Only a lump of meat (Jun Togawa)
Teinen Psiganga (諦念プシガンガ)
Yes, in the name of my love / I’ll even content myself with / this cruel treatment and forgive you
Just as with Mushi no onna (蛹化の女), I wrote down these lyrics without any hesitation, and they came out perfectly. I sat down with the manuscript in front of me, intending to stop should it turn out that I couldn’t write, and once I started writing I got it done in one or two minutes.
There were some older musicians who said “How could she possibly know resignation at the age of twenty?”, but this is what is at the core of my being. More than 30 years have passed since I wrote this song, but even now I feel that I want to keep on singing it, and Mushi no onna.
At my core there is always this feeling of resignation, of wanting to give up. It’s no exaggeration to say that this, for better or worse, is what determines what I am creating, my actions, and my thinking. There is a mutual connection between the awareness that I am ‘only a lump of meat’ that can be found in this song, and how I turn into the ‘pupa of a cicada’ in Mushi no onna; and there are links to many other works of mine in there as well.
When I made this song - I was, generally speaking, very busy. The first thing that comes to mind is this TV drama I did for Teruhiko Kuze. He was a really sadistic director. I had internalized that ‘actresses are just some kind of raw material for the director, they’re his slaves’ and had even professed so publicly, so I consented to all the scenes he wanted me to do, but then I started crying at this nude scene that just didn’t make any sense at all. In my career as an actress, that was the only time I cried when it wasn’t for a role I was playing. The tears just kept on falling. And then, there was the accident where I broke a bone while turning a TV ad. There was a scene in this ad where I had to fall down, we did it on a trial and error basis and I had to redo it tens of times. There was supposed to be this mattress at the spot where I was to fall, but the placement was a little off, and I broke my coccyx. I had finally become an actress, just like I had always wanted to be, but this meant that I had to take on all the work I was handed. I was at my limit in terms of the time available, of my physical capacities and also of the experience I had, and still I worked frantically every day. There were no days off, I gave it my all every single day, I had to undress for absurd reasons, I kept on fighting until I broke my coccyx. Even with the broken bone I didn’t want to imperil my status as a regular, so I simply continued working with this donut-shaped floor cushion that I carried around with me. All these physical demands and the mixed reception my work received among those who had been my fans since the Guernica days were taking quite the mental toll on me. Sometimes I was treated like a worm – some people wrote ‘die already!’. These were the days before the Internet, but even so there were critics who wrote stuff like ‘die already’ or ‘sooner or later, she’ll be weeded out’. The lyrics to Teinen Psiganga emerged at the time when all this was happening. And even so I wrote about ‘forgiving’. But ‘forgiving’ isn’t something that you only do for other people. If you can’t forgive, you’ll suffer yourself. Regardless of whatever cruel treatment I received, the only way to save myself that I could think of was forgiveness.
I was still only 21 years old, you know. That one time, Kan Takagi and Shingô Kubota and somebody else, a woman I didn’t know, were there. And when I borrowed that woman’s lap to rest my head on and tried to sleep, she said, ’This girl can’t go on living without being dependent on someone’. I remember that very clearly. I thought, ‘yeah, that’s me’ (but still, I was fighting alone). And then those three guys kept on talking:
‘How old is she?’
‘Apparently, she’s going on 21.’
‘I liked that time the best, when I was 21.’
‘Oh yeah, 21 is a great age.’
And I thought to myself, ‘oh, so apparently life’s supposed to be good when you’re 21’ – no, seriously!
Because that happened I remember the time when I was 21 very clearly.
Around that time, when we were together one day at the set, I overheard Kanako Higuchi’s manager saying to my manager, ‘now is the most important period for her’. I remember thinking, ‘yes, now is the most important time, I need to keep on fighting’. I felt like doing everything, like giving it my all. And because I had until then been living a sheltered girl’s life, I felt drawn to work and I dreamt about how working hard was supposed to be a wonderful thing, even though in reality I didn’t know anything about it.
