Japan’s music industry has long been dominated by saccharine bubble-gum acts. The formulaic groups sell well at home but lack the edge and originality to appeal to Western markets. Years ago Japanese companies like Yamaha and Akai helped spawn a breakthrough musical genre–selling sophisticated digital-sampling machines and turntables to hip-hoppers in Europe and America. The music swept through the West, but was largely unnoticed by Japanese music fans.
Now there is no escaping it. Inspired by Western techno music and hip-hop, Japan has a vibrant, cutting-edge club culture of its own–and it’s powered by the country’s newest celebrities, DJs. Once mere record-spinners, operating on the periphery of the music scene, Japan’s best-known DJs are now top-drawing performers with big contracts, glitzy shows, tour schedules and large followings. Ishii’s latest release, “Flatspin,” hit the top 10 on Japan’s music charts. So did the 2000 releases by a fellow techno-DJ act, Denki Groove, and Japan’s top hip-hop sensation, DJ Krush. “Right now DJs are the coolest people in Japan.” says Hideki Watanabe, an account executive at the advertising agency Leo Burnett. And coming full circle, Japan’s hottest DJs are in big demand in trendsetting Western cities like London, Berlin and New York, whose club-goers like (of all things) their original sound.
Japan’s DJ mystique is not confined to dance clubs. These new hit makers are becoming role models for Japan’s youth, cultivating a new sense of rebellion and individuality among kids who are starting to look askance at their country’s group-oriented culture. Kids now compete for entrance into “DJ schools,” where they learn how to take disparate sounds and whip them into a thunderous aural experience. DJ arcade machines, which test the user’s “groove levels,” are scattered across the country. Turntables, the main “instrument” for aspiring DJs, now outsell guitars in Japan. Shibuya, Tokyo’s neon-lit teen district, has the largest concentration of vinyl-record stores (per square mile) on Earth: more than 60 music stores now peddle LPs–one of the building blocks of DJ music. Last year Japan imported 8.2 million records, roughly four times the number sold in the United States. That makes Tokyo the global repository for vintage R&B, disco and hip-hop. “Its like DJ Disneyland out here,” says Zebra, a Japanese rapper who frequently guides foreign visitors to Tokyo’s best music shops. “Anything you want, you can get.” Big businesses are catching on to the fad. Heineken, for example, now sponsors DJ parties, and has produced a beer poster designed to emulate the DJ esthetic. “The DJs are changing society,” says Judith Herd, a Japan-based music scholar and independent record producer.
Unlike traditional Japan pop, which is masterminded by entertainment-industry executives who conceive and incubate new bands based on overseas trends, the DJ phenomenon is uniquely bottom-up. Denied recording contracts, big gigs or airplay on the radio, DJs worked their way up the entertainment ladder. They played small clubs and celebrated their outsider status in the early 1990s. DJ Honda, one of Japan’s new entertainment elite, worked as a cook before his rise to stardom. He lived in the shabby backroom of a nightclub in Shizuoka before getting his big break. When the owner got into a fight with the resident DJ, he asked Honda to fill in. “Since then, it’s been world domination,” quips the 35-year-old Honda. Last New Year’s Eve, he was the headliner at a massive millennium party in Nagoya; 20,000 hip-hop fanatics flocked to see him perform. Takkyu Ishino and Pierre Taki–who together form the hot techno act Denki Groove–have equally modest backgrounds. Taki worked odd jobs before gaining underground fame. His mother wanted him to be a nurse. Ishino wanted to be an illustrator. Eventually they met and began to make music, winning acclaim and a global following. Last September Denki Groove was the star attraction at Wire00, a 24-hour techno extravaganza in Yokohama.
Until DJs cracked the mold, it was hard for Japanese music to get heard in Western markets. Language was a basic problem. Few people outside of Japan understand Japanese. But lyrics are not terribly important to club music–it’s the beat that counts. When DJ Honda first began recording in 1995, executives at Sony Music in Tokyo offered him some advice for getting his records released in the United States. “They said, ‘Go to English school’,” he recalls. “I said, ‘F–k that! I’m not writing a book, I’m making music’.” Instead, Honda took the advice of Crazy Legs, the famous Bronx, New York-born member of the break-dancing group Rock Steady Crew. “Legs told me that it doesn’t matter if I can’t talk,” Honda says. “You don’t have to know good English to make good beats.” Since then, two singles from his album “hII” have broken into Billboard’s top 100. American fans like Honda’s Tokyo cool. Tokyo teens are impressed by the fact that he’s worked with major U.S. hip-hop acts like De La Soul and KRS-One.
Ishii says that Japanese DJs have taken advantage of a new musical form. “Rock and roll and soul music have a long history in the West,” he says. “We couldn’t compete. But when techno and house music started about 20 years ago, everyone was starting at the same level.” Learning to use samplers is a lot easier than years of guitar lessons. Of course, the Japanese are accustomed to all things electronic. The country’s videogame companies have long used electronically inspired music. DJs picked up some of the videogame sound and incorporated it into the club-music esthetic.
