This is part one of a multi-part interview:

Part Two - Part Three - Part Four

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In the West, if people know Zuno Keisatsu, they're known as key figures of 70s Japanese rock, releasing six politically incendiary albums before their split in 1975. What these people generally don't know, however, is that the story didn't end there: Frontman Panta went on to an enormously successful solo career, and even reformed Zuno Keisatsu in 1990. Next year, Panta, along with Zuno Keisatsu mainstay percussionist Toshi, will be celebrating the band's 40th anniversary with a new album based on the poetry of the late Shuji Terayama (of Tenjo Sajiki fame.)

You can't do 40 years of history justice in one sitting, so in the coming weeks, Jrawk will be posting installments of this exclusive interview. Here, Panta details the first wave of Zuno Keisatsu, it's inspirations, it's issues, and the decision to give the band "a send off" on December 31st, 1975.

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JR: Before Zuno Keisatsu, there was Spartacus Bunt.

PT: Yeah, I was in that band in 68-69. Before that I was in the backing band of a singer named Mieko Hirota. We were called The Mojo, and we'd play without her occasionally, with me singing. After that, I met a keyboardist named Mr. Chiba, and I started playing bass and singing with him and Toshi. I asked him what the name was, he said Spartacus Bunt. I thought it was kind of an uncool name! Spartacus Bunt wasn't really going anywhere, so after a while I decided to go back to school and just be an amateur musician, although I told Mr. Chiba I was going to continue with Toshi.

Zuno Keisatsu was originally six or seven people, but Toshi and I were the base. We took the name Zuno Keisatsu ("Brain Police") from the Zappa song "Who Are The Brain Police?" and went from there. I decided that, since we weren't professionals, we could play and do anything we wanted. We weren't political at first, but we were the first band I'm aware of to play serious rock 'n' roll with Japanese lyrics.

At the time, I was going to Kanto Gakuin University, which had a radical Communist group that had separated from The Socialist Bunt. There were about 8 groups, they had their own helmets with different colors: the red helmet party was the biggest and most powerful. They were supposed to be united, but there was some infighting. Eventually, people started moving on, getting out of the politics, and the people who stayed got more radical. Zuno Keisatsu started happening around the same time as this activity was winding down, but the two weren't connected: we were still apolitical.

Panta (l) and Toshi (r,) Zuno Keisatsu in 1972

JR: When did politics enter into the equation?

PT: One day, I was passing a protest, and out from behind the protest signs this guy came up to me and said "come see what's going on." This was "Mr. M." He told me about a book called "Leap For World Revolutionary War," which was published by the communist party. I was really moved by the book, but not by the ideology. There was a declaration in the book that moved me for its humanism. Not the ideology, the humanity.

The first lines said that if the bourgeoisie had the right to kill people in Vietnam, "we have the right to kill you. If you have the right to kill people innocent people in Okinawa, we have the right to kill you."

Like I said, it wasn't the politics, but this sentiment really stuck with me. I read this the day before a show in Hibiya, and I was thinking I could just whisper a few words about it during the show. However, I got caught up in the moment and shouted it! People took it as an attempt at agitation, and they really seized on it. I thought "hey, maybe this is where I should go with this." From that point on, Zuno Keisatsu became a political band.

I was planning on singing "赤軍兵士の詩" ("Red Army Soldier's Poem," based on lyrics by Berthold Brecht) at the Hibiya show, thinking there would be a lot of red helmets (from the Socialist Bunt) there. But it turned out the audience was all in white helmets! I was so nervous I started shaking. The first line was "we are the red helmet people," so I'm thinking I shouldn't sing the song! (laughs) There were 12000 people, and a lot of security. It wasn't a show, was a rally!

Fortunately, it worked. That was essentially the birth of Zuno Keisatsu as it is now. "銃を取れ!" ("Pick Up A Gun!")* came later. People started thinking of Zuno Keisatsu based on the politics, and we became famous.

Thing is, when I wrote songs like "Pick Up A Gun!" it was as an internal monologue...when you sing it out loud, it becomes a message, although that wasn't my intent. I was thinking that, with the world in the state it was, I should be doing something, and that song was the response. It wasn't really intended as a rallying cry.

JR: So now you had your direction.

PT: The music we ended up making was great, so we decided that we needed to find a way to make a record. In 1969, I think it was April 1st, we played a show in Kanda with The Flower Travellin' Band. It was their first gig under that name.** The first Zuno Keisatsu album was partially recorded there, the rest was in Kyoto. We started getting pretty popular.

