In the 1980s, as Japan became an exporter of both culture and technology, budding scenes in the once insular nation began creating a local home for foreign sounds imported from afar. Among them was a collection of artists creating homegrown reggae music that honored the genre’s Jamaican roots. Tokyo’s leading disciples of Trenchtown included drummer Masahito “Pecker” Hashida, who recorded at Tuff Gong with Bob Marley himself, while the band Mute Beat drew heavily from reggae and dub to forge a sound that presaged acid jazz and trip-hop. The new compilation Tokyo Riddim 1976-1985 is not a snapshot of that scene. Instead, it’s a valuable collection of more pop-aligned, pseudo-reggae music masterminded by artists and producers who envisioned Caribbean influences amalgamating seamlessly with Japan’s own city-pop sound. These songs are more analogous to the English cod reggae artists of the same era—think UB40, the Police, and Paul McCartney—than the Jamaican pioneers they pilfered from.
Often this influence manifests as simply a vibe, as though all involved were attempting to recreate the feeling of a half-remembered concert they had attended while journeying through Kingston. Tokyo Riddim 1976-1985 even begins with the sound of crashing waves, setting a seaside mood, before Miki Hirayama’s “Tsukikage No Nagisa” (“Moonlight Shadow at the Beach”) mixes the singer’s sophisticated vocal, typical of city pop, over some lazily strummed reggae guitar. A lot of the set moves at a similarly easygoing pace: On “Music,” Chu Kosaka—a rock artist whose reggae credentials include citing Jimmy Cliff’s House of Exile as his favorite album—deploys an appropriately hazy falsetto and voluptuous saxophone lead over a bassline as heavy as the setting sun.
The producers are clearly unconcerned with adhering to the core tenets of reggae, and in some brashly experimental moments they blur genre lines even further. The second of two Hirayama tracks, “Denshi Lenzi” pinches the rhythm guitar and bassline from Marley’s “Natural Mystic,” but sets them against vocals doused in futuristic robo-pop vocoder effects. “Hittin’ Me Where It Hurts,” by Marlene, a Filipina singer tapped by Japanese talent recruiters to become a pop star, includes airy ba ba ba harmonies that evoke Latin jazz, adding hints of arcade electronica, clattering percussion, brass, and trippy vocal effects that fray Marlene’s flashy big-band-style performance into a fantastical, cross-cultural melange.