Ishii’s brand of techno caught on in Europe before Japan. The obscure Belgium label R&S signed Ishii to a contract in 1993, and his music was soon heard in clubs across the continent. In 1995, he won MTV Europe’s award for the year’s best international music video for his techno hit “Extra.” He was also invited to appear at Berlin’s prestigious Love Parade, the world’s largest techno festival. By 1995 Sony Music had taken notice of his talent and signed him on. Last year, when South Korea lifted a World War II-era ban on Japanese acts, Ishii was the first performer to be invited to play in Seoul. His Japanese fan base is so faithful that, a few years ago, it braved a typhoon to see him play a concert at the base of Mount Fuji. “Finally,” says Ishii, “our time has come.”
Japanese DJs don’t mind tweaking their country’s conservative culture. Denki Groove has taken aim at Japan’s preoccupation with big corporations and materialism. Their song “Wicked Jumper” mocks Japanese jingoistic advertising, and hangs on the repeated lyric “Oh, don’t you look cool today in the jumper you bought from the local store.” And “Reaktion” proclaims, against a backdrop of grinding industrial machinery: “All the young people in Tokyo are here today.” Their message: kids should find their individuality. “It’s your life,” says Ishino. “You have to live like you.”
Talented DJs are serious about their work. Hideaki Ishi, a.k.a. DJ Krush, once belonged to a motorcycle gang, and now draws his inspiration from hip-hop. But he’s no boastful rebel. Sitting behind turntables onstage, he is almost professorial in his intensity–and nearly oblivious to the audience. He flips through stacks of LPs as if they were index cards. When he’s found the one he wants, he places the disc carefully on the turntable and gently lowers the stylus. Yuichiro Shiraishi, editor of the hip-hop magazine Blast, likens Krush to a Zen master. Why? “Japanese beats have ma,” or “the nothingness,” Shiraishi says. Ma is a term used in Japanese traditional arts, especially in music, to designate an important interval in time. For Japanese, the nothingness, or ma, works to accentuate the overall beat. “The nothing is just as important as the something.” Krush, 38, says: “I see my music as a rock garden. Each sound, even the space between beats, makes that garden.” To gauge the breadth of his appeal, consider his collaborations. He has worked with folk-rock singer k. d. lang (remixing her single “Sexuality”) along with New York rappers Method Man and Redman.
Japanese teens aren’t satisfied to merely dance to the music. They yearn to make it themselves. At Tokyo’s Toho Gakuen, 87 students pay $8,000 each for a yearlong DJ course, and typically dole out hundreds of dollars more every month to buy records. The students take such courses as “Sampling I and II” and “DJ Techniques and Fundamentals”–taught by real DJs. According to Katsuzuo Takahashi, an instructor, “We have more students applying that we can accept.” One of the lucky ones is 18-year-old Shinji Takeshima. He made it into this year’s program, but only after he told his father that he refused to take over the family plumbing business. He looks suitably disheveled with peach fuzz on his chin, an oversized orange T shirt, baggy pants and a floppy hat. His goal: learn to DJ so he can play small clubs and parties. “Dad told me that my dream would never come true,” he says. “But he decided to pay for the classes anyway.”
Everyone, it seems, has a DJ fantasy. For the young and the talented, DJ contests are held regularly in Tokyo. Rivals spin before judges who vote for their favorites. Amateur DJs beat a path to Manhattan Records, whose six-store chain sells a huge collection of old vinyl. “We go to America and Europe and just dig around for old records,” says manager Takemichi Shimizu. “I think I’ve been to every state in the union.” For those without turntables, DJ arcade games are a must. Japanese arcade manufacturer Konami struck pay dirt with a DJ simulation called Beatmania. Players choose a hip-hop, trance or techno option, and then press buttons to create beats. They also push a turntable back and forth to demonstrate their “scratching” skill. The machine gauges how good the user is at remixing music. “We wondered if we could translate this cool music into a game,” says Funiaki Tanaka, director of the Konami’s arcade-game operation. The answer is yes. Konami has sold 25,000 Beatmania machines in three years. In the arcade industry, selling 1,000 units is considered a success.
The direction is clear: DJ culture is going mainstream. The best-known DJs are now wealthy businessmen. Honda owns clothing stores in New York’s SoHo, Tokyo and Sapporo, his hometown. Leisure and manufacturing companies are now glomming onto the acts, using DJs in their marketing campaigns. To sell its sports watches, the company G Shock is now running magazine ads showing its timepieces resting beside a turntable. Phillip Morris is building a cigarette-advertising campaign around a DJ theme. The risk is that the beer posters, watch ads and tobacco promotions will eventually undermine the music’s rebellious appeal. But that hasn’t happened yet. “When Japanese do anything, they invariably need to have a leader to tell them what they are doing and why they are doing it,” says Donald Ritchie, who is a cultural critic and professor at Tokyo’s Temple University. “Japanese kids don’t trust the government, and they don’t trust the big corporations. But they do trust the DJs, who they haven’t learned not to trust.”
Even if there is an eventual backlash, Japan’s DJs will have made a mark. Young Japanese artists have an easier time setting their own creative agendas. And Japanese record companies–if only out of fear that they’ll miss the next big thing–are learning to pay close attention to the scruffy kid in casual clothes and headphones who’s got a head full of music. For now, at least, he rules.
