound is very listenable and the melodies are catchy as anything else that makes money, the very fact that Yamaguchi is versed in more than sixty words makes him a hard sell. It was the push from Japanese music critics (most of them female), word of mouth, and the totally-punk-rock tactics of guys like Hikaru Ishida at the Ikebukuro Tower Records that got the album selling almost as well as the newest J-bullshit-disco-hip-hop-trash. "The boss was like, we don't need to put this one out front -- we're not supposed to. Corporate says so! And I was like, fuck, man, put that shit out there. And he did. We left it at the listening station for three weeks." Yes, Tower Records, ladies and gentlemen. Add up the curious things you know about Japan -- they put .01% pork extract into their potato chips just to "make customers feel safe," signing to a major label is the best way to earn true freedom with your music (trust me on this one -- I'd kill to have a stable rehearsal studio in Tokyo for less than $50 an hour), and Tower Records is the ultimate place to witness the establishment being kicked in the shit-maker.



Part of the revolution in Japanese rock music involves changing the past. In the past, Eikichi Yazawa rose to the throne of king of Japanese rock; if Sambo Master and their followers have their way, Kiyoshiro Imawano and The Elephant Kashimashi will be put up on that pedestal. It's tough to change the past, though. The past, as the past, is already done, and things that are already done tend to be tough to change. Yet things find a way to happen. Ask any middle-aged Chinese man about the epic novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and he might be able to tell you that when he was a kid, the unifier of China -- Liu Bei -- was the most famous character, yet now people claim to like Zhao Yun, the humble warrior who did not let pride get the best of him, who fought nobly, who sought to serve his kingdom rather than seize any kind of power. Ask any middle-aged Chinese man's father, and he might tell you that, back after the war, everyone was looking up to the wicked general Cao Cao. The Japanese have a similar yardstick -- the three generals who battled in Japan's Warring States Period -- Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. There was a poem -- "A bird in a cage will not sing. Nobunaga says 'Kill it.' Toyotomi says 'Make it sing.' Tokugawa says 'Wait.'" Tokugawa was the man who unified Japan. As human beings are, generally, creatures that love to ponder "what if," the Japanese have never, exactly, on the record, looked up to Tokugawa. Before the war, everyone was big on Hideyoshi, the wild-eyed, ninja-legion-commanding psychopath (if a hundred Chinese kung-fu flicks tell no lies) who believed Korea and China were Japan's birthright. In the 1980s, and even now, people claim to admire Oda Nobunaga, whose focused ambition carried him sailing smoothly to an honorable defeat.

Koei made about eighteen videogames about that.

That's supposed to be ironic.

The words are supposed to be ironic, I mean. The fact isn't supposed to be ironic. Facts seldom are.

The Beatles hit Japan before the invention of the Walkman. One can say that it was most likely The Beatles that paved the way for the Walkman. Japanese people wouldn't care to listen to recorded music had The Beatles not birthed pretty much all the genres of music considered worth listening to. The Japanese were inspired to respect and admire rock and roll music for several reasons -- first of all, that it was new, second of all, that it was foreign, and least importantly, because it made them feel ways they'd never felt before. There was a kind of stigma from the beginning, one reinforced by the earliest attempts by Japanese men to perform rock and roll, that the Japanese just weren't good at performing this -- this . . . kind of music where a man relates his deepest feelings in a hip-shaking way that makes girls bedroomed-eyed. America eventually sent Buzz Aldrin and Neal Armstrong to the moon; Japan was, meanwhile, in awe of Eikichi Yazawa, the first man of Asian rock and roll.

My friend Shouei Sangyong, a Korean-Japanese boy who just turned twenty this year and has been singing in an eternally pubescent, crackling voice as the lead vocal of underground-turned-major punk-rock band The Sanyons ("The Three-fours") for three years, admires the hell out of Yazawa. Everytime Yazawa is in town, Sanyon goes to see him. He wrangles the band together, and they all go to the show and scream their lungs out. You go to any punk-rock club in Shibuya around six on a weekday evening, and there'll be a show already in progress. Inside, kids wearing "YAMATO DAMASHII" ("GREAT JAPANESE SPIRIT") T-shirts will gladly tell you that yeah, Yazawa is like a god to them. He's the first man to do this -- to sing rock and roll music, while being Japanese.

The problem, one jazzman told me -- I've found that Japanese self-proclaimed jazzmen are the fairest bet on earth for unbiased music opinion -- is that Yazawa was so inspired by Western music that even when he sings in Japanese it sounds like he's singing in English. Most of Yazawa's songs are half-English, half-Japanese. The English usually consists of key "Baby"- and "Oh yeah"-inclusive phrases pieced together from the tapestry of sixties rock and roll. Yazawa gets away with this because he is a manly man, and because he's still alive despite many self-inflicted hardships, and still rocks. "I've nothing against the man. It's just that he's too imperfect to be these people's god. He's so . . . vanilla," quoth the jazzman. He went on drinking his gin and tonic. I had a glass of water.

Meanwhile, you see the Sanyons wallflowering up the joint during the opening bands' sets. The drummer, Purdie Sakamoto, who didn't tell me his real name even when he was drumming for my band, sits at a table near the stage, arms crossed, dead asleep. He's the oldest member of the band by six years. He told me once, heavily drunk, that he's going to ride them until he can afford a Benz and a house and a stupid wife with big boobs. "These kids are a gold mine. They've got the spunk. They've got the drive to be pop-stars, dehumanized on television. It's great. They're great people." The opening set Sakamoto sleeps through is a band where everyone looks like someone else. The guitar-vocal looks like a Japanese Sid Vicious with a guitar. The bassist looks like a Japanese Kurt Cobain -- with a bass. The drummer looks like The Blue Hearts' guitarist Masatoshi Mashima, Indian headdress and all. The Pi-carried-out-to-a-hundred-digits T-shirt is too much of a coincidence. This kid is trying to look like Mashima. I ask him after the show if he's a Blue Hearts fan, and he tells me he bought the shirt for about a hundred bucks on Yahoo! Auctions. That?? Japan's eBay. I ask him if he still listens to The Blue Hearts every day, like I do, and he tells me "Hell yeah. They were the first guys to, you know, like, fight the fucking system, well, I mean, there were those harder punk bands like The Star Club -- they were just a bunch of posers, though, trying to be the Pistols. [Japanese people, even punkers, rarely affix the "Sex" to the Pistols' name. It makes them feel too kinky.] The Blue Hearts were, like, fighting shit by being popular. They managed to enter the mainstream, and that's fucking wicked." The kid, despite contradicting his own T-shirt-buying habits, has The Blue Hearts pretty much nailed: they were a Japanese band that, from 1985 to 1994, sang about things like how stupid the Japanese school system is for focusing on exam-preparation. They called the Japanese racists against their own people. Frontman Hiroto Kohmoto sang about not wanting to be a company drone in this era of international business-war. He said he'd not fuck with all the boring old men if they would agree not to stare at him when he reads a magazine and eats an apple in a bookstore in his leather jacket and tight jeans.

