Miscast
Hi, I’m back. Sometimes I think it’s only natural that the summer heat should turn your brain to mush just as much as it turns everything in the surrounding environment oppressive, render you unfit for productive existence. (And here, at least, the heat held out for much longer than I would’ve liked.) Voices get too loud; I can start to feel prickly, nerves exposed. The only thing to do is bundle myself up cotton-soft into a reclusive, regenerative cocoon, ignoring at all costs the clamor of the present.
Vibes may have been an issue. Substack’s growth in the social arena has sometimes revealed the writers who populate it to be not quite domesticated, snarling in an overstuffed pen. Everyone bristles at perceived slights, and claustrophobia is inevitable. I’m thinking about the height of “real writing” and/or “stop using your newsletter as a catalog of your consumption habits, only I’m allowed to do that” discourse. There are silly little list-makers, dear-diary dilettantes, who have it really easy on here — they prattle about their binges and their hauls and then they get one of those neat subscriber count badges and become independently wealthy overnight, or so the wisdom goes. Stop them, the wordsmiths said, the written word is dying. Meanwhile, great, I thought, because retail therapy is an attractive solution to a good many problems, and now all I had to do was blog about it.
But my vice has more in common with dumpster diving than the photogenic, vaguely literary splurges I tend to see whenever I log on here. In the hunt for weird music finds, my eye is always on the discarded, forgotten and unwanted. Cracked jewel cases and dog-eared pages become equal parts trash and treasure.
I said before that I’m basically a collector of useless knowledge, hopelessly attracted to little morsels of trivia and novelties with no significance to anyone but me. I dig until I find, I don’t know, a random one-off collaborative EP between a Japanese singer-songwriter and a band from Minnesota, and when that lead dries up, I scavenge for old magazines and print media to fill in the gaps of what time has eroded. Whether any of this music would be considered “good” or “bad” through the lens of focus-grouped taste doesn’t matter to me and never has. I’m just looking for a thrill, and because I can’t download or stream what no one knows exists, I hoard.
I stumbled across a curious article from
that framed this compulsion in a way I had never really imagined could be quite so legible:Human brains are wired such that we get rewarded for attending to surprisal. If we turn our attention toward things that surprise us we get excited … Sadly, it also leads you down a path that will likely end in existential loneliness and sobbing. What leads you there is the fact that the particular complexity that catches your interest is highly idiosyncratic. … Having idiosyncratic interests that grow in complexity means that if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about.
Within music communities, I’ve found that the idea of rarity can be for some a matter of affectation, like a secret handshake carried out in view of others’ admiring eyes (or so this fantasy plays out in the minds of people who make Topsters, I imagine). On the far end of that spectrum, true bargain-bin obscurity is, more often than not, just loneliness. There’s no rush of Record Store Day excitement and no hand to shake.
For whatever reason, though, it soothes me to breathe in the dust of past lives. The beauty of any form of creative expression is that it’s both made and tended by the work of human hands. With the right care, it can live forever. I’m here, I’m alive, and as long as this music is in my ears, it’s still here, too — breathing with me, filling this space, not gone yet. Isn’t that something? This is the high, this infinite, invisible connection, that I continue to chase through old CD racks and hypertext trails.
Among the odds and ends I picked up was Osu Chikara, which I might translate as “The Power of Fandom,” the latest book by Japanese subculture critic Nakamori Akio published last November. Nakamori is best known for coining the term “otaku” in the early ‘80s, particularly outside of Japan, but this is a retrospective on the past half-century of female idols, the subject closest to his heart, stretching from his sheltered 1970s adolescence to the present. It’s a slideshow of idol history’s most defining and sometimes darkest moments, full of familiar references to the disbandment of Candies, death of Okada Yukiko, and stabbing of two AKB48 members.
Still, the book makes no effort to be exhaustive, and with every turn of the page, you sense the enormity of everything left just out of sight. Instead, these are intimate snapshots of a life slowly winding to a close, reflected back through the pop culture that marked it, fully aware that history is only memory until someone writes it down. Having made it his life’s work to build upon a theory of idol culture, a subject for which criticism was at first (and often still is) regarded as wholly unnecessary, “[t]here are things only I can tell,” Nakamori writes. “Things you couldn’t find with an internet search. That generative AI and ChatGPT could never write.”
