Yellow Magic Orchestra -- Stairs

 

I enjoyed visiting shrines and temples in Tokyo such as Senso-ji in Asakusa and Hie Shrine in Akasaka. There is some grand architecture and especially during major holidays, the storefronts leading up to the religious establishments are bustling with happy activity. But for some of those places, I had to show my devotion to the cause by climbing up thousands of stairs. In 2017, when I made my most recent trip to Tokyo, I was happy that there was an escalator installed next to that gray-white slope of stairs on the way to Hie Shrine. Almost 20 years earlier, when I had gone there along with some students-turned-friends on New Year's Day, I almost died from exhaustion halfway up those concrete steps.

Until recently perhaps, stairs were an everyday thing in the megalopolis. Train stations had a ton of those almost as if a final test for tourists to prove their enthusiasm for traveling through the city, but in the last couple of years of my time in Japan, institutions such as Japan Railways and Tokyo Metro decided to give us all a break and finally install escalators and elevators at key points. Even my station, Minami-Gyotoku, got on the bandwagon and had those escalators and elevators built so at least, my two trips back to visit the old neighbourhood didn't have me risking knee breakage anymore.

Well, it is with that then that I introduce "Stairs" by Yellow Magic Orchestra from their November 1981 album "Technodelic"（テクノデリック）. Much like its track mate, "Neue Tanz", "Stairs" has that industrial stripped-down arrangement that probably had the entire album being compared to a release by Kraftwerk. YMO drummer Yukihiro Takahashi（高橋幸宏）was behind the words and music along with Peter Barakan's help for this mysterious tune which might describe the typical arduous commute in and out of the many train and subway stations. Fellow bandmate Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）took care of the rumbling piano and that haunting echo of an old-time piano midway through the song. In another way, I think "Stairs" might even be paying some tribute to the endless Penrose stairs that I actually saw weaponized in the movie "Inception".