Machikaze Roman

In 2007, Rolling Stone Japan declared Happy End’s Kazemachi Roman to be the greatest Japanese rock album of all time. For a band that can boast such an accolade, Happy End still isn’t all that well-known in the West. If you’re a hardcore J-rock fan, you probably think Happy End aren’t as interesting or cool as noisier artists from the 1970s like, say, Flower Travellin’ Band. Today Happy End are celebrated in Japan, yet Kazemachi Roman sold fewer than 10,000 copies the year it was released, and it’s still not available on streaming services. By this point, Happy End should be as documented and famous as Love or even Os Mutantes, but they are rarely if ever mentioned in the same breath.

When Happy End first formed in Tokyo in late 1969, the Beatles were basically kaput, which should give you an idea of how much had already happened in Western popular music. In Japan, pop music transformed more slowly, to some degree because it was constantly being measured against the West. Aside from fringe experimental psychedelic outfits like Speed, Glue & Shinki and Les Rallizes Dénudés, Japanese countercultural pop music in the mid-to-late ’60s was largely divided into two camps. On one side were “Group Sounds” acts, basically the Japanese equivalent of bands you’d find in the Nuggets box set; they combined skunky garage rock with kayōkyoku, a mix of Western scales and traditional Japanese music. The other faction was folk, either “campus folk” amateurs trying to reconstruct mid-’60s West Coast coffeehouses, min’yo artists attempting to re-create indigenous and traditional Japanese music, or unvarnished protest folk in the vein of early Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Language was another demarcation: Group Sounds bands would often sing or perform covers in English, on some level in the hopes of appealing to American listeners, while folk acts sang in Japanese, a purposeful act of resistance toward U.S. cultural dominance. The members of Happy End weren’t interested in either side, let alone the debate itself. Actually, they thought it was all pretty lame. Guitarist Shigeru Suzuki puts it bluntly in a 2014 documentary for the Japanese TV station NHK BS Premium: “Honestly, I thought Group Sounds was pretty boring. In the end, it was just an extension of the traditional Japanese ballad. The folk musicians had good melodies, but … their rhythms were just boring.” At heart, Happy End felt that in trying so hard to either win over America or defy it, both sides were defined by their relationship to the West. The message of rock’n’roll might be universal, but the music is inescapably Western; you had to bring Japan to rock’n’roll, rather than try to force rock’n’roll to be Japanese. Pitchfork.