Akb48+me English Translation
Vinnie Frevert
It was a sweltering hot summer in Tokyo. I was sitting in my study, which doubles as a disorganized storage closet for unsold CDs, zines and tapes. An office worker, taking a cigarette break on the fire escape of the building opposite, was watching me through the window with an expression of disdain, wondering what I was still doing in my dressing gown at 4:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon.
At that exact moment, what I was doing was reading an email from the Japanese translator of a book I wrote about the underground music scene in my adopted country. In it, she was laughing about an ironic reference the book makes about the influence that Mark E. Smith and The Fall had on mid-'90s Japanese chart pop, but was unsure how to translate it. In a country and linguistic environment where Smith's defiantly Anglo-Saxon punk poetry never really found purchase, the reference is little more than an Easter egg for a select few. To translate the joke meaningfully would be to explain it, which would be to kill it.
Sitting there in my dressing gown, surrounded by unsold CDs from bands no one cares about, I didn't really understand the problem. The only people in Japan who were going to be interested in my book were exactly the kinds of people who were going to get jokes about semi-cult Manchester post-punk bands. It was all about knowing your audience.
Six months later, in a small, suburban bookshop near my house, I see it. A gaudy splash of yellow and blue leaping out from amongst the books on kabuki, war photography and Norwegian loft renovation. It's the book I wrote, sitting in an ordinary Japanese store, acting like it deserves to be there.
I moved to Japan from the U.K. in 2001, anticipating a relatively short stay. Getting sucked into the alternate-universe rabbit hole of the indie and underground music scene was the key factor in the ongoing deferral of my return. When I got here, I soon was writing regularly (in English) about the music I was discovering, first on a blog and then in the pages of The Japan Times and other outlets. In parallel to that work, I dove into the thankless, financially draining world of event organizing and running a record label, Call And Response, specializing in obscure contemporary Japanese post-punk.
It was the height of the typhoon season, and I was shaking the water off my umbrella and squelching through the door to a live venue in already-saturated shoes. The place, Ni-man Den-atsu, was just a few minutes' walk from where I live, in the Koenji district of Tokyo. But for almost everyone else, the rain had done a devastatingly effective job at keeping them away. A few more people dripped their way through the doors over the next hour or so, but the night was looking pretty grim, audience-wise, for the five bands on the bill.
One of the bands on the bill, a synth-punk trio called Jebiotto, were in their element. They had a new song, the title of which ("Dreams Never Come True") was a riff on perennially platitudinous long-time J-pop chart-toppers Dreams Come True, tapping into the weary cynicism many musicians have towards the distant banalities of the mainstream. Also, and equally, their own overlooked status in the underground. There's nothing maudlin about Jebiotto though: they delivered their message of no-hope through joyous, anthemic, '80s-style heart surges, making defeat into victory, a party out of a pyre. Here, sheltering from the rain in this dingy basement, we were the entire Tokyo underground music scene, a band of brothers partying on heroically in the face of indifference.
After the English edition received a small smattering of attention from mostly local, Tokyo-based, English-language media, and a generally positive response from readers and reviewers, work started on the Japanese edition. One early decision we had to make was whether Awai would publish the Japanese edition themselves or whether they would license it to a more established Japanese publisher. Awai specializes in quirky comics, poetry and nonfiction with cross-cultural appeal. (I hoped, still hope, that the bands whose records I release have the same opinion of working with me as I did working with Awai.) But when it came to Japan, where book distribution tends to occur on a shop-by-shop basis, largely dependent on the relationships publishers and retailers have built up over time, Awai felt they lacked the resources to do the book justice and preferred to partner up with an established local publisher.
I was at a party to celebrate the release of a new cassette by my friends' band Tropical Death, which had just come out on Call And Response with the ultimate goal of selling a respectable couple of hundred copies. A few of us had moved on to a restaurant to continue the party into the night. With us were the members of a wonderful, off-kilter indie rock band called The Falsettos, whose debut album had just been announced by the label P-Vine. Congratulations, with a slight patina of envy, were in the air.
