Translation of the June 11th 2022 Interview with Tatsuro Yamashita by Yahoo Japan News (Page 2)

 

Well, first off, thanks must be given to all of the readers who came up over the past 18 hours to read the translation for Page 1 of the interview of singer-songwriter Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）by Yahoo News Japan yesterday. As I was telling Scott from the "Holly Jolly X'masu" podcast just now, I was surprised by the view rate for the article. Usually I consider a "Kayo Kyoku Plus" article popular if it can get around 35~40 views within 24 hours; Page 1 ended up getting over 100 in less than that!

There's been a bit of a buzz surrounding that interview and it rather reminded me of a certain ancient investment firm (EF Hutton) commercial. I guess when Tats talks, everyone does listen. Anyways, let's see if more people read and talk with Page 2 of the interview.

I Kept Thinking of Its Service Life

Interviewer: Yamashita says that he's never intended to make songs so that anyone can recognize who it is. However, he has produced songs that everyone sings across generations. To take an example, "Christmas Eve" which starts with the lyric "It rains too late at night...". The song was used in a Japan Railways Tokai commercial in 1988 and in the following year, it hit No. 1 on the Oricon chart. For more than thirty years, it has made it onto the chart and has become a perennial feature of the season.

Yamashita: Right from the beginning, my policy on making songs has been to create music that doesn't grow stale so that no one knows when it was created. I kept thinking of its service life. That was also true when I came up with "Garasu no Shonen"（硝子の少年）for the Kinki Kids (1997). I made that one under the weight of "Gotta be a million seller" but people involved thrashed me since it was "dark" and "undanceable". If that was the case, then the Kinki Kids would start to have doubts, too. But then what I told those guys was "It's all right. Why? Because this is a song that you'll be able to sing even when you turn 40". It was an act of premeditation on my part.

Perhaps you can say that it's universality. Something that stands the test of time. Those tools to evoke memories like "It's so nostalgic, like when my boyfriend and I listened to this together..." are also important, but I was struggling with how to prevent my music from becoming an oldie-but-goodie. And that's where arrangement trumped lyrics and composition. Then came the excellent performing ability by the assisting musicians and the efforts of the engineer behind the recording.

My songs basically follow one pattern. Because there are few impressions of sounds that I like. So I say with pride that they follow one pattern. It's just like how film director Yasujiro Ozu said it famously: "I'm a tofu maker so I can only make tofu". When it comes to rakugo comic storytellers, naniwabushi narrators and bunraku puppeteers, they don't change no matter how many decades pass, you know? The question is within that state of unchanging, how do they take in the mood of these times?

Interviewer: A generation of people whose parents have been Yamashita's fans have been attending his concerts.

Yamashita: Oh, that's because Japan has had 70 years of peace. If the times are cut off as was the case in World War II, there will be a disconnection between parents and children, and there will be cultural divergence. There has to be an effort to maintain peace to maintain culture. But the current circumstances aren't going too well and I don't know where we will end up though getting to where I am now, I've always been thinking about what I should do. I'm a musician, so I've tried to express myself through music.