Soul Flower Mononoke Summit

The Kobe quake provided the impetus for some punk rockers to create a vintage chindon band

“Before we went, we were nervous about playing in a disaster zone” courtesy of BM tunes

“At the time of the ’95 hanshin earthquake, the shaking was severe here in Osaka as well,” recalls bandleader Takashi Nakagawa on the line from his Kansai home. “A week after, one of our members suggested going to play in Kobe. Clubs weren’t operating, and there was no electricity, so we played for survivors at schools that were being used as emergency shelters.”
Such was the occasion for Soul Flower Union, one of Japan’s leading punk bands at the time, to make a virtue of necessity and play entirely acoustic. “Before we went, we were nervous about playing in a disaster zone,” Nakagawa says. “But the reception was so overwhelming we had to do it again.”

The result was an offshoot project, Soul Flower Union Mononoke Summit, which looks to traditional Japanese chindon street music for inspiration. The group has just released its first album in nine years, and on it they mine the history of Japanese folk music from chindon to Okinawan to early 20th-century enka, reinterpreting it from a modern vantage point.

Ironically, while the quake provided the occasion for the formation of a new project, it also meant the end of their relationship with Sony records. The band had wanted to release a remake of a feisty song that was popular after the earthquake and critical of the government, but Sony declined. “We changed the lyrics to make it a little cynical, but at the time Sony didn’t feel such a song was appropriate,” says Nakagawa. “In fact we’d already played the song to overwhelming response in Kobe. Sony knew that but still didn’t want to release it.”

With instrumentation that begins with acoustic guitars and mandolins and runs farther afield to the three-stringed Okinawan sanshin and the chindon taiko drum, Deracine Ching-Dong will appeal to world music aficionados. Guesting is Celtic music virtuoso Donal Lunny, who is married to Hideko Itami, a Mononoke founding member.

The band gathered at Itami’s home in Okinawa for the recording, and the album is permeated with the spicy atmosphere of the region’s shima uta (island songs). But only, says Nakagawa, up to a point. “I’ve loved Okinawan music for a long time, but it would be awkward for us to play it straight up. In the context of the Japanese colonization of Okinawa, it would represent a kind of musical colonialism, like when The Beatles played Indian music. But it’s great music and a living tradition—the last in Japan—so for musicians it’s a big influence. Rather than copy it, we added hints of it.”

Deracine Ching-Dong (deracine is French for “rootless” or “cut off”) reflects Nakagawa’s interest in the dying traditions of Japanese folk music, which he notes is foreign to most youngsters who are brought up on rock and pop and who disparage what came before as dasai, or out of fashion. The first song on the album, a rousing number in which Nakagawa’s raspy growl is set against a background of accordion and hayashi flute, was written by a popular enka singer in 1908.

“Enka players would play in the streets. They were the popular musicians of a time when there were no radios or record players,” he explains. “The most admired enka artist at the time was Soueda Azenbou. But he was viewed with suspicion by the police. Japan was then under proto-fascist rule, and he would sing protest songs. The song “Ah Wakaranai” [“I Don’t Understand”] expresses his disbelief in the ineptitude of [Imperial] Diet members of the era. He would attack the establishment in a humorous way.”

Many of the songs in Mononoke Summit’s repertoire were originally requests from elderly victims of the Hanshin quake. The band would write down the names and research them and put together their own renditions. How does Soul Flower Union’s younger rock audience relate to this music? “Actually, they find it interesting,” Nakagawa says. “Japanese rock fans are familiar with bands like The Pogues and Mano Negra that mix traditional music with rock, so what we’re doing isn’t really unusual. We may, however, be the first to try it in Japan.”

Kinema Club, July 15. See concert listings (jazz/world) for details. Deracine Ching-Dong is available on Soul Flower Record/BM tunes.

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