The Tigers: Part 2 of 3

Part two of my series on the very first idol group, the 1960s Japanese Group Sounds band the Tigers! This episode picks up with the Tigers debut and ends after the release of their groundbreaking album "Human Renascence".

Part 2 of 3 of the history of the first major Japanese idol group: The Tigers!

  1. “ヘイ・ジュテーム” by the Tigers, from The Tigers Sounds in Coliseum (1970)

  2. “Yesterday” by the Beatles

  3. “Boku no Mary” by the Tigers

  4. “Wild Thing” by the Troggs

  5. “Seaside Bound” by the Tigers

  6. “Mona Lisa’s Smile” by the Tigers

  7. “Kimi Dake Ni Ai wo” by the Tigers

  8. “Milky Way Romance” by the Tigers

  9. “Flower Necklace” by the Tigers

  10. “Massachusetts” by the Bee Gees

  11. “Legend of Emerald” by the Tempters

  12. “C-C-C” by the Tigers

  13. “Boat without a Sail” by the Tigers

  14. “Bluebird” by the Tigers

  15. “Koi no Kisetsu” by Pinky and the Killers

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Welcome to Filmi Girl’s Idol Cast. Hit it! 

Our opening song today was ヘイ・ジュテーム taken from the Tigers live album The Tigers Sounds in Coliseum recorded August 22, 1970 at the Denen Coliseum in Tokyo, a tennis arena which sat somewhere in the range of 10-12,000 people. It was torn down in 1989.

When we left off at the end of episode 1 the Funnys, the blazing hot garageband who had been burning down the jazz kissas of Kansai, had become the Tigers, and the Tigers were just about to debut with a brand new style of music heavily influenced by two of the most powerful women in the Japanese art and entertainment world at the time: Kawazoe Kajiko, aka Tan Tan, fashion designer and hostess with the mostess of Japan’s premiere salon, Chianti, and Watanabe Misa, visionary talent agent and star maker. Under their watchful eyes, the scruffy rockers had been transformed into exotic and princely dreamboats ready and waiting to whisk every young lady in the nation off to fantasyland.

And to go with the new band name, the five members of the Tigers picked stage names. Three stuck with their old nicknames from the Kyoto era. Bassist and band leader, tall lanky Kishibe Osami remained long, tall Sally. Cute as a button drummer Hitomi Minoru had long been known as Pi. And the handsome, gentle rhythm guitarist Morimoto Taro was simply “Taro.” The two youngest members were the wild cards. Sensitive and artistic lead guitar Takahashi Katsumi and the reserved but ambitious lead singer Sawada Kenji. Takahashi Katsumi thought his name sounded way too plain jane and boring. In Japan, Takahashi is a last name about as common as Smith or Jones. So Takahashi Katsumi became Kahashi Katsumi (which was way cooler) and for his nickname he chose “Toppo” after Toppo Gigio, the popular Italian mouse character. Sawada Kenji chose “Julie” for his nickname, after actress Julie Andrews.

The Tigers would use the two new nicknames publicly, but in private Toppo remained the more intimate “Katsumi” while Julie would forever be “Sawada”.

Now, when the Tigers heard the song intended to be their debut single for the first time, Taro remembers thinking, “Um, what the fuck is this?”  

ぼくがマリーと あったのは

さみしい さみしい 雨の朝

フランス人形 抱いていた

ひとりぼっちの かわいいこ

愛してる ひとこといえなくて

つない思いに 泣いたのさ

When I encountered Mary it was on a lonely lonely rainy morning

She was hugging a doll from France, all by herself, the poor girl

I love you, the words I couldn’t say.  The memory of it had me crying.

I can just picture their faces. Dolls from France?! Are you kidding me? These were guys who had just a couple of months ago been singing about not getting any Sat.is.fact.ion, baby. They were rock and roll! Toppo in particular just haaaaated it. He derisively called it the maruhen style--or fairy tale style--but it had been decided and there was nothing they could do about it. They’d signed the contract.

The new sound was being handled by the songwriting team of Hashimoto Jun, lyrics and Sugimoto Koichi, music. The pair were two of the many freelance songwriters who hung around, yes, Chianti. Watanabe Misa didn’t have to even leave her dinner table to find material for her new pet project.

