The sound of youth echoing through the city: The dawn of Japanese rock music on the stages of Teshima and Suginami in 1977.

The sound of youth echoing through the city: The dawn of Japanese rock music on the stages of Teshima and Suginami in 1977.

In 1977, musicians with a new sensibility, such as Makoto Kubota and the Sunset Sunset Band and Sentimental City Romance, took the stage one after another at Tokyo's Toshima Public Hall and Suginami Public Hall. There was a unique fervor that blended the lyricism of folk music with the energy of rock music. It was a time when rapid economic growth was coming to an end and youth culture was shifting from mass-produced pop idols to their own expression. Young people from the countryside came to Tokyo and gathered at live houses and public halls on street corners in search of "their own sound.

Makoto Kubota and the Sunset Sunset Band established a unique "Japanese roots music" that fused Hawaiian, blues, and Japanese folk music, and was a pioneer in blending American rock with Japanese sentiment. Sentimental City Romance, on the other hand, hailed from Nagoya and attracted attention as a rock band from a regional city. Their sound had the scent of life rather than urban sophistication, symbolizing the cultural backflow from the countryside to the center of Japan.

In Tokyo in the late 1970s, the live house culture of Shibuya's Attic and Shinjuku Loft was budding, and the boundary between folk and rock music was disappearing. As the student movement cooled and the "Me era" arrived, in which individual sensibilities were more important than politics, music functioned as a mirror of society. Drifting between everyday life and dreams, young people were sounding out their identities through the sounds of electric and acoustic guitars.

The neighborhoods of Teshima and Suginami were also symbolic. In these areas, a bit removed from the hustle and bustle of Shinjuku, the culture of public halls as places for purely enjoying music was alive and well. The year 1977 was just before the rise of Tatsuro Yamashita and Yumi Arai (Yumi Matsutoya), in other words, a turning point in Japanese pop music, just before it was transformed from local to major.

Performances in this period still had handmade lights and PA noise rather than sponsor lights. The sound on stage was unfinished, but it had a certain heat to it. It was a sound like a bridge between the city and the countryside, between folk and rock, between dreams and reality. The sound that echoed through Toshima Public Hall and Suginami Public Hall signaled the moment when Japanese rock music would step forward into the era of "singing in one's own words.