Then one day, I open the newspaper, and I read that someone had opened fire on a policeman...with a rivet gun! It was (Spartacus Bunt's) Mr. Chiba! He was trying to steal a real gun from the police.

I was pretty shocked. Then the incident got me thinking about the name "Spartacus Bunt." It was a German political party that eventually became the German Communist party. I was pretty apolitical when I was in Spartacus Bunt, but when people hear the name, they assume I was into politics from the beginning! (laughs) It turned out that Mr. Chiba had become active in the Chuo University socialist party. "Bunt" means road, and different groups would have different colors. Chuo's was red. A lot of the New Left people were very much against Stalin, but were pro-Mao. I can't really say I was influenced politically by Mr. Chiba or the band, but I had gotten caught up in the new left wing politics that were starting to pop up in campuses all over Japan after Spartacus Bunt. I think it's possible that our popularity got Mr. Chiba thinking, which might have led to the incident!

JR: Popular as you were, you had a big struggle actually getting recordings out.

PT: Zuno Keisatsu 1 was actually the last album to come out! There was a group in Japan that would check lyrics in Japanese albums, kind of an ethics in music committee, and they stopped the general release. We had put a column in a local magazine saying we wanted to sell the first album. This was in 1972, 600 people responded. The money disappeared, we weren't organized enough to respond efficiently, but I wanted to make good on the promise. It took a while, though!

The front cover was a guy who robbed a bank by dressing up as a policeman. They never caught him. The cover designer suggested the bank robber, and even though it wasn't directly relevant to the lyrics, I liked it: I wanted to convey the attitude of rebellion. The cover ended up being a lot bigger than normal, because we used LP mailers instead of actual LP sleeves. It was self financed, the mailers were cheaper!  I stamped and sent the albums out by hand from a post office in Shibuya, and immediately afterwards, I went to our last show in Yaneura on December 31st, 1975.

JR: You also had a lot of trouble with "2nd."

Yeah, it was banned.  The political content got the album pulled. The ethics committee came down on us: They didn't like the lyrics. They didn't even like our name. They got the first album stopped, which is why we had to take out that ad in the paper. This was just before we signed to Victor Japan (ZK's label.)

I actually told Victor that they might not want to record us, but they said not to worry. At the time, there was a lot of concern in Japan that was stirred up by the Yodo-Go hijacking, and the Tel Aviv airport attack by the Japanese Red Army, and all this made things very difficult for a strongly political band like ours. Particularly with "Red Army Soldier's Poem." It was actually from a poem by Berthold Brecht, about the Red Army in Germany, but politics in Japan were so sensitive that nobody bothered to pay close enough attention to find that out. Victor and I agreed to remove that song, but the album was still banned a month after it came out. Victor kept pressing them anyway! (laughs) The album did have "Pick Up A Gun!" and one song had some lyrics about marijuana, that's why it got banned. After that, they really had it in for us.

We eventually made "3" the same year, that was the first one that was realistically available! (laughs) We were pretty frustrated, the first song on the album was basically saying "fuck off!" (laughs) We still had to deal the ethics committee, so I made up some really foul lyrics, a lot of bad language. Of course, they hated them, so second time around presented the actual lyrics and said "OK, I fixed them." I changed "marijuana" to "grass," things like that. The ruse worked! (laughs)

Everybody pretended they didn't know what was going on, but of course, our label was supporting us! (laughs) All the bannings got us a lot of attention, and that attention let us make the third album. That was our best year, but we were weighed down by our reputation afterwards. I guess that's an inevitable consequence of being uncompromising about your art.

JR: Was that a factor in Zuno Keisatsu's split?

PT: Well, things had gotten stale. When people saw us play, they wanted to hear things like "Red Army Soldier's Poem," and it was making it difficult to branch out in any creative way. Everybody wanted politics, but I had other ideas. It got to be about fitting people's expectations, and not about creating something sincere.

I started thinking in terms of writing outside the band, starting fresh. I told the band we should give Zuno Keisatsu a send off, some kind of final ceremony, before things started getting really ugly and dysfunctional, and they were relieved: they were waiting for me to say it. We played our last show on New Years, 75-76.

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Part 2 of this interview, in which Panta talks about his subsequent solo career, is here.

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