Hashimoto’s father was a man named Yoda Junichi, a famous children’s book author and expert in children’s literature from way down south in Fukuoka. And intentionally or not Hashimoto’s lyrics were strongly influenced by his father’s work, giving us that maruhen imagery the Toppo hated so much. Now Sugimoto, on the other hand, you might remember him from the last episode as the television producer who gave the Tigers their name, was a jazz guy. But when faced with the challenge of creating a new Japanese pop sound for this scruffy garage rock group, he turned to a man who had done the same thing with another group of scruffy garage rockers. That’s right. Beatles producer George Martin. Sugimoto was intrigued by George Martin’s experiments with layering classical elements like string sections overtop the basic rock set-up of drums, bass, and guitar. Listen for yourself:

But this delicate, methodical style was unlike anything the pure rock’n’roll Tigers had attempted before and it took them something like 30 takes to get it right when they went into the recording studio for the first time. And 50+ years later you can still hear how tentative they sound. Pi’s nervous drumming ticking away in the background like a stuttery clock. The string section adds a sugary, sticky gloss that holds all the pieces together but it’s still an awkward fit. But it was with this song that the Tigers debuted on February 5, 1967. Boku no Mary; My Mary. I’m going to cut between the recording and a stage recording taken from the Tigers live album “On Stage,” that was recorded in August 1967. Listen for the drums in the live version when they hit on the “Aishiteru” part. You can still feel the constrained energy, how badly Pi wants to rock on ahead and pick up the beat. 

That gap between that initial maruhen sekai fairy tale image and their actual live performances would be a major source of tension for as long as the Tigers were together. Another source of tension that came up in these early days--the tension that would eventually lead to the shattering of the band--was the two very different temperaments of Toppo and Julie. Julie may have had a bold stage image but off stage he was the opposite. Julie was more or less okay with doing whatever he had to do to remain in show business. If that meant doing goofy comedic skits on variety shows and singing about dolls from France, so be it. He’d do it with a smile. Toppo was the exact opposite. Julie played along with the idol persona, telling the teen magazines that he couldn’t date just one girl when he belonged to all of Japan. Toppo started dating Miss Japan, 1968, Iino Yasuyo, telling the teen magazines that his life was empty without love. Toppo had strong opinions about art and about the world and was not afraid to let you know about them. His unhappiness and resentment at the box he’d been shoved into would simmer under the surface for years before finally boiling over in spectacular fashion. 

In the Tigers biography, the author mentions a particularly memorable early fight over a cover of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” that had Toppo stalking off from their dorm to wander the streets all night. He would return sheepishly in the morning, but it would not be the only time it happened. Looking back now, having been in my own share of intra-band fights and knowing the way these small things can seem so large at the time, there’s something quite precious about a bunch of 20 year old men fighting bitterly, with their careers as musicians on the line, over a cover of one of the stupidest songs ever written…

All through this debut period, they were still living in their tiny dorm, relatively unknown. They cleaned, cooked, took lessons in music, singing, and dancing and performed with their old friend Uchida Yuuya on the jazz kisaten circuit. They were friendly with the fans they did have, girls would sometimes ride home on the train with them or pop by the dorm with food. 

But all of this changed with the release of their second single on May 5, 1967, the up-tempo mega-bop Seaside Bound. Seaside Bound was again written by the team of Sugimoto and Hashimoto but rather than the exotic fairy tale imagery of dolls from France, it had lyrics about going dancing at the beach. It was a raucous certified sing-along-dance-along song much more in line with what the Tigers had been doing back in Osaka than Boku no Mary. With a peppy eighth note rhythm, Pi on drums backed up by Julie on percussion, you can’t help but nod your head and tap your toes along with the beat. (I dare you. Just try not to tap your toes.) They even had a little dance that goes with it! The verses also feature Sally’s deep bass voice harmonizing underneath Julie’s lead. Listen for it! And don’t forget to do the fan chants! GO BOUND!

Seaside Bound (go bound!) was Japan’s first real rock hit and it sold more than 400,000 copies. The Tigers hadn’t even been in Tokyo for six months but almost overnight the handful of fans who used to stop by to drop off much appreciated food and gifts turned into a tsunami, literally hundreds of teen girls would clutter the sidewalks around the Tigers’ dorm, peering into their windows and annoying the neighbors. The police would have be called to try and get the girls to disperse. The Tigers didn’t have a personal phone in their dorm (personal phones were still not universal in the 1960s) so girls would simply ring up their landlord at all hours of the day and night. 

