If the process of leaving Nagoya for Hamamatsu felt like my journey entering its epilogue, during my transit across Shizuoka Prefecture I started to feel in earnest as if I was returning to Tokyo.
The thundering Route 1 Tokaido highway dominates the route, made more significant to me by my constant need to avoid it. Navigating with Google Maps was never an ideal method of getting around because of the way it didn’t really recognise bicycles as a mode of transport distinct from either pedestrians or cars. Tell it you’re a pedestrian it it might send you up a staircase or down a bumpy gravel footpath; tell it you’re a car and it’ll send you on a toll road or highway where non-motorised vehicles are forbidden. The safest way was to tell it you’re a pedestrian but be aware of your surroundings and make adjustments to your route as necessary. In Shizuoka, however, that started to fall apart as its pedestrian navigation began increasingly directing me onto the impassable Tokaido, eventually forcing me to switch off navigation and guess as the the suitability of each road.
In practice, this didn’t make much difference to my route, but it started to feeldifferent very quickly. It was a form of unmooring, of wriggling free of my strings and using the map as a guide for exploration rather than a set of rails shunting me along to my next destination.
Hills and mountains stood between me and Shizuoka, offering me only three obvious routes through: Route 1 to the north, Route 150 through a long series of sub-mountain tunnels, and a winding coastal road near the town of Yaizu. Opting for the latter, I struggled up a sharp cliffside incline beneath the Hotel Ambia Shofukaku, only to find the road closed. Letting out a scream of frustration followed by a good few minutes of incoherent profanity that echoed around the cliffs, I retreated north to figure out a legitimate route along the impassable Route 1. It turned out that there was a sparsely signposted but more or less usable cycle path through the hills that saw me through to the small coastal plains where Shizuoka nestled, and it was here, amid gathering rainclouds, that I took a break for a few days in a run-down hotel with creaking wi-fi and two hundred pages of my book Quit Your Band! to edit.
Shizuoka itself is a decent sized city, with a slightly older, more cracked and faded, rusty sort of atmosphere than its slightly larger neighbour Hamamatsu. It’s home to a similar number of venues though, and in Cornershop Records has an indie record store with its own distinct character. Opened in the late ‘90s, there’s something of that decade about its atmosphere, and the owner clearly has an affection for the Shibuya-kei music that defined Japan’s alternative music culture at that time. The name of the shop was apparently given by Tomoyuki Tanaka of legendary Shibuya-kei act Fantastic Plastic Machine, but it also shares the name with a British indie band, formed out of London’s Indian immigrant community, who eclectically combined musical and cultural references from the indie rock and dance music that filled the cultural air of ‘90s Britain with elements of Indian music from their own families’ backgrounds.
This eclectic approach to bringing together disparate musical elements was mirrored to a large extent in Shibuya-kei’s crate-digging musical ethos, but the layer of cultural identity that informed the specific sort of fusion Cornershop made feels like something different. As members of a cultural minority with recent immigrant roots, Cornershop’s music feels partly about reconciling two separate cultural identities, both of which they were in some way dislocated from, and forming that into something that expressed something about themselves.
However, music itself is a culture of sorts. Shibuya-kei may have been manufactured to a degree by the staff at HMV in Shibuya, but there are enough interconnections between the artists connected to it that there is a recognisable creative community with some shared aesthetic leanings. How might people like Kahimi Karie, Hiromix, Tomoyuki Tanaka and others have felt at that time? Did they just see themselves as creative people pursuing their own unique vision, or did the community of people around them mean something on a different level from their creative endeavours? I’ve talked before on this blog about music as a source of belonging independent of geography or family, and going through the edits to Quit Your Band! in Shizuoka had really driven home to me the extent to which my own activity was about using music to define a space for myself in a world where the physical place I had grown up was feeling increasingly remote. Fragments of news from the UK as the 2016 EU referendum drew closer was revealing a frightening and alienating world, fuelled by fear and hatred of immigrants. Britain was already a country that had closed its doors to me when it introduced its freelancer-unfriendly financial restrictions on citizens with foreign spouses, and just a couple of months later its new prime minister Theresa May would announce that culturally unmoored people like me were “citizens of nowhere”. The way the country seemed to be doubling down on geography as the sole definer of belonging flow directly in the face of the direction my own confused grasping for answers was taking me.
Cornershop Records, meanwhile, was littered with the cultural detritus of my childhood in the UK, with a bizarre number of the inexplicably fashionable-in-Japan Fred the Flour Grader dolls. Here in Japan, shorn of his context as mascot of the Homepride food producer, he seemed to scream at me the fragility of cultural signifiers as a tether to a place. Shibuya-kei fetishised the roots that musical elements represented, even as it divorced them from those roots and reconfigured them into a new, albeit transient, culture. In the same way, Fred the Flour Grader had shed many of his cultural associations, his essence being boiled down by the manner of his Japanese consumption into an all-encompassing symbol of Englishness that has been divorced from whatver it was that tied him to England. Like me, he was a person between places.
In a way, Shizuoka is a classic example of a place between places. While Hamamatsu is loosely within Nagoya’s orbit, Shizuoka City sits alone on a small plain surrounded by hills and mountains to the north and west, and Suruga Bay to the south and east, just outside the cultural gravity wells of both Nagoya and Tokyo.
My evening meander through the rain-soaked Wednesday night in Shizuoka’s entertainment district took me to a couple of the city’s live venues, both of which were occupying their off-nights in different ways. The larger of the places I visited was Freaky Show, which was open as a regular bar on this particular night. The young guy tending the bar also did some of the booking for the venue and we had an enthusiastic conversation about music where we both heroically failed to meet each other with any shared frame of reference. I asked him if he knew Shizuoka Prefecture resident and avant-garde musical legend Koichi Makigami of experimental jazz/prog/new wave band Hikashu, and he gushed about visual-kei bands from Yokohama.
