Well, I wasn’t. I was a child at the time, and I’m not Japanese. Wasn’t really the issue, but I don’t currently have a category for this kind of post. I am a big Boredoms fan, but the Hanatarash records were impossible to find back in the day and are now merely too expensive. Got the split record w/ Evil Moisture but they seem like more of a legend as an extreme performance art than as makers of enjoyable records, which the Boredoms are in my opinion. Seemed like a footnote of where Eye started and I, myself, tried not to think about it too much. But enough about me.

What non-child, Japanese maybe-musicians were in this group? Seems like a straightforward question that should be easy to answer. The current wiki page is currently more correct that is has been in the past, in that it lists drummer Ikuo Taketani as a core member. It didn’t occur to me to screencap before for obvious reasons, but I will now:

Mitsuru Tabata was previously listed as being the second core member. Didn’t think about this too deeply, just had it filed away in my head as “fact”. I mentioned something about him being on facebook one day and how he seems like a regular, approachable guy (in contrast to Eye who is kind of a walking question mark) when someone mentioned Hanatarash. A little later, Tabata posted himself about the group:

Can’t say for sure if the two things were related, but it happened. Anyway, either he stopped reading at this point or the page was re-edited later to make sure he was included somehow in this group he was not in. Why would someone do this? Because there were numerous examples of articles that obviously used the earlier version of the page for reference, but that felt no need to cite their source (as is required for wiki). The original mistake seems to have come about possibly by a lazy translation from a unknown French writer for VICE, an organization infamous for its lack of fact-checking. There is this story of Eye meeting Tabata at a Einstürzende Neubauten show:

Eye met Mitsuru Tabata, the other founding member of Hanatarash, while working as a stagehand at the German band’s concert in Japan. Both of them felt that punk had become too polished and pacified – too mainstream – and decided to resurrect the genre’s most disturbing and revolutionary elements in a new band. The group put out three albums between 1984 and 1985, plus a few records after 1990.

You can read Tabata’s account of this meeting in this 2021 interview with Psychedelic Baby:

I met Eye Yamatsuka at the Einstürzende Neubauten concert in Kyoto in 1985. I think I was a volunteer for a security job at the concert. Organizers could get concert crews easily because a lot of young guys want to see famous artists’ concerts for free even if I was not a tough guy. Somehow I had a demo tape of ‘Noizunzuri’ to give to Einstürzende Neubauten. Maybe I might have expected something but I couldn’t give it to them, hahaha… Most of the artists from overseas have received hospitality like superstars here. Maybe I missed a chance to meet them. Anyway, Eye was the one in the audience. He came with a friend of mine. A friend of mine introduced him to me. That was my first meeting with him. Then we became friends and we hung around sometimes. Somehow we started to live in a cheap apartment called Yasuda-so which has a few tiny rooms in Kyoto. We became house mates.​ ​He was in Hanatarash at that time. However, that band had problems getting gigs because their live performance was too dangerous. After notorious Psychic TV concert in Tokyo that Hanatarash was supposed to play as support act….They were going to blow the stage by time bomb but it was found before gig. Support act was canceled…..Hanatarash could not play anywhere. He asked me to found a new band together. Normal four-piece rock band. That was Boredoms.

It should be noted at this point that Tabata has been in many bands; here he mentions the very obscure Noizunzuri. I actually mostly think of him as one of the Acid Mother’s Temple guys even tho he hasn’t been in the group for many years. But he was the original guitarist for Boredoms, appearing on their first official release, the Anal by Anal 7″. (The group’s first recordings, the only to include Takatani, were exclusive to comps.) Hanatarash however, was already winding down when he met Eye.

In this interview the details are made clear but the story has probably been told many times. You can kinda see how the mistake was made. If you are still skeptical and you think maybe Tabata is the one misremembering…um…there’s no guitar in Hanatarash. It’s just vocals and drums and power tools. Tabata only plays guitar, Takatani only played drums. But since I’m linking to Discogs I have to mention another complication, there is the album where Jojo Hiroshige maybe plays guitar and the actor Omiya Ichi is credited as a member.

There seems to be some guitar on some of the record so I guess Jojo was a “guest”. (No reason really to doubt this, it was released on Jojo’s own Alchemy Records.) If you go back to the current wiki (just scroll up) Jojo is listed as a member. I assumed this was a troll edit from someone that knew that Tabata was not a member and figured, if we’re adding guitarists to the group, why not add another? Then I found this credit which I cannot find in the credits on the record itself, but then again, Omiya Ichi is merely credited as “One”, so there is some “original research” going on here, which is not allowed on wiki, which is the reason I did not edit it. (Someone else will have to use this post as a reference in the future. Haha!) Discogs does list Ichi as a full member (not Hiroshige or Tabata) but also helpfully informs you that he did nothing in group. Since there’s no drums on the record, we can assume that record is mostly just Eye solo. It was released in 1988 (despite “1999” on the record sleeve); Ikuo was already playing in Zeni Geva at this point (with…Mitsuru Tabata…*boom*), BUT it seems like Eye wanted to make it seem like it was still a band so he credited someone who didn’t do anything. And yet, there’s no reason he couldn’t have done something, given that it’s a noise record first but also that he was also in another group? I can’t find anymore info on that but it seems like Ichi was loosely in that music scene. On a scale of being in the band or not, Ichi scores higher than Tabata, at least.

So, I think we did it. Thought there were some other loose threads to this, but there really isn’t. Tabata was never in the band. Jojo was a guest on one record, never played with them live. Ichi is a weird one, but if you are not a fan of confusion, I don’t see how you can be a fan of this music. Eye gives himself a slightly different name and credited role on just about every other record. So…?