The official fan club boomed and an unofficial network of Tigers fans popped up around the country. Watanabe Misa had intended the Tigers to compete with the Beatles and the Monkees for the affections (and pocket change) of the nation’s horny teen girl demographic. And it worked… a bit too well. And now the boys were caught in a trap. They had no concept of celebrity or of being idols. How could they? They’d basically gone from being normal high schoolers to having to call the police to be able to leave the house. The Tigers in early 1967 were still just kids who loved rock and roll. But the industry was ruthless and they were not going to let things like “artistic differences” fuck up the waves of cash about to roll in. 

The Tigers were different from those foreign groups because they were right there in Tokyo, not in far off London or Los Angeles. And they quite literally spoke the same language as their fans. Brands could link up with them, teen girls could connect with them in a way that they just couldn’t with foreign groups. The Beatles were great but they were also distant, speaking a foreign language, part of a different culture. They weren’t going to fly to Tokyo to film a chocolate advertisement and be available for monthly photo spreads in Myojo magazine. The Tigers lived in your neighborhood. You could talk to them face to face. They were on regular television, on billboards, in magazines. 

The other factor here is that the summer of 1967 was tense, politically, with many people convinced that the world was on the brink of World War III. America’s global anti-communist crusade spilling into the armed conflict in Vietnam, the armed conflict in the Middle East, rumblings of a new war on the Korean peninsula, the provocation of China with the signing of the ASEAN treaty… For teen girls, the Fairy Tale Princes must have seemed like a nice distraction from the mess that adults were making of the world around them. 


Critics, on the other hand, did not take so kindly to our fairy tale princes. In fact, they were quite vicious, calling the Tigers fake and manufactured. “Is it fake, what’s happening on stage?” the Tigers members would ask themselves, baffled by the accusation. “The cheers and the audience clapping along, is that all fake?”

In the summer of 1967 The Tigers (and manager Nakai) finally moved to a new dorm, one away from the hordes of teen girls littering the sidewalks. Sally and Julie shared one room, Pi and Taro shared another. Taro and Sally’s sisters lived in a room upstairs and helped with housework, cooking, and dealing with the numerous fan letters and gifts. And Sally’s beloved younger brother Shiro would also move in, bunking with Sally and Julie, and helping with day to day tasks where he could. Officially Toppo was sharing a room with Manager Nakai in the Tigers dorm but in reality he had moved to an apartment near Chianti, one with a view of Tokyo Tower. And he had moved alone. As his dissatisfaction with the Tigers image grew worse, it leaked into his behavior. He began oversleeping, passive aggressively showing up late or--in one memorable instance--simply not showing up for a concert at all.

Sally was the group’s leader in name but he wasn’t the type to seek out conflict and rather than confront Toppo about his behavior or confront their management--I mean, it’s not like the rest of the group loved the fairy tale style either--the tension just simmered. As Pi later said, “We were all good kids. We did what we were told, even if we didn’t want to.” 

It was in the middle of all of this that the Tigers 3rd single, “Mona Lisa no Hohoemi” (Mona Lisa’s smile), was released on August 15, 1967, another Sugimoto-Hashimoto joint, but this time Sugimoto was not about to suffer through 30 takes to get it right. He hired professional studio musicians. 

The song has a baroque pop feel, well in line with what groups like the Left Banke were doing. Taro’s electric harmonica, as well as the harmonies from Toppo and Sally on the chorus, were the charm points. The lyrics--much to Toppo’s chagrin, I’m sure--are all about crying over a girl who has left while gazing a picture that hangs like Mona Lisa on the wall. It was an even bigger hit than Seaside Bound. 

The Tigers released their first album, a live album, on November 5, 1967, but it was swallowed by the dark cloud of hysterical fandom that had been tailing the Tigers since Seaside Bound had exploded. It’s referred to now as the あやめ池事件 or the Ayame Pond incident and it would stop the Tigers momentum dead in its tracks. Despite their popularity, their record sales, their clean cut image, their hard work, for the Tigers there would be no awards, no television appearances, and no Kouhaku Utagassen… not for any of the long-haired Group Sounds bands. Rock, even princely fairy tale rock, had proven to be too dangerous for mere mortals to handle.
Here’s what happened. 