What The Blue Hearts represented, perhaps inadvertently, was the true power of Japanese ingenuity. As people and as businessmen, Japanese of the 1980s were innovators rather than pioneers. The music The Blue Hearts put forth was post-proto-post-punk, to put it into words that describe it both historically and aurally. Many of their three-chord progressions are lifted from Ramones or The Clash ("I Fought the Law"'s A-D-E recurs too many times to count); it's the undeniable energy, the flash of the music, the instant -- hell, the more-than-instant pop appeal of it that shows what Japanese people have historically done with foreign things like sushi (Korean), sumo wrestling (Chinese), and videogames (American): changed it in a barely noticable fashion and then set it free. The Blue Hearts have a song called "LINDA LINDA," which you might have heard on American radio once in 1987. As a man who is often assigned the task of putting a melody into a new guitar riff, I carry the knowledge that tens, even hundreds of melodies will fit any one chord progression. That The Blue Hearts were talented musicians is apparent in every recording they punked out. It was either a freak act of God or the sheer spirit of 1980s Japanese innovation that put the absolute best pop melody on top of an A-E-D punk progression, complete with a chorus that screams the phrase "LINDA LINDA. LINDA LINDA LINDA" (lifted from a textbook, "Linda" is Portuguese for "beautiful") with three distinct voices including bassist Junnosuke Kawaguchi and guitarist Masatoshi Mashima, in perfect harmony. Hiroto Kohmoto's voice, currently working hard alongside Mashima's guitar for classic-rock band The High-Lows, who have been on tour since the middle of 2002, come to think of it, glides on top of it all, mid-range and the inimitable texture of banana juice.

The song should have set the world on fire. It had every right to. It had every intention to. It was fearless, and it had been handed to Hiroto Kohmoto and Masatoshi Mashima by God himself. What happened?

Well -- the song was in Japanese, for one thing. And for another thing, it was punk-rock. In 1987. The idea of retro-cool hadn?? been invented yet. At that stage in history, when a fad died, it was dead forever. If anyone actually wanted punk-rock, they would just put on an old Ramones LP.

"The Ramones never had a real, solid, fearless, world-igniting hit song," I said to Sanyon one night after they played a show in Shibuya's Hachiko Square.

"What about 'Blitzkrieg Bop'? That's the song that invented punk!"

"Is it?"

"Yeah, you know that. 'Hey, ho, let's go; hey, ho, let's go,' eh?"

"Yeah, yeah, I know the song. I'm just saying I don't think it's that great."

"This coming from the man in the 'RAMONES' T-shirt!"

I was indeed wearing a "RAMONES" T-shirt.

"Hey, this shirt was free. And I'm not saying I hate them or anything. Just that -- well. I think The Blue Hearts did Ramones better than Ramones did Ramones. If someone asked me to show them some punk, and they?? never heard punk before, I?? give them Blue Hearts over Ramones any day."

"That's a bold statement."

"Is it? Is it, really, bold, to say that a revision can be better than the original? We're not talking about movie sequel here. The movie sequel analogy is best employed when an aging band tries to make a comeback. When a new band tries a new spin on an old band's style, that's -- you know what that is? That's rock and roll."

Sanyon sipped melon-flavored soda the color of a green crayon through a straw narrower than his tear-duct.

"That's not rock and roll. It's just people too scared to try something new."

I scoffed. Three punk-rock girls who had somehow become attached to us and followed us to the family restaurant where we'd spend the night were asleep with their heads on the table. One of them would tell me, the next morning, that she's only eaten chicken once in her life, because she bit into a chicken bone when she was four and it grossed her out. I'd later meet her for a date, and we'd end up at Denny's and she'd scream at me because I refused to pay 800 yen for a Coke. She'd then tell me I needed to grow up. She was wearing a little black office-lady suit when she said that. The morning she told me about her fear of chicken meat, she was wearing a punk-rock leather jacket and had hair sprayed with one-day cherry-red dye. Sanyon's hair is forever cheese-yellow. I'm always tempted to touch it. It's a puffy yellow afro. I was sitting next to him on the stairs to the Ginza Line platform after their street show in the Hachiko, thinking of touching the hair. I didn't do it. Their street show had been a succeess. At just past midnight, when all the subways were making their final runs, they managed to attract two-hundred-some people and fill them up with a little punk-rock before they headed home. Back in the eighties, punk-rock bands would swarm the Hachiko, a plaza famed for the statue of a dog -- named Hachiko -- who waited for his master at Shibuya Station for several years even after the man died one day at work. The dog died on the pavement as a symbol of Japanese business loyalty. In the 1960s right up through the 1980s, the statue was the most famous place to meet your friends in Tokyo; playing a punk-rock show, interrupting people's to-and-fro commute, was part of any band's coming-of-age. The Blue Hearts sure as hell did it. Girl-punkers SOFTBALL damn near caused a riot in 1998 - the last band to really tear the Hachiko apart, if memory serves. The cops used to break up shows that got too rowdy. That sort of thing doesn't happen anymore. The cops hand out tickets. If you get five tickets, you have to pay a fine. This is why The Sanyons tell the cops, every time they play Hachiko, that a different member of the band is the "leader." I guess this puts a limit of sixteen shows on them? The bassist, Nobuhiro Ito, was the "leader" the night I caught their street show. Just two weeks later, the bassist would become the guitarist. Another week later, his girlfriend would be pregnant. Nineteen years old, the two of them. He's missing a canine and a bicuspid in the front of his mouth, makes me think he's just a little kid. The day he told me about his girlfriend's pregnancy, his eyes lit up, "I made a baby!" Then his face darkened. The eyes went on glowing. "I need to think about the future." Like a hero in a Japanese cartoon about a punk band, his guitar skill increased dramatically. In order to wedge themselves more firmly into the modern vogue -- and to secure that Warner Records contract (as of this writing: done - look for The Sanyons??debut on Warner Japan this July), they made a reggae song, and Ito solos on that Gibson Flying V for five damn minutes. At the street show, it was still "Mick" Shogo on a Les Paul, which was all well and good. He plays the bass now. Ito went home to see his girlfriend, who was feeling sick, and me and Sanyon headed to a shitty overpriced restaurant to eat nothing and drink plenty of Coke with the punker girls. One of them -- not the chicken-fearing one -- was heavy into Shogo. Shogo looks something like Tommy Ramone. He's about six-foot-four and has fingers longer than -- . . . well, they're pretty long. His floppy hair frames his face in a statuesque kind of way. The girl who dug him had this habit with mahogany-colored eyeliner. I've met her a couple times at other shows; I think her name is Chieko. She has a nice complexion -- it's just that damn eyeliner. She wears the punk jacket -- home-studded -- and tight jeans, RAMONES T-shirt. She's really serious. She keeps her nose in the air and her lips pursed when Shogo is talking to her. She drags this girl with her to every show, and they giggle and stare. The other girl is dressed like she belongs at a photo booth in Ikebukuro after school. The punker girl carries a lipstick-red bass with a "HIGH-LOWS" sticker on it; I asked her once to play in my band, and she said I didn't look "punk" enough. So fuck her.

