Denshima

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).

that I looked like “I was in my element “. Hell’s yeah this is the scene I left behind in the UK and it was nice to make a return.

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