On November 5, 1967, the Tigers were set to record a performance of “Monolisa no Hohoemi” for national broadcaster NHK’s “Uta no Grand Show” which would then air in mid-November. This was supposed to be kind of a test run for the real prize, a slot on NHK’s Kouhaku Utagassen, the prestigious end of the year musical extravaganza watched by almost every person in Japan. We’re talking way bigger than the Super Bowl halftime show, way bigger than Eurovision. The stakes were incredibly high.

The performance was held at an outdoor stage at the Ayame Pond Amusement Park near Osaka. Something like 7,000 fans turned up overwhelming the venue. Due to what we can only assume was a lack of proper crowd control about 30 girls were injured in the crush. Some quite seriously. A newspaper at the time quoted a 16 year old girl named Junko from her hospital bed, “この次のチャンスにも、絶対見に行くわ。タイガースの舞台だったら、死んだっていいもん。” “I don’t care if I die if I get to see the Tigers play.”


This was all the proof the crusty old establishment needed that these guitar bands. These long-haired rockers were dangerous. It wasn’t about crowd control or even of the fanning of hormonal young teens’ worst instincts by the management company, no, it was the Tigers fault. The song was cut from the show and the group was banned from NHK. Worse still, schools also picked up on this way of thinking and began to crack down on kids who attended concerts. Punishing students if they were caught out at a rock show. And, in a move that will sound very familiar to any idol fans listening, Watanabe Productions took all that money the Tigers had made for them and did… nothing. 

What could the Tigers do but keep moving forward? They took off on a European trip over the winter holidays to try and get a sense of the market there. And on January 5, 1968 back home they released “Kimi Dake Ni Ai wo” a blazing rock song written (again) by the Hashimoto-Sugimoto pair. The thing to listen for is that delicious vocal harmony width with Julie’s strong lead sandwiched between Toppo’s high tenor and Sally’s bass vocals on harmonies. That blend of voices became one of the Tigers musical trademarks.

Despite the controversy surrounding them, Kimi Dake ni ai wo got all the way to number 2 on the Oricon charts. 

In February 1968, the Tigers began filming for their first movie, a Hard Day’s Night-inspired romp titled “Sekai wa bokura wo mattieru” The world is waiting for us. The Tigers played themselves, a rock band called the Tigers, and the film followed them as they re-enacted some events from the recent past--they played gigs, ran from fans, moved dorms, and… rescued a girl crushed by a mob of fans. But the girl (played by a fellow Watanabe Productions ingenue, a pixie-haired singer named Kumi Kaori) wasn’t just some girl, she was… a secret space princess who had crash landed on Earth and given her minders the slip because now she was in love with Julie. The Tigers and the Space Princess spend some time getting into hijinx but eventually she has to return home to outer space. Except, she’s fallen for Julie!! OH NO! She tries to kidnap him but he gently explains that he belongs to all the young ladies of Japan and cannot marry her. The chanting voices of the fans at home are enough to break the spell and Julie returns in time for the Tigers play their show at the Budokan. Go Bound!

Surprise, surprise, the Tigers hated the script. For one thing Julie’s popularity as the lead vocalist and face of the group was starting to grate not just on Toppo but on all of the other members. For another, they were really growing tired of the princely image. And I totally get where they’re coming from but as an idol film enthusiast, the film is a delight. A fine addition to the quick cash grab idol film canon. Most of the heavy lifting acting-wise is done by an extremely talented cast of character actors--to include a former Takarazienne!--and, of course, the lovely Kumi Kaori. And the Tigers scenes are balanced by a truly hilarious gang of fangirls who call themselves “Mrs. Julie” “Mrs. Sally” and so on. It’s a real window into what the fangirl culture of the time must have looked like.

The theme song of the film was a mega-scholocky ballad written by, yes, Sugimoto and Hashimoto, titled “Ginga no romance” or Romance of the Milky Way. The lyrics go a little something like this: 

銀河にうかべた白いこぶね

あなたと訪ねた夢のふるさと

シルビーマイラブ

In the Milky Way floats a small white craft

I fondly remember that dream I spent with you 

Shubi my love 

Shubi being Kumi Kaori’s character’s name in the film.

It’s a treacly monster of a song and Tigers fan girls started up a tradition of replacing “Shubi” with their favorite member’s name. Toppo, my love…. Toppo my love.. My loveeeeee. That seems straightforward enough, right? Treacly ballad sung by a dreamboat prince from outer space. It’s gotta be a hit. Well, things are never so straightforward for the Tigers. 


