This paper attempts to trace a connection between a contemporary Japanese rock band called Kishidan and the subculture of Japanese high school rebels called yankii. Kishidan markets itself as an authentic yankii band, claiming to have created a subgenre called yank-rock that plays specifically to the ethos of that subculture. The twist on all this authenticity is the fact that the yankii subculture peaked in popularity during the 1980’s and Kishidan’s fans are not primarily adults with memories of that decade, but high school and college-age members of Japan’s contemporary youth culture who were born too late for the ‘80’s.
So Kishidan’s yank-rock authenticity rests on a nostalgic rehashing of a cultural phenomenon that most of its fans have never participated in. Their access to it is literary: they read it as a text through the experience of movies, books, video games, and popular music. Kishidan’s version of Yankii culture is therefore also literary – a tragic-comic playground in which a working class rebellion against mainstream social norms is turned into a kind of high school photo album in which Japan’s young people can laugh at earlier generations even while recognizing in themselves a set of similar experiences. Kishidan sets itself up as a site of asobi where the toys are the experiences of youth, and of kata – patterns of social behavior which, through repetition, have become literary signifiers themselves. For this reason, Kishidan’s performances and music have a surprising quality. The themes they address in the words and music are important, deep, and involve common experiences that produce powerful emotions, but watching them one is always not quite sure if they are serious. Despite their rebel image, Kishidan fits well with trends common in much of Japan’s contemporary popular music scene. Though they cater to a different fan base, their popularity is similar to that of recent groups such as the Gospellers and Something Else, whose referent is the 1960’s Group Sounds movement, and whose cultural product is a manufactured nostalgia.
Kishidan’s yankii costume play and tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for 1980’s culture looks on the surface to be all image and no substance. In fact they are playing with the past as a literary subject. Kishidan inhabit the myth of the Japanese high school rebels of the 1980’s, as a place from which to critique mainstream Japanese society of the present. Their critique is, as Brian McVeigh has said about their clothing, anti-official, even para-official.[1] Kishidan use their performances to mock mainstream society, adults, youth angst, and even themselves. They encourage laughter of the sort described by Mikhail Bakhtin in his idea of the Carnival – an unrestrained humorous critique that does not desire to overturn society but recognizes the participation of the critics in the mainstream order of contemporary Japanese society.[2] Ultimately the effect of this is to include the public as silent partners in the rebellion of the yankii. Bakhtin wrote of folk discourse at a Carnival as a kind of free-wheeling critique of society that could not exist without the existence of the official discourse as its counterpart. In this same way Kishidan closes the circle between the exclusivity of the yankii gangs and the members of the society who have looked at them, and romanticized their rebellion from outside, helping each to recognize themselves in the others.
Kishidan was formed in 1997, but its cultural reference point is actually the pop music culture of the 1980’s when Japan was at a high point in its international and domestic economic position. This was the period of the economic “bubble,” during which money flowed easily, and employment, income, and consumption were at high levels. For that reason, today in Japan anything that can be attached to the culture of Japanese living at the end of the period of high economic growth in the 1980’s is called “bubbly” in a sort of nostalgic way. During the 1990’s and the early years of the Twenty-first century, the decade of the 1980’s was seen as a point when Japan had reached a position of importance and influence in the world which it had never held before, and a part of that importance was the soft power of cultural exports—particularly anime and manga, but also including music, television dramas, and movies.
It was in this context that Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi, a straight-ahead rocker, performed his song “Japan,” in 1991 to large audiences, asking in English: “Japan, where are you going? Japan, what are you doing?” and proceeded to answer that question with another series of ambivalent statements and answers about Japanese profligacy and place in the world – a kind of search for meaning and authenticity in Japan’s participation in world affairs beyond the fact of production for the world’s consumers, a rich but amoral presence in world politics, and a reputation for technical excellence. Nagabuchi seems to have been looking for authentic engagement in the world. This sense of Japan’s growing importance in the world, and its economic profligacy as a problem, though, seems by the dim light of the lost decade of the 1990’s to be naïve, and can be called “bubbly” and optimistic.