Which brings me to another book I read this summer, Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler (2007), a shambling overview of ‘60s and ‘70s Japanese rock that I managed to outrun for years until my friend, a Les Rallizes Dénudés enjoyer, mentioned it to me in conversation some months back. The scope is ambitious, and I don’t doubt that there was once a need for a book like this for the same reason the Guardian could dub it both “slapdash and error-strewn” and a “welcome” offering on its subject matter. But from where I sit in this decade, keystrokes away from, like, a Rate Your Music review of the same or better quality, I can only view it as a holdover from a time when the mere ownership of a costly record collection and a blog upon which to flex it was all the qualification required for someone to write that music’s history.
In the absence of other tools, Cope patches the gaps in his knowledge with opinion, strong and, yes, many times wrong. Entire turgid paragraphs go by unsubstantiated or otherwise exaggerated, and where truly silly mistakes occurred, I could only imagine his editors shrugging their shoulders, unequipped to do much besides proofread. (“Isn’t he the expert?”) In the years since the book’s publication, he has allegedly1 admitted to fabricating parts of his research. This is typical: Japan is a wonderland for the bored and jaded, its culture a delightfully malleable substance from which to shape foreign fantasies. In the crossover, truth becomes flimsy, immaterial. The groundwork is laid for new stories, hardened by carelessness into new facts.
At its weakest, Japrocksampler is childishly preoccupied with the period it explores as a stage play replete with avant-garde heroes and sellout villains. In this constructed narrative, the late Uchida Yuya is Cope’s savior of burgeoning Japanese rock, largely for his work in Flower Travellin’ Band, whose album cover for Anywhere (1970) graces the front of the book. Trotted out on marionette strings in the role of Uchida’s soulless, nauseatingly commercial “arch-nemesis” is generation-defining pop icon Sawada Kenji, better known as Julie, the doe-eyed lead singer of 1960s group sounds juggernaut the Tigers. Painted as “fey,” “precious,” and “a pouting effeminate prima donna whom everyone adored and loathed in equal measure,” Sawada lurks around every corner, a cartoonish scapegoat, forever a foil to more deserving luminaries.
Julie was certainly the definitive heartthrob of the era, proficient in the art of the wink and the smolder. He was also a former Kyoto delinquent who made headlines for getting into physical altercations with hecklers at the peak of his fame. “Sawada’s fighting prowess was seared in my mind, and from then on, I swore never to get into so much as an argument with him, let alone a fistfight,” his Tigers bandmate Hitomi Minoru recounted having witnessed him knock a yakuza out cold in a street brawl before he became the glossy centerfold of a million teen dreams. Yet his delicate looks and the nature of his stardom gendered him opposite rock fanatics of the time,2 who, as Michael K. Bourdaghs wrote in Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop (2012), saw the genre in its purest form as
somehow intrinsically subversive and libratory [sic] … [and] also assertively masculine: the squeaky-clean teen idol soliciting screams from girls gave way to the strutting-cock rock guitarist, his phallic instrument providing a model of power to a largely male fandom.
Rejected by this crowd, Sawada would forge the androgyny that gatekept him from male-dominated rock audiences and pushed him toward pop spectacle into, in his own words, a “weapon,” a double-edged sword he learned to wield with masterful precision. Far from Cope’s portrayal of a “media whore … who would dress and act in any manner [his] management requested,” his exploration of feminine styling and makeup throughout the ‘70s and beyond, a pivotal turning point in the later development of visual-kei, was staunchly opposed by his agency.
On the eve of his sixties, he reflected:
There were mixed opinions about me wearing makeup and piercings, but I’ve never been a manly person, and I think it’s okay for men to be feminine. On the contrary, I thought that deciding to wear makeup was manly.
