9 Japanese popular music in Hong Kong
What does TK present?
With the rise of a popular music industry in Hong Kong, the influx of popular music from elsewhere has had a significant role in Hong Kong's popular music scene. Similarly, Japanese popular music has had a dominant effect since the 1980s. However, there has been considerable variation in the extent to which such transnational flows have occurred over the past few decades. This chapter examines contemporary representations of Japanese songs and singers in terms of differences in reception and production between Hong Kong listeners and those Japanese music-makers who attempt to promote their music in a Hong Kong market.
Initially this chapter will review the history of popular music in Hong Kong, focusing on processes of flow and how the image of Japanese popular music was presented and created precisely through such transnational flows. I will then discuss the kind of characteristics that have defined the Hong Kong popular music industry in recent decades. Following this, I examine the marketing strategies of Testuya Komuro, who is one of a few Japanese music-makers trying to promote their music to the pan-Asian market. To do so, the chapter considers his first concert to the public in Hong Kong in 1997 and some of the effects it had. In so doing, the differences between what he tried to offer to Hong Kong audiences and what they were expecting from his performance are highlighted. Finally, the chapter seeks to determine the central factors contributing to differences between producers and audiences.
Hong Kong's popular music history
The roots of popular music in Hong Kong
The development of the Chinese popular music industry can be traced back as far as the 1920s in Shanghai. In that time and place one was able to identify composers and lyricists producing music for primarily commercial purposes; hence their work constitutes a form of popular music. The typical music style of Chinese pop songs in this period is now called Si Doi Kuk in Cantonese. Many scholars and critics see the typical music style of Chinese pop songs in this period as the root or prototype of the Chinese pop song (Wong 1997: 18). The songs in this style were sung in Mandarin in a traditional Chinese minor key. Furthermore, these songs drew on aspects of Western music, influenced as they were by concession culture in Shanghai at the time. This hybrid genre was a very popular one in the 1940s. Distribution was helped considerably by the early establishment of a record industry, enabling the widespread sale of Shanghai pop songs throughout China. The Baak Doi record company (now Hong Kong EMI) was established by a British merchant in the 1930s in Shanghai. It held about 90 per cent of the market share of Mandarin pop song records from the late 1930s to the early 1940s in China (Wong 1997: 21).
Hong Kong popular music scene, 1950s to 1960s
The political turmoil in China at the end of the 1940s defined an epoch in Hong Kong's popular music industry. In response to the turmoil, the main centre of production for these types of songs shifted to Hong Kong, with Baak Doi moving their operations from Shanghai in 1952. Large numbers of refugees from mainland China were active listeners to these styles of songs. As a result, Shanghai-style popular music was mainstream in the Hong Kong popular music scene until the mid-1960s. At the time, the tunes from Cantonese opera (traditional opera from the Gungdong region of China) were popular as well. With the cultural influence of British colonialism and the development of radio broadcasting, Western music was also popular, particularly amongst Hong Kong youth.
Some locally produced pop songs which were sung in Cantonese (the regional Chinese language spoken in Hong Kong) also emerged during this period. However, even in the 1960s, the quality of these songs was considered very low, and lower-class local Chinese were the main listeners to these songs. Thus the image of locally made Cantonese pop songs was constructed as low-quality music best suited for entertaining the poorer masses (Wong 1997: 23).
In the late 1960s refugees from the mainland became used to living in Hong Kong and they began to regard Hong Kong as a living place rather than a place for temporary refuge. They started perceiving urban Hong Kong as a cultural centre and their idea of the mainland as a nostalgic cultural centre started to fade. As these refugees were the primary listeners to the Shanghai-style pop songs, the songs lost much of their attraction (Wong 1997: 26–7).
