Like everyone else, I really got into Japanese ambient in the second half of the 2010s. At the time, decades-old records by almost forgotten minimalist composers such as Hiroshi Yoshimura and Midori Takada were blowing up through the YouTube algorithm.
In 2019, the brilliant Light In The Attic compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 came out. Expertly curated by the composer and producer Spencer Doran of the U.S. electronic music group Visible Cloaks, it’s a great overview of this field.
Environment(al) music, or kankyō ongaku, was a subgenre of ambient designed to create moments of serenity and stillness in everyday life – an antidote to the general acceleration of the hypercapitalist 1980s, which brought immense changes to Japanese society.
These composers and sound designers developed their ideas from their love of Brian Eno’s ambient and Erik Satie’s furniture music, but they approached their concept with the rigid ethos of Japanese craftsmanship.
A lot of their music was commissioned for lifestyle stores, art museums, even building company’s model houses. For them, background music wasn’t an insult. It was exactly what they were trying to master – still, most of their works were much more sophisticated than Western muzak.
The albums below are now seen as cult classics, but at the time of their creation, they were released in small tape and vinyl runs, and almost forgotten by the time someone uploaded them to YouTube.
The ambient scene of 1980s Japan was just a tiny collective of artists and composers that never turned into a mainstream movement – but the music they created was profound, and it has endured because of its timeless quality.
I kept my list of favorites limited to the real essentials. Doing research in this field over the years, I’ve heard many other albums. Some were quite good, others were forgettable, some have aged terribly – think proggy guitars and electric violin over programmed drums. They might be sought after because they’re rare and obscure, but this is not how I look at music.
The ones below are albums I still regularly listen to. The real timeless classics of environmental music. They appear not ranked, but in chronological order.
Hiroshi Yoshimura – Music For Nine Postcards (1982)
Looking out of his window, the minimalist composer Hiroshi Yoshimura, then in his early 40s, home-recorded these simple but perfectly balanced pieces on a keyboard and Fender Rhodes. They were inspired by “the movement of clouds, the shade of a tree in summer time, the sound of rain.”
This album was originally crafted to be played as background music in the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. It was then released as the first entry in the Wave Notation trilogy on Satoshi Ashikawa’s Sound Process label in 1982.
In the original liner notes, Yoshimura wrote: “I will be happy if, when you enjoy this album, the surrounding scenery can be seen in a slightly different light.”
Satoshi Ashikawa – Still Way (1982)
"Like the moment of stillness, after the wind passes through the garden, when the rain stops for a brief second…"
The second entry in the Wave Notation trilogy, Still Way is record store owner and label founder Satoshi Ashikawa’s first and only released solo album. In the late 1970s, he’d opened the Art Vivant record shop in the Ikebukuro neighborhood of Tokyo, which became a meeting point for the city’s early ambient scene. He died in a car crash at age 30, shortly after the release of this album.
Still Way is defined by the analogue sounds of harp, vibraphone, piano and flute. According to Ashikawa, it’s “intended to be listened to in a casual manner, as a musical landscape or a sound object… not something that would stimulate listeners but music that should drift like smoke and become part of the environment.”
Ashikawa found that daily life in Japan in the 1980s was “inundated with sound” and the music on Still Way was designed to help the listener regain agency over their acoustic surroundings.
Midori Takada – Through The Looking Glass (1983)
Coming from a theater and art school background, multi-instrumentalist Midori Takada had previously played in the free improv group Mkaju Ensemble. On this album, she was mostly exploring traditional African and Asian rhythms, employing various percussion instruments, with a focus on marimba and hand drums.
Despite the heavy accent on drums and percussion, this feels like an ambient album, because it overdubs these hypnotic polyrhythms with field recordings of birdsong and non-instrument sounds from glass bottles and similar objects.
This contemplative suite of four longform, minimalist pieces evokes a mysterious, ritualistic atmosphere and remains one of the most idiosyncratic examples of early Japanese ambient. It’s now rightfully considered a holy grail of the genre.
Haruomi Hosono – Watering a Flower (1984)
Haruomi Hosono played in a couple of groundbreaking Japanese bands since the late 1960s – the psych group group Apryl Fool, its folk-focused successor Happy End and the early electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra (with Ryuichi Sakamoto).
Watering a Flower was a commissioned piece for the Muji design store chain, containing two 15-minute synth and keyboard études, originally released on cassette and then forgotten, until the algorithm brought them back to a new audience.
