Hikaru Utada

The Japanese-American “axis”

Opening with a “step-by-step” summary of the influence of American music on post-World War II Japanese music might seem like an impossible task, given the sheer scale and varied nature of that imprinting. What pushed us toward this choice, however, was a matter of necessity. And that necessity lies in giving readers a (however scant) set of tools with which to approach, should they wish to, a musical reality that is too often ignored, reduced to a stereotype, or known only in broad strokes or through individual scenes more familiar to fans of Western rock (the japrock of the 70s, the plurality of phenomena known as japanoise) if not to more avant-garde palates (pseudo-avant movements built on hot air, like onkyo). Because while it's undeniable that Japan was colonized by every possible Anglo-Saxon subculture, from psychedelic rock to hardcore punk all the way to grindcore, some of the most compelling Japanese phenomena actually blossomed within the mainstream landscape itself, a landscape capable of devouring disproportionate amounts of information and adapting it to a different context and specific aesthetic needs (or, conversely, capable of partially reshaping that context to make it “receptive” to new external inputs). Rereading and decontextualizing American music, then: a practice that in Japan has marked much of the evolution of j-pop, accompanying it since the cradle.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the Land of the Rising Sun's fascination with American musical models has very strong historical grounds. Following the American occupation after World War II, the Japanese population came into far closer contact with Yankee customs and habits than with those of the Old Continent, which is why, over the following decades, and especially with the explosion of the most disparate rock languages, American music ended up having a greater impact on the youth of Japan than even the deeply beloved Beatles or Pink Floyd. It's no surprise, then, that Japan's record market in the '50s and 60s saw a slow but unstoppable decline of traditional kayōkyoku and enka pop, often supplanted, in the tastes of the younger audience, by imported phenomena such as rokabirī, eleki, Group Sounds, and fōku. And while American dominance would wane somewhat during the Eighties – whether due to the emergence of phenomena like j-fusion and visual-kei, or to British post-punk and synth-pop infiltrations that, duly revolutionized through the semantics of Yellow Magic Orchestra, would lay the foundations of Japanese electropop as we know it today – starting from the 90s the rekindled flame would return with full, uncontrollable force (not by coincidence, this coincides with the first full-blown j-pop boom).

From the Aor “turn” of a chart veteran like Yumi Matsutoya on her “Gates Of Heaven” (the first record in Japanese music history to reach two million copies sold), to the meteoric rise of bands like hard-rockers B'z and Mr. Children (the latter authors of a decidedly softer brand of pop-rock), by way of Chage And Aska (at the peak of their popularity in the early Nineties) and ZARD, the Japanese mainstream landscape at the start of the decade teems with groups and singers drawing on American rock and pop-punk scenes, to the point that the very few voices out of step with the trend (take, for instance, the early albums of the exuberant Chara) are still tied to a new wave aesthetic from the previous decade, one that still seemed hard to shake off. Equally lively was the dance-pop side, dominated by the towering figures of Midas-touch producer Tetsuya Komuro (responsible for the widespread diffusion of the eurodance sound) and his proteges, from Namie Amuro to Tomomi Kahala. Missing from this whole pop patchwork of scenes and trends was only r&b – and that's exactly where Hikaru Utada enters the picture.

Deep waters

Not that the “urban” idiom was entirely unknown in Japan before her arrival: at an underground level it had already begun to surface, alongside hip-hop, as early as the start of the 90s, and even though the success of bands like Speed, m-flo or Chemistry was still a way off, plenty of names were already stirring things up in the outskirts of Tokyo (Zeebra, to name the quintessential figure of the Japanese hip-hop scene), building a scene that would slowly but surely explode. But also thanks to the extremely frequent radio play given to songs by Mariah Carey (still the best-selling foreign artist in Japan to this day), Toni Braxton, TLC and similar acts, the Japanese had already “tuned in” in real time to the American r&b reality; what was missing was appropriation and reinterpretation, and it's precisely on these grounds that Utada's first steps were built, an artist who in just a few years became one of the brightest stars (and a genuine all-round artist) in the j-pop firmament.

She, the daughter of popular enka singer Keiko Fuji and producer Teruzane Utada, is in fact the prime suspect behind introducing turn-of-the-millennium American contemporary r&b to a mainstream audience. Born in New York in 1983 and living there until 1994, she absorbed and perfectly internalized the evolutions of black music, drawing on them as inspiration to start writing her first songs. Her family environment was quick to encourage this interest, leading a girl still in middle school to experiment in a recording studio and cut her first tracks. The result would soon prove explosive: first, as a shy fourteen-year-old in 1997, under the guise of Cubic U, in a failed attempt to debut in the States (the album “Precious” would only ever be released at home), and later under her own birth name, she would carry out a Copernican revolution that changed the dynamics of Japanese pop forever.

However you look at it, without a record like “First Love” (1999), not only would all the urban starlets who have run rampant ever since never have existed, but the dominance of a figure like Tetsuya Komuro would probably have gone on raging for a long, long time. It's true, though, that history isn't written with ifs, and the 7.5 million copies sold in Japan alone (over 10 million worldwide: a figure that crowns it the best-selling record in the history of Asian music) speak for themselves. Listened to again today, it remains a rather flat, derivative little work, more significant for its historical importance than for any intrinsic beauty. The classic “Automatic”, the “Waterfall”-style carousel of “B And C”, the synth-funk flashes that adorn “Another Chance” and the garage-house of “Moving On Without You” remain the only things worth noting, even though none of them hinted at developments quite so momentous.

