The Spooky Girl from Yokohama
Hako Yamasaki's Tobimasu
Hako Yamasaki's music is sitting in a ramshackle, intimate back alley bar with a low ceiling, smoking and staring intently at this mysterious young woman who conjures up a depth of melancholy and heartache that is as entrancing as it is heartbreaking. After the set ends and you finish your last scotch, you walk into the night without a destination, lost in the reverie of your reaction to her music. You may need to head to the waterfront to stare at the ocean while you contemplate loss and the innate purposeless of existence, but if you do that, you are going to have to share space with the people doing the same thing but thinking about "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins. My point is that, at 18 years old, Hako Yamasaki recorded an album—her first—that delivers an overwhelming emotional experience that will haunt the listener long after the final wistful note has drifted off into the late-night air.
In the late 1960s, Japan was rocked by social and political unrest, as was much of the world. Amid the upheaval, a creative new arts scene was forged. For years, Japanese musicians had been synthesizing American rock and jazz with sounds influenced by the long history of Japanese music—though it wasn't until 1970 that a Japanese rock band, Happy End, asserted by way of their music that rock could be performed in the Japanese language; before then, even bands writing original material performed it in English). This was a fairly controversial deal for a little while, but Happy End and singing rock in Japanese won out. In 1969, ELEC Records, one of Japan's first independent labels, was formed. In 1975, the label released Hako Yamasaki's debut album, Tobimasu ((飛・び・ま・す), a dreamy blend of folk rock, traditional Japanese balladry, blues, and psychedelia.
Yamasaki was born in Hita and, as a teenager, moved to Yokohama. Her brother, a part-time construction worker and music fan, got her into playing the guitar and singing. Yokohama had a vibrant local music scene, and Yamasaki would soon find her place among its top artists. In 1974, while a sophomore in high school, she entered and won a folk music competition. This brought her to the attention of local music producer Higashio Hoshino. Under Hoshino's wing, the teenager with the voice to reduce the saltiest old farmer men to tears began to meet other professional and aspiring musicians. In 1975, ELEC signed her to record her first album, Tobimasu. By that time, the 18-year-old had written dozens of original songs.
Tobimasu opens with "Bōkyō," a mournful folk ballad that sets the mood for the rest of the album (well, most of it) and would have been perfect accompaniment for a contemplative walking scene in a Meiko Kaji film (except that Meiko Kaji herself usually recorded such ballads for her movies). Influenced by the growing feminist movement, Yamasaki wrote and sang from the viewpoint of what she was: a young woman. She performs with a heartwrenching teenage earnestness combined with the world-weary melancholy of someone far more advanced in years. However, as is often the case with sad songs, Yamasaki wrote from a place of love and loss to inspire strength and resilience. You're going to make it through this. Although stylistically there's little similarity between them, the power of her voice and the sense of absolute soul-baring honesty reminds me of Mary Weiss, lead singer of the 1960s girl group the Shanrgi-Las, who could turn a simple song about teenage love into a gut-wrenching tragedy that puts Shakespeare and opera to shame.
The second song, "Sasurai," is a bluesy torch song that would have been a hit in any late-night jazz club. There's an Angelo Badalamenti vibe to parts of it. On "Sayonara no kane" the electric guitar takes more of the spotlight than it's had in the previous songs, and Jun Sato contributes some keyboards. The results have a countrypolitan feel, conjuring images of Tanya Tucker or, to keep it on the folksier end of American country music, Emmylou Harris (now I really want a duet featuring Hako Yamasaki and Emmylou Harris).
It was the song "Kage ga Mienai" (which has a particularly great electric guitar solo) where exactly what had been haunting the back of my skull about Hako Yamasaki finally cleared from a dreamy haze. One of my favorite bands is Angel'in Heavy Syrup, a Japanese neo-psychedelic band from the 1990s. Although they're considerably louder (they did emerge from the insane Japanese noise scene, after all), there is definite Hako Yamasaki DNA in what they do. And to reverse time that, I hear a lot of Angel'in Heavy Syrup in Hako Yamasaki, particularly in "Kage ga Mienai."
The track is followed by "Kibun o Kaete," the song on the album that exists closest to the rock end of the folk rock spectrum. It's got the fastest beat and the most complex production behind it, although if you've taken the journey from the first track to this one, the procession makes perfect sense. It even hints at the slick city pop sound that was just beginning to emerge in the 1970s and which would dominate Japanese music in the 1980s—and, somewhat ironically, end Hako Yamasaki's career.