In this period many local bands such as the Lotus and Roman and the Four Steps became popular. They are noteworthy for the extent to which they copied Western music, mainly British and American songs, and for singing in English. This was the first time that local Hong Kong musicians dominated the Hong Kong hit chart. The reasons why this happened can be related to the shift in the perception of Hong Kong, as described above. The youth generation who were growing up in Hong Kong at the time, and in particular those who received their higher education under the colonial system, were not attracted to Shanghai-style pop songs like previous generations. They needed other types of music that they could identify with. Therefore they were attracted to Western music which was widespread at the time. For instance, in 1964 the Beatles had a concert in Hong Kong. Although Hong Kong performers copied Western songs and sang in English, this boom can be seen as preparing the foundation for the rise of locally made Cantonese pop songs in Hong Kong's popular music scene in the period that followed.
The 1970s
The 1970s was the period in which Hong Kong people recognised the presence of locally made Cantonese popular music. Prior to this, as I have discussed, there were Mandarin songs and English songs covered by local Hong Kong singers. But no locally made Cantonese pop song (that is, one that did not cover other songs and was sung by a local Hong Kong singer) made a significant impact on the Hong Kong popular music scene. The song ‘Tai Siu Yan Yun’ sung by Sindra as the first TV drama theme song in Cantonese was the first smash hit of a locally made Cantonese song in 1973. This was followed by Samuel Hui's ‘Gwai Ma Seung Sing’ and ‘Seung Sing Ching Go’; the former was the main theme song of the movie produced by Samuel's brother Michel Hui, and the latter featured in the movie as well. The success of these songs prompted an altering of people's ideas about locally made Cantonese songs. In particular, the success of Samuel Hui's songs was the most significant in shifting people's recognition of locally made popular culture in Hong Kong. The Cantonese song which had been deemed as lower-class entertainment was sung by Samuel Hui, a graduate of the University of Hong Kong, one of the most prestigious universities in Hong Kong at the time. The movie was directed by his brother Michael Hui, who is a graduate of another prestigious university in Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Furthermore, their family moved from mainland China in the early 1950s and they became successful in the entertainment world following hardship in their youth. Samuel Hui sang about the hardships of life for ordinary people in a humorous way. This attention to a broader collective experience was welcomed by listeners at a time when Hong Kong's local identity was burgeoning. These cultural aspects helped elevate the image of Cantonese songs, which had been deemed as lower-class entertainment in contrast with English or Mandarin songs in the 1960s. This shift also corresponded to wider social movements at the time. In the early 1970s the movement to make Cantonese an official language gained momentum. In 1974 Cantonese became one of two official languages in Hong Kong. From this period Canto-pop — locally made Cantonese pop songs — started making inroads into the mainstream of Hong Kong's popular music scene (Ogawa 2001: 123).
In this period many of the theme songs of TV dramas were smash hits too. This was the period when many Japanese TV dramas, dubbed in Cantonese, were broadcast. This was due to the lack of production capability in the Hong Kong TV industry, which started broadcasting in 1967. They tended to buy more Japanese dramas than Western ones as the former were relatively cheap and their settings were more familiar to viewers in Hong Kong. Some of the theme songs for these Japanese dramas were packaged as Cantonese cover versions and became hits. This in turn influenced a boom in Japanese pop music in the 1980s, which will be described in the next section (Ogawa 2001: 123).
The 1980s
During this period Japanese songs, both in their original form and in cover versions, started playing a significant role in Hong Kong's popular music scene. In particular, the presence of original Japanese songs had become very prominent by the mid-1980s. Several radio programmes playing only Japanese pop songs in their original version were broadcast. Many Japanese singers became very popular in Hong Kong. Even today I come across the people of this generation who listened to these Japanese pop songs in their youth, and they speak about Japanese popular culture at that time with a great sense of nostalgia. Many cover versions of Japanese songs were produced. For instance, ‘Yuyake no Uta’, originally sung by Masahiko Kondo, was covered by four different singers at the same time in 1989 (Ogawa 2001: 124)
Several factors contributed to this rise in the popularity of Japanese songs. First, the fact that the listeners had already become familiar with Japanese songs through viewing Japanese TV dramas helped foster their interest. Second, Hong Kong listeners to popular music at the time were tired of the musical style of Canto-pop, which was pretty formulaic. Third, the human resources — creativity in particular -of the industry in Hong Kong did not catch up with advances in production technology and the direction of consumers' tastes. Despite the fact that the technology and patterns of consumption allowed the industry to make a lot more records and CDs than in previous periods, the creative capacity of the industry was not enough to meet the demand. In addition, during this period the commercial music industry shifted its sales strategy from a ‘single record-centred’ to an ‘album-centred’ approach. This meant that they needed to produce a higher quantity of musical pieces than before for one record or CD production. Originally Japanese cover versions were used to fill this gap, though they never featured as the main song of an album. Despite this, listeners found the Japanese covers more appealing, and this led to a rise in their popularity. Responding to this demand, the industry treated Japanese cover versions as a centrepiece. This led to the listeners developing a greater interest in the original versions and the singers (Ogawa 2001: 124).