I upped and moved along eventually, dropping by the nearby grimy basement venue Sougen. Sougen’s website and the sign outside claimed it was open as a bar, but upon entering, I found a young-looking indie rock band practicing. I stood and watched them for a few minutes and they continued playing, pretending not to see the enormous foreigner looming over half the room until an increasingly awkward stand-off was in full swing. The band cracked first and they took a break, a couple of them coming over to ask what I was doing. One of the band seemed to work at Sougen and since no one ever came in to drink on off-nights, he was using it as a rehearsal space. I remarked on one of the posters on the wall featuring my friends’ band Folk Enough from Fukuoka and they blinked at me blankly. Then I explained more about my trip and they started to get quite excited, producing a CD-R from one of their bags and gifting it to me. I immediately and stupidly lost it, and along with it all information about the band and who they were. My mind was also lost between places, it seemed.
Of course, there’s more to Shizuoka than a couple of live bars, both very different but both attractive in their particular ways. A bar called Asahi no Ataru Ie (“House of the Rising Sun”) puts on a lot of intimate acoustic shows and occasional oddball weirdness. I had seen noise act Niwa in Hamamatsu, and the general Shizuoka region is also home to football-loving dance music trackmaker Master Master. Meanwhile one of the most active and energetic Shizuoka bands was garage-punk The Wemmer.
During my stay on Shizuoka, however, it was difficult to keep my mind on the trip. Lurking somewhere behind the hills and above the clouds was Mount Fuji, guarding the gateway to the place I lived but didn’t quite feel I had the right to call home. It was only once I left Shizuoka City for a brief stopover in Numazu that I got my first glimpse of the grand old lady herself though, first in a brief, pale silhouette through the haze and then emerging taller and clearer around a rocky headland.
She came to dominate my vision for the next two days though, looming over the route to Numazu, then as I clambered over her undulating skirts towards Gotemba. Hokusai famously created “a hundred views of Mount Fuji”, and he could have made a hundred more. Fuji is the frame, the anchor that holds a thousand views together. When I talk about a sense of place and belonging, I instinctively lean away from assigning too much significance to geographical location – you aren’t defined by the dirt you were born on! – but the grand old lady insists on herself; you cannot exist in her shadow without feeling her presence constantly in every contour of the landscape and every step you take as you go about your life.
But while she is a powerful argument for the importance of physical place in defining our existence, she is no nationalist. Fuji is reduced by those who try to make her a symbol when the full weight of her physical presence is so insistent, and she makes that weight felt on natives and immigrants alike – anyone who steps into her shadow is immediately and unquestionably her subject.
Finally, she vanishes in a sudden deep descent into a wooded valley and it is like losing the sky. I keep glancing behind me, straining for one final glimpse of her snow-streaked crown, but she is gone for now, to return only in months to come, in those familiar distant, stolen glimpses through the metal and glass towers of Tokyo.
I hurtle down the valley, into the awaiting roar of Route 246, alive with the rumble of trucks carrying their cargo to and from the heart of Tokyo. There’s a tradition of road songs in America, from Route 66 to Highway 61 to Thunder Road, where the street or the highway is a symbol of the nation: of freedom, of its legends, of its decay, of the state of the American Dream. English songs like Penny Lane, Dead End Street, the Stanhope Road of Pulp’s Babiesoften treat a road not as a route from one place to another but as more of a fixed spot: a location around which life unfolds as the song’s narrator peels back the layers to reveal the secret heart of this little corner of society. Kraftwerk turned the sleek, modernist efficiency of the Autobahn into a futuristic vision of German post-war rebirth and a European future.
Route 246 doesn’t perhaps have the romance or expansive vision represented by some of these iconic Western roads, but it occupies its own little place in the rock consciousness of Tokyoites. Beginning in the seedy party centre of Tokyo around Roppongi and running through the somewhat more fashionable Shibuya and Sangenjaya areas, it’s one of the main routes out of the city and towards the beaches of Kanagawa, as well as a notorious truckers’ route afflicted by frequent traffic jams. What Route 246 represents to many in Tokyo is an ambivalent feeling of temporary escape from the stress of working life, together with a resigned recognition that the journey itself is probably going to be a tedious, unpleasant experience that barely if at all justifies the opportunity to get away. It is the escape route and the cage that keeps you trapped inside. The song Route 246 by Japanese-British-American supergroup NiNa describes this situation directly. Pop sinder and borderline idol Kyoko Fukada, in her own Route 246, written by Yasuharu Konishi of Shibuya-kei pioneers Pizzicato 5, takes a slightly less direct approach, focusing more on the route it takes her through the city of Tokyo itself, but I feel a similar ambivalence is at work in the background of the song.
Route 246 as it winds through the mounain pass between Fuji and Kanagawa Prefecture is all roaring, rumbling trucks on a road only just wide enough to accommodate them, and very much not ideal for a cyclist on an overladen bicycle, trapped between the screaming flow of elephantine traffic on one side and a hundred metre plummet into a ravine on the other. It was perhaps the section of this journey most intensely shot through with pure terror, so when I emerged into the peaceful streets of rural Kanagawa and began my gentle cruise down to the coastal town of Odawara, the relief was absolute.
As one of the terminal stations of the Odakyu Line railway, as well as a stop on the Japan Railways Tokaido Line, Odawara also found me once more being pricked by the remote tendrils of Tokyo. I could hop on a train and in less than one and a half hours be in Shinjuku. Whether Tokyo was home or not, I would soon be back there, for better or worse.
Burn Your Hometown 