Other bands that were popular in the early 1990’s had less to say about Japan’s relationship with the world, but much to say about the relationships of Japanese selves to tradition, society, lovers, and even consumption. Some were still “bubbly”. Others, like Mister Children, The Gospellers, and Something Else, were trying to move on, combining the Group Sounds Movement of the 1960’s with 1990’s production values and technologies to suggest a retrenchment to simpler, less profligate values. All had fan bases, and the most successful catered to, subcultures whose values were literally worn on their sleeves. The 1991-1994 disco phenomenon, centered around Juliana’s Tokyo and its female regulars, called bodi-con, (for ‘body-conscious’), and recognizable by their tightly fitting little dresses in various colors who danced in cages to a relentless house music beat is one example. But there were others. The 1980’s and early 1990’s was also the heyday of the yankii – the gangs of young toughs in stylized gakuran (high school uniforms) who had a reputation for disrupting class, intimidating teachers, vandalism, drinking heavily in public, and getting into turf wars and petty criminal activities. This youth subculture was romanticized even as it was occurring in manga, television, and popular music. Television talk shows frequently discussed these gangs as the central youth problem at the time, and lamented them as a sign that young people no longer had good values – a common refrain in mainstream news societies about young people’s culture. Kishidan has tapped into this historic cultural phenomenon to claim authenticity as its inheritor.
Kishidan was formed in 1997, signed with EMI Records, Japan in 1998 and sold its first album in 2002 after. With an over-the-top yankii look and a single called One Night Carnival, the promotion video for which made clear their connections to yankii culture, Kishidan was “bubbly”. The band’s six members each have stage names and personas: Ayanokouji “Thelonius” Show (Show), Saotome Hikaru (Hikaru), Saionji Hitomi (Tommy), Hoshi Grandmarnier (Ranma), Shiratori Shouchikubai (Matsu), and Shiratori Yukinojou (Yukki), several of which suggest a kind of excess. “Show,” as Ayanokouji is usually known to his fans, is the leader, MC, and the so-called “dragon voice” for the group. Tommy, the lead guitarist, performs as the insane member of the band – he behaves in a vaudevillian way as a self-destructive, compulsively violent but likeable clown. Hikaru is Show’s backup singer, and dances in front of the band with his oversized pompadour hair and overdone expressions that support Show’s antics. Kishidan’s music is technically solid. Created mostly by Ayanokouji Show, it is a mixture of rock, rockabilly and JPop sounds. Some of the band’s most popular hits have been “crying songs” with a comical twist. Kishidan embrace the yankii influence in their image and music. They call themselves the founders of “yank-rock” and claim a working class steel town heritage, noting that they are from the “crow town” of Kisarazu, Chiba, and that they “rule over the delinquent gangs” there.[3] Kishidan has embraced yankii culture as it wanes, and in turn fans of yankii culture have embraced them – when Nintendo Corporation created a game based on the ubiquitous high school cheering clubs called ouendan (officially sanctioned extracurricular clubs in which members wear yankii style clothing and get rowdy in the stands in support of high school sports teams), Kishidan’s music and look were featured in the game. But Kishidan is a simulacra of the yankii. Their look is over the top – their gakuran are tailored and slick – evoking the yankii look, but not the home-made quality of the yankii reality. Most members of the band wear pompadours that are two to five times larger than the pompadours of groups that influenced the yankii look such as the rock band Yokohama Ginbae or the Yoyogi Park dancers of the 1980’s, whose pompadours were made from their own hair. Kishidan’s music is often sensitive, complex, and full of messages that are seemingly at odds with the bad-boy image of the yankii they are channeling. In short, Kishidan’s yankii image is obviously, and intentionally, cospuray – costume play – and their music is a sophisticated blend of rock stylings designed to appeal to a broad range of fans, not just the dying breed of the yankii.
