Plastics -- Cards

When I wrote my first blog entry on the band Plastics（プラスチックス）back in 2013, I informed you that I first saw and heard this band via an old locally-produced TV program for the Japanese-Canadian community called "Japanese Panorama" around the turn of the decade into the 1980s. Chica Sato and Toshio Nakanishi（佐藤チカ・中西俊夫）and the rest of the band certainly made an impression on our family...mostly negative when it came to my parents but although I was never a fan of punk/hardcore New Wave, I was fairly intrigued with "Top Secret Man".

Some time later, when I was on that Japanese Language School graduation trip in the summer of 1981, my classmates and I all split up for a couple of weeks so that we could spend time with our own relatives. And then in the last week of our tour of Japan, we all met up again for a few days of summer camp before our class ended up having a bit of luxury at a really nice hotel on Mikimoto Pearl Island just off of Mie Prefecture for a night. I rather regret not having taken any photos from that leg of the journey.

Anyways, getting to Plastics, one of my classmates showed me one of his musical acquisitions during the two weeks with relatives. He actually bought an audiotape of the band's "Welcome Back Plastics" which had been released in that same year. It did have "Top Secret Man" and "Copy" on it, those two songs that had been featured on "Japanese Panorama". Plus, it had another song that my friend played for me on the Sony tape-cassette recorder, "Cards".

Created by Nakanishi and guitarist Hajime Tachibana（立花ハジメ）, I couldn't quite understand what Nakanishi was shouting about aside from the title but we took a look at the lyrics in the liner notes, and remarked how ripe some of them were. Well, they do have a punk sensibility but it was still shocking to us to hear a Japanese band swear in English. Still, it definitely made for an interesting evening in that well-appointed hotel room on the island, listening to Japanese New Wave/Punk. One commenter at Amazon remarked that "Cards" sounded like a parody of James Brown.

After that one night there, we all headed straight back to the metropolis for a couple of final nights at the Tokyo Prince Hotel before taking the flight home.