Taeko Ohnuki

How luminous Tokyo is 

The streets of the metropolis, captured in a night that seems eternal. Life flows vividly, despite the late hours, as if sleep were an alien concept. What matters is running, speeding through the streets, savoring the future and its promises, constantly fulfilled by a technology able to make them real. And then there's America, with its soft power, the pervasive influence of its culture and its dreams. Don't try to confine city pop to a single, precise musical form: plenty of people before you have tried and never reached any real consensus. Try instead to immerse yourself, in your imagination, in the climate of a Japan that between the second half of the Seventies and the whole of the following decade experienced a headlong economic boom, with all the consequences that entailed. Picture the streets and the newly built skyscrapers, breathe in a climate of openness and prosperity, and perhaps right now you can start to pick up the frequencies surrounding you. Between funk, the new smoothness of soft-rock, shy flirtations with disco, and even the occasional Latin American touch, jazz claims a considerable space of its own. And it's precisely here that the gentle, composed voice of Taeko Ohnuki comes into play, making a decisive contribution to a melting pot on the verge of boiling over.

Whatever one thinks about the origins of city pop and its exact starting point (our article does a good job of framing the heated debate that has arisen over time on the subject), it's undeniable that the musician from Suginami played a decisive role in bringing new languages and modes of expression to the surface in Japan. With her brief but essential stint in Sugar Babe, whose line-up included Tatsuro Yamashita and which relied on the production of Eiichi Ohtaki, the seeds were sown for a revolution within the Japanese musical landscape, rejecting any tie to tradition while also moving beyond the psychedelic and folk forms that had defined the country's first rock bands.

The sonic framework draws from soft-rock and funk, as if caught in the middle of a west-coast dream; the approach is sophisticated, the touch is gallant and not without a curious irony, applied to songs with an unmistakably pop structure. "Songs", the band's only album, decisively pushes forward the possibilities of rock communication made in Japan, paving the way for a generation of musicians who were deeply urban, refined, receptive to gusts blowing in from across the ocean, and yet skilled at reworking them with a distinct, perfectly recognizable flair.

Despite its scant commercial returns, the Sugar Babe chapter allowed the musicians involved to cut their teeth and take important steps toward defining their own style. Released just months after the band's split, "Grey Skies" continues along the smooth, Californian path of "Songs", but reveals a taste for jazz-inflected harmonic solutions and instrumental constructions with a progressive flavor that the earlier album only hinted at. Above all, it immediately makes clear the performing and songwriting talent of an artist who, though making her first record under her own name, was already comfortable adapting to different sonic contexts, tightening her grip when the arrangements grew denser, and giving herself the space she needed when the composition called for it. This, combined with the involvement of a handful of young musicians still far from famous but destined for illustrious careers (besides Yamashita himself, credits as multi-instrumentalists go to Hiroshi Sato and, above all, Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto in his pre-Yellow Magic Orchestra days), makes the record a kind of manifesto for the whole musical ferment that swept through Japan like a wave in the mid-Seventies. Starting the very next year, that ferment would explode.

How Dark Tokyo Is

Released just a year after "Grey Skies", "Sunshower" stands alongside Tatsuro Yamashita's "Spacy" in showcasing the technical level and expressive maturity reached within just a few years by the whole cluster of musicians on Tokyo's new scene, as well as their taste for a refined crossover capable of reconciling the different sonic and aesthetic directions that would come to define the new Japanese urban sound. Far more the product of Ohnuki's personal vision than the previous album, even though the entire arrangement work was handed exclusively to Ryuichi Sakamoto, this sunshower nonetheless turns out to be a collective affair, the fruit of a shared sensibility that brings out the best of what that season had to offer. With jazz as its guiding light: in April 1977, a four-day charity event called the Rolling Coconut Review was held at Tokyo's Harumi Dome, featuring a number of international musicians, from Warren Zevon to Jackson Browne and the New York jazz-funk band Stuff. It was precisely their performance, and above all drummer Chris Parker's contribution, that utterly captivated Seiji Kuniyoshi, the producer behind "Sunshower". Before they had even finished playing, Parker was already being contacted to record the drum parts and complete the album's line-up, recorded between May 13th and June 3rd.

A quick session, an "intimate" affair, plenty of ideas and a strong will not to compromise: "Sunshower" came out on July 25th and presents a completely renewed Ohnuki, still sophisticated (as the chic minimalism of the cover art is keen to point out) but with amplified means and awareness, held together by a clear creative vision. "Summer Connection" already makes plain the spirit behind the sessions, the sense of melancholy hidden beneath a bright pop melody.