In the grand scale of things, putting out an album on P-Vine isn't that radical a move. They're a thoroughly respectable independent label, rather larger than most, who have released a great many of my favorite Japanese bands at one time or another. Even so, there's cultural barrier crossed when signing with a label like it, the separation between a communal endeavor and the music business proper. When you cross that line, there's a sense of departure, of moving on. A fug of melancholy can't help but hang over the process.
For very small labels like mine, the presence of companies like P-Vine also represents a harsh reminder that even a small amount of money and power counts for more than all the good will you can accrue by spending mere time and energy on bands. A magnificently gothic-psychedelic-post-punk band called Hysteric Picnic had previously moved on from Call And Response to P-Vine, changing their name in the process, which had the unintentional effect of effectively erasing their earlier releases from memory. (I'd made cautious attempts to sign The Falsettos a couple of years prior, too.)
The joke landed with a few cheers and a lot of drained glasses. It probably helped that most people in the room by this point know that P-Vine's publishing arm, ele-king books, had been lined up to oversee the Japanese edition of Quit Your Band! It took me a bit longer to realize that what I was really trying to alleviate was my own awkwardness at something I'd written transforming from a quirky nugget of alternative culture into a product with real obligations to the market. I wanted the reach, but not the responsibility.
"This was indeed the first for me," Sakamoto tells me, "I had done taped interview transcriptions many times, and that means I have more information and tools to rely on, such as the mood or flow of the conversation, nuances or inflection in speaking voice, to work out if the comment is meant to be serious or merely a joke. Written text is tad dry or inflexible."
Even after extracting the inflections of authorial voice from the dry text of a book, rendering it into the appropriate Japanese brings its own complications. By way of example, Sakamoto points out that, for a male narrator, even a word as simple as "I" varies between "watashi," "boku" and "ore," depending on the speaker.
From Sakamoto's perspective, the key goal was to ensure the book flowed with a sense of fun and captured the original text's veering rhythms, from level-headed critical analysis to vaulting hyperbole and back, even if that meant discarding some of translation's formal rules and its biases towards brevity and strict accuracy.
The announcement of the book from ele-king/P-Vine last autumn landed with a bigger bang than I'd expected. On popular music news website Natalie, the book's launch was tied with an item about megastar Namie Amuro near the top of its most-active news stories. It started to dawn on me that I'd perhaps misunderstood the audience. I'd written it for a mixture of overseas music fans who were curious about Japanese music and for Japanese band-scene nerds. While those potential readers were certainly out there somewhere, the interest the book was receiving in Japan was being driven by a much broader coalition, most of whom shared little interest in the scene I'd devoted my life in Japan to.
Making cultural generalizations about a country as big as Japan is tricky, not least because Japan often seems so keen to generate those generalizations itself. A clich among foreign residents here is how easily people will allow the phrase "we Japanese" to dubiously prefix anything from "are culturally and racially homogenous" to "can't eat sweet food."
A different kind of thinking about the book lies in the differences between the English and Japanese editions' titles. I gave the English version the subtitle Musical Notes from the Japanese Underground, which draws attention to my viewing position as near-to-the-ground, in the indie scene, an impression perhaps underscored by the cheekily pretentious and in-jokey way the subtitle plays off a Dostoevsky book I've never read. The Japanese edition, on the other hand, uses the subtitle An Englishman's Deep Exploration of Contemporary Japanese Pop and Rock. From the start, it emphasizes my foreignness, while at the same time it broadens the musical scope to include more mainstream music.
"There are several reasons why your writing is interesting," Noda told me, "One of them is that you are looking at Japanese music with the perspective of world history, which is something I often feel from reading British writers. Especially after seeing you deejay at the release party, I got the impression that you see things from an interesting, outsider's perspective. For example, a Japanese person wouldn't think to put [1970s pop trio] Candies or [stadium rocker] Tomoyasu Hotei in that [underground] context."
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