"She kind of creeps me out," Shogo said.

At one show a few weeks later, when Shogo was appropriately slotted into the role of bassist, two girls came up to the club and asked me -- I was bouncing, because I'm so big and scary-looking -- "Is this where The Sanyons are playing?" The girls were old enough to be Shogo's boss if he had a part-time job at a convenient store. I told them, yeah. After the show, they talked to Shogo. He lit up bright red when I asked him who they were. "Some girls I met online. I . . . I don't know. I don't have much of a personality. I can play drums and guitar and bass, I just can't . . . you know. Sing. Girls like the outgoing kind of guy. I met this girl online, and I told her to come to the show -- I feel so fuckin' stupid, like, I should have just met her for coffee or something."

Sanyon doesn't get any action. I don't know if he's supposed to. If The Sanyons' life at the moment is a Japanese comic book, the female lead has yet to be penciled-in. This is a boy who got into rock and roll music because of Yumi Yoshimura, a vocalist in the girl-pop-rock outfit Puffy, at first headed by legendary Japanese guitarist/songwriter Tamio Okuda, now produced by Jellyfish drummer Andy Sturmer. Sanyon has stickers of her face on the back of his cellular phone. When asked how he feels about Yumi's love-relationship Ceronias Shou, the lead singer of Kishidan, a punk-pop-metal-rock battallion of a band that dresses in souped-up Japanese high-school uniforms and includes a liner-noted member -- Ceronias' brother, Hikaru -- as "Dance and scream" (think Bez in The Happy Mondays, plus some kind of hard drug, and a ninja suit) -- he says "Fuck that guy."

While waiting for Sakamoto to show up in his van and cart off the amps and microphones -- actually, Sanyon uses a bullhorn for a microphone at street shows because "It's more punk" -- me and Sanyon talk about the turnout, the weather, and the modern Japanese pop scene. He maintains that "The Sanyons are a pop band," and wonders what it was like to play the Hachiko in the 1980s. "It must have really rocked. Cops and shit. Now we just have that old dude hassling us around."

"Yeah, what's the deal with that guy?" We're talking about this old obviously-yakuza guy in a black baseball cap and pajama-loose pants who walks around with a notebook telling bands when to shut up and when they're allowed to play.

"A lot of kids play the Hachiko. Like, what, a lot of exposure here. He -- I don't know. He's in league with the record label bastards, that's what he is."

Something like 100,000 people cross the street at Hachiko every working hour of the day. That's a hell of a lot. "A lot of exposure," indeed.

Soon Sanyon's phone rings. He picks it up, and holds it against the left side of his head. I see the Yumi Yoshimura sticker on the back. I watch the phone sink into his yellow afro. He talks politely for ten minutes.

"I miss Hokkaido sometimes, really. I miss the old days, being a child."

I remember Sanyon telling me about his country home in Hokkaido, north-most island of Japan. It is very cold. He lived in a town of a few thousand. They only had one video arcade, he says. The high school was tiny, yet famous because Miwa Yoshida, lead vocal of pop group Dreams Come True, went there. I asked him if they had sheep there, and he closed his eyes, and then opened them. "No. Cows." He shook his head. "It's a nothing town, though. A bullshit town. I mean, Tokyo is like, worthless, just full of posers and losers. My town, cows and all, at least had some heart. Still, I wouldn't go back."

"It's hot here, yeah! I sweat a lot -- all over the futon. Yeah, I bought some of that Febreze stuff on TV. I haven't used it to get the smell of mackerel out of my curtains yet. Ha ha. I don't have curtains, no. We're working hard! Yeah, did you know Febreze is made of corn?"

Et cetera.

He hangs up the phone, grinning.

Shogo comes around the corner, and Sanyon jumps up and hugs him.

"Dude -- you remember Uehara-san, from elementary school?"

"Y-yeah?"

"She totally just called me."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, one of the indie stations up in Sapporo played 'Sakebe! Shakeben! ['Scream! Salmon-lunch-box!'], and she heard it. She totally called my mom and got my number." Sanyon put his hands on his hips and grinned. Shogo scratched his hair-mop.

"And she called you? It's like after midnight. Where are her manners?"

Sanyon let out a guffaw.

"She's coming down to Tokyo in September," Sanyon said. "She might catch a show!" He clapped his hands three times. "Yeah!"

She never came to the show. I'm sure she still plans to come eventually, once Sanyon has secured a home in Setagaya and a nice dog of medium size. I don't know why I always think girls are gold-diggers. My mom told me they were, even though she personally wasn?? (my dad sure as hell ain?? rich) and I always figured she'd know.

"She was the prettiest girl in my elementary school." Sanyon was still going on about her an hour later. The punker girls had fallen asleep with their heads on the table, and Shogo was asleep with his head on the booth-back. Sanyon and I had bored them with talk of American comics. It turned into something of a freestyle English lesson, with me explaining the prefix words on all the Marvel superheroes' names. "'The Incredible Hulk' -- 'Incredible' means unbelievable. The things he can do are not believed until they are seen." This talk started when I asked Sanyon what his dream was. He leaned forward, and said, in a low, destiny-filled voice, "The day I see a movie trailer where Spider-Man is swinging through New York and The mother fucking Human Torch glides up alongside him -- yeah, I can die happy." One of the punker girls -- the one who was afraid of chicken-meat -- widened her eyes and asked him, "Reeeally?" He blinked -- he has a Beat-Takeshi kind of nervous tick where his left eye winks uncontrollably, three times, every two minutes or so. "No, not really."

When the girls were bored by our manly talk, we spoke of rock and roll. I said I thought "Linda Linda" was a better song than anything Ramones ever did, and Sanyon didn't agree with me. His defense, the defense of a nineteen-year-old, was that Ramones came first, and that coming first means everything, because rock and roll is about pioneering, not innovation, concept, not execution.

"Look at all these shitass bands in America, these pop-punker bands with depressing names, does anyone really give a shit about them? Are any of them changing the world? Hell no. Nobody gets excited about that shit except Euro-trash with too much discretionary income, enough to buy all those shitty CDs and just pile them up in their big apartments. Nobody changes the world anymore. Nobody wants to. Hell if I want to. I'm not stupid. I'm not going to try to change the world. I'm just shoveling snow. Some people need new music. I give them new music. It's punk rock music, it has an attitude, it fits into the popular vibe. And there's some art in that, you know? That's our art. You know?"

I told Sanyon, "Art is poison. The 'art' of the past -- the words of the past set down for future generations to remember -- was it not made or chosen with the best judgment, can only hinder the freedom of the future."

"That's a very Western philosophy."

"No. It's The Tale of Genji. Murasaki Shikibu. The world's first novel. From your country -- 998 AD."

"Well!"

