When Clive Tanaka finally found his voice, he ended a family tradition of silence that stretched back half a century.
For 11 years, Clive almost never left his room in his family’s home outside of Sapporo on Hokkaido, Japan’s huge northern island. “I was hikikomori,” Clive explains, one of almost a million boys and young men in Japan who shut themselves away and withdraw from society. In Clive’s case, he stopped going to school and retreated to his room after sustained episodes of vicious hazing and harassment by older students, a chronic problem in Japanese public schools.
But even before his own withdrawal when he was 14, Clive had first-hand experience of what silence and isolation was like. “My grandfather was a Soviet prisoner of war until 1949. He was a very young soldier in the [Japanese] army in Manchuria towards the end of the Pacific War [World War II] and was a POW many years longer than he was a soldier.” He married when he returned and seemed OK. But while watching the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, he saw the Soviet Union flag carried by Russian athletes, and something snapped. He did not speak another word for 20 years.
When Clive became hikikomori in 1989, he had no computer or Internet for amusement, only books and magazines that his parents would leave by his door, on a tray with his meals, and television. One day, his older sister put in front of his door a big box of her cast-off magnetic tape cassettes of 70’s and 80’s disco, dance and electronic music. At night, Clive’s family heard him dancing and singing along. Which gave his mother an idea. One New Year’s Day, his mother left a Yamaha DX7 keyboard outside his room. As a young boy, Clive had learned to play the violin and recorder through the Suzuki method. Alone, he taught himself how to play the piano keyboard, using only the instruction manual. And Clive started writing his own music. He credits the music with helping him gradually emerge from isolation in 2000, although he remains painfully shy.
Clive’s music is an amalgam of Giorgio Moroder, Cerrone, ABBA, Andy Gibb, Paradise Frame, Zapp & Roger, Men At Work, Grandmaster Flash, Fatback, Kool & The Gang, King Tubby, Daft Punk, Air and The Tom Tom Club. One reason may be because of the influence of his sister’s tape cassettes. “I played them over and over and over, and it started to bother my sister and my parents. Japanese houses have thin walls so even when I turned the volume down, it annoyed them. My sister slipped a note under the door that said, ‘I will buy you some current popular rock music if you will just please stop playing my old cassettes! I didn’t mind hearing those songs the first thousand times but I don’t like them anymore.’ The next day, there was a pair of headphones outside my door!”
Clive is working on a full-length album to be released on (what else?) cassette in 2010.


DARIUS TOUR 2025  
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Booking Americas
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Two cousins who make music together

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Australia / New Zealand
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