Before the Genre Had a Name

I have recently been reading a book that Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote in his final years after his cancer diagnosis — a record of his thoughts, reflections and emotions. Sakamoto passed away in March 2023, and reading his book now reminds me of what an extraordinary artist he was: a mind that spent a lifetime thinking seriously about sound and its influences on the world.

It sent me back to YMO (Yellow Music Orchestra) — three Japanese musicians in a Tokyo studio making something that didn't have a name yet. Technopop, synth-pop, electronic music — the categories came later, applied by critics trying to find names and definitions for their music. What Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono, and Yukihiro Takahashi were doing wasn't fitting themselves into a genre. They were making sounds that didn't exist before they made them.

That's the thread this issue follows. Not Asian artists who mastered a form, but the ones who arrived somewhere before anyone else did — before the maps were drawn, before the genre had a name. Follow me to dive deeper into YMO, but also a Hong Kong director who invented an entirely new grammar for screen violence, and a photographer who declared war on the photograph itself.

— Yubin

In 1985, John Woo was a journeyman director working in romantic comedies, respected but unremarkable. Chow Yun-fat was a television soap opera actor whose film career had never quite ignited yet. Neither of them was supposed to change cinema — Then A Better Tomorrow did.

The film follows three men — Ho, a counterfeiter trying to go straight after prison; his younger brother Kit, a police officer who can't forgive him; and Mark, Ho's loyal partner who takes the fall and loses everything. The plot is familiar enough, but what Woo did with it was not. The action sequences — particularly Mark's single-handed revenge raid, both pistols blazing, long coat trailing — introduced a visual language for screen violence that nobody had used before: slow-motion ballets of gunfire, operatic emotion played at maximum level, loyalty and betrayal given the weight of a Greek tragedy. Heroic bloodshed was what critics eventually called it. 

The film broke Hong Kong's box office record, became the reason Hong Kong introduced a film rating system, launched Chow Yun-fat's career, and ignited an entire decade of HK crime cinema. It was so popular all over Asia that even elementary schoolers (like myself) found ways to watch it. It also quietly made its way to America later, where a generation of filmmakers absorbed its grammar. Quentin Tarantino borrowed from it and the Wachowskis did too. John Woo himself was eventually invited to Hollywood — though by then, the language he had invented had been spoken so widely that some people had forgotten who taught it to them.

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Infernal Affairs (無間道) — Andrew Lau & Alan Mak (Hong Kong, 2002)

By 2002, Hong Kong cinema had been living under Chinese sovereignty for five years, and the anxiety of that transition had quietly saturated its crime films for years. Infernal Affairs is the distillation of everything HK noir had become: two moles — a cop inside a triad, a triad member inside the police — locked in a race to unmask each other before being unmasked themselves. Andy Lau and Tony Leung carry the film's central tension without missing a beat. It won Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and was eventually remade by Martin Scorsese as The Departed — which won him his first Best Director Academy Award. At the ceremony, the PA system announced the film was based on "the Japanese film, Infernal Affairs." It is, of course, a Hong Kong film. The misattribution was later corrected. The original remains the better film.

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A Bittersweet Life (달콤한 인생) — Kim Jee-woon (Korea, 2005)

Three years after Infernal Affairs, Korea took the HK noir inheritance and stripped it of its sentimentality. Sun-woo is a fixer for a Seoul crime boss — efficient, loyal, the kind of man who doesn't ask questions. When he's given a simple task and makes one small, uncharacteristic act of mercy, his entire organization turns against him overnight. What follows is not a film about redemption or moral awakening. It is a film about a man who always knew exactly who he was, suddenly living in a world that has decided his precision is no longer enough. Lee Byung-hun (the ‘Frontman’ in Squid Games) plays it with absolute brilliance. Kim Jee-woon directs it with the conviction of someone who learned visual grammar from Hong Kong and then rewrote it in a colder key. The film screened out of competition at Cannes. It is one of the best action films of the 2000s, and one of the least celebrated outside of Korea and Japan. You have to watch it.

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Yellow Magic Orchestra was formed in 1978 as an intended one-off studio project. Haruomi Hosono, who conceived it, wanted to make a playful commentary on Western exoticization of Japanese culture — synthesizers playing with the same oriental clichés that American lounge music had always projected onto Asia, but with full awareness of the joke. The debut album was a commercial hit and they became an official band.

Solid State Survivor, released in September 1979, is where the joke became something else entirely. Side A is instrumental — Technopolis opens it as an ode to Tokyo's near future, the synthesizers not imitating anything but describing a city that was actually becoming what they were playing. Rydeen became one of the most recognized electronic pieces in Japanese music history, covered and sampled across decades. Behind the Mask was later picked up by Michael Jackson, who wrote his own lyrics intending to include it on Thriller. Royalty negotiations collapsed and it was dropped (and then it was released in MJ’s 2011 posthumous album). 

What Solid State Survivor did, in 1979, was establish a template for electronic pop that Depeche Mode, the Human League, and a generation of Western synth-pop acts would later develop without always knowing who started it. Kraftwerk from Germany are cited as the godfathers of electronic music; YMO remain strangely undervalued despite the fact that Solid State Survivor topped the Oricon LP and cassette charts around the same era — 82 and 65 weeks respectively — numbers that suggest that it was not a cult following but a genuine popular movement. The genre didn't have a name yet, but the audience was already there.

