In the late 1970s, while Brian Eno was imagining background melodies for baggage claim on his album Music for Airports, music for inanimate objects was also becoming big business in Japan with Get at the Wave, Takashi Kokubo’s 1987 masterpiece given away with Sanyo air conditioning units, or Yasuaki Shimizu’s selected ambient works for a Seiko watch advert.
Bright, beautiful, unashamedly corporate pieces like these appear on Kankyō Ongaku, a new compilation of Japanese ambient music from 1980 to 1990, when the influence of minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Terry Riley met a golden era for electronics. Kankyō Ongaku (meaning environmental music) melded music and commerce, and turned lounge music into an art form.
Traditional Japanese music has mirrored its surroundings for centuries – the shakuhachi, a seventh-century bamboo flute, was designed to play all 12 tones of the western chromatic scale as a way to give voice to nature’s diversity. So in Japan’s 1980s economic boom, when cities like Tokyo were mutating at warp speed and Roland synthesisers replaced the classical instrument, ambient was reflecting these new, hyper-advanced landscapes. “Technology was going through revolutionary changes, and all types of music were seeking out the synthesiser sound,” says composer Kokubo.
“It was a special time where people interacted, created works together and shared them,” says percussionist Midori Takada, whose debut album Through the Looking Glass is considered a foundation stone of modern minimalism. “I regard sound and physicality as materials, and the expansion of these sensations were based on the development of electronics.”
“When I discovered minimal music I felt I could create my vision – it was totally different to traditional music,” says Mamoru Fujisawa, AKA Joe Hisaishi, considered by some as Japan’s most accomplished composer. He leads orchestras – the active motions keep him fit at 68 – and as Hayao Miyazaki’s go-to composer, Hisaishi scored Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro, Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. With Mkwaju Ensemble he made xylophone-techno club fodder and explored futuristic boogie with his album Curved Music. “I felt confident this music would become the cutting edge in the future,” he says.
Musicians quickly adopted early synthesisers like the Herbie Hancock-favoured Fairlight CMI. “Synthesisers can be programmed with more imagination than a real, ‘human’ performance. It’s a joyful thing,” says Hisaishi, but the electronic instruments synthesisers were an expensive pursuit.
Thankfully, Japanese corporations had more money than they could spend and government initiatives offered tax breaks for creative investment, so these companies pumped money into the arts. Musicians were given free reign. They weren’t governed by corporate buzzwords, nor were they seen as selling out. “It was like a Renaissance style of funding, but instead of the king’s coffers, it’s a lingerie company,” says Kankyō Ongaku compiler Spencer Doran (whose work in electronic duo Visible Cloaks echoes this Japanese ambient music, and who has just collaborated with two composers from the original scene, Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano). The result? Imagine if the wispy John Lewis Christmas covers became adored relics that now trade hands for more than £300 a pop.
Everyone from avant-gardists to chic metropolitan pop stars like Ryuichi Sakamoto were enticed by this liberating and lucrative business model, and Kankyō Ongaku seeped into everyday life. Kokubo wrote emergency alerts for earthquake warning alarms (a piercing “Wee! Wee!” sound is the optimum way to demand attention, apparently). Hiroshi Yoshimura’s 1986 album Soundscape 1: Surround was designed for urbanites touring the model houses of Misawa Homecorp, and Muji snapped up Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono for their store playlist.
Yoshio Ojima made avant-pop on primeval computers with 1983’s Club, finding inspiration in “fashion, advertisements, buildings and everything that was overflowing in Tokyo at the time”. His album Music for Spiral was composed in 1988 for Tokyo’s Spiral building when environmental music was booming. The Spiral was funded by the Wacoal lingerie company, who used the billions they earned selling bras to fund arts programmes and the would-be influential record label Newsic.
Kankyō Ongaku has mutated in the years since. Negicco (The Green Onion Girls) promote a type of onion found around Niigata with sugar rush teen pop. Sticking to the source material, though, is Chihei Hatakeyama, founder of ambient record label White Paddy Mountain. “I do not find inspiration in the city,” says Hatakeyama. “Ambient music is a simple combination of sounds and timbres, and it has an affinity with traditional Japanese gardens or houses, the seasons, isolated places or formerly exiled islands like Hachijō-jima.” Ojima shares this connection with traditional culture, comparing environmental music to ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement): “a flower that blooms at the roadside can be beautiful if arranged by someone with knowledge. This has always been in my mind when making ambient music.”
Most of the original Kankyō Ongaku musicians are now in their 60s but they’re still reaching fresh ears. “Through globalisation the world is unifying, but this music which comes from Japan will not change,” says Takada. Shigeo Sekito’s The Word II was sampled in Chamber of Reflection by Mac DeMarco and How U Feel by Travis Scott and Quavo, bringing Japanese ambient to unwitting teens at festivals. “This music is necessary [now] when you’re living in a hyper-capitalist metropolis,” says Doran on the revival, with Kokubo suggesting that “30 years later, maybe it’s finally being understood.”
But some of the composers are no longer with us. In 2015, Susumu Yokota, ambient mastermind of Acid Mt Fuji and Sakura, died at 54, and in 2003, Yoshimura died from skin cancer. “Had Yoshimura already been in the ambient music canon when he was making records, he’d be as highly regarded as Eno.” says Doran.
One of the earliest flag bearers of what is also called Japanbient was Satoshi Ashikawa, who filled his record store with Stockhausen and broke ground with his environmental music label, Sound Process. But in 1983, aged 30, “the height of his career” according to Doran, he was killed in a car accident. He was in the middle of recording a collaboration with piano experimentalist Satsuki Shibano, who says Ashikawa told her “the world of sound shouldn’t be eroded by humans”. The sound world of the Kankyō Ongaku scene, thankfully, remains as strong as ever.
• Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 is out now on Light in the Attic.
