The late David Bowie was a keen exponent of Japonisme, particularly in the first decade of his career, when Bowie / Ziggy Stardust / the Thin White Duke was searching for modes of Otherness that would be creatively productive.
The above photo shows him in his early seventies Ziggy Stardust heyday sporting a billowing cape created by the then little known designer, Kansai Yamamoto.
Bowie‘s name is emblazoned on the costume in kanji. In those days Japanophiles sometimes wrote their names in kanji rather than katakana, but few would have favoured the selection that Bowie / Yamamoto came up with:
出火吐暴威 = “Spit Out Fire Force Dignity”
On his 1980 album, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, the first track is even sung (partially) in Japanese. Originally Bowie intended to handle the Japanese language sections of It’s No Game Pt. 1 himself. This proved challenging in terms of fitting words to music, so he asked Michi Hirota, the wife of London-based percussionist Joji Hirota, to handle the Japanese sections, which are translations of Bowie‘s ominous lyrics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4pzY0kRHMg&feature=related
Michi Hirota had previously appeared in ersatz geisha garb on the cover of the Sparks album, Kimono My House. In contrast, Bowie wanted a tough, uncompromising vocal from Hirota that would subvert the stereotype of the demure, passive Japanese woman.
Hirota duly obliged with a chilling performance that might have come from a member of the Japanese Red Army. The transgressiveness of her performance was reinforced by the use of ore, the exclusively male pronoun for “me.”
While Bowie’s use of Japanese cultural tropes faded after the early 1980s, he maintained an enduring interest in the life and work of Yukio Mishima, the celebrated Japanese novelist who sensationally committed seppuku ritual suicide in 1970, just before Bowie‘s breakthrough as a the consummate shape-shifting rock star. Bowie named Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace of the Sea as one of his favourite books .
During his late 1970s Berlin years, Bowie painted a portrait of Mishima that was eventually put on public display three decades later. Bowie was also an avid art collector himself. In 1994 he bought Sir Eduardo Paolozzi’s bronze sculpture, Yukio Mishima: Second Version, which was on auction at Christie’s.
David Bowie’s 1977 painting of Mishima
Unlikely as it may seem, the nationalistic Japanese novelist and the protean British rock star had some traits in common. Both were flamboyant personalities who projected a gay ambience and became world-famous under identities distinct from their birth names (David Jones and Kimitake Hiraoka).
Both were fascinated by masks and costumes and both promoted themselves through memorable visual images. In Mishima‘s case, Eikoh Hosoi’s photographs presented him in a variety of transgressive poses – as Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows, wrapped in a garden hose, with a rose stuffed in his mouth, etc.
Both exhibited the influence of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Bowie through songs such as The Supermen, Quicksand, and Oh, You Pretty Things (“Gotta make way for the homo superior“).
Mishima, according to literary scholar Roy Starrs, was “the most thoroughgoing as well as the most successful Japanese Nietzschean.” In his novel Runaway Horses the pure-spirited terrorist articulates a philosophy straight out of Beyond Good and Evil, deploring the “scum of humanism” that degrades “the exalted desire to kill.”
In the mid 1970s, Bowie even had a brief flirtation with fascism. “I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader,” he told an audience in Sweden. On his return to the UK, he allegedly gave a Nazi salute from the back of an open-top limo.
Mishima did not flirt with fascism. He embraced it fully, indulging his “heart’s leaning towards Death and Blood and Night” by setting up his own 100-strong private army and preparing to die “with sword in hand.”
Most extraordinary of all, both men staged their own deaths as pieces of performance art.
Bowie appears to have prepared his demise with meticulous care. He released his last record, Blackstar, on his last birthday, complete with macabre videos and knowing lyrics (“Look up here, I’m in heaven”). Just three days later he made his departure, having kept his terminal illness a closely-guarded secret.
Mishima spent over a year secretly planning his gory end. The manuscript of the last book in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy was delivered to his publisher on the very day that he led four members of his private militia to the headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces.
Having taken the commanding officer hostage, Mishima proceeded to harangue the troops from a balcony, demanding that they rise up in an insurgency against Japan’s post-war democracy. When, as expected, the professional soldiers responded with jeers, he slit open his own belly.
