Six Degrees of Cultural Separation: Kyu Sakamoto to Rammstein

Back in the day, science historian James Burke had a couple of documentary success with “The Day The Universe Changed” and “Connections,” in which he teased out a narrative thread from seemingly disparate parts. His purpose was to show how scientific developments were made and transmitted.

Today, the Internet lets you find your own connections, and this one concerns not the passing of scientific information, but musical and cultural.

Let’s begin with “Sukiyaki,” a song that reached #1 in 1963 in the United States, despite being a) a song sung in Japanese, not a common language in our country, and b) a song whose title is about a hot-pot dish best known as a product of the Chung King Company.

I discovered this track today listening to “Greatest Songs Ever: Japan.” While I was working on something else, I had decided to google some of the tracks to find out more about them.

This is what I discovered about “Sukiyaki.” YouTube, that Alexandria Library of world culture, has preserved Kyu Sakamoto’s video of “Sukiyaki” from a 1963 TV show.

The song’s original title is “Ue o Muite Aruk?.” It means “[I] Shall Walk Looking Up.” Wikipedia isn’t clear about the lyrics, saying only it “tells the story of a man who looks up and whistles while he is walking so that his tears won’t fall. The verses of the song describe his memories and feelings.”

As music, the song combines that easy listening vibe common at the time with what I feel is a Western (as in wild West, not Western civilization) cadence. One could hear Gene Autry cutting a version.

Whatever the case, the song was an international hit. It became another U.S. hit in 1980 by A Taste of Honey, after the lyrics were given an (uncredited) rewrite by Janice Marie Johnson, who found a translation of the lyrics, and decided that the song could have been about “as a man on his way to his execution, as someone trying to be optimistic despite life’s trials, or as the story of an ended love affair. “Me being the hopeless romantic that I am,” she explained, “I decided to write about a love gone bad.”

YouTube has preserved A Taste of Honey’s performance of Sukiyaki on “Solid Gold.”

The song remains popular. Japan Post in 2003 issued a stamp to commemorate its 50th anniversary.

Unfortunately, the singer, Kyu Sakamoto, lost his life in 1985 in the crash of Japan Airlines flight 123, considered the third-biggest crash in the world. Those of us with a more mournful (or poetical) bent, nothing that Kyu had been born three days after Pearl Harbor, would have seen his life bookended by tragedy and disaster, even if he would probably disagree.

But there’s one last thread to tease out of this skein. The crash of Flight 123 was particularly tragic because the plane, having suffered mechanical failure due to shortcuts taken by a repair crew, fought to stay in the air for more than a half hour before it crashed into the mountains of central Japan. In 2004, the German heavy metal group Rammstein released “Reise, Reise” (translated as either “Rise” or “Travel” depending on which flavor of German you prefer), inspired in part by Flight 123. On one edition of the CD, the group included the last 40 seconds snippet from the recorder of the doomed Flight 123.

I don’t know what this all means. I’m just fascinated how a simple search for information about a song can lead to these connections. How a song like “Sukiyaki” can find an audience from people who don’t know the language, even when it’s given a ludicrous title (Wiki mentions that it’s like retitling “Moon River” — a lovely romantic song — “Beef Stew.”). How a song can be given completely new lyrics and still find another audience. And the random nature of tragedy, and the degrees of separation that transmutes one sad song into another tragic song.

All unintentional, and all seemingly fated.

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