Similar to the works of Hiroshi Yoshimura, these two ultra-minimalist, longform pieces appear incredibly through-composed. They’re getting as much effect as possible out of an extremely limited palette of sounds and movements.
This music can truly dissolve into the background, but if you care to listen closely, you will be amazed by how engaging these simple, repetitive sounds can be.
Hiroshi Yoshimura – Green (SFX Version) (1986)
In my humble opinion, Hiroshi Yoshimura was the greatest of all environmental music composers, and that’s why he appears twice on this short list.
Green is a synthesized soundscape consisting of soft arpeggios and gentle pads that works perfectly as an introduction to the minimalist style of Japanese ambient music.
I’ve read that the composer preferred the original version produced for the Japanese market (available on Bandcamp as well), which didn’t contain any added environmental sounds, but what can I say? I’m a Westerner, and I love the enhanced new age-y atmosphere these ‘sound effects’ provide, given that they are actually nature field recordings of ASMR-like quality.
Yutaka Hirose – Nova (1986)
The Soundscape series was commissioned by the building company Misawa Homes for use in their prefabricated model houses. Hiroshi Yoshimura actually produced his own entry in that series, called Surround, which was recently re-released as well.
For the second Soundscape album, the sound designer Yutaka Hirose combined pointillist synthesizer tones with soothing field recordings of nature sounds – birdsong, crickets, ocean waves. On "Humming The Sea", he "tried to compose a kind of music that expresses the daily, lazy life of child-like innocence in a summer vacation in some small town", which is actually quite an apt description of how his whole album Nova sounds.
I recommend the 2019 re-release on Swiss label WRWTFWW (who are responsible for making a lot of environmental music albums accessible again) because it adds four hypnotic, previously unreleased pieces, which Hirose designed as ‘sound sculptures’ for installations and exhibitions.
Yoshio Ojima – Une Collection Des Chaînons: Music For Spiral (1988)
Yoshio Ojima is another pioneer of environmental music that started creating ambient electronic sounds in the early 1980s. This double album, released in two parts (Part I | Part II), is a compilation of pieces that were originally created for the Wacoal Art Center in Aoyama, Tokyo, an arts hub also known as Spiral (referring to the atrium structure designed by the architect Fumihiko Maki).
These chaînons (chain links) are soundscapes of three to 12 minute length, blending textured field recordings with synth melodies. Their mood varies wildly – from eerie drones to gorgeous little tapestries resembling music boxes. Ojima stated on the sleeve: “Please listen to this album at around the same volume as daily life sounds such as air conditioners and refrigerators.”
Susumu Yokota – Sakura (1999/2000)
This came out a decade after the formative period of Japanese environmental music had ended. Sakura was first self-released in 1999 and received wider distribution through The Leaf Label in the following year.
The late Susumu Yokota also wasn’t an ambient composer by trade. He was an electronic music producer, known for his atmospheric, functional techno and house tracks.
Sakura is an outlier in his discography, an experimental ambient album that employs techniques lifted from electronic music – loops, glitches, manipulated vocal fragments, and samples of Harold Budd, Steve Reich and Chick Corea recordings. Gentle programmed drums and percussion on some tracks nod to Yokota’s background as well. In the second half of the album, Yokota explores various styles of home listening IDM, even an Amon Tobin-style jazz edit.
But the bulk of these 12 tender tracks are based on processed guitar sounds and synth drones, beatless and drenched in massive reverb and delay. The most important element on Sakura are the melodies though – they have a dreamy, melancholic pop sensibility that make this one of my all-time favorite ambient albums, with an extremely high replay value.
The first time I was fortunate to travel to Japan, I went with my wife and teenage daughters. One evening in Tokyo, my eldest daughter & I decided to wander Harijuku in search of a record store we had read of called Beams Records. It had just stopped raining and the sun was setting, the streets and alleys were glistening with reflected Neon on raindrops and wet brick & bitumen and bustling with colourfully dressed young people happy to be out and about. When we found this lovely tiny record shop, the young man behind the counter was more than helpful, despite our very limited Japanese. When he found I liked ambient he immediately smiled and brought down an album called "Pier & Loft" from the shop display & carefully placed the vinyl on the shop's turntable & lowered the needle. This album became the first of many records I bought in Japan. Prior to that day I had never heard of Hiroshi Yoshimura but that night started a love affair with Japanese ambient (& other genres) that continues to this day. I have a few of the albums you have mentioned here but not all, I shall seek them out, thank you!
Having just come back from Japan - and missing the country like my favourite arm - this is very welcome!