"If I write a novel, for example, about a girl in a religious community who is ostracized when she's discovered to be an adultress, no matter how much I focus on the woman's pining over the wonderful cookies at the weekly church bake sale, and no matter how clever I make the cookie motif -- a metaphor for what, I don't know -- I can't publish it without drawing comparisons to The Scarlet Letter."

"I don't know what that is."

"It's a book. Famous American literature. Anyway. Furthermore -- if I were to, say, show The Scarlet Letter to a publishing company editor who had never read it, he'd look at it for ten minutes before telling me it was utter trash. Too long, too gloomy, paragraphs too big, too thick, setting details not fleshed out enough, needs too many footnotes, too prose-y."

"Aha. You're saying the judges aren't competent, is what you're saying."

"No. I'm saying that some of the shit we regard as gospel is actually . . . not."

Sanyon snapped his fingers, and pointed at me. His mouth opened, then closed.

"I'm not sure I follow you."

I shook my head. "I'm not sure I follow myself, sometimes. Anyway, what I'm saying is that it's probable -- highly possible that a lot of the punk-rock music people like you and me listen to now would still exist, in some way, shape or form, if Ramones had never existed."

"I'm not sure about that."

"I'm only mostly sure, myself. All I . . . know is that it feels criminally wrong to believe that only one man can ever hold the power to change the world. It's like this -- I believe in something we'll call an 'aesthetic god.' I also believe in music theory, though that's for another day. The 'aesthetic god' applies to, well, it's a belief that certain things look and/or sound pleasing. Good sights, good sounds. Jennifer Aniston's 'Friends' hairstyle; the computerized shine on Britney Spears' voice. With popular music all you're doing is throwing things at a wall, and seeing what sticks. Well, I don't know. I guess that's how it was in the beginning. Now people -- they know what sticks and what doesn't. This is because there are little . . . laws in aesthetics. Some kind of a supreme presence.

"Yet, see -- here's what I believe. There are infinite avenues to pleasant sights and sounds. Infinite ways of playing a guitar. It's just that Kurt Cobain comes in and plays these four chords in this order and everybody gets hooked up on it. Art isn't a 'poison' in that it rots and kills; it's a poison in that it slows down and hinders. Our eyes and ears are attracted to shiny sights and sounds, and we dare not look away. That's how Murasaki Shikibu would probably put it if she were around today. I take it she'd agree with me when I say (and you know old Japanese poetry was my major in college) that we stand, now, at an era where the ignorant are set to inherit the earth. When a guy who comes across a guitar for the first time in his life and sits down and plays it for an hour until he 'discovers' power chords, yeah, he's got a chance of doing something great. He can change the world."

Sanyon shook his head. "That sounds like some religious bullshit, man. A rock and roll messiah or some shit." He shrugged. "It's not like things -- the current rock and roll situation -- are so bad. People listen to music on the train. People get paid to make the music. As long as the CDs sell copies -- hey. I may be just a kid -- people like it that way -- and my grasp of the whole industry dynamic might be one-dimensional, though at least I feel like I understand it. Japan treats its musicians right, at least when it comes to securing them a future. And that's what it's about for me. A person-to-person basis. Not changing the fucking world. I feel sorry for the bastard who ends up having to do that."

I wagged my finger. "He won't even know he's doing it, is the thing. He'll just be another guy like you, maybe a kid, thinking he's just having fun. Then he realizes what he's doing, and he either rises to it or he blows the fuck up. If he rises to it, then he's suddenly a hero to people. That's how it happens. You kids overthink things sometimes, even more than I do, and I'm the one doing all of the talking. See -- hell. It's like . . . shit. I don't know. What I mean to say is -- go back to the Scarlet Letter analogy. The fact that there's so much literature backed-up in the historical pipeline pisses a lot of writers off. They know that they can't write such-and-such a novel without being compared to so-and-so. The same goes for music. This makes writers and musicians a bunch of ironic assholes. That's the problem here, is irony. People get all bitter and jaded before they're even twenty years old. They turn into a bunch of cocks. I was reading an old interview with The Pixies in this little book of rock interviews my friend had. I think the interview was from 1989 or some shit, and yeah, it was like -- I kept thinking what an asshole Frank Black sounded like. He sounded like a total fuckhole. It's like -- this way he's talking, his opinions, this is exactly the shit I hated on kids who thought they were rockers in high school. I totally understood a whole bunch of shit. They got it . . . from the music. I mean, nothing against The Pixies or anything."

Sanyon shrugged. "They're alright."

"Alright. Yeah, they're alright. They're alright."

"Anyway, man, like -- like I said. I'm just having fun. That's all. I'm not the hero in a comic book about punk-rockers in Tokyo. I'm not collecting all the fucking Pokemon. I'm just singing in a band -- hell, I can't even sing as well as Ito, and that fucker's playing the guitar now -- though I guess I have the personality. I can be on television. I can play the little Japanese television game. Perfect. They'll like me. [Sanyons manager and ex-Blue Hearts bassist Junnosuke] Kawaguchi says we'll be fine. People will like our style, and all that. That's what's important."

Sanyon wore a red Michael-Jackson-esque leather jacket over a torn Nelson Mandela T-shirt.

"I can be like Eikichi Yazawa, on a stage, entertaining people."

"Only you have competition. A lot of competition. Hundreds of underground bands. Dozens upon dozens of power-pop or post-punk-pop bands on the pop charts. He didn't have any other Japanese people singing rock and roll at all."

"He had Kiyoshiro," Sanyon says, pointing a finger at me.

"You're -- you're right," I say.

