Pachelbel, Pavlov, Muzak, and the catchy fish song...

Pachelbel's Canon will forever take me back to lunchtime in the Japanese school staff room, with children shitsureshimasu-ing in and out, and a tray of cold fried fish or little cold gray weiners in front of me, with a half-pint of that slightly cardboard-flavored Japanese milk. I'm not sure if that's what Pachelbel had in mind or not, but he is a sort of pre-recorded dinner bell for us every day at my base school, followed by some Verdi overture, before Vivaldi sounds the call to recess. In the afternoon we know it's cleaning time when Mendelsohn comes in with his Italian Symphony, and then that's it, until Bach starts up his Morning Meeting Brandenburg #3 at 8:05 the next day. Every day there it's the same program. I don't know if it's intended as some kind of Pavlovian conditioning to spur the kids into action or what. I almost think there would be an uproar if they played Pachelbel early in the morning-- kids might start circling their desks and getting out their chopsticks and placemats. At my other schools, a similar musical routine takes place, though each school has a different repertoire. One of my schools lets the kids listen to their Backstreet Boys or Orange Range or whatever, after the let's-get-ready-for-lunch tune is over, but an apparent over-arching rule of Japan is still at work: Everything must have a theme song.

It's not at all limited to schools. In the grocery store, in addition to the store jingles, you might find a little tape player next to the deli section looping a song about how korokke is watashi no oishii tomodachi, "my delicious friend," or the mushrooms in the produce section singing in a low voice, "Kinoko koko kono genki no ko..." The fish song was actually a real radio pop song several years ago. I can't understand much beyond "sakana sakana sakana" because of the high-pitched voices and my underdeveloped Japanese ability, but I am told that it extols the nutritional virtues of fish. Sickeningly catchy too.

One of my first impressions of Japan was in the bullet train station in Okayama, where every time a train arrives the intercom plays a Japanese-cutesy-ized Muzak version of "I've Been Working on the Railroad," all round bouncy synth tones. After being in Tottori for a while I noticed that not only would they play the same song on repeat in the train station for weeks at a time, but the special tourist bus which heads hourly for the sand dunes blares, everywhere it goes, a special cartoony theme song which was composed specifically as the Tottori Sand Dunes theme song. I can't recall it at the moment, but I'm sure if I heard it now, a flood of memories would come rushing back of random things I was thinking about when I heard the bus go by on a daily basis.

What is especially strange to me is the seeming ease with which the Japanese can become used to and/or completely tune out all the theme songs around. Particularly the people who work around them. The bus I ride every morning turns off its engine every time it stops for more than 10 seconds or so, and when it does it plays quite terrible toy-keyboard-demo-style Musak. If I were a bus driver I would never turn off the engine, because there are only about 10 tunes on the tape, or rather, about 20 seconds each of 10 tunes, after which it fades into the next tune. The tunes include "O Tannenbaum," "It's a Small World After All," John Lennon's "Imagine," one of those Peruvian folk tunes that you can hear played by traveling folk troupes in shopping malls across the US, and several tunes I recognize but don't know exactly. Since August, the same 10 tunes. I can assure you that "O Christmas Tree" and "It's a Small World" are hardly what I want to be listening to groggily every morning at 7 AM for months, and I'm sure the bus driver gets to listen to it well more often than I... Even worse, two well-known Best Buy-type electronics stores that I know, DeoDeo and Yamada Denki, both play a 45-second loop of their theme songs, complete with irritatingly high or low vocals, non-stop all day, every day. I cannot imagine working in a place like that, listening to that nonsense all the time. Even being in the store for 10 minutes, I tire of the repetition and start to dread having the ridiculous jingles in my head the rest of the day.

All I can say is that the public use of music is different here, and that sometimes my brain just screams music abuse! It snuggles right up against some other aural annoyances that abound, such as all the candidates just before election time who take advantage of the lack of noise ordinances, driving around in vans lined with loudspeakers blasting onegai shimasu's and introducing themselves over and over at peak volumes from 7 AM on any day of the week. (I actually once saw a helicopter with loudspeakers strapped on the bottom, flying low over Tottori-shi doing the same thing.) If I were Japanese, I would certainly vote for whichever candidate did the least of that particular type of campaigning...

Sometimes it just seems like unchecked noise pollution. The ping-ponging crosswalks. The beeping automatic doors. Talking ATMs. The sensor-automated speakers bleating irasshaimase and arigatou gozaimasu in certain restaurants and shops. The random gangs of minors intentionally drowning out all conversation by revving their motorcycle engine at full blast from one end of the street to the other, turning around and doing it again, legally immune from being pulled over by anything less than a roadblock (but that's a different story...)

Let's just says that Japan has different concepts of music and noise, and it sometimes draws the line between them in a different place than a Westerner otherwise might...