So, the B-side to Julie’s space prince ballad was reserved for a special tie-up with Myojo magazine. I’ve mentioned Myojo before but it’s a long-running celebrity-focused magazine for young women. It started up in 1952 and the name translates to “star” as in “Stars of the Silver Screen”. Actress Tsushima Keiko was on the cover of the first issue. Myojo is still publishing but it has turned into a 99% Johnny’s & Associates focused magazine. Those old issues were more like… a Teen People or something like that. Myojo were the ones who coined the term “Group Sounds” back in early 1967. They had a large readership and were an influential print outlet.


Anyways, so Myojo was obviously invested in the stable of celebrities popular with their readers--teen girls--and to that end they joined forces with the Tigers record company to host a contest where the winner would get her lyrics sung by the Tigers themselves!! Also some cash and a drum kit! But what a prize, right?! This Myojo tie-in song was the song slotted in as the B-side to the big movie theme song. A throwaway song. But in an effort to dispel some of the tension that had been bubbling under, Toppo was going to sing it. 

The winner, chosen from over 130,000 entries, was a 19 year old girl from rural Hokkaido. Her lyrics, set to a mournful Sugimoto tune, became “Hana no Kubikazari” or Flower necklace. 

涙の しらとりに 花の首飾り

かけた時なげく しらとりは 娘になりました

おお愛のしるし はなの首飾り

The tears of the white swan when I put the flower necklace around her neck, 

she gave a mournful sigh and turned into a woman.

Ooo the flower necklace is a symbol of love.

Despite his distaste for fairy tale imagery, Toppo threw himself heart and soul into the recording. He was a huge fan of the Bee Gees--not the Saturday Night Fever Staying Alive Bee Gees we think of today but these guys. And that is the feeling he tried to channel in his voice for “Hana no Kubikazari”.

The Tigers premiered the two songs at the Budokan during filming for the movie on March 10, 1968, and the single--with Julie’s Outer Space Prince A-side--was released on March 25. The Tigers movie premiered two weeks later on April 10. By April 15th, the Tigers had their first number one song--not the movie’s theme but rather Toppo’s B-side, “Hana no Kubikazari”. Radio DJs and fans alike had flipped the disc. “Hana no Kubikazari” would stay at the top of the charts for seven weeks selling well over a million copies and would become not just one of the Tigers most beloved songs but one of the most beloved songs of the entire Group Sounds era. This was no teen dream ghetto song but a genuine nationwide hit song. And the only one not happy about this was… Julie. 

Poor Sawada was shocked and upset that a song without his vocals had become such a huge hit. He was the lead singer. If he wasn’t singing, what use was he in the band? The gesture intended to smooth over tensions between Julie and Toppo had backfired spectacularly.

April wasn’t just a “Hana no Kubikazari” extravaganza but it also marked the beginning of the Tigers collaboration with girls magazine Teen Look, they sang the magazine’s theme song, and, more importantly, with Meiji Chocolates. Girls could save up and get these massive posters of their favorites, so big, in fact that they really could only properly be hung on the ceiling. Sales of the chocolates were spurred by a rivalry with another popular Group Sounds band called… the Tempters, who had linked up with rival chocolate manufacturer Morinaga Chocolates, and girls started just buying and giving away chocolate for the bonus goods and to prove their group was the best. Now the Tempters were a great group but more importantly their lead singer--the late はぎわら けんいち aka Sho-Ken or “Little Ken”--in 1968 was considered by many teen girls across the country to be Julie’s top rival for Cutest Guy In Japan. We’ll meet him again later but for right now all you need to know is that just after “Hana no Kubigazari” started falling in the charts, the Tempters rose to number one with “エメラルドの伝説” or the Legend of Emerald, an angsty rock song right in line with what the Tigers had been doing--featuring orchestral flourishes, maruhen imagery lyrics about missing emerald green eyes and this fabulous jangly guitar line from the Tempters leader and guitarist . Sho-Ken’s distinctive vocals, doubletracked and layered thick on the chorus, cut through the shlock like an arrow, giving a very different feel to the Tempters songs despite the similarities than the Tigers warm vocal blend.

