The First - 50 years by T-cat

It all started - as it so often does - with a giant monster.  Growing up in the New York city area in the mid-60's we had Mothra (and the Peanuts) in the movies, Phantom Agents (忍者部隊月光) on TV Saturdays, and on my Sony transistor I would listen to a wonderful song that got very heavy airplay on AM radio:  Sukiyaki, by Kyu Sakamoto.  For a period of time it was everywhere, and the fact it was in another language meant nothing to kids raised to believe "Wop Bop Shoo Wop" was a legitimate song lyric.  So Japan was not strange or exotic, it was another country like England or Brazil that had really cool stuff.  I still can't hear that song without being back in the diner at the jukebox asking my mom to "Play it again!" ....... on of the very few tunes that I can't imagine anyone could make a bad version of.  J-C has covered the history of it well, so here is the referenced Kenny Ball version:  

2nd song point:  flash forward to my college days - one of our small group shows up with an album "You guys gotta hear this" - by some group called Yellow Magic Orchestra.  Although we knew Kraftwerk and other "electronica" this was different - there was real melody, these were SONGS that were played using electronics - not the other way round.  And being Physics majors, it was "our music" - we got all the available albums and I still have them, plus everything else on CD.  As they've been very well covered in the west let us move forward again in time to ...... the 90's.  A Yaohans opened up nearby with attached CD store; I would browse and select mostly based on what the cover looked like: Shonen Knife, Blue Hearts, Sunnychar, Hibari Misori, Merzbow .... music by Japanese, but I didn't realize there were genres and types - only the random cool song.  Move forward to 2015 - while watching shells on the beach I failed to see the wave building behind me until it broke one night.  I was idol-ly listening to "Mime Through Time" videos for different countries when the Japan one suddenly grabbed me - one 20-second snippet put its hooks right in and would not let go.  After a half-dozen listens I checked the song list and didn't even know what was the song and what was the artist - but I took a chance to see if there was anything else on YouTube and typed in :  Onyanko Club. 4 hours later I was still tracking down all the music and information I could, loaded a translator into Google, rummaging through forums, reviews, blogs, etc. and haven't stopped.  Between Onyanko Club, its sub-groups, and individuals I've got about 150 CDs (albums, singles, compilations) and 21 DVDs plus lots of assorted ephemera.  And still collecting, including the All-Nighters (their ancestors).  This led to the realization that the true driving force was the writers and arrangers: Sato qasi, Etsuko Yamakawa, Tsugutoshi Goto, etc.  And eventually to this blog (and a few others) that have opened up my horizon to so much more music (another 100 non-yanko CDs and vinyl) with more every week.  This being the 30th anniversary of the Onyanko dissolution a lot is being published online (interviews, memories, etc.) - all grist for my information mill.  But strictly speaking, this sampler is all it took: 

And so 50 years later, here I am :