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Punk rock music scenes everywhere seem to spawn factions and cliques, whether populated with day-glo Mohawk punkers with their fur fannypacks or hardcore kids whose staple diet is malt liquor and whose chief form of exercise is crowd-surfing. In this, Japan is no exception.
But the country has some homegrown punk offshoots as well. One of the most influential is called melocore, short for melodic hardcore. Inspired by bands like Green Day and Offspring, melocore bands play energy-packed, accessible hard rock. Its most popular group, Hi-Standard, has sold hundreds of thousands of records. The independent label that epitomizes the melocore sound is Pizza of Death Records, run by Hi-Standard member Ken Yokoyama. (According to one interview, Yokoyama once made a living delivering pizza. The Japanese for "here's your pizza" is pizza desu, which sounds like "Pizza Death," and that became Pizza of Death.)
Pizza of Death has a devoted following: Sometimes on sunny days you can see Pizza of Death Records T-shirts hung out to dry on Tokyo apartment balconies, fluttering like flags showing allegiance to the label. I too have a few Pizza of Death CDs in my collection (as well as a black T-shirt with the label's distinct splatter-font logo), and among those, my favorites are discs by a group called Moga the Y5.
The Osaka-based quartet Moga the Y5 (pronounced Moga the Five Yen) isn't much like other melocore groups. Whereas bands like Hi-Standard sing in basic English, Moga's lyrics are exclusively in Japanese, and poetic Japanese at that. And whereas melocore melodies tend to be bright and catchy, Moga's music is intense and brooding, almost emo. Sometimes, just when you are becoming fed up with Moga's heavy, artillery-charge rock, the band tosses out a glimmering jadelike passage of melodic beauty, and that gets you hooked.
I went to see Moga the Y5 play live at a club called the Shelter, and was surprised to see how young some of the fans were. Moga's been around since 1995, and its vocalist "Escargot" just turned 40, while some of the audience members appeared to be in their teens. These kids must have discovered Moga only recently, but they were a spirited bunch, singing along to Moga's anthems of angst and discontent. Toward the end, they transformed the front of the club into a slamdancing mosh pit (prompting a couple of members of the opening band to poke their heads out of the dressing room with grins that said, "they're slam-dancing to Moga the Y5?!").
The Shelter isn't a big club — it holds maybe 150 people at most — but it was still surprising that the place was packed. I'd seen Moga the Y5 live before, and don't remember those shows being that crowded; maybe they're making a come-back? One thing I noticed: While there were lots of kids at the Shelter, there weren't many older fans, who must be in their 30s for the most part. Maybe they work for companies now and have children, and can't watch punk shows on weekend nights. Maybe they just grew bored of punk. In any case, it looked like a new generation had replaced an older group of fans.
Moga the Y5, photo by Ken M.
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This isn't unique to Moga the Y5; everywhere, punk is music mainly for the young, like an organism that survives by adding new cells and spewing out older ones. But in Japan, the odds are stacked even higher against people remaining active punk fans as they get older. For one thing, the Japanese workday is notoriously long, leaving little time for salarymen and women to swing by punk clubs after work. That's why a Japanese manga story I once read called Jiji Metal Jacket is so charming: It has to do with a quartet of senior citizens whose relaxing, post-retirement hobby of choice is — heavy metal. Clad in spiked leather jackets, these cartoon musicians rock out audiences of screaming grannies and grandpas by singing about health care for the elderly and other subjects close to their fans' heart.
I regret to say that no band like Jiji Metal Jacket actually exists in Japan (as far as I know). But at least there are some former angry young punkers that are staying with the music. Moga the Y5's Escargot is, as I said, 40. Pizza of Death's Yokoyama is 37. There are some other older musicians who got their start at the dawn of Japan's punk movement in the 1970s and '80s who are still active. I hope they keep at it — teens and twentysomethings shouldn't have a monopoly on punk.
Posted February 2007
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