Sawada Kenji is now 76 years old, still performing, white-haired and plump and released at last from the captivating shell that once shaped his perception in the media. But let’s revisit those charges — you know, the pouting prettyboy everyone loved and loved to hate. More than the lingering stigma of his group sounds heyday or inauthentic chart-driven musical career, there is, I think, a hollow within both “Julie” the pop star and later Sawada the actor that feels somehow innately coded feminine, a well from which others around him drew that deeply resonates with women and repulses men to their core. He did naturally what most couldn’t tolerate: he fell back, slipped into the skin of the muse. “By exposing himself to the public’s gaze,” the art critic Tono Yoshiaki wrote of his image in 1979, “he disguises himself as a woman.”
This void hums around the edges of his film debut, Statue In Fire (1974), a disjointed jumble of fact and fiction that sees his persona recast in the dim light of a languorous coming-of-age flick. It’s there, too, in the deranged 1975 TBS drama That Devilish Guy, written for and as a love letter to him, in which his brooding antihero — desired by men, women, and at least one blood relative — moonlights as a high-class callboy while dying of a terminal brain tumor and evading arrest for the real-life unsolved 300 million yen robbery of 1968, a ludicrous set of circumstances for all but a performer who loomed too large to ever fit neatly within the confines of reality. “Sawada Kenji is an actress,” showrunner Kuze Teruhiko famously said of his slippery screen presence. The classic Julie role is just this sort of cipher, often a homme fatale played to vampiric perfection. What little he gives, his admirers are only too eager to take, but they don’t realize they’ve gorged on an empty promise until they’re starving and bled dry.
For his songwriters, he could be just as much of a shapeshifter, embodying everything from soulful balladeer to raucous, liquor-swilling dandy. Lyricist Yasui Kazumi gave him his first Oricon chart #1 with “Dangerous Two” in 1973, drawing in song what some in their circle suspected was her own unrequited fantasy, but to get there, he had to play the part, bending every note with lovesick desperation that didn’t exist outside the studio. A decade later, the celebrated gay poet Takahashi Mutsuo, who saw in Sawada what he called a “lonely mirror,” was inspired to pen for him his risky, conceptual Aux Femmes, a synthesizer-drenched retelling of The Tale of Genji that he believed no other artist could do justice. Sawada, familiar with the material from having starred in its 1980 TV drama adaptation and curious what a more literary voice could bring to his music, agreed to record it.3 All this reinvention is a pop singer’s game, anathema to the rock star and his singular, inviolable identity, that belies the steady core needed to give yourself over to something else, to act as a vessel.
While I was off doing my thing, there was something else I read in
last month on Mishima Yukio and the 1985 Paul Schrader film about his life, which Schrader frames through selected vignettes of Mishima’s famous works:Schrader chooses scenes from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Runaway Horses. It was originally his intention to include scenes from Forbidden Colors as well, but Mishima’s wife denied Schrader the rights to the novel. Schrader turned instead to Kyoko’s House, a 1959 untranslated novel of four interconnected storylines. Schrader chose one of these storylines, of the actor Osamu, who ends up in a BDSM relationship with an older woman that culminates in a suicide pact.
The inclusion of Kyoko’s House means that Schrader’s film stages the first (and so far only) English translation of this Mishima text.
Vain, vacuous Osamu, of course, is played by Sawada, but even in isolation, this is a compelling perspective on the role of adaptation in film. What you miss, or fail to translate, as someone watching Mishima without a strong Japanese pop cultural lexicon is the metanarrative of Sawada Kenji in this role at a point in his career when the public, growing bored of their girlhood crush, increasingly turned their attention to his slipping sales and the first hint of fading looks. Osamu faces a choice to either decay or die; Sawada, in one interview from the time period, dwelled on figures like Elvis Presley and James Dean, wondering to himself “if people who die young leave a greater legacy, or if you’re better remembered the longer you survive.”
Spurned by art and now devoted to the cultivation of his physique, Osamu shares a meal with two friends, a fellow bodybuilder and an artist. The bodybuilder sees the human body as its own autonomous work of art, unburdened by artists who merely replicate what exists in reality. Hearing this, the artist counters, “Even the most beautiful body is soon destroyed by age. Where is beauty then? Only art makes human beauty endure.” He proposes a solution: “You must commit suicide at the height of your beauty.” Osamu sits quietly between them, weighing each belief.
