Inscrutable indeed is the train of thought that led Mary Sandeman to get up in a kimono and transform into the mysterious and bewitching Aneka. It was to prove an unrepeatable flash of inspiration – the dress-up box wouldn’t stretch to a second hit. And to be fair, nothing much about “Japanese Boy” suggests ‘career artist’ – the public’s appetite for syndrums and chinoiserie was briefly immense but always likely to be finite.
I quite like “Japanese Boy”. In an early draft of the Freaky Trigger Top 100 Songs Of All Time it occupied the #2 slot by general, hearty and drunken acclaim. Sadly we lost that particular list: justifying its position would have been intriguing. But it’s one of those records which has lost its lustre through doing the Popular project. As a memory from the dawn of my pop life it had an allure – helped by the fact that it’s very catchy and Aneka has a piercingly pretty voice – but coming at it chronologically, having worked through the late 70s and early 80s, it’s uncomfortably clear that “Japanese Boy” is subject to grievous diminishing returns. The syndrums are especially grating – telegraphing the singalong chorus like an unpleasant nudge in the ribs, and draining away any feeling or empathy that might have carried over from the more heartfelt (“a word of explanation – that’s all!”) verses. Plus the orientalist arrangements don’t really mesh with the galumphing rhythm: the overall impression is of a record on the nasty end of cheap, slapdashery defeating an otherwise jolly bit of bubblegum.
Score: 4
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Sidenotes:
i. I will hold up my hand and admit that, age 8, I thought Aneka was actually Japanese, and remember being quite shocked on learning the truth.
ii. What a ghastly sleeve!
6 year old me also thought she was Japanese, and it was a long time before I was disappointed. I have very similar feelings to you on this all round – it’s one of my earliest very clear TOTP memories, probably because I liked it so much.
Listening to it again now and it indeed sound very cheesy, and not in a great way.
Strange is the impotance of cheap music.
I did like this when I was eight – the combination of an easily grasped narrative, striking image, playground chorus and exotic signifiers of orientalism making a fizzy pop package.
This enthusiasm has, alas, not survived into adulthood.
I observe that there was a follow-up hit of sorts, number 50 smash ‘Little Lady’. I wonder if there was any chance of image to go with it?
TOTPWatch: Aneka performed ‘Japanese Boy’ on Top of the Pops on two occasions.
13 August 1981. Also in the studio that week were; Duran Duran, Soft Cell and Shakin’ Stevens, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘Startrax Club Disco’. Simon Bates was the host.
27 August 1981. Also in the studio that week were; Startrax, Soft Cell, The Nolans, Ultravox and Genesis, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘Hold On Tight’. Richard Skinner was the host.
#4 according to Wikipedia, yes! Aneka dressed up as a Victorian lady.
From time to time the western public are suckers for a bit of eastern exoticism – that hook in the chorus made it a winner the way a Japanese flavour had taken Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki” to number one in the States in 1963, and “Tokyo Melody”, the BBC theme for the 1964 Olympics, was also a big hit. It didn’t exactly grab me but you could see why it was a hit.
You didn’t mention it, Tom, but Mary Sandeman was indeed a “career artist” in the sense that she was a successful mezzo-soprano with the Scottish Fiddle Orchestra and a folk singer as well, so she was obviously slumming it a bit with this.
‘Tokyo Melody’ is the business! Anthemic, expansive and utopian: That’s how to do an Olympian theme.
#7 something that occurred to me writing this, though, is that despite the occasional success of orientalist western pop, yer actual Japanese, Cantonese etc. pop has NEVER (as far as I know) crossed over into the UK charts. Unless I’m missing someone blindingly obvious?
Yellow Magic Orchestra went top 20 with ‘Computer Games’
Christ, this one had been completely wiped from the old memory bank. Watching the video just now the first thing that came to mind was an oriental Black and White Minstrel Show, especially her comedy Japanese accent.
Still, it had a good beat. I can imagine enjoying it without that voice over the top.
Does anyone know if this was part of the phenomenon of the summer holiday hit (such as Ryan Paris’ Dolce Vita or Spagna’s Call Me, where a hi-nrg/Eurodisco/Italo record that wouldn’t normally bother the UK charts, gets bought by punters returning from holiday having heard it every night in Valentino’s in Benidorm) ? It’s always struck me as fairly hi-nrg sounding and I just noticed it’s August release date.
Even the hardened regulars are mostly staying away from this one I see
Ryuichi Sakamoto had a minor hit or 2 with David Sylvian.
