The Fueiho law brought me to Japan for the second time. It is a regulation that was introduced in 1948 to outlaw nightlife ‘immorality’, banning dancing under certain conditions and hours. Thanks to the Let’s Dance activist movement, Western media have been reporting on its abolition since 2015. But this is not true: the law is still in force and affects mostly small venues in a society made of little places. At the same time, it feeds an underground spirit and secret locations to go. It would be the larger, more commercial dance floors getting free from Fueiho surveillance. This half-hearted success does not question the law but seems to confirm it even unwittingly. Specially when clubs claim to be moral, not breaking the Fueiho principles. Before coming here, I assumed that Fueiho would be a direction to follow. Shortly after arriving, I realised that it was more of a roundabout leading to many other places. Thanks to a certain necessary degree of disorientation and many chance encounters, Fueiho easily disappears from my head. The enveloping quality of music in Tokyo’s dance floors fills my curiosity and my attention. A nerd spirit joins what a friend called sound jewellery in a scene built from different rhythms. In an unexpected turn towards hip hop there is Egaitsu Hiroshi. He is a DJ, writer and lecturer who prefers to live in Yokohama than in his native Tokyo. For those who have not grown up in either city, the differences are not great at first glance. But all it takes is a careful stroll to realise that bodies do not behave in the same way. While retaining the uneven rhythms of straight lines in Tokyo, the streets of Yokohama are a different remix of bygone futures. People also move around in a more erratic and relaxed way. They even sit down to read the newspaper with a coffee in the convenience store.
Egaitsu and I met thanks to a common friend who put us in touch. These were my first days in Tokyo and I was adapting to things that would later become part of my anticipated nostalgia because going back to Berlin and to a proudly Zionist Germany. When I mentioned Fueiho in my first email, Egaitsu playfully replied that he had first-hand experiences with this law in his early years as a hip hop DJ. Falling into the cliché, I immediately mentioned Dj Krush, with whom Ega often played. Long before deep techno in my body’s rhythms, Japan meant abstract hip hop for me. It would have a big influence, not only here, but in Barcelona too. Whenever DJ Krush played there, I went to see him. Often, followed by Dj Shadow. A few days after arriving, they both played in Tokyo. With regrets later, I didn’t go. Dj Krush was important to me in Barcelona for reasons of vague belonging as well. He was that kind of musician helping me identify the disperse group I was part of: people moving through many scenes without belonging exclusively to any of them. But it would be more than twenty years before I could spoke to anyone about why hip-hop became abstract in Japan. And it would be now, with Egaitsu Hiroshi. Abstraction and hip-hop are almost polar opposites, as he says. While the first one obscures contents, the second one is all about speaking straight, loud and with rapping lines. That is why one of my reversing questions for Ega would be what Japanese language does to hip-hop and what hip-hop does to Japanese language, within a society that can say things without speaking much. Abstract hip-hop is part of my soft spot for situations that work with contradictory instructions.
Often, while researching or traveling, the most significant encounters are unplanned. We are expecting them but we don’t know the exact time they will arrive. This is how friends come into our lives. Work processes often make me think of music festivals: what moves us the most happens when we stray from our line-up. A similar gut feeling made me ask Egaitsu Hiroshi for a conversation in our first exchange by email. Hip-hop came back to my walking playlists in Tokyo. Thanks to Ega I was able to attend an Ace Cool concert in Shibuya as well. As I share with him, there was a time when techno and hip hop were very close. In their growth, both musics share a similar history of social disobedience and subsequent gentrification. Fashion, which Egaitsu brought up in our conversation, is also something that ties techno to hip-hop. They are musical genres that are easy to dress up. But then again, not all techno scenes work the same way. If Berlin is a city that wears night clothes during the day, Tokyo is rather the opposite, much more relaxed and casual.
Besides a shared enthusiasm for thinking with music, Egaitsu and I have other things in common, including birth numbers. We both lived for a time in clubs or raves, looking for home in music environments. Our enthusiasm for music is critical, but from an expansive spirit that connects dots without drawing fixed conclusions. Using language to talk about something that goes beyond it keeps you trying and trying again. It’s exciting, but also demanding. By not fully arriving somewhere, you are always moving and changing direction. As Ega said during our conversation, writing about music is mostly about grasping what cannot be captured or named: a vibe. You can’t describe it, you have to feel it. At the same time, language allows us to raise the volume of so many things that are in music but are not music. Like rhythms, they repeat but never in the same way.
Departing from the Fueiho law only to quickly forget about it, Egaitsu and I recorded a conversation in Tokas, the residency I was part of for almost three months. Our first meeting in mid-February was followed by another at the end of March. We talked, without definitive answers, about elements of Japanese society, moments of civil disobedience, left and right bends, leaps and scratches in time, missing scenes sounding forward, crossovers between language and music forms, entering dance floors to stay there as long as our bodies can take it or wearing statements,communist dreams from the standards of capitalism… Despite the many years moving with music to places and meeting lots of people, I have often felt alone. It is not so easy to find people with a raver self and an intellectual self speaking with equal yet irregular intensities. It is in recent years that I have met my partners in exhaustion and exuberance. Mostly in Berlin, but also in Tokyo. This body connexion has less to do with sharing a passion for the same music or the same dance floors, as with being moved by a similar curiosity and drive. Returning to Ega’s words, it’s about sharing a common vibe. And this vibe is strong enough to bring us together no matter where we come from. Life also resembles writing or music in how form makes meaning. Given my tendency to mix my surname with other people’s names, Panega was born: a fictional drone metal band made of rap, beats, breaks and techno drums.
Music and sounds, appropriated and modified thanks to files shared by Ronny Pries, szegvari, The-Sacha-Rush, looplicator, waveplaySFX, juskiddink, dslhfli, Hewn.Marrow, Solar01, Glitchedtones, deleted_user_38815 within Freesound.