The kid is right. Kiyoshiro Imawano, the only man on earth who looks and acts more like Keith Richards than, well, Johnny Depp in "Pirates of the Caribbean,??is credited with, among other things, giving birth to the idea of Japanese "visual rock." He did his own hair and wore thick makeup -- crayon-blue eye-shadow and the like. The songs he wrote for his band RC Succession -- and this was way back around 1972 -- were absolutely shameless, smirking, ironic strings of sexual innuendoes. Take "Sky Pilot," for example: "Baby, I want clearance to arrive / in your airport / Your runway is slick with rain / Don't worry / I'm an expert at landings." His famous "Toward a Rainy Sky" -- just recently remade by Kiyoshiro himself, in a painfully sneering nu-metal version that could either be a tribute or a parody -- is probably the most mischeivously sexual song ever written in any language. Sambo Master's Takashi Yamaguchi, in a recent interview about the history of Japanese rock, said that Kiyoshiro's lyrics were great because he wrote Japanese lyrics while holding the firm belief that the Japanese language could sound cool. Eikichi Yazawa, on the other hand, had birthed a trend in Japanese songwriting that persists even until this day, evident in smash-hit bands like Asian Kung Fu Generation, a hell of a guitar-rock unit with piercing vocals who, despite extreme competence, will never hold a candle to the world: this is the trend of blending together syllables so that the words being sung sound, well, a lot like English. Kiyoshiro sings Japanese like he's singing in Japanese. Japanese only has five vowel sounds -- Ah, Ee, Uu, Eh, and Oh. Whenever you see a vowel, that's the end of a syllable. A vowel-following "N" is always its own syllable. This lends spoken Japanese a different rhythm than spoken English, a rhythm that few rock-and-rollers ever think to carry over to their music. They always go for the easy way out -- aping English pronunciation. This lends a hell of a quirky air to Japanese pop music. Your first time hearing 1980s disco in Japanese, as an English-speaker, will probably make you giggle. It just doesn't seem right. Punk rock fits Japanese better, because punk, as a kind of bastard child of folk, is music made by eclectic people who could just as well sit down and talk to you about what they want to say. Punk musicians -- at least, Japanese ones -- tend to understand the power of the spoken word like that. It's been said that punk has often been a tool of idiot political craze-os because it only requires two chords, at the least, and the vocals only need to be loud, not necessarily good. The lyrics are the heart of punk. The Blue Hearts succeeded as a punk act because they used punk as a genre of music, and not a tool for telling people something. Sanyon agrees with me on this. He doesn't necessarily agree with me when I say that Kiyoshiro achieved greater things than Eikichi Yazawa because Kiyoshiro molded the Japanese language into the rhythm of rock while Yazawa just imitated English. "Yazawa was cool. He sang dumb rock songs and love ballads, all that shit. Kiyoshiro just sang jokey songs about sex." I say that he did it with style, and moreover, that he hit upon something in the Japanese language that fit well into rock and roll.

"He just left his work unfinished. He figured out how to sing rock in Japanese; he just didn't figure out what to sing about."

"That's the thing about rock -- you can sing about whatever you want. You just have to figure out what you want to sing about."

"No. No. No. What if 'you can sing about whatever you want' is just another one of those trends, those bullshit trends that aren't . . . you know, real? That we just walk around believing in?"

"You don't mean . . ."

"I mean, like, every language has . . . an emotion it is hard-wired to express. Like . . ."

I trailed off.

"You are too much a fan of words," Sanyon mused, and then yawned. He'd contradicted my contradiction of myself, a response to his own self-contradiction, for the tenth-odd time that night. It was late. "I've gotta change this shirt," Sanyon said. "Ninety more minutes till first train, shit."

Sanyon went into the bathroom, and came back a minute later. His torso now wore a tight, red-and-white Mickey Mouse shirt.

"The fuck is that?" I said, pointing a chopstick at Mickey.

"It was like 100 yen at a vintage shop, fuck."

"God damn Mickey Mouse."

"Girls like it. Makes them think I'm boyish and childish or whatever."

"You are."

"More than you, maybe."

I cleared my throat. The ice had melted in my Coke.

"This girl -- the one who called me."

"Yeah?"

"She was the prettiest girl in my elementary school." That was when he said it. I remembered the way the Yumi Yoshimura sticker on the back of his phone had looked pressed into his yellow poof of hair. I pointed my chopstick at Mickey Mouse again, and spoke:

"That thing you told her about the Febreze on the sweaty futon -- that was a lie, wasn't it?"

"Heh. Shit. Yeah. How'd you know?"

I shrugged. "It's one of those things you -- you know. You just can't make up. So of course, I knew you'd made it up."

"Nothing gets by you."

I drank a Coke standing up. I asked Sanyon if he wanted anything else from the Drink Bar, and he said Melon soda. I swear that shit will rot your teeth out. Not that Sanyon has many left. Another curious thing about Japan is the dentistry -- what are they paying these people?

Two schoolgirls, obviously breaking curfew, followed me up to the drink bar, in navy-blue uniforms, skin the color of caramel -- what are these girls doing with the tan-in-a-can, drinking it? -- and giggling. One of them had a little notebook. She opened it, held it in front of my face, and spoke English while I pressed the Coke button.

"You give me sign?!"

"Sign" is Japanese for "autograph."

"What?"

"You give me sign?! Cool one?!"

I looked the girl in her pea-sized eyes and drank half a glass of Coke. It burned the top of my chest inside.

"You are berry cool!!" the other girl Englished, hands clasped in front of her chest.

I finished the Coke and clacked the glass down onto the countertop and told the girls to fuck the fuck off. They clapped their hands and squealed "You speak the Japanese!!" I told them yeah I do, now fuck the fuck off. I poured another glass of Coke, and a glass of Fanta Melon. The girls kept giggling.

"You are rock and roll?!"

"You are the SUGOI rock and roll!!"

MEANWHILE, MANY DAYS LATER

Two schoolgirls in uniforms the color of caramel were holding hands at the top of the escalator on floor four of the Yamagiwa Soft building in Akihabara, Japan's Las Vegas of electronics supplies. This building had been burned down six months earlier, and now it was back. The girls were standing with their eyes fixed on a widescreen television. My bassist Nishizaki and I showed up, in a hurry, looking for something important. Some limited edition boxed set of some shitty Japanese animation about Japanese animation. Referential animated series are all the rage now in Japan. We planned to sell it to some dumb American on eBay, make a quick profit of about a hundred dollars or so, was all we needed. We gave the rest to charity, honest. We ended up hung up because of the schoolgirls. Like regular schoolgirls on a day off, they were holding hands and giggling about something. We found that they were giggling about rock and roll.

Jack Black was on-screen as a rock-and-roll-burnout-turned-schoolteacher in "School of Rock." With the help of Japanese subtitles, he was telling a room full of innocent-faced kids that rock and roll music is and always will be about "sticking it to the man." The kids don't seem to get it. That's part of the joke -- what do little kids know about "the man"? What do they know about life's hardships? Nothing. It's supposed to be funny. Jack Black has a guitar -- a Gibson SG -- and he's playing some random riffage while the kids tell him things that frustrate them. He's making up bits of a song about anger, illustrating that that's where rock and roll comes from -- anger. The schoolgirls are laughing at this, though they really only understand the subtitles and the big dumb look on Jack's face. It's comedy about something deathly serious -- the very source of what scientists call "rock and roll energy." Jack claims it comes from anger. The Japanese subtitles claim "You will turn that anger -- into ROCK!! It is your destiny!" The subtitler is hamming it up a little bit. This is most likely because it's funnier that way to Japanese people, and if it's not funny, there's no point in watching a comedy. The scene strikes me, and it makes me wonder if rock and roll really does come from anger.

MEANWHILE, WEEKS LATER

My guitarist Drew Cosner and I are at the 24-hour Saizeriya family restaurant in West Ikebukuro at around four o??lock on New Year?? morning. It's a cheap place where even the non-smoking section smells like cigarettes, the drink bar is 189 yen, and you can sit for five or six hours at night if you miss the last train. Drew was drunk the night before, and he's still drunk now. He slept too little to be hungover. As per Japanese laws -- the same laws that dictate you can sell illegal drugs only if you sell them at a stand on the street with a sign declaring that the drugs are legal, even if they aren't -- only one person can sleep in a diner at one time. I ordered a 270-yen pepperoncino pasta, which is Japanese for spaghetti noodles slathered in sweaty olive oil and garlic. It doesn't taste like anything that deserves such a fancy name. Then again, when you're poor and trying to get together a rock band to revive classical rock and slay the world, nothing ever does.