I’m not certain if ought to talk about this, but since I won’t be able to talk about certain other things if I don’t even touch on this, I’ve decided to talk about it. ‘You may kill me like a cow, like a pig’ – there’s an extreme feeling of resignation, of perfect capitulation here that goes well beyond a simple ‘you may kill me’. And I’ve had these emotions since I was child, since way before I entered the world of entertainment. I’ve told people from around the time of my debut that I had led a sheltered girl’s life, but it wasn’t quite as easy as that. My father was doting on his ‘Junko’, but at the same time he put me through a very severe ‘disciplinary training’ accompanied by violence. He was very strict until I finished high school. I have already talked about curfews and not being allowed to go out before, but really, I was leading a life of being bullied and beaten at school, then going home and being beaten some more by my father in the name of ‘disciplinary training’. I wasn’t even allowed to cry, let alone talk back to him. When I was a child, nowhere did I have a place I could think of as home. I would read books alone, and fantasize about being somebody other than myself. My favourite song when I was an elementary school student went like ‘who turned me into this woman’ (‘konna onna ni dare ga shita’, from Hoshi no nagare ni by Akiko Kikuchi). You could say that I already loved nostalgic oldies at that time, but more than that it was about singing nihilistic songs for me. I was forced to quit my theatre troupe, and I was being told that I had no talent, and I got beaten up. You could say that from the time when I had to quit the troupe in the second year of elementary school right up to the end of high school, my life was all about giving up.
By the way, ‘Psiganga’ means ‘sitting in a circle, drinking alcohol, singing and dancing’. This was really the only fitting word for the song’s title. The record company arbitrarily changed this title to ‘One Lump of Meat’ (Ikkai no nikukai) (which when the album came out turned into ‘Lump of Meat’ (Nikukai)). And they spelled it ‘One Lump of Meat’ (ikkai 一塊) when what I really wrote in the song was ‘Only a lump of meat’ (ikkai 一介). They did this even though the kanji are very important! That was really annoying.
Folk songs from the Andes are sad. This sadness becomes something soothing. Inside myself there is something, a common point that both my song Kanon (カノン) and Andean folk music share. When I’m sad, I don’t listen to melodies that cheer me up, but to sad songs, and they soothe me. It’s the same principle.
Suki suki daisuki (好き好き大好き)
I love you, I love you, I really love you / If you won’t tell me you love me I’ll kill you
When I changed the arrangement of Mushi no onna (蛹化の女) to Punk mushi no onna (パンク蛹化の女), I received many surprised reactions. Before I put out Tamahime-sama (玉姫様), I had to do this nude scene for Mr. Kuze that I have already mentioned, so it was like I had already gotten used to my fans being angry at me. It was like I was saying to my fans, 'Don’t get surprised over trivial things like that’.
I wanted to keep on changing rapidly. Because when I first changed it wasn’t by my own design, but then they’d abandon me because I did what I liked best. When I was making Suki suki daisuki, I expected to get lots of surprised reactions. I wanted to create something that I wouldn’t be able to do once I got older. I’m glad I did this at the time. Because I thought that next I wanted to change into something different. I probably had this subconscious desire to transform myself.
With this song, the title came first, which is rare for me. It must have to do with the cloying verbosity of the original poem by Ronald D. Laing, where no matter how many times you’re being told that you’re loved, you still keep on asking 'do you love me?’, this kind of cloyingness. This was what had inspired me. This cloying sense of, ‘So you won’t do this much for me, well I will do at least that much’. But in Laing’s case it’s [the lyrical I] that asks 'Do you love me?’. In my case I wrote the lyrics intending to say [first 'I love you, I love you, I really love you’ and then] 'I’ll kill you if you won’t tell me you love me’. Depending on the listener however, the whole part from 'suki suki daisuki’ to 'ai shiteru’ [may be interpreted as part of the subordinate clause beginning with] 'if you won’t tell me’, so the lyrics then become: 'If you won’t tell me that you love me, you love me, you really love me, that you love me, then I’ll kill you’. So in some people’s interpretation the lyrics turned out to be even more cloyingly verbose.
I wanted to make this a fun song. That being said, unlike songs like Osozaki Girl (遅咲きガール)or Herikutsu BOY (ヘリクツBOY), when I wrote this it simply wouldn’t turn into a fundamentally fun song, no matter what. I wanted to get some laughs, and I crafted the first part with this in mind. 'A love that grows far beyond common sense / A rose-colored romance mutatedly erupted’. 'A pure love that might sooner be called violent / A Je t'aime with a force that will leave a mark in Shôwa history’, these lines. And they went down smoothly. I wrote them snickering to myself, and the following lines came to me ever more swiftly. The forceful protagonist of the song, the forceful words themselves, these really stupid lines that I was laughing at when I wrote them – I mean, 'A rose-colored romance mutatedly erupted’, 'A Je t'aime with a force that will leave a mark in Shôwa history’ - I was like, 'what am I even saying!’ But when I sang them, I used to sing them earnestly, as if I were explaining my feelings straight from the heart.
