• 1 The song is featured on the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (19 (...)

1“Like some cat from Japan”: the line from “Ziggy Stardust”1 could be an apt autobiographical description of David Bowie, so dense and multifarious is his relationship with Japan, a relationship that started very early in his career, long before he became a rock’n’roll star. Now, many of the practices Bowie borrowed from Japan do not belong to popular culture. Though most Japanese people are familiar with them, they rather belong to avant-garde or classical culture, and as such could hardly be described, either, as mainstream. However, through Bowie’s appropriations, these practices gained worldwide exposure, and entered, at least subliminally, Western consciousness. This raises the question of the impact of such heightened recognition. Have these practices become, in the process, more mainstream in their country of origin? Has, on the contrary, their integration into Bowie’s art made the latter more obscure, arcane, and underground? Have these art forms, combined by Bowie with rock music, changed the nature of what is popular, or of what is rock? Have these cross-cultural, interclass exchanges altered our understanding of the mainstream and the underground, the middle-of-the-road and the avant-garde? Or have these categories become so porous that they have lost any semblance of meaning and relevance?

• 2 “‘Oblique Strategies’ is a deck of oracle cards which Brian Eno developed and published, modelled p (...)

3The first, obvious entry point to appreciate Bowie’s connection with Japan is “Moss Garden”. The song, an instrumental co-written during the summer 1977 with Brian Eno according to his “Oblique Strategies”2 technique, was released on Heroes (1977). It was explicitly meant by Bowie to evoke Saiho-ji, a temple in Kyoto famous for its moss garden, that he had visited while on tour. What makes the song particularly interesting is that alongside Eno’s Yamaha synthesizer, Bowie plays, in a fairly simplistic manner, a koto. The instrument has a long history: it derives from the ancient Chinese zheng, perhaps via the Korean kayageum. If it was initially an instrument for the wealthy, it became, during the 19^th century, a rather romantic, almost popular one, a social skill, much like the piano for the young ladies of the bourgeoisie throughout Europe. It fell again into relative oblivion in post-World War II, Americanized Japan, before recovering to some extent its currency, but in a different context. It can now be heard not only in classical Japanese music, but also by performers such as Reiko Obata or Miya Masaoka in jazz, world, electroacoustic, or experimental music. What happens when you add, in Britain, in the late Seventies, a traditional Japanese instrument to a pop/rock song? Does it endow the instrument with a new status? Did Japanese people hear it differently afterwards? Conversely, what impact did its presence have on the song itself? Did Western listeners identify the instrument when they heard it? Did it contribute to making this pop/rock song more acceptable to a large audience, or, on the contrary, did it enhance its experimental (and thus, one can assume, underground) quality? And finally, should we ask ourselves whether “Moss Garden” is still a pop/rock song?

• 3 His popularity in Japan has to be contrasted with his relative obscurity in nearby Korea, which was (...)

5Once one is inside Bowie’s world, his frequent, intense, and early connections with Japan soon become obvious. Bowie toured Japan extensively on several occasions: in 1973 (Tokyo, Kyoto, Kobe, Hiroshima, Osaka, Nagoya), 1978 (Osaka, Tokyo), 1983 (Tokyo, Kyoto, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya), 1990 (Tokyo), 1996 (Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Kokura), and one last time in 2004 (Tokyo, Osaka). By the time of his first tour, Bowie was already so popular in Japan that a huge poster (the largest in the world at the time) hung from a Tokyo building.3 Apart from touring the country for concerts, Bowie visited Japan frequently, including for his honeymoon with his wife Iman Abdulmajid. At one point, he even mentioned to journalists the possibility of moving permanently to Kyoto, where he had spent several weeks in 1979 at Togendo, the home of David Kidd, an American Sinologist. His last stay in the country was in 2004.

• 4 Incidentally, Hirota is featured on the cover of the 1974 album by the Sparks, Kimono My House.

6We could easily draw a long list of Bowie’s references to Japanese culture. “Blackout”, on Heroes (1977), makes it clear: “I’m under Japanese influence”. Bowie alludes to spending a night in Kyoto in “Move on”, on Lodger (1979). 1980 marks the acme of his Japanophilia. The album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) opens with actress Michi Hirota screaming lyrics in Japanese on “It’s No Game (N° 1)”.4 Another song, “Ashes to Ashes,” mentions “pictures of Jap girls in synthesis.” Later, Bowie referenced Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima by name on the song “Heat” (The Next Day, 2013), when referring to a dead dog that appears in one of his novels, Spring Snow:

• 5 Chris Mitchell, “David Bowie’s Kyoto.” https://www.insidekyoto.com/david-bowie-kyoto, consulted on (...)