A number of music critics point out that the typical Japanese pop song melody line is well suited to Asian listeners, particularly to Chinese listeners. They argue that the typical melody line of Japanese pop songs employs a kind of pentatonic tone similar to the melody line in Canto-pop compared with the melody line of Western counterparts. Often the popularity of a piece of popular music is explained in terms of it achieving the right balance of newness, or strangeness, and familiarity. If it is too different from the familiar style of music, it will not attract listeners. On the other hand, if it is too similar to the familiar style, it will not provide enough stimulus for listeners. Rather, it will make them bored. In this sense, although the listeners to Canto-pop at this period were tired of the pattern of Canto-pop's melody lines, Western melody lines were perceived as being too different or strange. By comparison, a Japanese melody line offered the right balance of newness and familiarity. For instance, critics point out that the Japanese song ‘Ru Ju’, a song covered in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand and even in Turkey, has a melody line typical of this blend of the new with the familiar (Ogawa 2001: 124).
Several media magazines, such as City Magazine, heavily promoted the Japanese lifestyle as the lifestyle of the middle class, which was expanding in Hong Kong at the time. This appropriation of the Japanese lifestyle as the desired middle-class lifestyle enhanced people's interest in Japanese popular culture in general.
For a short period in the latter half of the 1980s, local bands, such as Beyond Taichi and Grass Hopper, became very popular. They were distinctive from others at the time in the sense that they played their own originally produced music. Curiously, they tried to tag a social message to their music. This was a particularly distinctive change, as the music scene at the time was heavily emphasising love songs and ballads. This could be seen as the burgeoning of the backlash against an overemphasis on cover versions, particularly cover versions of Japanese songs, which occurred in next period.
The 1990s
In the first half of the 1990s original songs became a trend. This can be seen as a backlash to too much of an emphasis on cover versions. In 1995, Chet Chat 903, a very popular music radio programme in Hong Kong, announced that it would broadcast only original songs as a change from the previous trend that overemphasised cover versions. This was indirectly triggered by the death of Wong Ga Kway in 1993, who was the lead singer of the Beyond. This band was tired of Hong Kong's popular music scene and they started working in the Japanese popular music scene. Wong died in a TV studio accident in Japan. Many fans of the band and people concerned with the Hong Kong popular music scene viewed the death as being indirectly triggered by an overemphasis on commercialism in Hong Kong music at the time. They blamed the Hong Kong popular music industry for not trying to provide the sort of supportive environment where young talent could grow. Rather, for the purpose of seeking fast financial returns, the industry had relied on the production of cover versions. After this incident various kinds of campaigns to promote young talent in Hong Kong were run. This resulted in a huge decline in the number of CD releases of cover songs in 1995 (Hara 1996: 152–7).