The album's title track, "Tobimasu," returns the listener to pastoral balladry, though it retains a bit of the previous two track's more electric sound. "Komori uta," the final song on the original version of Tobimasu, brings us full circle, with the flute and acoustic guitars reasserting themselves and Yamasaki's deep, woeful vocals sending you back into the pits of lonely despair so that they can then lift you back out. Speaking of descending into and then emerging from the pits of despair...
Hako Yamasaki enjoyed success with Tobimasu and a few subsequent albums, but her health kept her somewhat enigmatic. She suffered from chronic pancreatitis, and to their credit, the people around her did not want to risk her health (or life) by pushing her to match the recording pace that many other Japanese musicians struggled to maintain. Still, she made radio appearances, played concerts, and developed quite a decent following for a few years.
Unfortunately, folk rock and psychedelia didn't survive the 1970s. In the back half of the decade, folk rock and psych fell out of fashion. ELEC Records went bankrupt in 1976. The more polished, upbeat sound of city pop characterized an ascendant Japan and an embrace of glossy futuristic urbanism. Folk rock was considered corny, and Hako Yamasaki in particular was singled out as being too dark for this shiny new Japan. Her songs were used by the wildly popular television comedian Tamori whenever he wanted to signal that something spooky was about to happen. No one wanted to hear creepy, depressing songs from this weird Yokohama girl when you could turn up the hot guitar licks and synthesizers as you tore through Tokyo in a Porsche.
Yamasaki continued to release albums, however, although not to the popularity or acclaim of her early career. She began writing music for films, beginning with Tatsumi Kumashiro's 1979 horror film Hell (in which Yamasaki also appears) and including Kinji Fukasaku and Hiroyuki Goki's 1981 drama The Gate of Youth. There were dodgy attempts to city pop her up, but it never really stuck even though some of the songs are quite good. Even her breeziest work from the 1980s and '90s is still infused with glorious, poetic Hako Yamasaki spookiness. She was City Pop's "In the Air Tonight." No amount of urban sheen could brighten the darkness at the center of her artistic genius. Then, around 1996, she more or less disappeared entirely from the music scene and entered a run of bad times and hard luck.
That's the descent. But then she reemerged. Apparently after hearing one of her own songs while working a part-time restaurant job in the early 2000s, the spark to create again was reignited. By then, the city pop era's disdain for her spooky folk music had subsided, as had the carefree good times Japan thought/hoped would never end. The country had developed one of the strongest, strangest punk, underground, and indie music scenes in the world. Things like the ghostly ballads and folk rock of Tobimasu had been embraced by new generations of music fans, DJs, and record collectors, not to mention musicians. Classic folk and psychedelia were being rediscovered and reimagined by a whole host of new bands.
Hako Yamasaki was able to get her foot back in the door. She released a previously unheard Tobimasu demo tape, and new songs started to emerge. She married guitarist Hiromi Yasuda, a member of the folk rock band Rokumonsen in the early 1970s and later Flying Kitty Band. She appeared as (well, voiced) herself in an episode of the long-running anime series Chibi Maruko-chan. She started touring again, made TV appearances, and did a series celebrating the 30th anniversary of Tobimasu. Retrospective compilations were released, and suddenly no streaming playlist of cool Japanese music was complete without at least one Hako Yamasaki track, be it from her dark and brooding folk days or her...well, only slightly less dark and brooding pop era.
There is a lot of gold in Hako Yamasaki's music catalog, but Tobimasu remains something apart and above. That an 18-year-old kid made an album this rich in mood and this deep in shadows is only surprising if you ignore how talented some teenagers are. While the album wanders dreamily from pure folk to folk rock, not a song seems out of place, and there are no weak tracks. In 2023, Tobimasu was reissued by Swiss label WRWTFWW Records, which has several amazing Japanese reissues in its catalog. Their version contains a bonus track, "Otoko To Onna No Heya," which, like all of the songs, is achingly beautiful. Her reemergence and the subsequent release of new material and reissue of her classic early albums have been fantastic, shining light on an amazing artist. So dim the lights, pour yourself that scotch, and prepare to stare out of rainy window while Hako Yakasami sings to you of love and loss and resilience.
Sources
Hako Yamasaki website
"The Blue Ballads Of Hako Yamasaki," Sabukaru Online