So I’ve been asked about this several times by
my friends back home. What is the Japanese electronic music scene like? Sadly I
didn’t know until now. The scene is here; it’s not as big due to the dominance
of awful, awful industrial pop, but there are some Japanese ravers out there.
Part of the reason I’ve been struggling with
this (aside from the lack of free time) is due to the lack of a real club scene
out here in Japan. Space is at a premium so getting large groups of people
together to get down and skanking is a tough ask. I’m pretty sure this is the
reason for the overrepresentation of small bars in the major cities.
The clubs that do exist are pretty expensive
(though weirdly often they have ‘foreigner’ discounts, maybe they expect us to
drink more?). Mostly they will put on weekly/monthly events rather than being
consistently being open. I was a little shocked by this since like almost
everything else is open 24hrs.
In fact clubs have been faced with some
serious adversity of late in the major cities. The government have deemed it
worth while to make it illegal for venues to permit dancing past 1am (I am not
even joking it’s called the Entertainment
Business Control Law and has theoretically been in effect since 1948). Due to
this it’s just not worthwhile to run a club, the place can be open after 1am
but you most definitely can’t dance.
You can see then why
it’s pretty difficult to be a DJ in Japan and why the development of an
electronic scene has been somewhat stifled. And yet Japan is full of electronic
noise, as a nation it seems to be crazy about it.
I digress. The festival
itself took place at the same location as Summer Sonic though on nowhere near
as grand a scale. I’d say there were maybe around 5000 to 10000 people though I
honestly have no real Idea. Either way it was a bigger crowd than I was
honestly expecting.
The start of the day
was a bit surreal I must admit. I can honestly say it is the first time I have
ever gotten up at 8am to go out raving. In fact the day ended a little while
after the sun had set, rather than rising. It was novel I’ll give it that. Anyway
I met up with some friends and we set off on a 3 hour journey by train and bus
to Maishima sports Island, an artificial Island situated in Osaka bay with,
wait for it, a lot of sports fields. The festival
itself was situated in one such field overlooking the bay just to the north of
where summer sonic had been held.
The first thing I noticed was the average age
was much higher than I had seen at Summer sonic. I guess this goes with the
scene really, That being said there were still some people wandering about with
little kids in tow, and in some of these kids got stuck in when the music
kicked off.
The festival ran for eight hours (12pm to 8pm)
and had five stages covering some of the breadth of electronic music. Well I
say that but the focus was heavily skewed towards Trance and Techno, not my
music of choice I’ll admit but I’ve had a drought so I wasn’t going to be
fussy. The five stages were Drum and Bass (which seemed to be going off but my
friends showed no interest), Techno (which sometimes eemed to be playing
trance), Trance, (which often seemed to be playing techno), Live house (I only
stopped by a couple of times cos it was by the food tents but what I heard was
cool)、chillout (there can’t have been more than five
people there the whole event) and the main stage (more
trance/psy-trance/techno).
What also made the day for me was the
wonderful opportunity for people watching. Niche cultures usually have there
extremes it’s true but I don’t think anywhere in the world does extremes like
Japan. It most likely stems from the oppressive level of enforced conformity
that pervades every aspect of Japanese life. When people don’t conform they
don’t conform hard.
Now normally if a trend takes off in Japan a
good 90% of the population will follow it so it can be a bit like a scene from
Scooby doo walking through the streets. There were of course the standard fake
eylashed over makeupped Garuzu (Gals) in the crowd pouting away but also a lot
more variation. In fact if I was really into fashion this event would have been
a feast for the eyes. A particular highlight though was definitely the neon
chun-li ladies or a girl with a (forgive me for the unintentional intertextual
reference) massive Dragon tattoo.
In fact it was nice to see people just letting
go, and letting go myself. The people were so into what they were doing that I
definitely did not feel out of place skanking along besides them. Music is
something that truly bridges boundaries. The primal instinct to move to a beat
knows nothing of geographical separation and it’s fun to just be young and stupid
from time to time.
The artists were no less wild, one of the
Dj’s,Yoji, had some of the biggest fake eyebrows I’ve ever seen. In fact the
biggest act where an Isralei duo called Skazi. They mainly focussed on Psy
Trance with some metal licks thrown in. It’s not really my thing to be honest,
I’m deffo a bass head, but they did drop some Skrillex so that made up for it a
bit.
On an interesting note halfway through the day
was something called クレインアプチム (or clean up time). For fifteen minutes all the music stopped and we were
told to pick up our rubbish. The cool thing is, everyone did. This is
refreshing and I’m sure would be met with boos in the UK but as the DJ
proclaimed “We love the environment so lets keep it clean”. It makes perfect
sense, it saves the area and costs and it’d be cool to see it happen at more
music events.
All in all it was a nice introduction to the
Japanese electronic music scene. I’ll have to keep looking for some Japanese
dubstep but I’ve not had any leads so far. The event runs twice a year, once in
the spring and once in autumn. It was a shame I didn’t manage to make it to the
show earlier in the year as it featured a really cool Japanese group called
Hifana who meld traditional Okinawana music with breakbeats. Basically the event
has let me know that I need to do a lot more digging.
では、またにぇえ