In the latter half of this period, the production of cover versions of Japanese pop songs was not as large as the 1980s. However, the percentage of cover versions in the total number of CDs released in Hong Kong is fairly high in comparison to markets elsewhere in the world. At the same time, many Japanese singers and their original songs became popular in Hong Kong. These singers and their songs became popular more or less simultaneously in Hong Kong and in Japan. For instance, until recently most CDs of Japanese original music sold in retail outlets were imported ones and were more expensive than locally made ones. But nowadays many CDs which become popular in Japan are locally pressed two weeks to a month after release in Tokyo. Surprisingly there are a few people who prefer buying imported CDs to locally pressed ones, despite the fact that the former are more expensive. Several of my informants suggested some of the reasons why: Japanese CDs are perceived to be of better sound quality; these listeners want a CD as soon as it has been released (suggesting a correlation between a perceived ‘authenticity’ and a diminished temporal proximity accompanied with a spatio-cultural exteriority in terms of the purchase of the commodity object); jacket designs in ‘original’ versions are supposedly better; and a bonus version of the originals are understood as more worthwhile to listen to. So original Japanese songs are maintaining a firm position in the popular music hit charts in Hong Kong.
Along with the reasons given for the popularity of Japanese pop songs in the 1980s, the following points can explain their popularity in the 1990s. First of all, at this time the industry did not initiate the flow of originals, as was the case in earlier periods. This can be partially explained by the widespread practice of pirate VCDs (video compact discs) of Japanese drama series. Aided by technological advances, pirate VCDs started being distributed in the Hong Kong market three to four days after the programme was broadcast in Japan. Even after the government started seriously trying to crack down on this kind of piracy, these VCDs, both legal and illegal, were items of popular consumption among Hong Kong youth. In the Japanese popular music scene these days, many CD singles sales try to make ‘tie-ups' or links with drama series. Often half of the songs in the top ten charts are dual packaged as tie-up songs. Thus, in viewing Japanese TV drama series, Hong Kong listeners have become familiar with many of the original Japanese hit songs.
With the widespread use of advanced media technologies such as cable TV and the internet, Japanese popular music has become much more widely available for listeners in Hong Kong. With the advent of these technologies, consumer choice for listeners has become much wider. As the consumer market in Hong Kong is smaller than Japan, the industry in Hong Kong cannot afford to diversify the supply. This presents a paradox between industry and audiences in that consumers tend to look for commodities, such as Japanese songs, in a more diverse market and will willingly purchase such products at the expense of local industries.
Summary of Hong Kong's popular music history
The trend of popular music in Hong Kong has been flowing within twin frameworks. One aspect of these frameworks is whether the song was a cover version or not. The other is whether the lyrics were in Cantonese or not. For instance, in the early 1980s the Cantonese cover versions of Japanese pop songs were popular in a local market. However, in the late 1990s, the original versions of Japanese songs, which were not cover versions and not sung in Cantonese, became popular. In the early 1990s, Hong Kong Canto-pop, which is original and Cantonese, became popular as the backlash against the trend of the previous period.
These frameworks are directly connected with the listener's image of Hong Kong-produced Cantonese songs as locally made culture. Until the 1970s popular songs were looked down upon as lower-class entertainment. However, in the 1970s they became the mainstream. In the 1980s, because the listeners became tired of the stagnant music patterns of Canto-pop, they again looked down on Canto-pop and preferred Japanese pop songs to their cover versions. After that, original Canto-pop songs became popular again. In other words, the trend has been one characterised by an oscillation between stigma and pride in original Cantonese songs as representative of locally made culture (Ogawa 2001: 126).
Characteristics of the recent Hong Kong popular music industry
In this section I will describe the characteristics of the industry and relate them to the peculiarity of cultural flows of Japanese popular music into Hong Kong.
Lack of creative human resources
Political turmoil at the end of 1940s in mainland China brought on a sudden change of what Arjun Appadurai (1990) terms ‘ethnoscapes', ‘technoscapes', and ‘finance-scapes' in Hong Kong's popular music industry. As discussed earlier, many people who were involved in the popular music industry in Shanghai, which was deemed the centre of Chinese popular music production at the time, fled to Hong Kong. This change altered Hong Kong's popular music industry; from its previous position as periphery, it came to occupy the centre of Chinese popular music production. However, as their creative capability was not able to meet market demands, the industry was forced to be on the constant lookout for other creative centres in music production, and to import music which could then be covered. Initially, the centres they linked with were Shanghai and Britain, with interest shifting to Japan in later periods. The trends of popular music in Hong Kong were thus moulded by cultural flows expressed in terms of popularity or rejection of the cover versions. This is one of the key reasons why the cover songs are so visible in the Hong Kong popular music scene.