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A — Denki Groove (Japan, 1997)

Formed in 1989, Denki Groove spent their early years explicitly picking up where YMO left off — not a surprise that they covered Cosmic Surfin' (YMO’s 1980 hit). A, an album released in 1997, is their answer at peak confidence: eleven tracks spanning trance, big beat, chiptune, disco, and hard techno, held together not by genre but by character. The centerpiece is Shangri-La — a rework of a 1977 Silvetti disco track, acknowledged in the liner notes, transformed into something so distinctly Denki Groove that the original becomes a footnote. It sold 500,000 copies and reached number 10 on the Oricon singles chart, an unlikely commercial breakthrough for a record this stylistically uncontainable. Their international following grew particularly in Germany, where they performed at the Mayday festival in 1998 and released records on European labels. The unseriousness was always the point. The music was also always very good.

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11111101 — Idiotape (Korea, 2011)

The title is a binary code. The approach is similarly precise: no guitars, two synthesizers, one drummer, and a sound that sits somewhere between electronic music and rock without fully belonging to either. Idiotape formed in Seoul in 2008 — Dguru and Zeze from the club scene, DR from a pop-punk band — and built their debut album from influences that wouldn’t normally be coherent: Korean classic rock from the 1960s and 70s, Radiohead, Metallica, techno. 11111101 won Best Dance & Electronic Album at the 2012 Korean Music Awards and brought them to SXSW, Canadian Music Week, Summer Sonic in Japan, and eventually Glastonbury. "We don't think we're too different from the average rock band," Zeze said in a 2014 interview. "We just don't use guitars." Play the album while you’re exercising. You’ll love it.

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The title is a provocation. Daido Moriyama was not saying goodbye to photography as a medium. He was saying goodbye to photography as it had been defined — to the idea that a photograph should be clear, composed, technically controlled, faithful to the thing it depicted. Farewell Photography, published in 1972, is his declaration of independence from all of that.

The book is composed of what the photography establishment would have called failures: images so grainy they dissolve into texture, so blurred the subject disappears into motion, so high in contrast that shadows eat the frame. Rejected negatives appear alongside scratched and solarized images, with sprocket holes from the film strip left visible at the edges. Moriyama had developed this approach through Provoke, a small Japanese photography magazine he joined in 1969 alongside Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanashi. They called it are, bure, boke — grainy, blurry, out of focus — and opposed it explicitly to the socially oriented documentary photography that dominated the field at the time. 

Farewell Photography is described by its publisher as "one of the most important events in the history of modern photography" — a claim that sounds excessive until you look at how many photographers who came after Moriyama were working in the space he created. He photographs Tokyo's streets, its bodies, its signs and surfaces, not to document them but to transmit something about what it feels like to move through the world with a camera that is also an extension of consciousness.

"I tried to dismantle photography," Moriyama wrote, "but ended up being dismantled myself." The book was followed by years of personal and artistic crisis. He eventually returned, continued, and kept shooting — now in his eighties, still walking the streets of Shinjuku with a small camera. In 2012 he became the first Japanese photographer to receive the ICP's Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2019 he received the Hasselblad Award. The genre he helped invent still doesn't have a proper name. Are, bure, boke is maybe the closest.

Follow his work on IG @daidomoriyamaphotofoundation

In January 2025, at a conference in Chennai marking the centenary of the Indus Valley Civilization's discovery, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin announced a prize of $1 million for anyone who can decipher the Indus script. "The riddle hasn't been answered for the past 100 years despite several efforts by archaeologists and experts," he said. A million dollars, he suggested, might help.

The Indus Valley Civilization flourished 5,300 years ago across what is now northwest India and Pakistan — one of the world's earliest urban societies, characterized by sophisticated city planning, standardized weights and measures, and extensive trade networks. Its people left behind around 4,000 inscriptions, found almost exclusively on small seals, pottery, and tablets. The inscriptions are short — five symbols on average — and no bilingual artifact like the Rosetta Stone has ever been found to provide a translation key. For a century, the script has resisted every attempt at deciphering. Theories linking it to early Dravidian languages, Indo-Aryan languages, and unrelated extinct languages have all been proposed, contested, and left unresolved.

The prize is not purely academic. Stalin's announcement followed a new study by the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology finding that 60% of Indus script signs and 90% of graffiti marks found at Tamil Nadu excavation sites have parallels with Indus inscriptions — evidence, his government argues, of cultural continuity between the Indus Valley people and the Dravidian civilization of southern India. If the script is Dravidian, it reshapes the origin story of South Asian civilization. If it is Indo-Aryan or something else entirely, it doesn't. A 5,300-year-old writing system is carrying the full weight of contemporary identity politics, and the million dollars is the price tag on that answer.

The timing of the prize also reflects a technological shift. Machine learning is now being applied to the Indus script in ways that weren't possible a decade ago, mirroring the Vesuvius Challenge — a 2023 initiative that used AI to decipher 2,000-year-old charred scrolls from Herculaneum, successfully reading thousands of ancient Greek letters that had been unreadable since Mount Vesuvius buried them. The Indus script is a harder problem: shorter inscriptions, no known related language, no bilingual key. But the tools are better than they have ever been. Somewhere in those 4,000 inscriptions, across seals and pottery that survived five millennia, there is a language waiting to be read. Someone, eventually, will read it.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com