The Second Room regretfully announces the immediate suspension of Psychedelic Radar trance party promotions and all post-party reports following revelations of an alleged incident of coercive entrapment more ridiculous than the Deep Blue roundup that sank Zodiac Music some 2 1/2 years ago.
Details of this recent event are unfolding and being withheld voluntarily at the moment. But suffice it to say that I now feel it unwise to continue giving out free hints as to where I might be, or may have been, on a given night to people who frighten me and that I don't feel like running into.
I have provided links at right for you to scope out upcoming parties. I will add more links soon to fill out the list.
Honestly, I should have stopped writing up party promotions after experiencing the police state firsthand outside Zepp Tokyo last year. Read further down in this blog for a description of that. But 2006 was hopping and summer was coming and the calender was full of open-air festivals. So I gave it some thought and kept it going.
Here we are seven months later and party calenders in Tokyo and Osaka are still full -- 2007 is off to a blazing start like I've never seen for any January. I know that the organizers, artists and labels have been largely pleased with getting their Psychedelic Radar mentions on a mainstream Web site like The Japan Times, and I have enjoyed being given the opportunity to do something positive for Japan's trance scene. I think the scene can carry itself until next summer while I absorb myself with work, music production and video editing. (That's my backup story and I'm stickin' to it!)
The lurid tale of the October 2004 Deep Blue roundup in Roppongi, as told to me firsthand, goes like this. One morning just a few minutes after a large group of "VIPs" (read: Family guys) leaves this 6th Floor open bar, a gaggle of cops barge in and tells the 15-20 remaining people to stop what they are doing. Then they begin searching the bar for "the evidence" of drugs. This goes on for several minutes while they check the couches, the VIP room, the toilets and even the CDs in the rack above the bar -- pulling out and checking individually each of more than 50 CDs. (Your tax money at work, folks!)
Somewhere amid all the movement a nondescript guy in an overcoat joins the search, which has yet to produce even one of those little tiny ziplock bags that so freely litter Roppongi. No evidence? No problem! This guy, who has blended in with the other officers, saunters over near the bar, reaches down and feels around in the dark without a flashlight like he suddenly figured out the bad guy's trick and behold, produces out of an impossibly small nook a small box that contains a green leafy substance. Grass out of thin air? Nice trick! Nothing up your overcoat sleeve now, eh, Detective Columbo?
So when the cop with the biggest mouth pipes up and asks who the box belongs to, the people being detained in the bar are all telling the truth when they say that they don't know. And this is where the gestapo bastards get you:
Guess what? The test on this immaculate dope showed the wrong color. Uh, oh! And all those people were rudely yanked out of their lives for a minimum of 23 days on NO CHARGES and PLANTED EVIDENCE. There was at least one poor fellow who left behind traces of something bad in his urine, he was there much longer.
One of those unfortunate detainees was working there on irregular part-time shifts at about 1,000 yen per hour so he could bring home at least some money while doing something he was good at. On this fateful morning, he was DJ'ing, cleaning glasses, delivering drinks at the bar counter and wiping up wet circles from people who can't remember to use a coaster. I had been begging him for weeks to quit this place -- even today just thinking about it gives me the creeps. Aside from not wanting this very same thing to happen to a sincere friend, it just wasn't worth the 5,000 yen or so takehome pay per day. But his Zodiac Music events were bombing because he continually allowed himself to get shafted by poor business choices. The record company had given him a raw deal on his second compilation as well. Bills are bills and children must be fed, and he worked there one day too many.
Kemal wasn't coming. Kemal was a guest of the police state, "participating in the investigation." Inside they wear you down with endless discipline under depressing and demoralizing conditions. And as often as they can get around to you, expect illegal threats, getting yanked out suddenly for special questioning, being forced to wade through endless albums of trance party photos -- most of them in that annoying "V-sign" pose that these kids can't stop themselves from doing anytime someone says "cheeeeee-zu!"
They show these photos over and over again with varied question patterns until they start to look exactly the same. "Do you know this person? That person? That one? That one?" They also go to your home and misdirect your family into thinking you are Charles Manson. (Got a Japanese mother-in-law? You may never fix this damage.)
It does you no good to hear from me about life inside one of these holding tanks and the daily dramas that manifest out of various induced psychoses in an ordeal like this. You need to hear it firsthand, see the permanent scars in their psyche up close, listen to this victim as they unfold for you the most harrowing, unpleasant, humiliating and wholly unnecessary 23 days of their life, barring any time spent in Camp X-ray or the inescapable clutches of a depraved psycho torture/kill machine. Which could be one and the same.
Endless questions calulated to produce perjury in the weary, until you confess, or until your second 10-day "investigation period" ends 23 days after simply going to work on the wrong day.
If you assumed that by giving your full cooperation and allowing yourself to get taken inside and losing 23 opportunites to earn a daily wage when there was not one piece of evidence that they will even mutter a "thank you," then you are wrong. No apology, no redress -- "Get out and don't ever let me see you again!" if you get that much. I was told it's actually more of a high-pitch grunting sound, like a skunk bitching because he sprayed himself.
The next time I saw Kemal after his ordeal, I greeted a once-proud talented man whose will had been shattered. He had lost weight, especially in his face. He was more nervous than I had ever seen him. His attention was distracted and his eyes darted off during and between drags off never-ending cigarettes at simple shapes lurking in the shadows. The debts and the emotional pain, the lost income, it was too much. Kemal faced a choice of trying to recoup his losses against bad odds and maybe regain his pride in some break-even gigs, or he could turn his back on psy-trance, start over with a six-day-a-week factory job and pay back his debts.
It was the end of my brief residency but it was an awakening for my dear friend. These days Kemal is doing great, looks healthy and was maybe even going off cigarettes. He just excludes evil Tokyo from his life. Perhaps being shocked back into his place in the Matrix was the best thing for Kemal, but it was a shitty deal and one that killed a still-promising career.
Parents and loved ones are the people best qualified to tell someone to stop using drugs, so I'll leave that righteous lecture to them. But you are risking certain hell if you're dumb and/or brazen enough to carry around drugs with you anywhere, especially in Japan. Which is exactly the mind set that the police state succeeds in creating. Now, ask yourself why.
posted by DJO at 10:24 PM
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