Small markets demand constant hits
As the population of Hong Kong is small, it follows that the consumer market of Hong Kong is small as well. Despite the potential of a vast market in globally dispersed Chinese communities, the global success of a song or singer is dependent on success first being obtained in Hong Kong. And in order for pop music to be successful in Hong Kong, it is necessary to constantly produce smash hits in a short cycle. It is often said that ‘one hit in three songs is not enough in Hong Kong. There must be hits every three months'! For instance, Thomas Chow, one of the prominent lyric writers in Hong Kong, estimates the number of core consumers of the popular music market in Hong Kong to be about 200–300,000. In order to make a profit from CD sales, it is necessary to attract the majority of these consumers, claims Chow (see Uchida 1996: 134–5). In other words, within Hong Kong the market for local popular music is a small cake to share, and intensely competitive.
Because of this, record companies tend to release CDs of popular singers at short intervals. Often the marketing and production of a new CD occur simultaneously. A condition for this fast and constant production involves writing many of the music pieces in a very short time. In turn this leads the industry to rely even more on cover versions.
Conservative attitudes in music production
The industry tends not to take risks by being adventurous or by promoting new trends in pop music. Rather, they tend to be conservative, preferring to stick with the old pattern of Canto-pop ballad styles (Uchida 1996: 134–5). In other words, they cannot afford to fragment the market by offering different types of musical forms. However, consumer taste for popular culture in particular demands the right balance of familiarity and novelty. Yet the industry cannot risk investing in nurturing creative new and young talents which ensure new trends and market development. Therefore, the industry is characterised by a dependence on music trends developed elsewhere. Japanese pop music, either as cover versions or originals, has proven to be particularly suitable for adaptation into Chinese musical structures and cultural tastes.
Record companies with foreign capital
Most record companies in Hong Kong are subsidiary companies with foreign capital. This fact contributes to an industry orientated more towards profit than creative innovation. Although no popular music industry in the world can ever be only creativity orientated, the Hong Kong industry puts a great deal of emphasis on short-term capital gain. One key reason for this is that most of the companies are given a sales target to reach each year by the headquarters of their companies. This conditions the tendencies described above.
On the whole, the industry tends to conveniently employ music pieces from elsewhere, most of the time as cover songs, in order to fill the gap between their creative and production capabilities and the demands of the market. This constitutes an industry-led demand rather than listeners' demand for the importation of pop music.
Image of Japanese pop songs and singers in Hong Kong
As I stated in the previous section, until very recently the main in-flow of Japanese popular music was initiated by the Hong Kong industry for use as cover versions. Interestingly, the Japanese industry has not made many serious and active attempts to market its music to Hong Kong. Although there are several artists who have performed concerts in Hong Kong and visit Hong Kong to promote their music, there has been no consistency or sustained effort in this respect. As the Japanese industry was not serious in promoting their music in Hong Kong and the Hong Kong industry is mainly concerned with ensuring a quick supply of music by importing Japanese music, the process of constructing an image of Japanese music and singers has been left to a great extent to listeners.
It appears from my interviews that many listeners to Japanese pop songs, in their original versions, consider them to be representative of a Japanese ‘neatness' and ‘perfectionism’ in producing pop songs. Such impressions are vastly different from the actual circumstances of their production. For instance, numerous respondents perceive these songs to hold an authenticity, in that they do not lip-synch the prerecorded tape of the song.