"You know what I'm thinking, Cosner?"

"Yeah? What?"

Cosner is wearing an "Aspen, Colorado" shirt, even though he's never been there. Ironic!

"I'm thinking I want to sing a song in Japanese. We need to write some songs in Japanese."

Cosner waves his hands around and has a literal hissy fit. "Fuck no! Why would you want to sing a song in Japanese?! Japanese is lame. It . . . there's no anger in it. Rock works best in English. English -- English is convoluted and fucked-up. That makes it ideal. Rock is convoluted and fucked-up. Japanese is too ordered. German -- fucking dirty language -- that sounds like rock and roll. Sounds like pure hatred, Nazi motherfuckers, that's rock and roll. Japanese is all . . . -- no. Not enough anger."

"There doesn't need to be anger!"

"Yes there does! Rock is about anger! Or at least angst, or depression, or whatever."

"Japanese people get angry."

"It's a fucking joke when Japanese people get angry. They're a bunch of pussies when they get angry. You ever seen two construction workers in a bar fight? They sound like crybabies."

"I was thinking about that, actually," I say, taking a sip of the Tabasco bottle. "Sadness. Why can't rock be about sadness?"

"Rock can't be about sadness."

"Are you sure?"

"Pretty fucking sure. Even these guys who get depressed as shit, they're angry about the very idea of being depressed." Drew snapped his fingers -- how he does it without any goddam fingernails, I'll never know -- and pointed at me. "That's where the rock comes from, out of that being pissed-off about being sad."

"Well, Sambo Master--" I checked myself. I shouldn't mention Sambo Master around Drew. The words "Sambo Master" have this way of distancing and angering guitarists who aspire to play better.

"What about him?" Drew, like the rest of the people who currently live in Japan, had forgotten the other two members of the band.

I folded my hands. "He sings about his sadness. All of his songs are about sadness. The words he uses have a way of hypnotizing and moving people. His new song -- the one that's the theme song for the cartoon 'Naruto' at the moment -- he says words in there that . . . the first time I heard that song, I thought, 'I'm not even sure people can say things like this yet.' I seriously was thinking, like, humankind is not technologically capable of saying things like this. He's talking about delving into the ruins of yesterday, finding out how we can 'end these days of looking back.' He says that if we join him, and if we all be sad together, then, then . . . our memories, our sadness will give birth to a bubbling river of tears that will flow out into the ocean, and melt together."

Drew blinked at me, sobered. "You sound like a fucking religious cultist."

"You don't get it. I know you're a big riffs-and-melody man. You said before that melody is important yet the words aren't so important, and I know if I write about you saying that you're going to read it and call me a jerk-off for making you look like a jerk-off. Still -- the lyrics are amazing."

"And another reason they'll never make it big! They're fucking creepy! The guy sounds like he's trying to herd all the fans together for a ritual suicide."

I unfolded my hands and then folded them again. "I don't perceive it that way. I don't perceive it that way at all. I perceive it as this -- desperate need to fill people with the power of real rock and roll music."

"That's fucking creepy, too! Listen to yourself, man! Listen! And anyway, Japanese -- Japanese music will never be big in America. It's impossible."

I inform Drew that the only foreign-language song to ever reach number one on Billboard was Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki" (actually titled "Ue wo muite arukou" -- "Let's walk while looking up"), a Japanese song.

"That doesn't count. It had the novelty element. It doesn?? count. "

I suppose not.

"Look. The only time people listen to Japanese music is like -- like, metal. Japanese metal. Japanese metal is that music your 'one friend' or your drummer listens to. The weird people, the eccentrics. Americans don't want to hear music in a language they don't understand. I mean, I know I said lyrics don't fucking matter as much as the music and all that shit, though the American public -- just the very idea of a song being in another language is like, it makes the song diseased to them. No matter how awesome the riff, the people can't focus on anything other than the fact that the song is in a language they don't understand. Just as making the drinking age twenty-one only makes teenagers more eager to drink, making a song in any language other than English makes Americans want to know what the fuck the guy is singing about."

"What about all those old hard-rock songs where you can't understand a quarter of what the guy's saying?"

"At least those are in English -- it's not your fault you can't understand, it's the guy singing's. Either way, Americans -- shit, human beings don't like feeling incompetent, especially while they're supposed to be being fucking entertained."

"Japanese people don't mind listening to American music. They have Japanese lyrics translations in the liner notes."

Drew blinks again. "Well, Japanese people are . . . different."

And here we get into linguisto-racist prejudices again. It's a vicious cycle.

Drew goes on. "You told me yourself -- about the girl who listens to Avril Lavigne because she's 'cute.' It's shit like that."

"Don't Americans do it for the same reason?"

"Well, yeah, that's what I'm talking about! I'm talking about how it has to be about the fucking music!"

"Well, Sambo Master don't have much of an image. They're pretty anti-image. Their 'musical' element is pretty strong."

Drew sighs. "You show me a song by them that does something that can change the world, and I'll tell you if it's a good thing or not."

"You show me a hit song in English that?? currently ??hanging the world,??and I??l tell you . . . something you don?? want to hear, probably.??

??uck you.??r

"The only way to change the world in this day where we have books documents every change in the world is to . . . not try to change the world."

That's why we call this a vicious cycle. I'm reminded of Yamaguchi's lyrics about lying. "Are the words I say to you now true or false?" he sings. He prefaces another track with a short speech (short -- someone at the label must have hinted that he should cut down just a bit on all the psycho-chatter in the recorded stuff) that "I am indeed a wicked man." That is his theme for the album -- that he is a wicked man because he uses words to achieve means.

It resonates pretty deeply with me. I've always believed that words are, innately, lies. The banana I hold in my hand before breakfast is not a "banana"; it is ??he thing I hold in my hand right now.?? Words are as distinctly different from the things they represent as, say, little girls with shotguns are from cups of hot cocoa, as race-car-drivers are from broken harmonicas. The things you can see, hear, and feel are as different from the abstract thoughts you have concerning the things you can see, hear, and feel as your abstract thoughts are from the words you use to express them. Thinking about a common object like a soccer ball -- changing the concrete into an abstract -- is lying. Using words to describe your thought is lying even more. Turning those words into a song is a terrible lie. Singing that song -- fitting it with a melody and underscoring it with three guitar chords -- is nearly unspeakably unnatural a deed from a lion-versus-wildebeest perspective. Translating someone else's lyrics into another language and then emailing them, via cellular phone, to a girl you only plan to have sex with once -- were Takashi Yamaguchi suddenly voted dictator of Japan, this would probably be a capital crime. He's working hard, wherever he is at this exact moment as I sit here homeless and quite violently hungry, at making the words he wants to use fit into the grand scheme of something that moves people, using a language in a way no one has used that particular language before. He's like a scientist about to split the atom.

