Hanatarash is the point at which Japanese noise abandoned the instrument altogether. Where Merzbow built walls of processed sound and Hijokaidan turned the stage into a free-improvised riot, Hanatarash made its noise by destroying things, and the Bureau files the project at Tier I for that founding gesture. It passes the founding test: it instantiated danger music as a Japanese form, the strand of the tradition in which the performance is the work and the recording only its residue. It passes documentary necessity too, since the Osaka scene and the Japanoise account at large cannot be told without the bulldozer and what it represented. The project is also, through Yamatsuka Eye, the direct ancestor of the Boredoms, which makes it a node the later Japanese underground routes back through.
The origin is well documented. Eye and Mitsuru Tabata met around 1983 working as stagehands at an Einstürzende Neubauten concert in Japan. Neubauten were then in their metal-and-power-tools phase, beating sound out of scrap and wrecked machinery, and the encounter clearly landed: Hanatarash took that approach and pushed it past any concern for safety or music. The pair felt punk had become too polished, and set out to recover its most disruptive instincts in a form with no rules left to break. The name, Hanatarashi, is the Japanese word for a snot-nosed child; after the first album the final syllable was dropped.
The method was destruction, performed live and largely unamplified. Eye used drills, circular saws, sheet metal and heavy machinery, and the sound that reached an audience was as often the crowd's own reaction as anything the band produced. The anthropologist David Novak, whose study Japanoise remains the standard scholarly account, notes how little sound actually comes from something you are smashing with all your might; the gap between the violence of the act and the thinness of its noise is part of the point. These were events first and recordings second, and the early albums make sense only as traces of something that happened in a room.
The live shows became genuinely hazardous. Audiences were asked to sign waivers acknowledging they might be hurt. Eye performed with a running circular saw strapped to his back and came close to losing a leg; on other nights there were Molotov cocktails, thrown objects and, in one widely repeated account, a dead cat cut in half. The notorious 1985 Tokyo show at the Superloft ended with Eye driving a backhoe through the wall of the venue and onto the stage, doing enough damage that the group was effectively barred from performing live. The ban was lifted only on the understanding that future shows would happen without the destruction, which removed most of what Hanatarash had been about.
The recorded catalogue is small and difficult by design. Hanatarashi (1985) appeared on Jojo Hiroshige's Alchemy Records, the Osaka label at the centre of the scene; 2 followed on Alchemy in 1988, and 3: William Bennett Has No Dick on the American noise label RRRecords in 1989, its title a jab at the Whitehouse founder. The records are abrasive and only partly musical, and the consensus, which the Bureau shares, is that they cannot really be appreciated apart from the performances they came out of. Later releases through the 1990s and a scattering of 2000s material extended the name without recovering the early charge.
What gives Hanatarash its lasting weight is less the records than the line that runs out of it. In 1986 Eye founded the Boredoms, and that project, which took the Hanatarash chaos toward a psychedelic, hyperactive noise-rock, became one of the most internationally visible Japanese groups of the following decades. Eye's later work, with John Zorn, with Sonic Youth, across dozens of aliases and collaborations, all descends from the same refusal of polish that started here. Hanatarash is where that instinct first took shape, and the Boredoms are what it grew into.
The Bureau records the transgressive content of the early performances plainly, without dwelling on it. The animal mutilation and the endangerment of audiences belong to the historical account and are noted as such; they are not the reason the project is filed, and the archive does not present them as anything to admire. What earns the file is the formal gesture: Hanatarash established, more starkly than any of its peers, that a noise performance could consist of nothing but action, and that the document of it could stand as a record. That idea has run through danger music and confrontational performance ever since.
The Bureau's reading. Hanatarash is filed at Tier I as the founding act of Japanese danger music and the project from which the Boredoms emerged. The catalogue is slight and the legend large, but in this case the legend is the work: the bulldozer, the waivers, the unamplified destruction are the form, and the records are the residue. Among the Osaka founders the project is the extreme outlier, the one that located the noise not in equipment but in the event itself, and the one whose central figure carried that instinct furthest. It is filed alongside Merzbow, Hijokaidan and Incapacitants as a founder of the tradition the archive documents under Japanoise.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Sengoku period · last revised c. the Holocene