About

Happy End first formed in Tokyo in late 1969. In Japan, pop music transformed more slowly, to some degree because it was constantly being measured against the West.

Happy End only existed for three years, but the band’s enduring legacy is creating dynamic rock music that was essentially Japanese, exemplified by their 1971 masterpiece, Kazemachi Roman. Sung entirely in Japanese, the songs don’t initially sound innovative—it’s crisp, melodic, and swaggering folk-rock that recalls the Band, Little Feat, or the Kinks in the late-1960s. But Happy End refashioned early 1970s folk-rock into their own style marked by conceptual, compositional, and emotional depth. The album signaled to Japanese artists and audiences that you could make pop music influenced by the West while maintaining a distinctly Japanese identity, a breakthrough that permanently altered the trajectory of Japanese pop.

Happy End was far from a commercial hit, but it had a huge impact in the Japanese music press. The Japanese New Music Magazine anointed it the best album of 1970. Naturally, with anything that receives overwhelming acclaim, there’s an inevitable backlash. In this case, it even had a name, the infamous “Japanese-language Rock Controversy” (“Nihongo Rokku Ronsō”). Most notoriously, Yuya Uchida, who produced and managed the Flower Travellin’ Band, believed Happy End’s approach posed two problems: By singing in Japanese, they were alienating global audiences, and because of the unusual style of their singing, the words were too difficult to understand. Happy End couldn’t relate to Uchida because they didn’t share his objectives. “He was thinking about business,” Hosono says in the documentary. “We were just experimenting, without thinking about how it would appeal to the rest of the world.”

For Happy End’s follow-up, the band wanted to refine its sound and deepen its fundamental Japaneseness. Matsumoto devised a concept album that would revolve around a changing Tokyo. In the West, the city seems impossible, vast, intricate—a puzzle box of nesting dolls of rooms within rooms within tunnels within buildings within buildings, surrounded by mountains in one direction, water in another, and imperceptible horizons everywhere else. But as Italo Calvino writes in the 1973 postmodern novel Invisible Cities, “the sum of all wonders is an endless, formless ruin.” Had that sentence existed at the time, it’s one Matsumoto might have used to describe what he dreaded about Tokyo’s future. To him, the real wonder occurred in the Tokyo that existed before the Olympics, the quainter Tokyo of his boyhood.

Kazemachi Roman is widely considered to be a paean to Tokyo prior to the 1964 Summer Olympics—a drawing of the Tokyo streetcars features prominently in the gatefold of the record cover—yet as Moritz Sommet argues in his essay, “Framing the Tokyo Cityscape,” the concept is far more layered. Matsumoto wrote in 1985, “I made it an indicator of this act to project my personal panorama of the city in my memory, which I called Wind City, and which had been erased by that other city.” Wind City was his memory of a triangle connecting the Aoyama, Azabu, and Shibuya neighborhoods. The title of Kazemachi Roman literally means “Wind City Romance.”

In hindsight, Kazemachi Roman’s canonical stature can be traced to its connection to city pop. For most people, “nostalgia” conjures the cheap sentiment of half-baked kitsch, when the word is actually a Greek compound of “homecoming” and “pain.” Just as city pop embraced American style as an underhanded way of calling attention to its artificiality, Kazemachi Roman pioneered a new Japanese rock through the true definition of nostalgia, pining for the Tokyo that existed before it became beholden to commerce, preserved in a sepia-toned portrait of four prodigal musicians fortuitously united and seizing the moment. — (via Pitchfork)

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RSD limited edition reissue, 180g black vinyl

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Label: URC
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Reissue, Stereo, 180g
Reissued: 2024 / Originally Released: 1971
Genre: Rock, Funk / Soul, Folk
Style: Folk Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Soft Rock, Japanese

File under: Japanese Folk/Rock
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