However, the reality is very different. I have asked several backing musicians who have worked with both Hong Kong and Japanese singers about this. All said that unless there are unavoidable technical problems (such as if most of the instruments for backing somehow cannot be used and there is only pre-recorded tape with voice), most Hong Kong singers, at least those who are known by name to the listeners, sing live. Furthermore, some Japanese singers sometimes lip-synch to pre-recorded tape in concerts. This suggests how the image of Japanese neatness and perfectionism has a strong role in shaping the image of Japanese singers and songs (Ogawa 2001: 125–6). Thus the image of Japanese songs and singers in general among the listeners is a fairly positive one. However, we need to pay attention to the fact that these types of listeners did not start listening to Japanese songs just because they were Japanese. Different reasons prompted them to start listening to them. But when they rationalise why they tend to listen to Japanese songs, this sort of cultural rather than political image of Japaneseness comes to the fore. However, when we examine the images of Japanese singers and songs held by Hong Kong listeners compared with Japanese listeners, we can sometimes find interesting distinctions between the two. I will describe one of the incidents that illustrates such a gap, and the factors that contribute towards making it.
Most listeners to original Japanese songs first listened to the cover versions. It was only later that they became interested in the original versions and singers. Thus their images are to a certain extent influenced by the ways in which cover songs and singers are packaged and marketed. As I explained previously, until recently most of the Japanese songs that are imported are used for cover versions by local singers. The lyrics, of course, are changed into Cantonese. Cantonese is a tonal language and its tones are pleasant. It is very hard to directly translate the original lyrics into Cantonese and, at the same time, make the tones of the words fit with the melody line. Therefore it is common for completely different lyrics to be created from the original version. Sometimes the original lyrics that describe the feeling of a macho man are changed to words describing the broken heart of a woman. Due to the tonal nature of the Cantonese language, even in the production of original Cantonese songs, the melody is made first of all. Lyrics are then designed to fit in with the melody. Furthermore, as the industry's primary objective with cover songs is to produce musical commodities in a short period of time, there is no concern with whether the image of cover song and singer correlates with the image of the original singer and song. This creates a vastly different idea of the original songs for the listeners of cover songs.
Second, Hong Kong journalism has peculiar ways of informing the public about the Japanese entertainment world, and this also contributes to this gap between Hong Kong and Japanese listeners. The entertainment pages of Hong Kong newspapers are often divided into Hong Kong and world entertainment. About half of the world entertainment pages are occupied with gossip about the Japanese entertainment scene. However, most of the information is simply second-hand, or a direct translation from articles in Japanese paparazzi magazines, such as Focus and Flash, or gossip magazines of the entertainment world, such as Myojo and Heibon. Whereas in Japan, although information in these gossip magazines plays a significant role in constructing the images of singers and actors, they are only partial factors in the moulding of images. While a record company and a talent agency are trying to present his/her ‘hard official image’, these gossip magazines give it some ‘personal touches'. Although the information in gossip magazines can debilitate the life of the person as an entertainer, usually their images are placed somewhere between these two extremes. However, in this respect, the images of Japanese singers in Hong Kong are constructed with a heavy reliance on the images the gossip magazines present.
This type of gap in the image of a Japanese singer between Japan and Hong Kong has sometimes resulted in clashes between Japanese singers and Hong Kong's entertainment journalists. For instance, Masahiko Kondo visited Hong Kong in 1985. He refused to take off his sunglasses or to be given a welcoming kiss by a female Hong Kong actress at his press conference. Hong Kong entertainment journalists were annoyed to say the least and made pretty bad reports of the incident. At the time Kondo was trying to change his ‘official image’ from a young teeny bopper's idol to a sort of rebellious macho guy. As his song was popular in Hong Kong, he tried to live up to the image he was presenting in Japan at the time. However, the image that was projected in Hong Kong was still of his earlier incarnation mixed with information from his private life that was generated by Japanese gossip magazines. In short, the image Kondo tried to present and that which local Hong Kong journalists expected were vastly different. This type of clash between Japanese singers and Hong Kong journalists has happened on several occasions. Such cultural tensions are also due to a difference in the professional relationship between journalists and entertainers in Hong Kong and Japan. In Hong Kong, generally speaking, entertainers are much more journalist-friendly than in Japan. It has been suggested that this is due to the fact that the Hong Kong market is small, so the competition to attract public interest is harder. Therefore the entertainers tend to be more ready to attend to the expectations of journalists than in Japan.
On the whole, the image of Japanese singers and music in Hong Kong is primarily shaped by the following factors.
