Michi Mochizuki ‘Me No Like Hiroshima’ c/w ‘Pretty Tokyo Street Boy’
Released August 23rd 1964.
Pye International 5N 30007
Recorded to cash in on the Tokyo Olympics in the summer of 1964, ‘Me No Like Hiroshima’ is both an offensive and absurd recording. Michi Mochizuki was the then wife of record producer George Capfeld, who was hoping that the record would compete with Atari Yamamoto’s official Olympic theme ‘Wind Chimes In The Desert (Death To The Gaijin)’.
Although Miki had no recording experience and had never sung, her plaintive voice, varispeeded to a near chipmunk level, had a childlike charm which appealed to certain listeners at the time.
The backing track was loaded with bells, gongs, wind chimes and out-of-tune guitars, which Capfeld believed would convey an authentic Japanese feel or aura and that didn’t really work on any musical level whatsoever.
Today, Capfeld still stands by his decision to release the track: "Mickey, Michi – whatever she was called – was great. She sounded like a cute, Japanese gerbil or fujiyama. It was an easy record to make because Japan is culturally very similar to Britain. It’s on the same latitude and longitude, it has the same weather and it has frequent earthquakes. It’s the Britain of the east, really. I’ve never been there. There’s no point".
Michi and Capfeld were divorced after two weeks of marriage, shortly after the record was released. "We had problems with the Japanese government about that song and I’m sure that’s what caused the breakdown of our marriage. That and the fact I preferred boys".
Although the record’s lyric content has no connection to the Olympics whatsoever, they deserve quoting purely as an example of what you could get away with in 1964:
‘Me no like Hiroshima
It am not no good
Yankee boy he drop him bomb
But on a universal level we are all to blame
Bengo, Bengo, Bengo Bengo!'
The b-side ‘Pretty Tokyo Street Boy’, is, thankfully, an instrumental.