It was a complete about-face from the world view, the resignation espoused in Teinen Psiganga, it was more like “I want it! I want it!”. There were really many people with whom these lyrics resonated. This feeling of ‘Am I allowed to say something so extreme?’ - almost like a horse racing freely across the sky, without limits, without looking back and worrying about whether what you’re doing is right or wrong. I guess this loss of control comes through on Tamahime-sama. This ‘infantile violence’ that’s like an impulse that leaves you helpless, that you don’t know what you should do about.
I was in love when I wrote this, totally, happily in love. And when I wrote it, I was also feeling a fierce greed for a love that would go beyond even this romance, I was feeling like ‘More!’, even though I was plenty happy. I was being told ‘I love you’, but I was like, ‘My love can’t be as simple as that!’ Because I was happily in love for the first time in my life, it was like my engine had just started working normally. I was on unknown territory. And I wanted to overcome that, too. My romances before that had been fleeting things and I used to be the party who was stronger in love than the other guy, and I had to repress my affection, but this time I didn’t have to hold back anymore. Also, when someone in reality actually tells you ‘I love you’, you don’t really understand what’s so great about it. That’s why I had to put it into the song.
Also, the song Joseitekina, amari ni joseitekina (女性的な、あまりに女性的な) which I wrote for Yûko Miyamura is about motherhood. It’s not quite explicit, but ‘This force of nature / that has been given to humans / to women / so that humanity’s blood won’t perish’ refers to motherhood. To ensure that humanity’s blood won’t perish, things like menstruation and instinctive sexual desire exist. But when I was writing this I still wasn’t really aware of this, I didn’t really know what to do with these things residing within me. I was even clueless about making out. When I was writing this, I was thinking that this was just the way I was, and that I would probably always stay like this. (laughs)
At the time I said, ‘I love you so much and I don’t know what to do. When we were still fish we’d just throw some sperms at an egg, but something was lacking in that, and perhaps that’s why humans evolved the way they did.’ You want to do something to [for?] your partner, and you want to receive something, and this thinking has given birth to that behaviour. That’s the way I used to think before I thought of this theory about the continued existence of the human race. And once you’ve fallen in love with a partner, you don’t just want to do it one time, or one night long, you want to make out again and again and again. That’s what I was feeling. And when this feeling keeps growing, when it takes a different turn, it is joined by an excessive force that manifests itself in behaviour like ‘kisses like beatings’, or ‘embracing each other so fiercely that your ribs break’. This is certainly not domestic violence, it is because you love each other and want to hug each other so bad that there’s some excess force left over that you just can’t stop, that’s how it felt like.
Also, on the lyrics sheet it says ‘anti-nihilistic intuitive awareness’ (anchinihirizumu no chokkan ninshiki アンチニヒリズムの直感認識). But it shouldn’t say ‘intuition’ (chokkan 直感), it should say ‘intuitive apprehension‘ (chokkan 直観), you know, the Buddhist term [derived from Sanskrit prajñā]. The record company messed it up, and it’s stayed that way ever since.
Barbara Sexaroid
What are pride and stubbornness? / A pessimistic tale / Indeed, I’m an optimist / My code name is Barbara
You’ll laugh at me for sure for saying this, but when I was around 21-22 and not yet sure what I wanted to become in the future, I hadn’t decided on what kind of clothes I should wear, and I told everybody around me that I when I turned 26 I wanted to be like Sheila E., who was popular at the time. Not like her as in a percussionist, but as a “sexy woman”. But everybody laughed their ass off at me.
Then, when I really turned 26, people inside Yapoos tried to turn Yapoos into a full band [on its own], even though I thought that we’d be best not as 'me and a backing band’, but as a normal band. With myself as one of the band members. At the time, Yôichirô Yoshikawa was producing the 'Love’ side for Min Hisako’s 'Love & War’, and several Yapoos members jumped on board, and there were even ads in which they were credited as The Yapoos, The 'Yapoos’ you’re familiar with because of Jun Togawa. Even though we were working as 'Jun Togawa and the Yapoos’ and it was me who had decided on that name - I somehow felt like they had abandoned me. At the time, it was Yoshikawa who hadn’t told anybody he was using the Yapoos name, he was acting prematurely and he apologized for this later. I thought it was OK to use the Yapoo name for such activities, but I felt like it had to be me for the vocals, and the members apparently also had said that the vocals had to be done to be Jun-chan. So it became clear that it was mutual love. Great congratulations were in order.
