What does it mean to be “Japanese”? As I listen to Sacra’s ついのすみか (Tsuinosumika), whom mvns kindly shared the original version of on their YouTube channel a few years ago, and research those behind it, I can’t help but think of how its existence calls into question so much of what is driving Japan’s current political climate. For all of Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s current prime minister’s faults, I view there is no greater current failing than her attempts to update Japan’s permanent residency guidelines to dictate just what kind of person the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) wants to bless as worthy of living in Japan — either by pricing out those who could add something vital to Japan’s cultural and financial growth with a twentyfold fee hike and the “above-average-income” test, or by asking more of immigrants than is asked of the native-born.
In the end, no amount of legislative bones thrown to her far-right, Japanese-first-appeasing, crowd can change this fact: Japan is part of Asia and has been and will be changed by the world at large. What I think you’ll find interesting about Sacra’s story is just how its powerful music was the product of the distance it gave itself from Japan in order to land on something very “Japanese,” something we all can learn from.
In our modern era, one can easily forget just how cut off from the rest of Japan Hokkaido once was. Before the Seikan Tunnel opened in 1988, there was no rail link to Honshu at all, and the Shinkansen wouldn’t reach the island until 2016. Back in the era that birthed Sacra, there were few easy ways for those in Hokkaido to connect culturally with Honshu and elsewhere. As a Hokkaido native, Takahashi felt intimately cut off from Japanese tradition. He discovered his own “Japaneseness” by looking at Korean and Chinese culture.
It was his seed of an idea: a Japanese group exploring Asian music from China to Java, one that would take time to come to fruition. Sacra, a group born out of a core trio — Yutaka “Charlie” Takahashi, Kaori Obata, and Kenji Komatsuzaki — sprang from Sapporo’s ’80s live-house music scene. However, in many ways, one can think of Sacra as the brainchild of Hokkaido-born guitarist Yutaka “Charlie” Takahashi. In the ’70s, as a sax player, he played in various Sapporo-based rock and blues bands. Then in the ’80s he transitioned to guitar and began to question just what kind of an artist he was, and what kind of music he wanted to create.
On some fateful day in the mid ’80s, Takahashi encountered Obata singing at one of Sapporo’s live houses. Obata was a trained musician who had sung in several Sapporo-based bands and grew up on organ and Electone lessons. Dazzled by her singing, Takahashi proposed the formation of a duo, チャーリー高橋＆小畑香. Together they performed an experimental set of music, frequently playing or covering Brazilian and Hawaiian songs.
As the duo gained confidence performing in the Sapporo scene, Takahashi invited another performer into the group, hammered dulcimer player Kenji Komatsuzaki. Komatsuzaki, then, was a true rare bird. Born in Tokyo, but choosing to make his life in Sapporo, it was Komatsuzaki who took it upon himself to build his first hammered dulcimer after encountering the playing of famed American storyteller and musician David Holt.
While running a Hokkaido soup curry restaurant by day, Jack in the Box, Komatsuzaki would take time to host folk-inspired shows at night, helping build Sapporo’s folk scene. And as a musician he helped start Hard To Find, a group inspired by Celtic music. It was the music he played within that group that inspired Takahashi to invite him to join. Much like himself, Takahashi saw in Komatsuzaki’s own music and “foreign” influences something that vibrated with his thinking. They stood out in Japanese culture. And for a very brief moment, in the late ’80s, they performed as チャーリー高橋＆小畑香 with 小松崎健.
When they spoke of releasing their first music, of privately releasing it on tape, the trio realized that their band name was too long. It was Takahashi who suggested the name “Sacra” after サクラメント (sacrament). And surprisingly for them, Sony’s SD (Sound Development) program, a part of the label in search of new artists to invest large recording money on, marked them as an act it would like to back and sign.
You wouldn’t think of it when you hear ついのすみか, but this record was “recorded live with no audience.” Before booking Sapporo’s Lutheran Hall for several days of recording sessions, around 1990 or 1991, Takahashi looked into the songbooks of Korea, China, Indonesia and Japan, and reimagined whole songs with new Japanese lyrics for the trio to perform. Imagining a new kind of ethno-pop, in the league of others like Dick Lee’s Asiamajor or Tokyo’s Okinawa-inspired, pan-Asian Shang Shang Typhoon (whom he wished for but couldn’t get to perform on the record), the album took the form of capturing some kind of new Asian diaspora.