To understand the music and image of Kishidan, it is important to know who the yankii are. They share a set of ideas, clothing styles, hairstyles, and attitudes the bosozoku motorcycle gangs, and it is possible for a member of one to be a member of the other. These groups are primarily male-oriented, though women join and play a deep role, which includes as much dressing of the part as the men, and support of the men in a hetero-normative set of gender relationships which reify male power and dominance. Still, yankii girls are supposed to be masculine in many of their habits. While they defer to the boys’ authority, among girls their image is that of delinquent toughs in a way equivalent to that of yankii boys, but distinguish themselves from the boys by small feminized gestures that could include display of a cute stuffed animal chained to a belt. Primarily, though, their femininity is performed as dependence on the males, and as objects of possession to be fought over by their fathers and boyfriends. Paradoxically, both yankii boys and girls are also often portrayed in mass media, and by Kishidan, as being attracted to mainstream members of the opposite sex, who are frequently seen as a kind of savior from the delinquent lifestyle the yankii have fallen into. These gender roles suggest that to be a yankii is to exist in a liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, where the problems of growing up, love, sex, responsibility, and identity, are worked out in a state of becoming adult, Japanese, and mainstream. In all cases, members of these gangs leave the gang at points of their lives when transition to adulthood begins – graduation from high school, starting a first job, getting married. In fact, the yankii are seen far less frequently in Japan, and those that do still dress and behave according to the yankii image exist more on the fringe of society in the first decade of the Twenty-first century.
During the 1980’s, though, these yankii were the bad-boys of Japan, romanticized in literature, film, and music. They had their own subculture, and other, popular subcultures were built up for them to inhabit in the minds of those who observed them. Music was always a primary part of the yankii lifestyle, as was clothing style. The most common outfit was the stylized gakuran and seiraa-fuku – the ubiquitous high school uniforms required of most Japanese high school students. in yankii style, these included the standing collared Prussian-military style uniform jacket, usually worn with collar unbuttoned and a tank top undershirt beneath, often lengthened so that the hem of the jacket hung down to the knees or below. Frequently, the second button of the jacket was missing – given to a girlfriend as an unspoken declaration of love. Buttons were often stylized themselves – oversized, shiny and gold. The pants were as stylized as the jacket – made into virtual balloons, some in clear imitation of the billowy pants worn by construction workers.
This fashion found its 1980’s visual showcase in four locations. The first was among the high school cheering clubs (ouendan) who wore stylized uniforms as a rather extreme way to show school spirit, along with extreme hairstyles, including faux punk pink mohawks and exaggerated James Dean-style pompadours. It could also be found in the rockabilly circus that existed along the bridge and walkway to Yoyogi Park, off of Harajuku in Tokyo, where garage bands of all stripes came to play for micro-audiences, and dance clubs who performed to rockabilly music wearing updated 1950’s American nostalgia clothing and James Dean Style hair. Another was the popular 1980’s band Yokohama Ginbae (Yokohama Silver Fly), who also performed in 1950’s American nostalgia clothing – mostly black biker leather and tight jeans, and occasionally the gakuran discussed above, along with pompadours and dark sunglasses. The last and perhaps most widely disseminated source of access for young people to this fashion image was the publication in the 1980’s of the hugely popular manga Bebop High School about the adventures of a group of high school toughs in pompadours and stylized gakuran and the live-action television series that this manga spawned. The television drama theme song was performed by Yokohama Ginbae.
Yankii identity was therefore confirmed by common clothing, commonly accepted music, and group-oriented activities. These gangs self-identified as bad-boys (furyoukai, tsupparikai – the world of delinquents), and acted the part to the hilt. Further, their exposure to mainstream society through interfaces such as popular music, television and manga assured that mainstream society knew about yankii culture. In addition, the yankii subculture of the 1980’s was very much a working-class culture, as can be seen in the modification of gakuran to look like carpenter’s pants, and it attempted to preserve a kind of pure adolescent experience. It was also not revolutionary – it did not seek to overturn the social order, but simply to operate at its fringe, in a kind of liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, where any juvenile delinquency could be attributed to youth, and from which all members were eventually expected to reenter society, get respectable jobs or become respectable housewives, and take on the roles of their working class parents. That is to say – it was an anti-official subculture, but one that was tolerated as an outlet for youthful energy – a chance for young people to get the rebellion out of their systems before growing up.