9But instead of compiling a long and tedious list of odd facts and details, it will be more fruitful to investigate Bowie’s ties to Japan through four figures who shaped his relationship to the country.5

• 6 This movie was itself influenced by German Expressionism, a style which had a strong, repeated impa (...)
• 7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys10OajhV4Y. Consulted on January 21, 2020.
• 8 Takemitsu is particularly well-known for his soundtracks of many Akira Kurosawa’s movies.
• 9 Bowie’s interest in Buddhism was such that at one point, after spending time in 1969 at Samye Ling (...)

10The first is Lindsay Kemp, who provided Bowie with his earliest artistic contact with Japan when he enrolled in his London Dance Centre in 1967. Kemp was familiar with Japanese cinema and theater. Thanks to him, Bowie became acquainted with noh and kabuki make-up and dance practices, and with movies such as Teinosuke Kinugasa’s silent masterpiece, A Page of Madness (1926).6 In 1978, during an interview for the Japanese TV show Star Sen Ichiya, Bowie explained how kabuki taught him “the discipline of movement”.7 Thanks to Kemp, Bowie discovered the music of Toru Takemitsu,8 which was used often during the dance classes. Kemp also introduced Bowie to Buddhism.9

• 10 UNCUT, October 1999, https://www.webcitation.org/5kJBbyRU5?url=http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/hero (...)

11Bowie’s second major connection with Japan is photographer Masayoshi Sukita. Sukita’s first encounter with Bowie was through his image, which he saw on a promotional poster in London. He managed to secure a meeting, followed by a shooting session in the summer of 1972. Bowie and Sukita subsequently started a 40-year long collaboration. The most famous work they did together took place in Tokyo’s Harajuku Studio in 1977, while Bowie was in Japan to promote Iggy Pop’s The Idiot (1977), an album he had produced and which had just been released. Sukita sent a selection of the photographs he had taken to Bowie, who later selected one for the celebrated cover of Heroes. At the time, Bowie was living in Berlin, where he had discovered the works of the Die Brücke movement, which includes artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Erich Heckel, all hailed as outstanding representatives of German Expressionism. Two works by Heckel, a painting and a woodcut entitled Roquairol (1917), became the inspiration behind the famous pose on the iconic cover (and for its reworking for The Next Day, 2013). Bowie readily recognizes the source: “Heckel’s Roquairol […] was a major influence on me as a painter. [For the cover of “Heroes”] it was Heckel”.10 The same painting had already inspired the photograph taken by Andy Kent for, in point of fact, the cover of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. Sukita also had the opportunity on numerous occasions to photograph Bowie during his stays in Japan, in relaxed, everyday environments (food stalls, the underground, telephone booths, etc.), where Bowie could enjoy a normal life, without being recognized.

• 13 “David Bowie… Pop Goes Kabuki”, Toshimada, November 23, 2010, https://toshidama.wordpress.com/2010/ (...)
• 14 Some of Yamamoto’s original designs also had their roots in German Expressionism, as is the case fo (...)

18When he met Yamamoto and Bandō, Bowie had already posed for photographer Michael Fish in a woman’s dress for the iconic cover of the British edition of The Man Who Sold the World (1971), and had thus begun to question and challenge the boundaries between genders, which he would keep on doing with “Rebel Rebel” on Diamond Dogs (1974). His appropriation of kabuki’s codes goes further in the same direction since kabuki, “by its very nature, it is a ‘gender-bending’ form.”13 Bandō, for instance, is an onnagata, a male actor playing a female role, as is the tradition in kabuki. Using Yamamoto’s clothes, originally designed for women, can also be interpreted along these lines. Even if most Westerners were not aware of their initial purpose,14 the feminine touch added by the Japanese designer’s clothes enhanced Bowie’s gender ambiguity. Yamamoto clearly perceived his costumes as expanding Bowie’s experimentations:

• 16 “Through this accumulation of visual effects and mannerism put forward by Bowie [...] it is a trans (...)

19As Frédéric Aubrun and Chloé Monin conclude, “Par cette surenchère d’effets visuels et de maniérisme mis en avant par Bowie […] c’est une identité transgenre, presque irréelle, qui est ici construite”.16

• 17 Michael Watts, “Bowie: ‘I’m gay and always have been’, The Melody Maker, January 22, 1972.