Tomita had some charting albums in the 70s.
This is undeniably naff but just about tolerable with production values and quality akin to ‘Feels Like I’m In Love’. What about the origin of the song? Inspired by ‘China Girl’ (I mean Iggy’s version of course)?
I remember her prancing about on TOTP with a wig that looked as if it had been cut using a wok rather than a pudding bowl. It seemed embarrassing that this was number 1.
I think I spent that summer working a night shift at a 24 hour petrol station listening to Capital Radio. I got hooked on Rickie Lee Jones’ ‘Woody and Dutch on the Slow train to Peking’ which got played a lot and bought the ‘Pirates’ album on the strength of a glowing article by Ian Penman in the NME.
#13, I’ve been trying to post but they’ve all been sunk into the ether!
Now I’ve logged in, maybe things will start to work more!
#9: The NME was trying to launch JapPop on us all, around this time.
The Plastics got a free gold flexidisc covermount. Susan’s “24000 kiss” on a NME compilation tape.
Of course, “Japanese Boy” killed off the whole scene.
So I had never heard of this…thing before, but Tom’s commentary piqued my interest, and um wtf is this awful racist song? Was it seen as racist at the time? It has sort of blown my mind.
I actually remember Little Lady, and rather like it. It all makes a lot more sense if you think of Aneka as a cut price Toyah (which then leads to cut price Kate Bush and Hazel O’Connor allegations being thrown around which I would not be able to adjudicate). There is part of Japanese Boy which makes sense from a kiddie brought up on Radiophonic effects, its effeXor are very Swap Shop.
But no, its low down on Japanesed themed hits of the era for me even.
Also Satoshi Tomiie’s (and Frankie Knuckles) ‘Tears’ pretty massive on the pirates, the newly legalised Kiss, in the clubs etc but I don’t know if it was a big pop hit too.
Racist performance surely, not racist song? Nice, keening hook, but a bit naff even for me and, yes, Jap-ing up somewhat racially queasy
I’m not sure it’s racist at all – quite affectionate really unlike the Vapors’ ‘Turning Japanese’…
Lordy, lordy “Tears” was an incredible record. Don’t think it was a hit outside the clubs or radio though, unless you count in my living room.
The performance is doubly weird because the song is surely sung from the perspective of someone who ISN’T Japanese – why would a Japanese girl sing “he’s my Japanese boy”?? I don’t think there’s any particular “Japface” going on in the singing – she’s pitching the voice to work with the off-the-shelf orientialisms, so it’s more like Sting’s slightly faux-JA accent when the Police were doing reggae.
The performance tho is somewhere between Mikado and Minstrels.
the wonderful ‘Tears’ actually made #50 in ’89, so v nearly a hit
A testament to pop subjectivism: all of the reasons that Tom dislikes this song – the galumphing, the syndrums, the disjointedness – are the reasons while I love this ramshackle juggernaut. That said, Sandeman’s voice is probably also a big part of it, as her crystal vowel sounds are identifiably part of the Scottish Folk/Gaelic singing tradition and completely incongruous (to these ears) within the context of the song.
#22 and #23 – I don’t think it’s a rascist lyric (it’s certainly a nonsense lyric), but as for Tony Blackburn “…well that certainly puts a different slant on things” the week this entered the Top 40…
I had thought that this one of the last handful of number ones of the 80s that I didn’t know at all. Having youtubed it, it does stir very dim memories (I was six when this came out)… However, I wonder if I’m just picking up a slight resemblance of the chorus to “Live It Up”, by Mental As Anything (it was on the Crocodile Dundee soundtrack). Is it just me?
As to the song itself, it does sound cheap to me, and I’m not sure I can agree on her voice being “piercingly pretty”.
Cover version watch: Shanadoo – a Japanese Eurodance group from Germany, it sez here (Spotify link).
I’m not being funny but… the only thing racist about this is the ‘Charlie Chan’ motif that appears once – I’m sure the Chinese love to get confused with the Japanese (“inscrutable” must be off limits!). Oh, and I think ‘Oriental’ is frowned upon to describe anything other than foodstuffs, same as ‘Scotch’. Shouldn’t it be ‘Asian’? I may well be corrected.
Well, I still like this. Super-catchy, and a hell of a lot more fun than Kelly Marie’s Marathon Man-like “piercingly pretty” vocal. First time I heard this I thought, ooh, Toyah’s recorded something I actually like. Probably because the mannered vocal is clearly the work of an actress; obviously I can’t hear any similarity today. It fitted with the Tight Fit end of New Pop for me. Proper Electropop, even if it was clearly stitched together by non-teens.
