(Credits: Far Out / Gin Satoh)
An occupied toilet, a bedroom being graced by the act of coitus, or the lounge at your local conservative club, there are certain rooms that you walk into and feel instantly repelled by the contents. In a silent, shocked subconscious spasm, your body instantly spins you 180 degrees and sets you off in the other direction. In 1985, a few people were forced into one of these embarrassing U-turns as they unwittingly opened the door to Tokyo‘s Superloft club.
These unsuspecting wanderers were met with a stupefying sight. A roomful of people were stood in silence, gripped by a mixture of fear and excitement, staring at a stage that remained empty. After some time gazing agog at absolutely nothing, the mystic stupor began to subside. The audience were here to see the fateful return of Yamantaka Eye, the mythical frontman behind Hanatarash, who had effectively been banned from public performance by virtue of the fact that not a single venue on Earth was willing to risk booking him.
This time around, he had cleverly subverted that by ensuring everyone in the audience had signed a waiver. Yet, as the minutes ticked beyond the expected performance time, some folks began to wonder whether he had been arrested or sectioned en route. He hadn’t been. He was, in fact, just outside, starting up the bulldozer he would soon drive straight through the venue walls. Needless to say, not even a legal waiver would be enough to ensure any subsequent performances.
Hanatarash were, in effect, considered too dangerous for public consumption. They briefly returned to the stage in 1990 after Eye promised he would behave himself, but that rather defeated the point of the band. As a marketing pitch, The Most Dangerous Band In The World: The Responsible Years, just doesn’t play out all that well in the playground of the imagination. They faded towards obscurity. That in itself is an oddity: how and why could such a band be so cult to begin with and forgotten thereafter?
The most dangerous band in the world
Well, in Japan at the time, such creative radicalism was commonplace. Officially, the US occupied the country after the Second World War in a supposed bid to restore order. They claimed to have simply initiated demilitarisation and democratisation before handing control back over in 1952. But many thought that this handover was a sham. The US maintained military bases and funded the conservative ruling LDP party, while the CIA lined the pockets of pro-American politicians, brutally suppressed student movements in ‘The Red Purge’ and pushed the nation towards involvement in the Vietnam War.
Amid such suppression, cult bands thrived in the underground scene. They offered the youth a chance to rebel against the hand they perceived to be on the back of their neck. In such a climate, it is little surprise that many of these bands took a radical approach to performance. Hanatarash took that premise to the extreme. Eye incorporated dead cats in their performances. He almost cut his leg off with a circular saw. He threw glass at the audience. And even emerged from the bulldozer holding a Molotov cocktail.
So, why is there so little footage and reporting on the band? Well, that was also inherent in the underground scene. Recently, I spoke with Makoto Kubota of Les Rallizes Dénudés – a fellow Japanese band whose former bassist hijacked a plane – and he explained that in cities awash with spies and factions, even apolitical bands became “like the club of some secret society”. People weren’t there to document or film, they were there to be part of the underworld buzz—to escape the bureaucracy abundant in their daily lives. Hanatarash certainly provided that. Filming them would’ve been beside the point.
However, a few rare snapshots of Hanatarash do exist, and we’re sharing one below. The enigmatic Eye, a mild-mannered man, hurls a sheet of glass at the audience before leaping towards a cage in a display of industrial music gone awry. Not renowned for their love of catchy melodies, the band, instead, espouse – if nothing else – a dangerous level of freedom, showcasing in their own manic way, the fine line between liberation and reckless abandon.
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