20Gender ambiguity was strengthened by Bowie’s statements to the press about his (claimed) bisexuality. In an interview given to the Melody Maker, he famously stated: “I’m gay […] and always have been, even when I was David Jones”.17 The interviewer, Michael Watts, added:

• 20 Alec Banks, “The 4 Japanese Luminaries Who Helped Shape David Bowie’s Signature Look & Sound”, High (...)
• 21 “David Bowie… Pop Goes Kabuki”, Toshimada, November 23, 2010, https://toshidama.wordpress.com/2010/ (...)
• 22 Kabuki now appears in many works of Japanese popular culture, such as anime.

25Some elements of Japanese culture highlighted by Bowie also connect to “a rebellious streak and unwillingness to conform to cultural norms”,20 two elements that have been central to the social and aesthetic construction of rock music. Such is obviously the case of his interest for controversial novelist Mishima, or for the extravagant, flamboyant and outrageous “basara” style of Yamamoto’s designs. The kabuki basara aesthetic of “visual excess”, its “garish juxtaposition of colours”21” resonated with Bowie’s nonconformity and trickled into the mainstream popular culture he helped define.22

• 23 Tickets for kabuki performances can easily reach 100 or 200 euros.

26If we understand the difference between the underground and the mainstream as the difference between what is available to a few, and what is available to many, Bowie is thus clearly mainstreaming Japanese culture, or least a few specific elements of this culture. And this is true, to a certain extent, for the Japanese audience itself, since the traditions he toyed with belong to an elite culture.23 But Bowie’s appropriation of practices little known outside Japan may also have made his art less understandable and approachable, a product of the avant-garde rather than a component of popular culture.

• 24 Helene Marie Thian, “Moss Garden: David Bowie and Japonism in fashion in the 1970s”, in Eoin Devere (...)

27There are obvious limitations to the mainstreaming hypothesis. The most obvious one is that most people in the West did not identify Bowie’s explorations as originating from Japan. Only recently has the general or specialized press focused on the Japanese connections, particularly in the wake of the David Bowie Is 2013 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Historian Helene Marie Thian was instrumental in this recent acknowledgment, from her early presentation in 2012, at a symposium in Limerick, Ireland, to her interviews of Lindsay Kemp and her contribution to the collective opus David Bowie, Critical Perspectives.24 Besides, one could claim that what became truly mainstream were not Bowie’s experimentations with Japanese culture, but what less adventurous, less original, but perhaps more “commercial” artists did with them, in various fields. In that case, “mainstream” would apply not only to what is visible by the many, but also to what is easy to access, and not too demanding in terms of cultural codes. We need to develop these issues more at length.

• 25 George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorielli, “The ‘mainstreaming’ of America: (...)
• 26 George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorielli, “Charting the Mainstream: Televi (...)
• 27 Ibid., 446.

28We first need to clarify what is generally understood by “mainstream” and “underground”. In 1980, George Gerbner and his team (Larry Gross, Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorielli) defined the concept of mainstreaming in an article on television as follows: “the expression of a commonality of outlooks and values”,25 “a commonality” which they detected especially among heavy viewers (at the time, more than 4 hours a day). For Gerbner thus, mainstreaming implies a leveling process. Indeed, the commercial imperatives of television require the support of the widest possible audience; differences of taste and opinion must therefore be reduced as much as possible in order to obtain an “average” type of programs, governed by a few common denominators. Furthermore, in terms of political impact, Gerbner not only identified mainstreaming as “a narrowing of political differences” but also “a significant tilt” towards conservative positions.26 He added: “Converging technologies fill the mainstream with a single perspective”.27

• 28 Robert Burnett, Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 83.
• 29 Stanley Dance even released records under the collective title “Mainstream Jazz”.

29However, in music, mainstreaming has been conceived less as a leveling process than as the absorption, the “uploading” of marginal, underground practices into mass consumption. The process has been described by Robert Burnett as follows: “Music often becomes mainstream only after an earlier incarnation as a counterculture genre”.28 A musical style, or a specific artist, developing in the margins of the musical market for aesthetic, ethnic, or sexual reasons, succeeds in seducing a few teenagers in search of exclusive signs of identity. The group of fans eventually becomes sufficiently large to convince the record industry that the given style could be offered to the general public with, or without, sonic and/or lyrical alterations. Once absorbed into the mainstream, however, the genre often loses its alluring “difference” and is rejected by a new wave of teenagers who choose to adopt a more confidential, challenging one. The first official occurrence of the “mainstream” label applied to such a combination of familiar and more challenging stylistic features dates back to the Fifties. Jazz writer and producer Stanley Dance used it to describe a type of jazz between traditional Dixieland and bebop.29 The term thus originally encompassed a dose of modernity, almost avant-garde.