From his song "I have need of your warmth":

"You will allow anything
And I have lost everything
What you hold within your hand
Is the wild road we call 'warmth':

'Tears flow
And love is born.
Love is born
And an early summer rain begins to fall.'"

It's either the power of Yamaguchi's voice, the backing superchorus, the chaotic, fearsomely trembling guitar, or the positioning of the Japanese syllables that cause five out of ten full-grown women and men to cry upon hearing the chorus. "Namida nagarete; ai ga umareru; ai ga umarete; samidare ni naru." I've personally never heard lyrics as powerful as this in any language, and I've heard a lot of song lyrics. They're very straight, and very simple, as Japanese lyrics tend to be (old-school disco-funk pop group Dreams Come True did a quite serious song in 1991 about making a salad), yet they're not kitschy, they're not weird -- hell, they're not even campy. His use of archaic words like "samidare" ("early summer rain") and "yokoshimana" ("wicked"), his mix of first person pronouns (in Japanese, you basically pick one of many pronouns, each with different connotations, and stick with it for the duration of your adulthood), and his random, psychotic shoutings before each violin-virtuoso-like guitar solo -- "FORGIVE ME, FOR I CANNOT PUT THIS PART INTO WORDS; THEREFORE, I MUST PLAY THE GUITAR!!" -- they're all just the icing we call "personality" on the cake called true rock and roll superstardom.

I send Takashi Yamaguchi an email, saying I want to interview him for possible publication in an American magazine. I say I want to tell the world things about him and his music. I write this email on my cellular phone, while riding the Yamanote Line around Tokyo. It takes three one-hour rotations around Tokyo for me to finish the email. In it, I say a lot of things. I say how I'd just seen him on television with rock legends Tamio Okuda and Tortoise Matsumoto, and how they'd all been comparing guitar techniques by faking different styles, and how Yamaguchi said he didn't know anything about heavy metal, though when he tried to play an improvised heavy metal riff, Tortoise Matsumoto was shocked to the point where he put his guitar down. Two months later, Matsumoto's band Ulfuls would released their newest single; after nearly fifteen years of being beloved, the band had made a great song, mixing a slightly Queen-inspired feeling with excellent harmonic hooks revolving around a chorus that states "My heart lashes out violently; someone, anyone please stand by me" concerning confusion about the point Matsumoto has arrived at in his life; one part gospel and three parts rock, it's the best song Ulfuls has ever put out. I ask Yamaguchi if he thinks Matsumoto might have been inspired on that day, by Sambo Master. I ask Yamaguchi why he always talks about words so much. I tell him about how I have grown to fear the very idea of words. At an early age, I tell him, I was identified as carrier of what's called a "photographic memory" -- that I remember things without using words. I tell Yamaguchi that for six years of my life, for no good reason, I stopped talking, only to suddenly start again when I realized I'd never have sex if I didn't at least start talking to people. I ask him about Japanese literature; I ask what he thinks about Natsume Soseki's novel Kokoro, in which the narrator kills his best friend with words alone. I tell him that that novel inspired me deeply as a person who aspires to do something; it gave me the impression that there is something beyond words, something dark and ominous, resting within each and every person. Its existence is much like a place, not entirely biologically pinpointable, where thoughts give birth to words. Its existence is both a blessing and a curse on the human race. Those who acknowledge it are given a very Zen peace of mind that allows them to change their self completely, two times. I tell Yamaguchi that I used to have a hardcore band called Small Prime Numbers up in Saitama, back when I was working as the live-in chef and personal assistant for a comic artist, and that the band broke up when the guitarist killed herself. I tell Yamaguchi that it still makes me sad, that I'm now twenty-five, the age he was when he started Sambo Master five years ago, and that I want to do something to help people, I want to create something wonderful that one person I don't know can show someone else I'll never know and say "This is how I became free." I ask Yamaguchi, why does no one want to change the world anymore?

Rock and roll is something I've listened to my entire life. The first time I heard The Beatles I didn't know I was supposed to like them. The first time I heard The Rolling Stones I realized I liked The Beatles, and the first time I heard The Blue Hearts sing "Linda Linda," I realized that rock and roll would haunt me for the rest of my life. It made me free, and at the same time, it shackled me. I knew no one could ever tell me what to do; I feared being in charge of myself, and to a point, it made me so deeply sad I've yet to, really, ever get over it. I have a rough idea what I have to do -- it involves a rock and roll stage, a microphone, a couple of amps, a couple of guitars, a bass, a drum cage, and a large enough audience -- it's just that realizing it is so damned hard. I have absolutely nothing, as it stands. When Yamaguchi sings about "losing everything," and "starting from nothing," and "forgetting the past," I know where he's coming from; yet I can't tell if he's singing about what he has experienced or what he longs for in the future. I send the email to him, and I never get a reply. Just like a rock and roll song that changed the way I think, though I give part of my self to the song, the song, really, gives me nothing material back. All is words, and words are nothing.



I miss The Sanyons' last indies show because I get arrested at Shinjuku Station for man's oldest and most primordial crime, that of walking down the street while looking like a white man. When the cops discover I'm carrying less than the equivalent of two thousand US dollars, they detain me in a lead-lined room for two hours. Then they come back in, drop my passport on the desk, open the door, and don't say a word. I'm back in Shinjuku, the sun has set, the JCB credit card advertisement atop the Studio Alta department store is aglow, and all looks like an electric box of crayons. A day later, I'm in a basement in Shinjuku with a lady friend -- I couldn't risk going alone again -- seeing a country-grunge band called Kama Boiler. They're produced by Sambo Master's Takashi Yamaguchi, and they're damn good. The guitarist doesn't remove the bottleneck from his pinky for the duration of the set. He should cut his afro, just a little bit. It's tangled and dirty, though I guess that's part of the appeal -- they're from Ibaraki Prefecture, up in the country, same place Yamaguchi is from, and up there they don't know no better. After the show, the lead singer tells me he's thirty-five years old. I'd thought he was just my age. He's been playing basements for eight years, and just now, thanks to Yamaguchi, he's got an EP out on Sony Music. I think of how Yamaguchi's band got their major debut thanks to Gozak Maeda of gagagaSP; it seems that Japanese record executives are just flat-out brain-dead confused about good music, and it's the musicians who seem to be running the show, I tell Kama Boiler's front dude -- who also needs to trim his afro -- and he tells me yeah, it's a better honor to get your break thanks to a fellow working musician, though. Kama Boiler is excellent live, and excellent in the studio. Though my guitarist Drew Cosner accuses Sambo Master's Takashi Yamaguchi of "beating on his guitar while screaming," he considers Kama Boiler the best thing since -- well, since something. "Like Lynard Skynard without all the bullshit," he says. I'm not sure what that means. I'm not sure what anything means, anymore.