I wanted to go for a rockband style next, completely different from what we had been doing so far. For the time being, I felt that we had exhausted what we had wanted to do, it felt like we had run dry. I thought we could still maybe work in cooperation with each other, maybe if we did it with the composition first, lyrics later method. I didn’t know what kind of kind of songs the Yapoos guys would write, but I would decide on the concept. The first thing to do was to at least take on the outward appearance of a rock band. Then I thought by myself about what the female vocalist of a rock band should be like. If she’d wear pants, they had to be black. I wanted to show off a garter, but when you’re putting on hot pants over that, wouldn’t people be able to see [too much], and so on.
Before this story, there had been talk of forming a unit with an SM concept. Like, the lyrics had already been written, I’d only have to write the music and then sing the songs. The lyrics were very explicitly SM, stuff like 'You’re my slave’ and 'Turn into a pig’ and such. But Ann Lewis had already been doing the SM thing, and so I thought I’d decline. When Kyôko saw me in a swimming suit, she often used to tell me 'You’re glamorous, I’m jealous about your curved waistline, why don’t you show that more?’, but I used to argue against that: 'Because I don’t want to show it. I’ve always worn clothes that hide your body shape as good as possible!’ While in the Yapoos, I’d been afraid that all the men who told me they liked me would go away should I decide to change my image and go for clothes that’d show off the shape of my body, and there was indeed a big movement. But, even if a part of the people had gone away, it weren’t as many as I had thought, and there still many people who liked me.
There are many different elements mixed together in the Barbara Sexaroid outfit. I put together my outfit by mixing the style of various female villains like Poison Ivy and Harlequin (whom I had seen in Batman when I was still a kid), the villains from Cutie Honey, and so on. For the upper body, a short shirt with 'BAD’ written on it. Come to think of it, the Barbara outfit would be just like a leotard if you covered up my belly. It’s not really all that showy. It was sexy, but was also made to play well among women. Then I turned to SF. I thought I’d change the image of the Yapoos to something that combines SF and '007’. We had meeting after meeting and I decided simultaneously on the lyrics, the composition style (1960’s 007 with a saxophone and a trombone), and on my outward appearance.
I created Barbara Sexaroid’, which personifies this image, with the goal of making it the image song of the Yapoos. Like, 'From here on, I’ll join the Yapoos’. Once a Yapoo, I was decided to keep my views restricted to those of just one member among others, but since nobody said anything about what we should be doing, I wanted to decide on at least the concept, and that’s what this song was for. Other than the outfits, there were some more elements that were subjected to sudden change, like the idea of 'writing emotionless lyrics’. Specifically, at first there was absolutely nothing like the portrayal of emotions, 'I have no pride, I’ll teach you something that is more important tonight’ - instead I was decided to do only descriptions of circumstances or things. The passage 'I have no pride’ was 'Our agency is N2’, or something. Because N2 was the name of the management office of the Yapoos at the time. Really only the surface, only the description of things. And then Nakahara said, 'I think it’d better to put emotions in there, like we always used to do until now’.
At the time, I had had enough of singing about emotions. I felt like I had exhausted that. I wanted to change not just the outfits and the sound of the Yapoos, but more fundamental things, so it’d be good if the lyrics touched only the surface of things. No psychology, just visual descriptions. With an image like 1960s Barbarella or Tetsuwan Atom. With landscape sketches like 'A shining highway made of tubes’.
But Nakahara told me 'It’s because this part (the emotions) is what’s great about you. I’m working with you because I think you’re someone who can touch people’s hearts with New Wave music.’ Because New Wave had started with acts like Devo, and was more about criticism or maybe jokes than about emotions. But these words from Nakahara hit me. Neither he nor I had the intention of moving people’s hearts, but he still told me, 'in the end, that’s what it’s about’.