Part of Kishidan’s appeal to the general public begins right here, at the point of reentry into the mainstream of Japanese society. In the promotion video for their song kekkon toukon koshinkyoku – mabudachi (“Wedding March”), the members of Kishidan perform in a hotel ballroom decked out for a wedding reception, stocked with guests, and complete with newlyweds waiting for speeches and entertainment. From the double back doors comes Kishidan, in tight caricatures of high school uniforms reminiscent of 1980’s yankii teen rebels and the popular comic series Bebop High School. But rather than the tough rock they are known for, they begin to sing a very melodic song that seems reminiscent of 1980’s girl idol groups such as The Candies (and perform a cute dance in unison) that recognizes the transitory nature of the moment, and the misery of the father of the bride, who is shown at home, unable to bring himself to witness his daughter’s wedding. The song laments the end of childhood as marked by three features: the groom’s re-entry into mainstream society as symbolized by his commitment to his bride; the bride’s sacrifice of her own youth and perhaps some happiness on the wedding alter; and the bride’s father’s sense of losing his daughter as he comes to accept her marriage to this man and a life for her that will be as grey, mainstream, and banal as his own. The chief source of hope in the song is the bride’s mother, who seems to understand both the rebelliousness of the bride and her groom, and the sacrifice that they are about to make, and to not be worried about either. It is the mother, and the words of the song, that make it clear that this is not revolutionary. The social context is upheld, despite the rebelliousness and delinquency of the groom and his friends in their youth. In the end, the bride’s father comes to the wedding and dances along with Kishidan and everyone else, and the members of Kishidan promise to carry on their rebelliousness in the name of the groom.[4]
In its attention to re-entry into mainstream society, this song and its promotion video describe the life of members of the furyoukai (the delinquent world) of yankii culture as a liminal experience in which, as Arnold van Gennep has said, entry into the liminal space provides an opportunity for the subject to experiment with identity – to think and be whatever he or she wants to be – and to reenter the world a changed person. But reentry does require reacceptance of the social norms which don’t apply in the liminal space, and the bride and groom are described in the words to the song, and in the images in the video, as two formerly liminal individuals who now must conform to their new mainstream role as adults in Japanese society.
But there is more here than just the liminal. The element of surprise in the cuteness of the song, the musical cross-dressing in the song itself, which is not Kishidan’s usual fare, and the reference to the 1980’s in choosing a song style in the mode of The Candies all combine to include a humorous element. This re-entry is not just a serious and somber business, and it allows for jokes at the expense of the mainstream – the official culture. This fits well with Bakhtin’s idea of the Carnival, and of the laughing folk as a social force. Bakhtin’s Carnival is a place where social commentary can exist, and even the most serious things be satirized, but out of which comes no revolution or attempt to overturn social order. The comical nature of the song and of the setting within the promotion video is a kind of self-directed laughter that still succeeds in being subversive. Brian McVeigh has also suggested in his analysis of the uses, and mis-uses, of uniforms in Japanese society that the stylization of the gakuran is subversive without being revolutionary – the appropriation of the high school uniform, and its subversion through modification into a grotesque of itself is an act of both criticism of the system represented by the uniform, and acceptance of membership within that system as the basis for criticism. This, what McVeigh calls anti-official action, complains about the cultural context, but seeks to take part in, and even to benefit from that culture.[5] By critiquing Japanese mainstream culture in this way – poking fun at both the subject of the criticism and the point of view from which it comes, Kishidan has made it clear that they are not really yankii, even while overtly claiming that they are. They are taking a position, claiming authenticity, as yankii in order to speak to mainstream society about the values of the yankii, romanticized and nostalgized as a part of the common Japanese past.