The lead vocalist of a blues band called Pineapple Freeway (they opened for the Boiler) lets me in on a secret -- at his next big live show in Shimo-Kitazawa, in a basement club called Que into which forty people can fit comfortably, Japanese rock legends The Elephant Kashimashi are going to show up and play a five-song set. Of course, I'm there, at the show. When Elephant takes the stage, the place goes quite literally fucking nuts. I got elbowed in the face by a girl half my height. I'm not sure about the physics involved. Guys against the wall threw down and stamped out their cigarettes to bum-rush the stage. The lead microphone, which had been turned up because the previous band, Captain Stridem -- fronted by a nice-haired dude who really, really wants to be Tamio Okuda -- was a little vocally weak gets the shit beat out of it. Yamamoto, Elephant's frontman, has a voice so loud and so hard-edged it's pretty damn special. He's looked up to Kiyoshiro Imawano since he started his band in the mid-eighties; at the same time, he adds a darker edge to the visual personality, constantly stroking his hair and glaring at the audience with eyeballs the size of five-hundred-yen coins. I stand there, thinking of Japanese rock-star Gackt, a real doll-faced pretty-boy who, despite his girlish looks, is apparently a real-life karate master. The guy's ripped. Once, on television, an interviewer was asking him about odd rumors concerning his lifestyle. The interviewer asked, we hear you keep the lights off all the time in your apartment. Why is this? Gackt replied, glaring icily at the camera: "Because I am one with the darkness. And my electric bill was getting ridiculous." The interviewer asked, we hear you have a trampoline? Why? Gackt replied, tone unwavering, "I like to jump." Gackt can also play guitar and has quite a distinctive, Japanese voice; he'll never set the world on fire, according to some young punkers I know, because he lacks sincerity. Yes, sincerity is the stuff dreams are made of when it comes to the Japanese punk-rock mentality. Yet I have a candle of respect in my heart for Gackt; he uses his attitude, which he has borrowed from the likes of Marilyn Manson, Kiyoshiro Iwamano, and Elephant Yamamoto, to comedic effect. He entertains television audiences with his personable interview performances -- there was this one time he rode a rollercoaster with this screaming pop idol girl; the look on his face, one of utter boredom, was godly and priceless -- and entertains music-lovers with his pop ballads. There was a time he was metal. That time is as gone as the life of Hide, genius guitarist of X Japan and friend of Marilyn Manson, who committed suicide in 1998 when on the verge of exploding into superstardom. Elephant Yamamoto, as he performed live just a few weeks ago, reminded me of Gackt a little bit, and made me think "He's really got the attitude thing down." Yet it was more than just an "attitude thing" -- it was a real attitude. It had been born of anger that Yamamoto probably made for himself like a girl in elementary school makes herself a little charm bracelet with Mickey-Mouse-face-shaped beads on it. It's a scary thing when men grow their own anger out of nothing. I've feared anger in myself for as long as I can remember. I feared it that night when Yamamoto finished beating the ever-loving death out of that microphone with his vocal chords, buried his left hand in his long hair, tossed the microphone over his shoulder so that it CLACKRASHed hard against the floor, and then walked off, hands in hair, breathing like he'd just fucked a supermodel.


kama boiler live at club goodman in akihabara. they are more excellent than excellent. full-length album coming out on sony music japan next spring.

"What does he have to be sad about? Why's he so sad? He just seems pissed-off to me. A little, short-legged, jumping, ranting, pissed-off Japanese dude," Drew was saying about Sambo Master's Takashi Yamaguchi. I'd just said that Yamaguchi, whether he wanted to or not, and whether Drew wanted him to or not, represented something that is not currently represented elsewhere in rock.

"Represents what?"

"Undistilled rock and roll? I don't know. He represents something. He's not normal. He's like Andrew W.K. minus the muscles, plus Wesley Willis minus the fat and the black, plus Django Reinhardt plus a full hand of fingers. His lyrics stretch beyond 'is this guy serious?' and into 'this guy's so serious he's for real.' And he's . . . sad."

"He's just a short, fat, pissed-off Japanese guy, that's all. That's all."

Yet I met a woman a while back who said Sambo Master changed her life. She says that her life changed when she heard The Beatles and she's listened to rock and roll ever since; it wasn't until Sambo Master that music seemed to be actually speaking to her. Yamaguchi's voice, she says, seems to be informed of her past, and telling her what she needs to do to be okay. She's not a born-again Christian and she's not a recovering drug addict. Six years ago her husband divorced her because he'd been cheating. She told me once about this little nephew she used to have, a little kid who knew everything about the train service in Japan. "He had models. He used to say, this is the Tobu-Tojo Line from Ikebukuro to Kawagoe! It makes the run in forty-two minutes! This is the Keiyo Express from Tokyo Station to Chiba! You can get to Disneyland in seventeen minutes! He was a really good kid. Maybe a genius, I don't know. Five years old. He called me one day about three years ago. He sounded like an adult in a room full of helium. Kind of sinister. He said, 'Why don't you come play with me anymore?' It was really sad. I had to lie to the poor kid. 'Your auntie's been really busy lately, that's all! I'll give you a call when I'm free!' I wonder, though, maybe, if he could have handled the truth. I mean, he knows so much about the trains and all." The woman closed her eyes, and then opened them. "No. Things you know because you know them are different from things you know because you remember them. He was a good kid, though. He'll probably grow up to be something really great. . . . Or something truly horrible." I tell her, maybe both. She sniffs a tear. "You're right."

Perhaps we will meet some day. Perhaps we'll run into each other on the street in Shibuya, like we did two weeks ago. Perhaps next time we'll have a conversation. Perhaps we won't.

Takashi Yamaguchi, do you really think you change the world? Can I change the world, too? Can more than one person change the world, at the same time? Is there more than one world to change? I am entirely hopeful that there is. When you think hard enough about it, when you squint your eyes enough, you realize that everyone occupies their own world, and that through acquaintances and friendships, people's worlds become fused together, resulting in a rough duality. At least, that's my hope, in times like these, when I'm writing down words to try to satisfy something dark within myself. At other times, I'm walking, with an iPod I got through very punk-rock means, and I'm in barren places, looking at the world's loneliest train yard from an old rusty bridge, and I'm hearing music. Like Sean Penn's character in the Woody Allen film "Sweet and Lowdown" when he listens to Django Reinhardt, I seize up with shaking fear every time I listen to your music. You're not the best band in history, maybe, and what you do is not entirely new. You use existing genres to create a unique indivudual brand of music; the same could be said about any popular techno DJ. Yet your words make me aware of what one needs to be a rock star. One needs to give the world everything one has until somehow no one has anything left. Playing a rock show should fill one with the feeling that one has just cut off one's right hand, and looked at the bleeding stump, and thought "That's it -- that hand is gone" -- that feeling, stretched out, fearsome, saddening, ferocious, transcending comprehension in any language. Your performances make me realize that within me, wherever I go, however sad and cold and hungry I might grow, there is a small warmth I can use to give something to someone else. I will try my best.

Thank you.

--tim rogers, tokyo, february 24th, 2005