Many non-Japanese artists express an affinity for Japanese culture, whether that¡¯s through traditional crafts, anime or aesthetics. For American pop singer Caroline Polachek, her kinship to Japan is more subliminal because, from the age of 1 through 7, Tokyo was her home.
Polachek even spoke Japanese during this time, having attended a local primary school for two years before her family relocated back to the United States. ¡°(Growing up bilingual) really trains your ear for phonetics and sonics at a young age,¡± Polachek says via video chat from her label¡¯s office in Shibuya, ¡°especially in Japanese, which is such a delicious and beautiful language.¡±
Though she is no longer fluent in Japanese, Polachek¡¯s childhood memories are still firmly intact. She lived here in the late 1980s, a boom time for Japanese anime, and her favorite show was ¡°Creamy Mami, the Magic Angel,¡± which follows a little girl who transforms into a magical pop star. ¡°Of course, for me, that was aspirational as a 5-year-old,¡± says Polachek, 38. She also recalls formative memories of learning Japanese songs in choir, her first earthquakes, family trips to the aquarium and ¡°the feeling of the architecture ¡ª even the way the trees are shaped differently.¡±
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