Kishidan’s debut single was another matter. In many ways, One Night Carnival was a Bakhtinian Carnival – all the grotesquerie, all the social critique, all the anti-official laughter, but none of the re-entry of the song described above. Still, it is not revolutionary in the sense that the anti-culture of the yankii that Kishidan claims to inhabit would clearly lose its meaning if the mainstream culture it comments upon were to disappear. Yankii culture here is not an alternative cultural model, but a liminal place in which commentary on the mainstream can safely take place. Every scene in this promotion video evokes 1980’s working class Japan from the point of the yankii rebel. It opens with a white-clad biker riding through a tunnel to a solid four-beat bass rhythm and pulsing guitar riff. As the scene shifts to a bridge over Tokyo bay, the same rider, Kishidan leader Ayanokouji Show, this time wearing a billowy blue caricature of a high school uniform leans over to a similarly over-the-top yankii girl in stylized uniform and says, “wanna come to my place?” The rest of the video is repeated images of the six-member band Kishidan walking through graffiti-ridden parks, standing around under freeway overpasses, and playing music in a dirty abandoned parking lot, all in billowing retro-yankii high school uniforms with kung fu slippers and over-the-top James Dean hair, dancing in unison in the style of high school cheering clubs with the Kimitsu works of Nippon Steel Corporation glittering in the background, singing about teen love and angst.[6]
One Night Carnival is very demonstrative of the working class culture that Kishidan claims as its own, with scenes from neighborhood parks marked with graffiti, hangouts under freeway overpasses, and dirty parking lots, bridges, and steel factories forming the majority of the backdrops. The critique of society comes from that perspective, too. Teens with little hope, but lots of hormones trying to decide what is right, and find ways to vent their energy and frustrations, and to demonstrate emotions they are not yet used to. The music has elements of rockabilly and hard rock, and the lyrics give vent to a kind of street ethic that is similar in some ways to the populist music of Bruce Springsteen in the United States. The band seems to want to present its music as an authentic comment on social problems for working class teenagers in its own time, and it does so by digging up the past – referencing the 1980’s and presenting Japanese teens in working class neighborhoods, or in gangs, as the underside of successful Japan. They are using nostalgia in their images and songs to dredge up a historical past that they can then use as a source for community and a base for social commentary.[7]
This strategy does seem to be working with Kishidan’s audience. In video recordings of Kishidan concerts, many fans can be seen dressed in yankii style. On Internet fan sites, the nostalgia for the 1980’s is frequently a topic of conversation[8]. On music blogs and their official website, Kishidan claim to be part of the “culture of delinquent gangs in the crow town of Kisarazu, Chiba.”[9] Fans buy into Kishidan’s representations of Yankii culture. On one internet fan site a fan worried after having bought a Kishidan CD, whether his humanity would suffer from the band’s influence. The band’s official website claims that “yank-rock” takes as its themes the yankii subculture of the 1980’s. One of the nicknames the band has given itself is Tanabata-yarou no A-chiimu (The A-Team of Tanabata-guys) – a moniker that refers both to a slang term coined in the 1980’s Japanese TV drama Bebop High School, in which tanabata-yarou referred to a boy willing to let down his friends just to chase girls. The A-Team part of the title is a nod to the 1980’s U.S. television series “The A-Team” starring Mr. T. Here we have inter-textuality between cultures and times, as well as a sort of picking and choosing from the past in order to support subversive messages of the present – both television dramas were popular among young people, both were mildly subversive in content, and both refer to a past with which the members of Kishidan and their audience have probably only had minimal experience. Their contact with the source material of the 1980’s, whether it be Yokohama Ginbae, or the A-Team, is primarily literary in nature – they can access it through archived sources such as videotape, books, and compact discs, but have no direct experience with the context of events that created those cultural artifacts. Evidence of the literary, inter-textual nature of Kishidan’s music and its fans, can also be found in fan commentary online: one fan has said that “there are many quotes from ‘80’s subculture. If you don’t know 80’s subculture you can’t enjoy these parts [of Kishidan’s performance].” Another fan notes that “they cut up ‘80’s JPop and mix it up!”[10] Fans do notice and participate in the parsing of 1980’s subcultures, and dress the part when they attend concerts. Kishidan is establishing a nostalgic space among post-1980’s Japanese youth within which they can place their own readings of Japan, class, and youth culture as commentaries upon social problems in the post-bubble era. To be “bubbly” is to be ironic, in a Bakhtinian sense, to laugh at official culture even while expecting to participate in that same mainstream culture as adults. Kishidan is “bubbly” in its tongue-in cheek references to 1980’s culture, and, as we have seen with the reference to The A-Team above, they allude to foreign cultural products as well. On Oops.net, fans have commented on the ubiquitous male dancers at Kishidan concerts, who wear cut-off jeans and American-flag patterned tank tops and do what looks like calisthenics on stage behind the band: “I really liked the Americaman dancers in the back!”[11] As with the references to Japanese culture of the 1980’s, it appears that specific meaning does not have to attach to these dancers – their suggestion of United States culture is enough – the inter-textual play of images both domestic and foreign, contemporary and historical, provides the liminal space in which the Carnival can take place – a palimpsest of costume play and commentary on the present through asobi – play with images and symbols from the past, and present, the local and the foreign.