I thought, villains are great. When it comes to rock music, being bad is better. An evil outfit, different from the old 'black Togawa’. But I wouldn’t wear high heels. I didn’t paint my fingernails red. I was afraid that either would make my look too suggestive. That’s why I chose to wear what I called my 'resignation boots’ instead, boots that had chains attached to those belt-like things, looking like fetters and rattling with every step that I’d take, plus yellow lipstick and nail polish. And I wrote the storyboard for the promotion video. In that one I actually do wear high heels. At the every time every band member played several parts, going even so far as to buy gunpowder. Only Nakahara I had thought wouldn’t go out of his way, outside of the music I mean. Many promotion videos looked like they were only aimed at a band’s fans, so I thought it’d be nice if ours could also bee watched by people who weren’t already fans. That’s why it’s movie-like. But still, musicians are at their coolest when they’re playing their instruments, so we put in music scenes at every turn.
As to the question of how I ought to go about inserting emotions into the songs (if that was what we were going to do), well, at the outset, it had been about whether there was some sexiness in that or not, but what continuously interconnects [my songs] since Psiganga and Mushi no onna is my lack of pride. My pride that has been trampled upon, that has been nipped in the bud and has never been allowed to grow. That has been covering up myself ever since I’ve been a kid. I thought that I ought to take a positive approach to what until now I used to call 'resignation’. In psychology, there is this word called 'vulnerability’ (varunerabiritî). It means something like a tendency to invite violence, or masochism, or weakness, and in Barbara there is this reversal [of perspective], where I’d take all these things [that vulnerability implies,] that had been shut up inside myself and that I had given up on in Psiganga and Mushi no onna, and now I’m looking down on the other party even as I’m falling down to the lowest place, saying 'I don’t have any pride’.
Akai sensha (赤い戦車)
Paintings / Almost cube-ish self-actualization / A colour that assures me that I was born to live
When I first listened to this song by Nakahara (Chû-chan), I had no idea what kind of lyrics I should write for this - the scale of this song was just too big. But I pulled myself together and wrote some lyrics alright. Then Nakahara told me, 'On the whole, this sounds kind of like a juvenile song’. This criticism really hit home, and I got depressed, swearing to myself 'I’ll never write lyrics again’. But I recovered and tackled the song once again. As far as I recall, the last part went 'to assure [myself]’ (kakushin suru tame). It probably went something like 'Hot desire bursts forth… to assure myself that I was born to live’, and I thought it’d be better not to talk about the emotions directly but to put a motif in there somewhere, and so I thought of colors, and the melody made me picture a tank, and I changed 'to assure myself’ (kakushin suru tame) into 'a colour that assures me’ (kakushin suru iro). And then, on the whole, it turned out OK once I went and went with red [as the colour].
At first this didn’t get through to Nakahara, it stopped dead because of the juvenile song thing. And then it did get through to him, once I really put my lifeblood into it, once I went somewhere really desperate and covered in blood (chimidoro). I didn’t think Nakahara would place such importance on emotions, since he has this dry way of speaking. This song, too, is one that I couldn’t have written if the composition hadn’t already been there when I wrote the lyrics. I was often inspired like this by Nakahara’s songs, and I’m really grateful for that.
But Nakahara really fusses a lot about lyrics, not just with this song. On Tenshi no yô ni, the other band members had contributed lyrics, but Nakahara was like 'I’m not in a position to talk since I can’t write [well] myself, but I really think Togawa-chan should write all the lyrics’. When he felt too embarrassed to call me 'Jun-chan’, he always used to say 'Togawa-chan’. And when he was too embarrassed to say even that, he sometimes called me 'kimi-chan’ ('you-chan’). He’s a really shy guy (laughs). So much so that on stage, he always positioned himself somewhere where he would stand out the least. I go way back with him, longer than with anybody else, and he really understands me well.
I guess you could call these lyrics kind of 'stubborn’. I repeat the same thing several times, e.g. in 'Without doubt, unshakeable, unmoving’. It’s the same pattern as in Fukeba tobu yona otoko. The time when this kind of strong resolve started budding inside me was my third year as an elementary school student. It started then and developed into what I have now. Of course, if you’re a third-grader, you have to obey your parents, you can’t enforce your will, but from that time onwards, my dream has been to become an actress, and I have nurtured that dream inside me. Even when I had already become an actress, I kept saying 'I want to become an actress’ and got laughed at for that: 'Aren’t you already one?’ - but I kept thinking, 'that can’t have been it’. Even when I received awards, this wouldn’t stop. Regardless of whether it’s singing or acting, there is no ceiling to the performing arts. Therefore, now even more than before, I need to restore the lower key [of my voice] to its former state. And then I need to go even higher.
