Aneka – ‘Japanese Boy’

19 September 1981

Content warning: cultural appropriation, Orientalism, the works.

This is the first of our number ones that I was actually aware of at the time. During one rain-swept holiday at Rosses Point, as we were driving along a main road somewhere around Sligo, this came on the radio. The combination of glassy voice and catchy disco-pop chorus immediately jammed itself into my pre-school brain. My Top of the Pops awareness still being some years away, I only knew ‘Japanese Boy’ from the radio and didn’t see its video or singer on TV at the time.

Sometime in the ’00s, on one of those greatest-ever list shows featuring one-hit wonders, I finally saw Aneka and her 1981 Top of the Pops performance. The show first gave some background: Aneka was the stage name of a Scottish singer called Mary Sandeman, who had no Japanese or Asian family heritage. And yet there she was on TOTP dressed in a kimono and black wig in the traditional Japanese style, essentially doing what her compatriot Sean Connery also does in the latter half of You Only Live Twice.

But wait; why did Aneka feel the need to dress up as Japanese herself to sing about a Japanese boy? Well, performers dressing up as national stereotypes with “funny” “foreign” accents—and to my ears Aneka’s slightly stilted diction in the verses sails pretty close to putting on an accent—has been a light entertainment staple since night one. Also, you ask yourself if those involved had some sort of latent assumption or unconscious bias that only a Japanese person would be singing about loving a Japanese boy and by now the whole enterprise is smelling fairly rotten.