The sound turns orchestral, the horns (courtesy of Yasuaki Shimizu and Shigeharu Mukai) advance with great elegance, the guitar bolsters the groove with precise, well-placed touches: above the intricate dynamics of the arrangement, the songwriter's voice steers a melody of anticipation and hope, evoking a season made of dreams and adventures, islands to be lived and pockets to be filled. There's all the joy, all the sweet anticipation of a warmth that Ohnuki interprets exceptionally well, blending perfectly with the rhythms of an orchestrated funk that has no precedent in her earlier records.

Be careful, though, about pigeonholing the album as a product aimed at diehard nostalgics and relentless holidaymakers. Beneath the sometimes playful surface, often designed to hook listeners with killer choruses and unforgettable instrumental hooks, the songwriter's pen knows how to land poisonous blows, delivered with a beaming smile. "Kusuri wo takusan", with its flute accents and delicate choral openings, is the most dazzling indictment of drug abuse, of the mad rush toward a psychosis that blurs the line between cure and illness ("so many, so many medicines, there's an embarrassment of choice, if you take them all, it's the end"). "Nani mo iranai" is sadness turned into funk, a groove that slows down disco's typical pulse and feeds it a handful of carefully chosen words, delivered with firmness:

I'd like to lock everything inside a mirror

If a sky stretched out on the other side

I wouldn't need anything else

Night and its reflections, a guitar acting as a channel for this desire for subversion, before everything fades into the unspoken. The Tokyo captured by Ohnuki can be both glittering and chaotic, while carefully concealing the sense of disorientation felt by its many inhabitants. "Tokai", destined to become one of the classics of the songwriter's repertoire, moves in backlit contrast to the city's glow: despite the synthesizer's outward euphoria and the soul fire of the melody, the disgust the musician describes comes through sharp and pointed, ready to switch off the city lights for good, if that's what it takes for her to finally move on.

With the dreamlike abandon of "Karappo no isu", already performed live back in the Sugar Babe days and here reworked into a sophisticated fusion number, the curtain falls on a side A that shines a light on the many dark alleys, the regrets and abandonments of a capital already poised to embrace its future.

It's precisely the future that becomes the focus of side B's opening track. Modeled after Todd Rundgren and his Utopia (as Ohnuki herself has explicitly stated), "Law Of Nature" arrives to give the album a sudden progressive swerve, a dynamic jazz-rock departure that, under the guise of naturalness, offers in just a few words a biting critique of the headlong rush toward an unknown yet to be written. After all, given the sense of pain and flight that dominate the following "Dare no tame ni" and "Silent Screamer", this embrace of the unexplored would seem decidedly out of tune. And so the songwriter first turns her back on this world, rediscovering an unusual lightness through a polished, cool-toned passage, before then confronting head-on her own vision of escape, racing forward like the wind, on the wings of a brisk orchestral jazz.

It's the preparatory ground for the ultimate escape, for the dream that becomes one with the soul. Conceived as an ambient retreat toward legendary seas, "Sargasso Sea" is a fantasia for synthesizers and piano that effectively anticipates much of the exploration later undertaken by figures such as Hiroshi Yoshimura and Midori Takada, disguised as a waking mirage. The final act, "Furiko no yagi", completes the dissolution. Through the eyes of a goat that slowly turns into a tree, Ohnuki and Sakamoto paint the end of days with the gravity of an orchestra and the indifference of the most laid-back funk, as detached as the animal protagonist's own gaze.

How beautiful Tokyo is

Made against the wishes of a label that would have preferred an approach more in line with "Grey Skies", anchored to a lyrical and compositional sophistication that wasn't exactly mainstream, "Sunshower" proved to be a genuine commercial flop on release, so much so that it substantially altered Taeko Ohnuki's sonic direction on the albums that immediately followed. Partly because of its chiaroscuro nature too, and the subtle way it captured life in a megalopolis already on the verge of becoming one of the world's technological hubs, its legacy has ended up covertly influencing much of the city pop ferment that would go on to explode from that point onward, expressing itself in a thousand different ways.

It was the excavation work carried out first by various vaporwave and future-funk samplers, then by a passionate crowd of devotees and enthusiasts of rétro-pop made in Japan, that has granted the album and its author from Suginami the pioneer status they deserve, in support of a movement that has found two of its fundamental pillars in cross-genre handling and technical solidity. More than forty years later, Tokyo's blinding light still shines, beautiful and pensive.

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09/11/2025