What was the first Japanese song to top the US charts?
Despite boasting the second-largest music market in the world, Japanese rock and pop have held little presence in American charts.
Music is a big deal in the tiny but powerful East Asian island country. Most will instantly defer to its mega J-pop industry when considering Japan’s biggest musical exports, beloved in the West by Otaku Japanophiles and the domestic industry worth billions due to its fervent fan enthusiasm.
Then there’s the alternative underground. Be it GISM, Merzbow, or Boredoms, Japan enjoys a venerable reputation for representing some of punk and electronic music’s most abrasive and confronting acts ever unleashed to popular music’s fringes.
The only two Japanese global titans to make a dent in world record sales are the pop-rock duo B’z. Formed in 1988, members Takahiro ‘Tak’ Matsumoto and Koshi Inaba have gone on to sell over 82million certified albums, placing them as the 57th biggest-selling artists in the world ever and beating ‘Empress of Pop’ Ayumi Hamasaki’s 64m silver medal.
Yet, such commercial Japanese acts rarely translate to mainstream American pop appearances, with Pikotaro’s 2016 novelty hit ‘PPAP (Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen)’ being the first to make any real dent on the Billboard Hot 100 for decades. For the country’s first-ever US chart topper, we have to reach back to a time when Japan was first beginning to shake off its wartime residue and imperial conservatism in tandem with the 1960s’ youthquake liberation.
So, what was the first Japanese single to top the Hot 100?
Curiously, the sprightly Japanese number that took the American charts by storm was dreamed up in the fierce political fervour of the day. Having participated in the 1960 Anpo protests in defiance of American military bases situated in the country, lyricist Rokusuke Ei poured his frustrations at the controversial treaty into a whimsical pop piece about a young man facing the sky to mask his falling tears wrought from lost love.
Eager for a significant solo debut after spending his teens in The Drifters group, Kyu Sakamoto cut his version of Ei’s ‘Ue o Muite Arukō’, released in October 1961 to instant success and selling record units for three months. It would take a chance encounter with Pye Records Executive Louis Benjamin to carry Sakamoto’s hit travel across the Pacific, however.
He liked and saw the commercial potential, but Benjamin’s concerns that the song’s title would impede mainstream embrace forced a title change. Plumbing for the Japanese cooked beef dish popular in the West, the renamed ‘Sukiyaki’ was ready to land on the US charts in Spring 1963, helped by The Beatles’ American distributor Capitol Records.
Sakamoto scored a bona fide transpacific hit. To this day, ‘Sukiyaki’ is the only Japanese single to ever top the US singles chart, staying at number one of the Billboard Hot 100 for three whole weeks, as well as enjoying a steady presence on the UK and Australian pop rankings. Such a feat has never been achieved again, with ‘Ue o Muite Arukō’ looked back on affectionately among Japanese pop fans as the soundtrack to the country’s modernising confidence on the world stage.