1 the image of Japan;
2 the image of cover songs;
3 listener impressions of melody lines;
4 gossip-oriented information of Hong Kong entertainment journalism.
When a Japanese singer takes on a strategy that stops him/her exposing their privacy through this image construction, Hong Kong listeners tend to choose Japanese singers or songs which can be a variant within mainstream music of their taste.
What does TK present in Hong Kong?
In this section we will look at Tetsuya Komuro's first concert in Hong Kong in order to examine the gap between what he tried to present and what the audience expectations of the concert were.
Who is TK?
Tetuya Komuro, who uses TK as his trademark, was born in 1958 in Tokyo. He was a member of the TM Network formed in 1983. The band itself was not remarkably successful, although they made several smash hits. However, before the band was disbanded in 1993 Komuro started working as a composer of pop songs. He wrote many hit songs and was considered more as a hit melody maker than as a member of TM Network. Since 1994 he has been working as a music producer doing total management for a singer or a piece of music, such as talent-spotting, training potential singers, composing music for them, doing music direction for them, deciding the best form of presentation for them and making tie-ups with drama series or commercial films. The singers and bands he has produced, such as Namie Amuro, Tomomi Kahara, globe (of which he is a member) and TRF, are constantly making hits. They are popular in Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. He was deemed to be the most prominent pop music producer/composer/performer in Japan until 1997. Although recently his influence in the Japanese popular music scene has not been as great, he is still one of most popular ‘hitmakers' in Japan.
It is said that one of the reasons for his success lies on the fact that he introduced the musical elements of dance music and club music — Euro-beat in particular — to pop songs. In 1996 he established the joint corporation TK News' in Hong Kong with News Corporation's ‘media king’, Rupert Murdoch. The corporation is aiming to produce musical talent in Asia. He is supposed to be in charge of finding talent and producing singer's entire music activities. He is notable as one of the few musicians who have started to market their own music in Asia.
TK presents ‘Groove Museum’: TK's concert in Hong Kong
In 1997 Komuro and the ‘Komuro family’ — Japanese journalists call the singers and performers that he produces by this name — were invited by the Beijing government to be special music envoys. They performed concerts in Beijing and Shanghai. After these concerts they flew to Hong Kong to perform two concerts titled ‘Groove Museum’. In these concerts Hong Kong Chinese singer Grace Yip also made her debut. She was selected from a semi-private audition in Hong Kong to promote Asian talents in the Asian popular music market. This was the first concert to the public Komuro had produced and performed in Hong Kong.
What does TK try to present?
In his press conference in Hong Kong, as well as in magazine interviews, Komuro emphasises that he wanted to let the audience in Hong Kong be exposed to the newest and most advanced music he creates. In so doing, Komuro adopts a pedagogical persona, since he seeks to educate the Hong Kong audience who, in his estimation, are not fully fluent in the complexities of his music. Responding to my question in the conference, he said that As I was invited as a special music envoy [to Beijing], this time I want to present the newest kind of concert that I have not presented even in Japan to an Asian audience.’ The concert consisted mainly of him playing his instruments with huge video clips and projected computer graphics, and with DJs playing dance music, as laser beams randomly carved out the performance space, rather than focusing on the performance of the singers of his ‘family’. Furthermore, for the concerts in Beijing and Shanghai the video clip that explains what groove music is was made on Komuro's instructions. It was shown at the beginning of the concerts. The title of the concerts — ‘Groove Museum’ — which he invented indicates his idea clearly. The audience were to learn what groove was at the concert.
The result of the Hong Kong concert: Groove Museum or station platform?
One of my friends who attended the concert described the movement of the audience as resembling ‘a platform in a train station’, meaning that the movement of the audience towards the exits looked like people moving from a station platform. Members of the audience were constantly leaving the venue in the middle of the concert. His reception by the audience in general was not good. There was no true standing ovation or excitement. Rather the atmosphere in the audience in general was something like ‘What's going on here?’ The ovation for the encore was so small that the performers were confused as to whether they should come out or not. While the Japanese media reported this concert as successful, the local media made some quite bitter comments.