Mishima’s second, who was supposed to decapitate him, botched the job, leaving him gushing blood and spilling out intestines. Another of his young men took the sword and did what was required.
It was more of a gruesome coup de théâtre than a realistic attempt at a coup d’état.
Bowie mentions the Japanese author’s name in the lyrics of Heat, from his penultimate album The Next Day, released in 2013.
Then we saw Mishima’s dog
Trapped between the rocks
Blocking the waterfall
The dead dog blocking up the waterfall appears in the beginning of Spring Snow, the first instalment of Mishima‘s tetralogy. It is an omen of the doom that awaits the beautiful youth who is the hero of the novel. The image was evidently on Bowie‘s mind in the last years of his own life.
Mishima: from Eikoh Hosoi’s Ordeal by Roses
In 1980 Bowie was advertising shochu rice liquor on Japanese TV, long before it became a fashionable tipple. Jun, made by Japan’s largest shochu producer, Takara Holdings, is still on the market today.
The tune used in the commercial, Crystal Japan, appeared on the B-side of Bowie‘s 1981 single Up the Hill Backwards and later as a bonus track on the CD version of the Scary Monsters album.
“When the times change, rock changes too. Crystal Jun rock Japan!” (= “Jun on the rocks”)
According to Kichiro Hosomi – an executive in Takara’s advertising department at the the time, later to be chairman of the company and deputy mayor of Kyoto – the idea of the campaign was to raise the image of shochu, then considered a cheap, working-class drink.
Bowie made an unpublicized visit to Japan and, at his own insistence, stayed at Kyoto’s celebrated Tawaraya Ryokan for a week. The filming was done in Arashiyama, near a shrine dedicated to the god of alcoholic drink.
Bowie appears to have taken some time off for a photo shoot in suburban Kyoto with Masuyoshi Sukita, who worked with him for more than 40 years.
Later on Hosomi-san was surprised to learn that many of the advertising posters had been ripped down and stolen by David Bowie fans. Film director Nagisa Oshima saw the TV commercial and was so impressed by the charisma of Bowie, who he had not heard of before, that he called Takara to find out more.
The upshot was Bowie‘s starring role in Oshima‘s 1983 film, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, which also starred Ryuichi Sakamoto, formerly of pioneering techno-rockers Yellow Magic Orchestra, and actor-comedian-auteur Beat Takeshi.
The film is based on Laurens Van Der Post’s novel, The Seed and the Sower. Echoing Van Der Post’s own wartime experience, “Mr Lawrence” – played by Tom Conti – is a Japanese-speaking British officer who is assigned the role of translator in a prisoner-of-war camp in Java.
One of the film’s key strands is the relationship between prisoner-of-war Major Celliers, played by Bowie, and the repressed homosexual commandant of the camp, Captain Yonoi, played by Sakamoto. Apparently, Oshima based Yonoi’s look and manner on Mishima, who he had met and debated several times. Van Der Post also knew Mishima (“a wonderful companion with a great sense of humour”) and considered Yonoi as played by Sakamoto to be a dead ringer.
The film’s famous main theme, composed by Sakamoto, is entitled Forbidden Colours in the vocal version on the soundtrack album. The reference is to Mishima‘s 1951 novel of the same name which explores the gay demi-monde of post-war Tokyo. Coincidentally, Sakamoto‘s father was an executive at a large publishing house who was directly responsible for handling Mishima.
In the film’s climactic scene the Christ-like figure of Celliers kisses Yonoi on the cheek. Effectively David Bowie was kissing a reconstituted Yukio Mishima.
“He took death very seriously – not in a negative sense, but in a positive sense… In Japan, it is not treated as something which is purely an end or purely negative. It is treated as something for which one needs almost as much preparation, ceremonial, devotion and love, as for marriage.”
Laurens Van Der Post on Yukio Mishima
“My death waits there between your thighs / Your cool fingers will close my eyes / Let’s not think of that and the passing time
My death awaits to allow my friends / A few good times before it ends / So let’s drink to that and the passing time”
My Death, by Jacques Brel, as sung by David Bowie