Performing and recording live as a trio, armed with Takahashi’s imaginative songs, for days, most of their songs were recorded in one take. When they were done, their tapes went to Tokyo, where arranger Keiichi Oku was joined by impressive session musicians like Coba, Masatsugu Shinozaki, Eiji Narushima and countless more, to add their own truly inspired orchestral backing to these performances. What came together in ついのすみか was this wonderfully inviting, nostalgic sound, a sound of a Japan that could have been, or (truth be told) always really was, a Japan inspired from within, from abroad. Surprisingly, the first time the trio heard this music coming together was on one of only two trips they ever made to Tokyo as a band, to hear the mixdown.
What they’d hear would be songs like “南冥行～蘭の舟～ケシの花,” a gorgeous, otherworldly suite whose centerpiece reimagines a little-known Sundanese traditional song, floating from the tropics to the plateau of Tian Shan, as Obata imagined while singing it. Other songs, instrumental originals like “ナーダムがやってきた,” transport Komatsuzaki’s dulcimer from Appalachia and Dublin, elsewhere, to places less defined, more lived into their life stories and experiences in Hokkaido.
The original CD release, which I own, features the epic “中国民謡メドレー,” a Chinese folk song medley that takes you from Xinjiang to Guangdong, on Komatsuzaki’s hammered hoofbeats, mutating and translating to Japanese the pentatonic wuyin music that inspired so much of their own. Gontiti would briefly champion Sacra’s music, based on songs like “ガブリエルのラッパ,” which featured some like-minded whimsy and charm. On songs like “チベットワルツ,” which harken back to Sacra’s own folk roots, we hear that there is a throughline in Sacra’s music with Asia’s own attempt to integrate contemporary folk music into its own tradition.
For all its “Asian”-ness, ついのすみか has a center that’s distinctly theirs and even more unmoored. In the middle of the album, Takahashi-penned songs like “夢の秘密” reveal an evolution of their acoustic heart. Others like “雲南の風” inspire some meeting between vaudevillian Americana and Sino opera. When the record finds them performing as simply a trio, as on “基隆（キールン）で,” they affect something like their namesake, a hushed, almost reverent sound, felt in the universal folk tradition. “さくら さくら” explores their homeland’s most-known traditional song as a lament, a letting go to segue to something better, brighter.
Near its close, the album offers an inspired reimagining of the Korean folk song 도라지 타령 (Doraji Taryeong) as “トラジ,” a fantastic bit of jazz-pop flipping the lament of the original into some other kind of wistful feeling. And for a brief moment, before Sony ever came calling, ついのすみか‘s final track, “わーい,” was featured in a TV commercial for JR Hokkaido’s Twinkle (ツインクル) campaign, using this sprightly, upbeat song as a beacon for others to spend more time luxuriating in this prefecture. For many this was their brief-but-impressive introduction to Sacra.
I sent an email to Komatsuzaki asking him why Sacra stopped existing after this record. “To go professional, we would have had to change the lives we were living then,” he told me, “and I think that was the main reason.” He went on: “I believe there was talk that, though not right away, we would eventually move our base to Tokyo. There was no talk of making a second album. After the breakup, we each went into our own lives and never performed together again. Takahashi-san continued making music in Tokyo and I in Sapporo, but Obata-san hasn’t been active.”
In many ways, turning pro meant leaving Sapporo and what it stood for, something they were not all willing to do. For now, ついのすみか exists because in 2015 a few fans who had kept copies of this album, some on dubbed cassettes, requested that Sony’s Order Made Factory reprint it, briefly resurrecting an inspired album and ideas made for a different era. As I look at my original CD, with its cover partly-adorned in gold ink, admire its sprinkle of karako figures trapezing through heavenly East Asian imagery, and think of its two prevailing colors (a deep lacquer red and off-white) — something you would find in Asian crafts celebrating a new harvest, a new year — my hope is that a decade later we can reframe this album as not speaking to ideas that are slowly dying out but being reborn. My hope is that by sharing it, we can get closer to Obata-san’s feelings of the record and of Takahashi’s ideas, about capturing feelings that speak more of “finally seeing someone you love” or, in our case, opening ourselves to love those we welcome home.
