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Not East Not West, Not Old Not New: Trends and Genres in Japanese Popular Music
| Article
# : |
16527 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1989 |
4,030 Words |
| Author
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James Stanlaw
James Stanlaw is assistant professor of anthropology at
Illinois State University. |
The radio station called itself KIDS Radio. It caught my attention because it was English. Sort of, at least, sometimes. This was something…well, something that I knew well but, at the same time, something very different.
KIDS Radio, in Aoyama, Japan, was not a full-fledged professional station and was certainly not the famous FEN (Far East Network) broadcast by the U.S. armed forces and listened to everyone to catch the latest hits from America. KIDS only transmitted a rather weak signal during weekend afternoons, and its personnel consisted of young, college-age Japanese who called each other by Americanized first names or nicknames: Karen "Cutie Pie" Ushijima, Mike "Dance-able" Fujiwara, "Candy" Ohtomo.
The station name presumably was based on the America custom of assigning K-prefaced call letters to broadcasting transmitters west of the Mississippi. The music played was a 1960s Southern California sound; some of the songs were unabashed copies of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and other similar types of American music, altered in only a minor way.
But what was most amazing was that these KIDS kids did not just want to play surf 'n' roll records. They wanted to create a whole new milieu, based on images connected to Western music. The KIDS Radio people have tried to alter conceptions of their immediate environment in various ways. For example, they have "renamed" many geographic features close to the station, including several of the main streets running through the business district (e.g., Raspberry Ave., Flamingo St., and Epstein St.). This imagery is also used in their advertising slogans and bumper stickers, such as "Ride
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