“Deep River” marks, in a sense, the watershed compared to the more r&b-oriented output of the first two records, a work that results from the synthesis and digestion of languages, attitudes and contexts that seem, on the surface, at odds with one another. With it, Utada begins to truly become aware of her potential as a composer/arranger (not that she lacked it before, but her abilities had yet to fully emerge, wrapped as they were in an often overly stifling emulative straitjacket), kicking off the experimental phase of her career, crowned in 2006 by “Ultra Blue”, her second personal masterpiece.

There are several fronts, however, on which this “departure” from the calligraphic r&b of “First Love” and “Distance” (2001) takes shape, starting with the way the rhythms are built: “cellular”, hyper-syncopated, driven by a circular fraction that ripples out into an interlocking play of parts, genuine mosaics of overlapping patterns (some based on traditional Latin percussion, as in “Letters” or “A.S.A.P.”). Even when the beat settles into a canonical four-on-the-floor (the house-inflected fantasies of “Traveling”, the chorus of “Tokyo Nights”), what thickens the texture are the surrounding flourishes, genuine accessory/ornamental loops.

“Arrangement”, then, is a magic word for understanding not just this record but j-pop as a whole: the fondness for the bizarre solution, for the peculiar timbre, is a constant across pretty much the entire pop landscape of Japan, even its most disposable corners, such as the idol world. All the more so, its weight is even more consistent on “Deep River”, a work blessed by a clear duality in its conception: on one hand, there's the relative rawness of stringed instruments and nods to a more traditionally Japanese stylistic imagery (also evoked in the lyrics), while on the other, the synthetic textures of turn-of-the-millennium pop make a fine showing of their own.

Kawano Kei (lead co-arranger) and Utada worked long and hard on balancing these two opposing forces, ultimately favoring an electronic sound that never feels overbearing, while thickening the arrangements with instruments such as solo violin, harp, harpsichord, oboe, strings with a more classical feel, acoustic guitars with an occasionally percussive tone (almost evoking the shamisen), baroque pianos (listen to "Shiawase ni narou," with clear nods to Beethoven's "Für Elise") and even a mellotron (the verses of the opening "Sakura Drops").

Keeping the result from tipping into sonic overload are producers Akira Miyake and Teruzane Sking (notably, they forgo outside input, especially after the recent collaborations with American mainstream heavyweights like Darkchild and the storied duo Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis), who, aided by Utada herself, blend the record's different souls with real refinement, while still allowing themselves the odd eccentric flourish (the "treated," wonderfully effective electric guitar riff in "Uso mitai na I Love You").

A caveat is needed regarding the peculiar construction of the melodies: their conception, a reflection of a pronounced intimate, pained dimension, leads to a more cohesive, "authorial" songwriting, favoring minor keys and descending chord changes (perhaps the high point of this new compositional direction is the choral "Hikari"), yet already informed by that highly distinctive sense of harmony that Utada would go on to develop across her next two records.

Perhaps also spurred on by the storm of a rather trying personal experience (the removal of a benign tumor in the middle of recording), her pen shies away from the sentimentality of her earlier albums to embrace irony (the Dadaist bent of the lyrics in "Traveling"), a faint sense of fatalism (the feeling of abandonment behind the words of "Letters"), and a greater use of Japanese's various linguistic registers, from quick shifts between masculine and feminine (the varied use of pronouns in the first-person narrative of "Hikari") to literary passages.

In step with this, her voice appears purged of melisma, freed from any typically black-music trappings, finally ready to step into a dramaturgical dimension where more weight is given to modes of expression akin to enka (perhaps inspired by her mother) and kayōkyoku (the seductive poses of the title track, a reflection of the Indian pilgrimages immortalized in Shusaku Endo's novel of the same name). All without sacrificing the elegance of her phrasing, the thousand shades of a voice one struggles not to call — said with the least possible emphasis — prodigious.

And "Deep River" is undoubtedly prodigious, given the remarkable leap in quality compared to her two previous records and the time required to write and record it. Made in barely more than half the time it took for "Distance" (with future classics "Final Distance" and "Traveling" hitting shelves respectively four and eight months after the release of her second full-length), despite the surgery, the album, in every respect, isn't merely proof of genuine artistic stature — it goes well beyond that, quickly becoming a significant, irreplaceable cornerstone of Japanese pop in the new millennium, confirming a stratospheric success (over three million copies sold in Japan alone) undiminished by such a striking artistic maturation.

Four years later, "Ultra Blue" would go on to confirm Utada's absolute stature (not to mention the odd, curious American venture under the name "Exodus"): but diving into this deep river remains the most illuminating experience for understanding the passionate sensibility of a true queen of Japanese music, black sheep and integral part, in no small measure, of a scene she herself helped to build.

A partially expanded and edited version of an article published in 2013 on a webzine no longer online, in memory of what was and what still is.

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27/07/2025