But when I wrote this song, I didn’t just think of my dreams of becoming a truly able actress or singer, but of something like my views on life and death. Actresses or singers need to live energetically, and this by itself directly ties into [the question of] 'living’. That’s why I said, 'How many times have I overpainted this image with the same colour / And then: it turned three-dimensional, a model / Which means it’s fully realized’. I’m still far from fully realized, though.
At the time, I just wanted to keep on living somehow. I felt more and more like I’d be carried away by death’s temptation, but I was fighting. I was fighting with society. I was also fighting with the temptation of death inside of me. For me, there was this aspect to 'living’ where my soul needed to become desperate, where it needed to be drenched in blood. The 'red’ [in this song] is that kind of red. This blood that still I had even after I had been pushed down and beaten with stones and wounded and it had been washed away, these tears that even as an adult my heart was still crying. I couldn’t be in the world without fighting, and fighting meant my soul would become drenched in blood. No matter what I did I received mixed reviews, and that was OK, but my soul still bled.
At the time, somebody told me something. I’ve told you before how Nakahara had said to me that I was 'someone who could move people’s hearts with New Wave music’, and it was something similar to this, it was 'emotions you’re not ashamed of’. 'When I’m moved by this, I don’t feel ashamed of myself’, s/he said. From the second half of the 1970s onwards, we were living in an age where you couldn’t speak anymore about [silly things like] your selfhood, your ego or self-actualization, but isn’t that because this word 'self-actualization’ and its usage, like, other stuffy terms have tied down these words, so that they have become weak? They have only become associated with words like 'hardships’ (shinsan). But there is a necessity for all of these words.
I don’t have apocalyptic thoughts. It’s all due to my individual determination. If you’re trying to escape from 'the temptation of death’ and you don’t have something as strong as that, well, in my case, I would have been ripped apart. You need to stop short of being carried away by death’s temptation.
I wrote the slogan for the spine card of my first best-of album Tokyo no yaban myself. I didn’t want some commercial advertising slogan like 'Jun Togawa, breaking her silence after one year and a half!’, I thought it’d be nice to have something lyrical on there, too. Therefore it’s 'An attachment to life so strong that it’s ugly and mean, slipping through the cracks of desperation, bursting forth like a geyser. This, probably, is the barbarism inside of me.’ In Kyokutô ian shôka, because I used to squat down a lot at the time, there is a line 'If you squat down and cover your ears, you can hear it coming from the faraway [Buddhist service during] equinox, a song, of soothing’. You can’t hear if you don’t cover your ears. If you just behaved normally, you’d be swept away. Tokyo no yaban also connects into this. At the time, I used to call my survival instinct 'barbarism’ (yaban). With this song, Akai sensha, I had thought a bit more about the same thing. But 'Hot desire, bursting forth, has tossed this [on the canvas]’ is probably like barbarism bursting forth like a geyser.
I first attempted suicide when I was still a young elementary school student. Up until then I had been a good child, full of love for my parents, but come to think of it my father was like a violent tyrant, not that this is reflected in Gilgamesh, but well, I did get beaten and kicked. At the time I felt affection for my parents, but maybe it wasn’t just that, maybe it was also for myself. My mother terribly regretted that she had given birth to me, and she told me so directly. When my father was beating me, my mother often was out of the house, as a chaperone for Kyôko. My mother was fleeing from the house, you see. She had probably always hated this household, as well as my father. I was abused by my father in ways that left marks on my soul as a girl. When I was beaten, I was not allowed to cry. When I thought 'Someone help me’ and looked towards my mother, I saw her standing in the kitchen doing the dishes. I clearly remember the shape of her heels in her slippers. She ignored me and continued to do the dishes, because she herself would get beaten if she stopped him.
When my father’s kindness came through again and the violence would stop, my mother would give me this medicine called 'Balance’ that psychiatrists prescribe. But more than that I thought that I wanted her to fix a poultice for me. I understood that it was hard not just for me, but also for her. So I tormented myself with the thought that if I died, she could then divorce my father and become happy, and I cut my veins with a switchblade where they were shining through on my arm. I thought that I could die like this. My mother discovered me and brought me to the hospital, but I wouldn’t tell her why I had done this, no matter what. I thought in my child’s heart that our household would fall apart if I did.
