Some soul to keep

New Crisis, The, Jan/Feb 2002 by Dyer, Ervin

Crisis Forum

music

TOKYO, JAPAN - It is a cloudy afternoon in lidabashi, a crowded neighborhood of narrow streets and tall buildings in central Tokyo. In the back halls of the nearby Edmont Hotel, entertainer Alexander Easley rehearses his music and waits for the hotel's chapel to clear. Easley throws a Japanese patterned bib over his burgundy choir robe. He then tops it with a wodden cross around his neck. In one last nod to showmanship, he pulls on his white gloves. Easley and his pianist, "Mr. T," a burly Black man in a do-rag, are here to sing praises to the Lord. But this is no gospel concert. The two will perform a gospel wedding.

Many Japanese are enamored with Black gospel music. Tokyo alone has more than 25 gospel choirs. Across the island nation, there are more than 100 gospel groups. This growth, which started in the early 1990s, has lured Black gospel artists, who used to tour exclusively in Europe, to Japan.

At the gospel wedding, Easley sings "Oh, Happy Day" as the bride, in a white gown, proceeds down the aisle. During the ring exchange, he belts out "Blessed Assurance" - parts of it sang in Japanese. Business is booming. Easley, who speaks conversational Japanese, has three weddings and a gospel reception scheduled on this Saturday in early November.

The income from gospel concerts, video sales and gospel weddings is lucrative. Japanese pay Black artists like Easley the equivalent of about $350 or more per event, while Japanese singers get only $25. The Japanese believe Black singers lend the music an authenticity, so it is not uncommon for Easley to get $100 tips.

About 1 percent of Japanese are Christians, so chapel weddings are only ceremonial. But Japanese like gospel weddings because they allow more family and friends to celebrate with the couple. The more traditional Buddhist and Shinto ceremonies are held at small, simple shrines that accommodate only a small number of family members for wedding services.

The bigger Western celebrations are more fun. At the wedding with Easley, the crowd claps and throws up its hands. Many in the back rows do the wave and stomp their feet.

"This sets them free," says Easley, 53, who left Pittsburgh for Japan 25 years ago. "It helps them to let out emotion and gives them a safe forum to be expressive."

Gospel music's raw energy has been moving people for almost a century, mostly Black Americans. However, singers like Aretha Franklin and Fred Hammond, who blend the gospel with rhythm and blues, have contributed to the music's ever-widening international appeal.

Japan isn't the only country to celebrate Black gospel music. It's also hit Germany, where there are more than 30 gospel choirs in the Berlin area alone. Germans prefer the music's passionate call-and-response to the country's emotionally detached folk traditions. But the joy gospel music brings to the world doesn't end there; gospel choirs are in Sweden, Italy, England and France, too.

But the fervor is swelling in Japan. Ronnie Rucker, a nightclub singerturned-Christian choir director, has lived in Tokyo since 1989. He says the country has had trace elements of gospel music for decades - most of it shipped in by Black soldiers stationed at U.S. bases in Japan.

The country's gospel explosion was sparked by the success of two U.S. films popular in Japan. One was 1992's Sister Act, which featured Whoopi Goldberg as a lounge singer who resurrects a failing church by teaching a chorus of nuns to groove. The second film was The Preacher's Wife (1996), starring Whitney Houston and Denzel Washington.

Since then, the Black gospel stage play Mama, I Want to Sing has been regularly performed, Sounds of Blackness has appeared in concert and the a capella gospel group Take 6 has been featured in television commercials.

Rucker, who directs the Bright Lights Gospel Choir and the music program at Chofu Minami, a Protestant church in west Tokyo, attributes gospel's popularity to the rhythm and inherent soul of the music, which helps the traditionally repressed culture to cut loose. Rucker, who hails from Rochester, N.Y., adds that they can take off their suits and ties. The hollering and the swaying make them feel good.

Akiko Shimada, an interpreter and licensed tour guide in her late 30s, is a Buddhist. But she joined a neighborhood gospel choir last September after a friend took her to a church.

"I like it. You are free to express yourself," says Shimada. "When I sing, I also feel like I'm praying."

According to Rucker, Black gospel's messages of hope and uplifting spirituality are a timely draw, as well. With Japan's once flourishing economy set adrift by a decade-long decline, thousands of Japanese have been laid off or downsized. Suicides are up and people are stressed out. More are seeking a healing through the music, Rucker says.

For Shimada, who lives in west Tokyo, the music helped her finally to come to terms with her mom's illness and death two years ago. "My religion had not prepared me," she says. "Gospel helped me with the inner work I needed to survive my mom's sickness."