Re 29: Definite melodic similarity to Mental As Anything, yes.
Re 30: Anyone know how long you usually have to wait to get ‘accepted’ for Spotify? I feel locked out of the love-in.
as an american who was less than a year old at this time, it is a real pleasure to discover these songs for the first time and have immediate access to all your opinions and memories regarding them. i like this song quite a bit. sure, it’s basically a cheap trinket with a “made in hong kong” sticker affixed to its bottom. from an american point of view, this is pretty indicative of that early ’80s british pop sound (another soon to be chart-topper is the epitome of it, but we’ll get there soon enough).
one stray observation. the riff from “I Wanna be Adored” bears more than a passing resemblance to the repeating hook from this song. am i the only one who hears it?
spotify = the green door!
#31 I have opened the green door for you Wichita – check your email!
“Oriental” may be off limits – “orientalist” isn’t tho, it’s the right word for Western imitations of Eastern culture (or at least I thought it was!).
Oriental is a tricky one for me, what with where I work. People do still describe themselves as orientalists though they tend to be the old school. The word is seen to be vaguely acceptable in academia as a historical term but I’d be surprised if you saw many people use it outside of that cintext. Post Edward Said’s “Orientalism” no-one wants to be seen to be going there.
On the accusation of racism at this song I refer m’lud to the Typically Tropical thread and then come back. And being near Turning Japanese, Hong Kong Garden and even Bowie’s China Girl (musical motifs as cultural appropriation?) it looks pretty tame. Its merely Aneka’s dressing up box which offends really – and we’ll see a lot more of that in the 80’s.
The impression I get is that the word became *more* generally popular post-Said – but with a more perjorative tone to it, understood to include an element of the ersatz and condescending.
Re 31: when that vicar doing Around The World In 80 Faiths got to the one about Buddhism/Taoism etc, he kept referring to them as being “inscrutable”! Extraordinary – on the BBC of all places.
Re 34: There you go, Tom. You open the green door for me and I slam it shut, trap yr fingers, and shout “Racist!”. Ungrateful bastard.
Cut-price, yes, I can’t disagree, but plenty of ’81 productions were, with a sense of lightness (pre-Fairlight? definitely before the gated snare became obligatory) that had disappeared by early ’83.
Opening track on Ronco’s Super Hits, followed by Tenpole Tudor’s Wunderbar and Toyah’s sub-fourth-form, proto-Dubya I Want To Be Free (pfft… a lot less fun than Japanese Boy, no?). It shocked me that Toyah and Hazel O’Connor were taken even remotely seriously at the time, which definitely aided my liking for the entirely unpretentious, distinctly non-rock Aneka (plus she always looked touchingly embarrassed about her success/outfits).
Were they really taken seriously? I think both of them made good records as well as poor ones – “It’s A Mystery” and “Eighth Day”, though I guess a liking for the latter is helped by a baseline enjoyment of preposterous sci-fi records.
Come to think of it, I’m fond of “I Want To Be Free” too! Though only for the gleefully anticlimactic “BEING VERY LOUD!!” bit – it always reminds me of a certain 1998 #1 by a future Dr Who companion.
Should have emphasised “remotely”, but I don’t recall Breaking Glass being laughed out of the room.
I’m usually the last person to take the authenticity ticket, but Toyah and Hazel O seemed such out-and-out chancers to me at the time: theatre school stuff with suspicious pre-punk moves in spite of their new wave trappings. What the Daily Mail would call “punky”.
If I’d been a few years younger I’d probably have found the sci-fi whirs and bleeps on Eighth Day neato, but I was 16, and ’81 was such an extraordinary year. Every Top 40 placing these two hogged meant one less for Josef K’s Chance Meeting or Modern Eon’s Childs Play or The B-52’s’ Give Me Back My Man.
And “on the eighth day machines just got upset”. Christ-all-bleedin-mighty! Worthy of the Cranberries innit.
it’s “machine just got upset”. singular. it was THE machine. man.
skynet style
calumerio @ 27 pins down for me the old question of why this doesn’t work. It sounds like, say, Moira Anderson trying to be cool.
As for the chinoiserie and the matter of “cultural appropriation”, well that’s no problem for me. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery I see no problem with working with the modes of another culture’s music and there’s a long tradition for it. It goes back to The Mikado at least. Not, oddly enough, to Madama Butterfly although Puccini laid it on thick later on in Turandot. As has been noted, it’s not the first time it’s been used in a Popular entry (let’s not forget, too, Kung Foo Fighting). Nobody seems too bothered by the Beatles incorporating Indian musical modes.
