Ue O Muite Arukō | Liner Notes

I noticed a sign that seemed somehow out of place. Written with English characters, it said “HANABI” (the Japanese word for fireworks) with a cool looking oni (a kind of ogre/demon thing) drawn in chalk marker and an arrow that pointed into what looked like an office complex or quiet apartment building. I was playing hooky in Japan for the foreseeable future, so I investigated. And after winding through doorways, halls, small courtyards, I stumbled into a tiny room that smelled delicious. A man was hunched over a skillet in the corner and a woman with straight brown hair sat up at the bar when she noticed me. She said something in Japanese that I didn’t understand. I asked if it was a restaurant I had walked into. “Hai”, and she motioned for me to sit at the bar.

Akira and Mitsuko opened Hanabi as a sort of side project, I came to find out from their English speaking friend Rikako. Akira was a musician, not unlike myself, so that was a great translator, too. I ate the yakisoba they were hard at work perfecting (already incredible in those early stages), and afterwords Akira took a bottle of Suntory off the shelf and put it and four short glasses down on the bar.

We spoke in broken Japanese and English and drank the hard stuff until Akira floated the idea of me performing at the restaurant before I returned back to America. I was flattered, honored, and immediately jumped at the chance to play for sweet people in a lovely country that I was quickly falling for.

Akira would provide the guitar, the amp, the microphone (not that we really needed any of that in the place. It was the size of a standard American bedroom), and he asked that I prepare two songs to do as a duet. One was “You Are So Beautiful” a la Joe Cocker. The other was this very famous Japanese tune that I’d woefully not heard of before.

It’s called “Ue O Muite Arukō”. Debuted and made famous by Kyu Sakamoto in 1961, American GIs came to know it as “Sukiyaki”, which is a sort of gentle racism that’s not very important to prosecute. The actual translation of the title is “I Look Up As I Walk”, referring to keeping one’s chin up so as to prevent the tears from streaming down. The original is very late 50s, early 60s pop. That’s how I was introduced to it.

So I returned to Hanabi a few weeks later. Akira and Mitsuko and Rikako had packed the place out with friends (so like eight people) and my cousin joined who was studying abroad and I played a set of jazz and blues and original music followed by a duet with Akira on his calls and then a relatively drunk jam session (cus more Suntory). It was incredible. The kind of night only a life in music can provide.

In 2017 I tricked a bunch of friends into touring Japan with me to promote an album I had written while there the first time. That trip was bursting with beautiful and serendipitous moments, but one that stood above for me was when we returned to Shimokitazawa late in the tour, just up the road from Hanabi, and Akira showed up to our set. We played “You Are So Beautiful” with Akira belting it out like an absolute legend. He said thank you. I said thank you. And he was off into the night again.

A little over a year ago “Ue O” popped back into my head. I pulled it up on YouTube, learned the chords by ear. And as I did so I realized it had a lot of room to be the kind of big bluesy thing I’d found so much joy in lately. So I did some mild reharmonizing, wrote a chart, brought it to a gig, and the rest is history.

I’ve been fortunate to travel a lot. But that first trip to Japan ushered me into the world in a way that I’ll be forever grateful for. To Akira, Mitsuko, Rikako, and all the other friends made along the way, ありがとうございました.