• 31 “Music that can please anyone”, Christophe Pirenne, Une histoire musicale du rock, Paris, Fayard, 2 (...)

31Similarly, Belgian musicologist Christophe Pirenne uses “mainstream” to imply a capacity to sell, and reach a mass audience (“des musiques qui plaisent à tous”31), without taking risks or using stylistic innovations, but also as a style per se. In his excellent Une histoire musicale du rock, several sections covering different eras, are subtitled “Mainstream”. They are devoted to specific genres, and may include artists, who, depending on the nature of their production, are in other chapters considered as part of the underground or the avant-garde.

• 32 John Street, “Shock Waves: the Authoritative Response to Popular Music”, Come On Down? Popular Medi (...)

32When the first punk bands emerged, however, the relationship between the two concepts began to change. Punk’s underground, unconventional, and shocking character was precisely what appealed to the mainstream media, the crucial ingredient of its success. “Punk was not separate from mainstream morality and culture, but symbiotic with it” writes John Street.32 Punk, more than a form of underground rebellion against mainstream culture, was its parasite, a saprophyte simultaneously feeding on it and transforming it. To a certain extent, punk became mainstream by stressing and highlighting its underground nature. Consequently, it is difficult to observe with punk the same process we described earlier.

• 34 Lawrence Grossberg, “You (Still) Have to Fight Your Right to Party: Music Television as Billboard o (...)

34Thus, an artist like Billie Eilish can be officially lionized almost immediately after her first exposure online. The classic margin/center dichotomy no longer holds. What Lawrence Grossberg wrote as early as 1988 has now become even more manifest: “Today’s fan […] is neither mainstream nor underground but everywhere”.34

• 35 Kenneth Goldsmith, “It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing’”, The Chronicle of (...)
• 36 Indeed, according to its classic definition, [La culture postmoderne] s’accompagne du mélange de va (...)

35Bowie’s artistic approach has been instrumental in this convergence. Clearly, the analysis suggested by Kenneth Goldsmith that “literature has remained on two parallel tracks, the mainstream and the avant-garde, with the two rarely intersecting”35 does not seem to apply to music. In music, they do intersect, as is demonstrated by Bowie. His connection with Japan, indeed, highlights a global, postmodern36 strategy aiming at bringing together in a seamless whole usually contradictory elements: the high and the low, the here and the there, the traditional and the avant-garde, the classical and the popular, the underground and the mainstream.

• 37 Arnaud Vaulerin, “Derrière le Bowie hermaphrodite, l’importance de la culture nippone”, Libération, (...)

36In turn, the fusion Bowie performed in his art has trickled down into mainstream practices, including in Japan. A few random examples are the following : the cover of Irara, a 1980 manga by Kazuo Umezu, was inspired by Bowie’s kabuki style Pin Ups (1973) sleeve; several collections created in the 2000s by Dolce & Gabbana, Dior, or Jean-Paul Gaultier were directly borrowed from Kansai Yamamoto 1970s designs for Bowie; recently, Masumi Ishikawa has produced two modern ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) featuring iconic pictures of Bowie fused with elements of kabuki. Traces so numerous that for Arnaud Vaulerin, Bowie is a contemporary avatar of Japonism, the movement initiated in the second half of the 19^th century by artists such the Goncourt brothers and the impressionist painters, exerting an influence equal to the one these artists had on their epoch, but a 20^th century avatar, “transfigured by pop culture”.37

• 38 “David Bowie [...] was one of the few who maintained the popularity of a mainstream artist while ex (...)
• 39 Douglas Wolk, “How David Bowie’s ‘Scary Monsters’ Turned Avant-Rock Into Chart-Topping Pop. At the (...)

37However, the nature of the intersection actuated by Bowie is quite unique in the pop world. He does not only insert into the pop idiom elements that initially did not belong to it. He does not only make the mainstream more experimental, and the underground more accessible. He is one of the very few artists Pirenne identifies as belonging to both categories simultaneously: “David Bowie […] fut l’un des seuls à conserver la popularité d’un artiste mainstream tout en se livrant à des experimentations dont allaient se réclamer nombre d’artistes attachés aux nouvelles vagues”.38 Neither edulcorating his style, nor spicing it up, Bowie, at his (Japanese) best, is both radically adventurous and extremely popular, the perfect embodiment of what Douglas Wolk wrote about the 1980 album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps): “It was one of the most avant-garde/avant-rock, convention-defying records of his career […] Even so, Scary Monsters worked just fine as pop music”.39 Thanks to David Bowie, we can now all be “cats from Japan.”