On film, Julie at his most beautiful invited morality’s punishment and art’s reward, and in project after project, his characters met untimely ends. Mishima is the last of these roles, the final word on a quandary that defined the first two decades of his career. In his forties, his feet finally touched the ground, stepping on screen into the soft, unassuming bodies of fathers and professors and office workers. The void receded. “He was no longer killed. He no longer died. He gained a sense of corporeality,” one fan observed. “And he survived and became a normal old man.”
Compared to these fictions, Japrocksampler as biography frustrates me for how it flattens real people into caricatures positioned to act out its author’s script, imposed from the outside without a reliable lens into the world these musicians inhabited. Uchida, who scouted Sawada along with the rest of the Tigers at the age of 18, called him by the affectionate nickname “young Sawada” — and, the higher he ascended, “a person chosen by God.” When the Julie-fronted post-GS supergroup PYG had their set hijacked by a hostile crowd at the infamous Hibiya open-air rock concert in 1971, a scene so disastrous and vividly reflective of the times that Murakami Ryu was compelled to immortalize it in his 1976 debut Almost Transparent Blue, it was Uchida who attempted to fend off the interlopers. And Kuze, who directed both men on the small screen in 1978, wrote years later that Sawada was “the man Uchida Yuya has loved more than anyone else for the past fifty years.”
When painting the portrait of an artist, how much fits in the frame? For her acclaimed 2023 biography Julie Was There, culture writer Shimazaki Kyoko chose to trace both these personal relationships and the nature of the superstar as a prism, refracted onto countless smaller, far-reaching lives. Moreover, she relied on the independent preservation efforts of fans to access costly and hard-to-find materials that might have otherwise left this picture incomplete. “From the beginning, Shimazaki was adamant about wanting to hear from fans,” said the book’s editor Naito Jun. “The girls of that time were crazy about this, but there are no documents left from their perspective.” The lyricist and music critic Yukawa Reiko, Naito explained,
said that when the Beatles came to Japan, girls were all screaming and making a fuss, and the adults were saying things like, “Be quiet!” When she saw that, she said she wanted to be on the side that kept screaming for the rest of her life. That was exactly [Shimazaki’s] stance. She said that she wanted to leave behind a record of what kind of people Julie and the Tigers were from the perspective of the people who were screaming.
The year I was born, 43-year-old Sawada Kenji was inventing the modern get-ready-with-me vlog, a weird and prescient concert interlude given new life on Reiwa-era YouTube to the tune of 2.7 million views. I can watch old TV appearances, flip through the yellowed teen magazines (“Sorry, I must’ve doodled on this page. What was I thinking?”), and even read entire diaries (“January 24, 1971, the Tigers farewell concert at Budokan … I don’t care about my graduation exams tomorrow …”) all because the girls who used to scream at the top of their lungs never really stopped, only grew up and found out how to relive it online. “Julie says he doesn’t like to look back on the past,” reads the homepage of a fan site in continuous operation since 1998. “But this is also my history, and I want to continue it little by little.”
My birthday is next month, and I’ve been thinking about getting older in light of the music and popular culture that makes up my own history. I go online lately and see people ten years younger than me obsessed with everything I loved ten years ago, screaming just as loud as I ever did. I’m wondering now what I can do to share that with them, to keep it alive. Like Shimazaki writes in Julie Was There of music as a “memory device,” Nakamori proclaims in the closing line of Osu Chikara that “[t]o support an idol is to believe in the future.” I think preserving the past is every bit as optimistic. When you pass something down, you place your faith in a world that has yet to be born. You trust that the next set of hands will be steady and gentle.
I qualify this statement because I believe it was mentioned by Ian Martin in the Japan Times, but I can’t get around their paywall anymore to verify.
Plenty of avenues to interrogate what I see as Julie’s “social gender” in popular culture, but in this context I think most of all about a 1986 book he participated in about the Rolling Stones, one of his most foundational musical roots. The interview opens: “Hello, nice to meet you. Do you actually like the Rolling Stones?” Oh, yeah, then name five albums, etc.
More on Aux Femmes from the great blog FOND/SOUND.