traces of Japanese sixties pop culture

From about 1963-1968, my family lived in Japan where my father, then a doctor in the U.S. Army, was stationed at Camp Zama.
Some sounds and melodies are imprinted from those years.
"Sakura sakura" (played with many variations on the koto by Yoshie Sakai) is a tune everyone knows.


We lived in a house in the Sagamihara Housing Area. There were lots of trees, and the post was small enough that we could walk the few blocks to school. I went to first-fifth grades there.
Although we were in Japan, we lived in the Army. Think "Leave it to Beaver," airlifted and dropped into the Japanese countryside. Sagamihara was a small town then; now it has been absorbed into greater Tokyo. Officers (doctors were automatically officers) had bigger and nicer houses than the enlisted men. We kids and wives were "dependents" and our entire social life was contained by the post. Those families who chose not to live in Army housing were said to be living "on the economy." I thought "the economy" was the land outside the fence around our housing area.

There was a commissary where we did our shopping, a pool where we spent most of the summer, a library, a movie theater, a "snack bar" with a juke box and hamburgers, an Officer's Club where we could eat steak. Even though we had relatively little contact with Japanese people or culture, we did watched Japanese TV in black and white: samurai movies, army movies, monster movies, variety shows, cartoons, sumo wrestling. Since it was all in Japanese, we made up the stories to go with the images. For a while, we had a confused idea that any dueling samurai was "a victor."

One program I that I loved was a cartoon called "Obake no Q" about a ghost named Q-Taro who was afraid of dogs. The theme song has been stuck in my head for decades (there were later versions, but this is the original). I can't believe I managed to find it on YouTube!


This song ("Ue o Muite Aruko"), sung by Kyu Sakamoto, was a huge cross-over hit (meaning Americans actually heard of it). We had the record.

I also remember seeing some of the early Group Sounds bands on TV shows. I was especially impressed by The Spiders.