There were lots of photos left from the time when I was born, and when I looked at them it seemed as if I had been a planned, a desired child, and I thought, 'Even if because of my birth you can’t break up with my father, why do you keep on telling me that I should not have been born, and why should I be kicked and beaten’. Until I became Jun Togawa and became famous, my little sister too had taken this attitude with me, having seen it in my father and mother. I attended a kindergarten that was being run by church, and I thought, my parents can’t help me, only God can. Because of all this, I had turned into someone who constantly wished for death.
My mother (even when she hated me) loved to dress me up, and would make me perms even though I was still in elementary school, and put this American hair cream in my hair every evening, and brush it with this brush made from pig bristles. That one hurt. I looked just like a doll. Maybe that was the reason I got bullied at school, because I looked different from the other kids.
My father told me that he’d let me practice the performing arts again once I’d go to college. He probably thought that until then I would have forgotten my childhood dream. That’s why, when after one year I still hadn’t forgotten my dream of becoming an actress, he told me, 'Give it up already! It’s pointless!’ Seven years of my youth I had earnestly practiced to become an actress, and after one year he told me this, as if he had fulfilled his promise with this. But my mother was different. It was just the other way around with her. One evening around the time when I had been forced to quit the troupe, when I was sleeping, I overheard her whispering into my ear. I pretended to be still asleep and heard her saying, 'Jun-chan, once you’ve grown up you can be anything you want. Of course you can become an actress’. She kept repeating this, just like with the sleep-learning method. I don’t think she only did it this one evening. Then, when I had grown up, about one year after I had entered university, she would let me learn modern ballet and vocal music and keep it a secret from my father, and would let me walk the path that would lead to me becoming an actress, and later on to my current singing career.
In the fifth grade of elementary school, in the toilet of a nearby park that had just been completed, I ran into a pervert. I was playing with Kyôko, and when by chance I went to the toilet alone was just about to enter the stall, I was pushed inside from behind, and he came in with me and locked the door. I resisted, but I only had the strength of a child, of a small girl. The instant that I got home I burst into tears (even though I thought that I mustn’t cry), and [my parents] went with me to police, and to the hospital. My high school was an all-girls school in Shimokitazawa, and the Inogashira line was alaways terribly crowded. I’m not exaggerating, I encountered perverts almost every day. Both at the time when I was fat and the time when I was thin, and I was so scared, I simply couldn’t say 'stop this!’ Then when I got off the train in Shimokitazawa, there would be this snot-like liquid clinging to my school bag. I often washed it away at the station’s water fountain. That’s why I would, even as an adult, always wear clothes that concealed my body shape. I erased all sex appeal from myself.
From my childhood onwards, life had been tough. There were these sexual matters, but not just that. For me, the 'mixed reception’ I would receive as an actress or a singer sometimes felt violent as well. But on the flip side, here’s what I think - it’s an impudent way to say this, but I think that I have also been loved more than other people. My fans call me 'Jun-chan, Jun-chan’, and I feel happy being thought of in this way. When I look back on my life so far, then I feel it’s a good thing that I have become an expressive person. If I had turned into someone who does office work at a company, I really don’t know what would have become of me. As an expressive person, and I mean not just as an actress, but also as a singer, as someone who writes lyrics and who can supply the part that can’t just be expressed through the lyrics with her singing style, I can express my true meaning. For me, this is 'living’. The barbarism inside of of me - my survival instinct - tries determinedly to keep on living, as the wild part of me, even when my heart tells me that I want to die. I was saved, was kept alive by this instinctive element that animals have. And I accept this as a good thing. I have avoided sexual expressions, but I thought, well, just once would be OK, and I wrote Bôjô no tsumi. Because that was about a guy I loved, and because I believe that among men as well there really are all kinds of people.
This may have been a strange tale to tell you given that I always say that I want to be 'pop’, but people probably won’t fully grasp my 'attachment to living’ if won’t tell them about things like that, too…
I thought that the people who were bashing me for daring to talk about 'resignation’ (teinen ) when I was around twenty didn’t really understand that there were people like [me]; and that living for me meant to have been drenched in blood, not just psychologically but for real, in the medical sense, and that mentally, it would stay like this for me in the time to come.
Jun Togawa
Translated by kiyoaki on jpopsuki.eu
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