Their vocals might have blended together like a dream but the Tigers, by summer of 1968, were falling apart. Watanabe Productions, clearly not having read Aesop’s Fable about the goose that laid golden eggs, were determined to squeeze every last drop of gold from the Tigers even if it killed them. Julie, for the first time, was given solo work. An acting role in a feature film. He took it gladly.

Toppo, boosted by the success of “Hana no Kubigazari” and inspired by his late nights with all the who’s who of the arts scene at Chianti, began insisting that he be allowed to contribute to the Tigers music. 

Piecing together the summer of 1968, what seems to have happened is that during the recording for their sixth single--yet another Sugimoto-produced song called “南の島のカーニバル” or the Carnival of the Southern Island, Toppo quits the band for the first time. 

Toppo returns, the song is dropped, and their sixth single has no producer listed. “C-C-C”, released July 5, 1968, and another number one hit, was written by かせ くにひこ of the Wild Ones, another group under the Nabe Pro umbrella with lyrics by Yasui Kazumi aka ZUZU, a Chianti regular, friend of Toppo, and a lady we will be seeing again later.

“C-C-C” is a frothy delight, playing up the Tigers strength--their vocal harmonies and natural good humor--combined with a bouncy bass line and a loose-and-easy drum beat. It feels… free. 

The summer of 1968 needed all the lightness it could get. To get a sense of why the Tigers, especially those Tigers who spent their evenings with the intellectual elites at Chianti, might have been feeling unhappy with singing about southern carnivals, here’s what’s was happening across the world: Riots, protests, and war. 

In America, the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr led to the burning of African American neighborhoods in cities like Washington, D.C. In France, students and workers went on strike across the country, sending the nation into panic. And in Tokyo, students took over the campus of the prestigious Tokyo University (Todai) to protest, among other things, the high tuition, low acceptance rates, and unfair working conditions of graduate students especially in light of recent reports of university tax evasion and money laundering. The students would eventually force the resignation of the entire board of trustees but 165 universities across the nation would join in with the protests. Revolutionary-thinking students from Todai would even join in protest with the farmers outside the city trying to hold onto their land in the face of development and face off against American military using Japan as a staging ground for the war in Vietnam.

Watanabe Productions might have preferred that the Tigers stayed firmly grounded in space prince, chocolate box idol territory but they weren’t about to kill their golden goose. For their next album--the Tigers first proper album--the boys from Kyoto would finally have some creative control of their own music, with both Toppo and Taro contributing songs, and with all of the members except Pi getting a song on which to sing lead. That album would become Human Renaissance, released November 25, 1968. 

It was also around this time in late 1968 that the rest of the Tigers left the nest or, rather, their dorm and took apartments of their own. While Taro, Sally, and Julie seemed fine with the change, Pi was deeply unhappy and would say that he wished he could go back to their pre-debut days all living together. He began to feel that maybe they didn’t have anything special to offer as individuals. That the magic had been created by the five of them together, as a group. That unhappiness would only grow deeper over the next two years.

Human Renaissance is ambitious, both musically and thematically. It sounds like nothing the Tigers had ever attempted before and nothing like anybody else was doing either. There was no room for schmaltzy songs about dolls from France or bops about going to party down by the beach. Human Renaissance is here to cleanse your soul. Song by song it strips away whatever meaningless garbage has been cluttering your thoughts and fills the space with the beauty found in sadness and yearning. Of being human. 

Toppo, if you remember from the previous episode, had been politically aware even as a young teen, but the other member who really threw himself into this new direction was… good-natured, easy going drummer Pi. There’s a reason Pi and Toppo had first become friends despite their age gap. Pi might not have been as vocal about it as Toppo but his mind was as sharp as Toppo’s and he also felt the pull of the events happening around him. He’d been deeply affected by seeing the counterculture musical HAIR on a trip to New York. The musical, which tells the story of young people trying to break free of the boundaries and expectations put on them by a cruel adult world, seems really cheezy now but at the time the young people seeing the anti-war, anti-establishment story felt like they weren’t alone. That there were others who felt the same way, who saw the stupidity of the world around them.

The lyrics for the majority of the songs on the album were done by Nakanishi Rei, a well-regarded and award winning poet, novelist, and prominent pacifist.  The album opens with a song called 光ある世界 or There is Light in the World. Sung by Julie, Nakanishi’s lyrics echo the Milky Way Romance but instead of the boat sailing among the stars, our boat has lost its way under a hoshinakiyoru or night sky without stars. The arrangement is bombastic, with Sally’s bass vocal anchoring us in a storm of sound.

