The Secret Doctor

[imomus]

Himitsu Hakase is "the Secret Doctor". He's a designer-turned-DJ turned absurdist torch singer who, in 2004, released a mini-album called Pomade on Japanese label Felicity. I think Felicity has some connection to the (now-defunct) Trattoria label via parent company Polystar.

Crooners Parodiques!

The Secret Doctor performs covers of 1960s Enka hits -- the kind of sentimental drinking songs sung by old men in karaoke bars in working class districts of Japanese cities -- backed by a band called The Emperors. He's currently touring Europe with the impossibly cute faux-canine Jon the Dog and their friend Yuichi Kishino, who looks like this and sounds like this.

Pantomime Synchronisé et Karaoke Ultra Pop!

The touring poster showing all three of them is made, I think, by the French geniuses behind Gangpol und Mit, who are probably classified as "kidult electronica". When Hakase and Kishino perform together they become the Gira Gira Knights and look and prance around like this:

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So why am I telling you about the Secret Doctor, Himitsu Hakase, and his Gira Gira Knights? I suppose because my last album is listed on iTunes as being in the made-up genre of "Absurdist Asian Torch", and I'm still interested in the traditional expressivity of Enka music run through a postmodern filter of some kind. I don't mind there being humour in the result (as long as it doesn't become the kind of retro-loungecore comedy act that flourished ten years ago), but there should be emotion too. And here I think Himitsu scores. Have a listen to his lusty rendition of "Yokohama":

Yokohama (mp3).

Is it just the indestructability of the song, or does he sing it like he means it? Does he give it all he's got? If you felt it, you belt it!

Variety shows and their nostalgic melodies!

There's another song here, a chanson-style ode to the city of Kobe. Doesn't he make the reverb soar? It reminds me of the trashy but swashbuckling pop hits the kabuki actors in Shinsekai (where the kabuki theatre shares a building with a run-down porn cinema) swagger-sing while grannies stuff 10,000 yen notes into their costumes.



I think I'd prefer to hear some of the cute uncertainty of Jon the Dog in these songs, or perhaps the eccentric electronic arrangements of Gangpol und Mit dragon-snaking around them. But their ambition is rousing. I think I might have one more album of Absurdist Asian Torch in me.

My favourite song of the moment also has an Asian and absurd edge to it. Here's "The Stitching Song" from Shohei Imamura's brilliant, Brechtian film The Pornographers (1965). It's being sung here right at the end of the film, with one of the sleazy filmmakers now living on a small bobbing black boat, singing insanely to himself as he stitches dolls together -- less trouble, he's decided, than real women.

Stitching Song (Stereo mp3 file, 2.2MB)