Kishidan performs a version of rock music whose images at first seem disconnected from any reality, Japanese, or foreign, but taking the time to read them yields rich results. Kishidan gives Japanese fans one of the greatest shows on earth: the band provides a Carnival within the liminal space carved out of the ideological and cultural trace of the recent past and the present. With adept use of symbolism, and a large dose of asobi, Kishidan plays with images of gangs, bad-boys and bad girls. In a literary sense they stand at the underbelly of technological, economic powerhouse Japan, and belt out a critique of the mainstream political and cultural reality in which they and their fans live by telling love stories interspersed with sophisticated inter-textual jokes. By taking the rebelliousness and intimidation out of the yankii, they have made him a source of nostalgia and a critical figure whose consciousness can be inhabited by any Japanese.
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Kishidan. “The Aishiteru (the アイシテル).” 2006.
—. “Kekkon Toukon Koshinkyoku – “Mabudachi” （結婚闘魂行進曲「マブダチ」).” Trans. Kishidan. Tokyo, 2004.
—. “Koibito/Love Ballad Ha Utaenae (恋人／Love Balladは歌えない).” 2002.
—. “One Night Carnival (Pv).” Trans. Kishidan. Tokyo, 2002.
—. “One Night Carnival Live.” 2007.
—. “Secret Love Story.” Kishidan Promotion Video. 2003. Vol. 2009.
—. “Swingin’ Nippon (スウィンギン・ニッポン).” 2003.
—. “Zoku (族).” 2004.
Lachmann, Renate, Raoul Eshelman, Marc Davis. “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture.” Cultural Critique 1.11 (1988-1989): 115-52.
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Moore, Allan. “What Should a History of Popular Music Tell?” Popular Music History 1.3 (2006): 329-38.
“Oops! Music Community: What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”. 1999. Blog. (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.
van Elteren, Mel. “Populist Rock in Postmodern Society: John Cougar Mellencamp N Perspective.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.3 (1994): 95-124.
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[1] McVeigh, Brian J. Wearing Ideology : State, Schooling and Self-Presentation in Japan. Dress, Body, Culture. Oxford ; New York, NY: Berg, 2000, 160.
[2] Lachmann, Renate, Raoul Eshelman, Marc Davis. “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture.” Cultural Critique 1.11 (1988-1989): 121-23.
[3] “Oops! Music Community: What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”. 2009. Blog. (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.
[4] Kishidan. “Kekkon Toukon Koshinkyoku – “Mabudachi” （結婚闘魂行進曲「マブダチ」).” Trans. Kishidan. Tokyo, 2004.
[5] Lachmann, Renate, Raoul Eshelman, Marc Davis. “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture.” Cultural Critique 1.11 (1988-1989): 115-52.
[6] Kishidan. One Night Carnival (Pv). Tokyo, 1998.
[7] van Elteren, Mel. “Populist Rock in Postmodern Society: John Cougar Mellencamp N Perspective.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.3 (1994): 100-102.
[8] “Oops! Music Community: What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”. 1999. Blog. (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.
[9] Ibid. “Oops! Music Community: What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”. 1999. Blog. (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.
[10] Ibid. “Oops! Music Community: What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”. 1999. Blog. (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.
[11] “Oops! Music Community: What Is Kishidan? (Kishidan to Ha?)”. 1999. Blog. (May 10, 2009): A brief description of the band in blog form with fan posting. Spoo! Inc. May 10 2009.