There may be several reasons for the bitter start of Komuro's Asian promotion campaign. For instance, thee was a lack of advertising caused by poor coordination between the local promoter and the Japanese promoter. In fact, most of the audience who left at the beginning were passers-by who had been given free tickets at the door. (The ticket sales were not good.) Most of the advertisements were concentrated in the Japanese media in Hong Kong. A difference in the concept of the concert in Japan and Hong Kong seems to have contributed to the result. For instance, Chiu Tsang Hei, one of the most famous and active musical concert directors in Hong Kong, states that if a concert by a popular performer attracts only that performer's enthusiastic fans, it does not cover the cost of a concert in Hong Kong Stadium, which is the biggest in-house concert venue in Hong Kong. To make a profit, the concert has to attract a substantial number of people who are not enthusiastic fans of the performer. Usually Canto-pop singers make a great deal of effort to entertain the audience so that even those who are not enthusiastic fans can also enjoy the concert (Gekkan Honkon Tsushin 1996: 11, 34). Various items are used to encourage if not excite the audience: fluorescent ‘glow-sticks' and fans printed with the face of the performer, for example, are distributed to the audience as they enter the venue. Sometimes the performers invite members of the audience up on the stage to chat with them; on other occasions, gifts are thrown from the stage. Consequently, the audience for pop music concerts in Hong Kong are very much spoon-fed with ‘pleasure’. They are not ready to be educated or learn about the music as intended by Komuro.
The findings of the survey conducted with the audience before and after the concert suggest that the image of the singers that attracted the audience was rather different from that which appealed to Komuro. Like Kondo in the previous section, Komuro seems to have thought that the music, which he considered to be of superior quality at the time, would attract Hong Kong audiences because the singers he produced were popular in Hong Kong. However, the songs that were popular in Hong Kong were not exactly the same ones that gained popularity in Japan, although the singers were the same. Most of the songs that gained popularity in Hong Kong were slow ballads similar to the typical song style in the mainstream of Canto-pop, although they are not identical. It appears that the audience in Hong Kong were attracted to something ‘foreign but not too foreign’ in these Japanese singers. However, they did not seem willing to entirely change their music tastes by being educated by Komuro. Apparently the part of the concert that attracted most enthusiasm in the audience consisted of those instances when Tomomi Kahara sang songs with typical Japanese ‘cutie’ mannerisms. Thus Komuro's efforts to educate the audience were not received enthusiastically. Furthermore, the main topic on the entertainment page in most of the local newspapers on the day after the concert was Kahara's interview. And the main topic in the interview was that a blue mole was found on her finger (a typical gossip magazine topic)!
Conclusion
In this chapter I have examined the key characteristics of Hong Kong's popular music industry by reviewing its history. I have identified how these characteristics relate to particular influxes of Japanese music. Such cultural influxes have in many respects defined the industry, yet such shifts have not occurred independently of the media industry at large. The dynamic interrelationship between music, performers and the media is most apparent in the field of journalism, with gossip magazines in Hong Kong playing a substantial role in shaping the image of Japanese singers. This in turn affects how their songs are received by audiences.
Finally, by examining Tetsuya Komuro's first concert in Hong Kong, I have tried to illustrate the gulf between the audience-as-consumer demands in Komuro's concert and the expectations of the audience assumed by Komuro. Additionally, I have tried to illustrate how such a distinction leads non-local performers, who have started becoming popular in Hong Kong, to employ unsuitable sales strategies to promote their music. This chapter is not attempting to try to prove that Tetsuya Komuro's strategy was a failure. He is a very good market researcher and his first comment about the concert afterwards was that ‘we need to do serious market research here’. His efforts have been continuing and will continue. At the beginning of 1999 in Shanghai, he opened one of the largest-capacity discos in Asia, collaborating with Hong Kong capital. It is reported that he has tried to research the trends of youth in China, and at the same time he is trying to create and promote the trend of Hong Kong singers across Asia. It will be interesting to see how this will be received in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia.