Amerika Mura in downtown Osaka is where the night owls go... Bars and restaurants, pubs and clubs, coming down from the northern side you take the Midosuji subway line from Umeda. The Midosuji line is of note because of the unseemly behaviour of some of the passengers. It used to be easy to see why there were female only carriages during peak hour. On day I saw a homeless man harassing a young female office worker as she stood in the doorway. No-one in the carriage came to her help her. She finally snapped and walked away but he stood there until another young woman got onto the carriage and the started all over again. It is hard to tell who to feel more sorry for, the young women who are being so blatantly sexually harassed or the homeless man who was to all intents and purposes invisible?
The Big cat is easy enough to find and like most shows in Japan the concert started early at about 6.30. The band is popular in their native Osaka and there was a big turn-out. There were a few other foreigners in the audience but mostly the audience were Japanese. I had first seen Nakagawa Takashi on TV when he had put a smaller unit together called Soul Flower Mononoke Summit which played Ching dong (street songs) from the war period played on old instruments of the non-electric variety. This was after the Kobe earthquake which had devastated parts of the region. Thousands died and my wife's parents were without gas for weeks and had to visit friends so they could have a bath. The band did lots of performances in the street to bring music to the people. For Nakagawa it was about playing music from the heart and through this kind of traditional music he also wanted to reconnect the Japanese people with their past free of its associations with the war and emperor worship.
Soul Flower Union was a congolomeration of two bands from the '80s, Mescaline Overdrive featuring Itami Hideko and Nakagawa's old band Newest Model. The combination of male and female members in the new band made for a more exciting blend of costume, nostalgia and genre hopping music ranging from Celtic swing, folk, reggae to rock and roll. With his 1970s style side burns, Nakagawa was an uncompromising songwriter prepared to take on the enemies of peace wherever he found them. Highly political, he wrote songs about East Timor and the Middle East in an effort to raise awareness of the plight of various minority groups caught up in military conflicts. He has also written about social injustices in Japan such as the problems (or even existence) of the burakumin (the untouchables) and on the album Screwball Comedy he had written a song about the right-wing Tokyo governor, Ishihara Shintaro, 'The Man Who Said No'.
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