The whole album is incredible and worth an episode just on its own from the Last Day of Pompeii inspired cover to Sally’s mournful church organ solo song but for now let’s just listen to a bit of two of the standout tracks. 帆のない小舟 or The Boat Without a Sail. It’s got this hypnotic 6/8 beat of layered vocals from Julie and Sally that feels like waves lapping the sides of a boat with Toppo’s piercing, plaintive tenor floating on top as he sings to feeling directionless. Like a boat without a sail. And spoiler alert, this song was a good indication of the direction his solo work would go in.

The other song worth spotlighting is Taro’s contribution to the album. Aoi Tori or Bluebird. Its’s a song that would become one of the Tigers most beloved songs and the final single of the Toppo era of the Tigers career. 

The lyrics are heartbreaking in their simplicity and the combination of Julie and Taro’s voices is just… devastating. Taro’s soft, gentle harmonies under Julie’s voice are just… one of the ultimate treasures in the Tigers catalog. Taro was rightly very proud of this song and very moved to hear the orchestral accompaniment for the first time. Not too shabby for a kid from Kyoto. To think that his parents had dreamed no further than him becoming a banker and now… here he was with a whole damn orchestra playing his music.

青い鳥は飛んで行った あの広い空へ

狭いカゴが いやだっだのか

My blue bird flew off into the wide open sky. I guess it hated that small cage.

After the recording was finished for Human Renaissance, the Tigers began filming for their second film “Hanayaka Naru Shoutai” or Fabulous Invitation. Although the second film was just as much of a cash grab as their first film was the Tigers now had more influence over their own creative direction and it shows. The film again has them playing lightly fictionalized versions of themselves but unlike the first film, they are allowed to play themselves. The film--which has the Tigers playing a high school band who hop a train to Tokyo with not a single yen between them--showcases the Tigers easy camaraderie and extremely charming personalities. The songs, taken from Human Renaissance, also give the film a deeper emotional resonance than the light bubblegum of the first film. The climax has the Tigers faced with a tough choice: a fabulous celebrity career on the one hand OR saving the life of a dear friend on the other. Guess which one they choose? The final scene has the Tigers playing Taro’s beautiful “Aoi Tori” on homemade instruments on a beautiful field of flowers outside the hospital… where their friend is well on the way to recovery.

Human Renaissance was released on November 25, 1968. The film was released on December 19, 1968. On December 24, the Tigers held a meeting. Toppo was tired of being forced to dress up like, for example, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves for a laugh on television, which they had done a few weeks earlier for Fuji Television. With this last album the Tigers had proven they were serious musicians. They shouldn’t have to make fools of themselves. 

Toppo was talked into staying. Saying they would again be able to write their own album, do their own music. And it worked for a few weeks but… Group Sounds was on the way out and the comfort of Kayoukyoku was BACK baby. While Tokyo students and leftists rioted and protested for fair treatment throwing the nation into crisis, the top song of the second half of 1968--the number one single from basically September 1968 to February 1969--selling almost 3 million copies was the almost incandescently corny “Koi no Kisetsu” by a vocal group called Pinky and the Killers. The dorky group in goofy bowler caps on the cover of every single one.  

There was no way Watanabe Productions was going to allow outspoken Toppo with his anti-nuke activism and political awareness any real freedom. Group Sounds may have been on the way out but the nation still needed a sugary distraction. And forcing Toppo to shut up and act the fool was killing him. 

On March 5, 1969, during the middle of recording, Toppo just… went out and never came back. And he didn’t show up the next day for a television filming. Or for the recording session the day after that. And with that, nine months after he’d first tried to quit… Toppo was finally out of the band.

At the end of the day, Watanabe Productions knew that as long as they had Julie--not only the nation’s number one heartthrob but also a man who had no problem wearing make-up and a wig for a laugh on television if that’s what he was told to do--they didn’t much care about losing the eternally troublesome Toppo… or indeed the rest of the Tigers.

Stay tuned for part 3!

Filmi Girl

I’ve been a fan of Asian pop culture for over 20 years and want to help bridge the gap between East and West. There is a lot of informal (and formal) gatekeeping that goes on and I’d like to help new fans break through the gates.

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Episode 23: SixTones and SnowMan

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Episode 18: The Tigers Part 1