As for the matter at hand – pleasant and instantly forgettable; no more and no less. A 4 is about right for me.
“Will You” was a marvellous record I thought.
Toyah seemed to appeal more to the younger brothers, although in retrospect I can tolerate her singles more than I could at the time. “Thunder In The Mountain” is pleasingly overwrought.
There were a lot of great singles appearing at the tail end of the Summer of 81. In fact, the next 9 months or so is my absolute favourite period in pop.
This was also the height of the short-lived Britfunk/new romantic crossover. Funkapolitan, Spandau/Beggar & Co, Blue Rondo A La Turk. Most of it hasn’t aged too well. It’s also slightly odd, looking back, at how much the NME idolised Kid Creole. His coming over to London to produce Funkapolitan’s album gave them instant credibility, apparently.
i had the tape album of the Breaking Glass soundtrack (pretty rub except for the well known stuff already mentioned here) and i LOVED thunder in teh mountains (I was [] close to playing it at at a poptimism). i still have the 4 from toyah ep knocking around somewhere. i think i liked the post-apocalyptic thing she did — nicked off of numan’s album stuff, little did i know at the time. i reckon toyah was rly only popular with a-level art-y gurls though.
“… Machine just got upset” is OK, but the real clunker is the next line, “a problem man had not foreseen as yet”!!
I was surprised when Paul Burnett on Radio 1 played “I Want To Be Free” and then said something like “Good luck, Toyah love, but someone’s got to work in a cosmetics factory for next to nothing so you can look like that. We can’t all be alternative personalities.” Not the usual Paul Burnett style!
Welcome aboard, Johnny at #32.
Re 31: when that vicar doing Around The World In 80 Days got to the one about Buddhism & Taoism etc, he kept describing them as “inscrutable”!
I’m getting a bit obsessive about this now in my disbelief that so little Japanese pop got in the charts.
I’ve also got vague memories of another record from 1989 called ‘I Want to House in Japanese’ by someone called Samarai Sam (!)those were all the words plus a Japanese girl saying “speak” or something. It was obviously a bit of a novelty but you might also hear occasionally (not at peak times)at the (acid) parties/clubs. But the novelty aspect makes me think was it could have been a pop hit too and i could imagine it being made by an Japanese person being ironic.Anyone remember know about this?
Conrad at 42: yes I remember that brief flirtation of New Romanticism with Britfunk quite well as I was a follower of the New Romantic scene myself gradually getting into the soul/jazz-funk scene. I remember that Spandau Ballet/Blue Rondo etc whilst not exactly embraced in the “real” jazz, funk and soul world weren’t exactly disliked possibly because in some members’ cases they actually had gone to the ‘right’ soul clubs before they started hanging out at Blitz etc.
Funkapolitan however never got invited behind the green door – I think they were looked on by the ‘soul-boys’/’jazz-funkateers’ as earnest student-types trying to do some kind of funk-by-numbers because they’d heard it was trendy and failing miserably.
it was weird how there was almost a sixth sense re what was accepted in the soul/funk world as I remember being at a Caister weekender when Matt Bianco did a PA and they went down surprisingly well but it was known that Marc Riley (ex Blue Rondo)their main man had roots in the soul world going back years so that probably helped…
Re 47: You’re right. Hard to believe that the golden age of the Shibuya sound in the mid 90s didn’t quite make it, beyond Pizzicato 5 getting used as background music on the telly.
Sheila B, Japanese girl-pop expert who runs the chachacharming.com site, has been promising a Nippon Girl cd on Ace for years now. There’s some mindblowing stuff, and it’s all impossible to buy online unless you’re fluent in Japanese : ( Even then, sellers are loathe to ship abroad.
Kylie has dressed up similarly to Aneka a few times over the years, for Towa Tei’s ‘GBI’ but more recently the “Naughty Manga Girl” section of her X tour. The only real difference between this and that is that Kylie does it all much better.
I know Spandau had gone to the “right” Soul Boy clubs being good Essex lads and all but I always thought of Blue Rondo as poseur products of the Wag Club/Le Beat Route/St. Martin’s Art College scene much loved by The Face (cf: Sade and Animal Nightlife).
Yes, I did own a pair of pleated Zoot-suit style trousers with a long key chain. Bought them at The Great Gear Market on the King’s Road.