Betty Davis in Japan - Entry #7

A Travel Journal by Danielle Maggio. Entry #7 of 7.

Day 7: Friday, March 8^th

I awoke to my last morning in Japan and slowly began my preparations for the long day of travel ahead. I returned to the playlist that Betty retroactively helped me create, and, on this final morning, I listened to one of her more recent favorites from Japanese ambient musician Hiroshi Yoshimura. While Betty never knew Yoshimura personally, she was turned on to him when Light in the Attic (LITA) released his album Green in 2020. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with emotion as I packed my bag to the cyclical sounds of Yoshimura’s synthesizers. The reality of the trip had begun to sink in, and memories of Betty’s unique humanity started to vividly appear in my mind. I thought of her varied interests and passions, her strong opinions and silly quirks, and her impressive commitment to absorbing new music while still only engaging with media on her own terms.

After several days of record shopping in some of the most extraordinary stores I’d ever seen, I managed to acquire a healthy amount of vinyl. And, as I feared, I couldn’t fit this new haul of records into my single piece of carry-on luggage that was now also filled with the large pile of written correspondence given to me by composer Shigeru Umebayashi. These precious materials needed their own mode of transportation. So, with only a few hours before my flight back home, I headed out into the busy streets of Shibuya one last time to purchase another bag.

Despite the purpose of my shopping trip, I couldn’t help popping into the nine-story Tower Records store one last time as I walked by its gigantic sign that reads: NO MUSIC, NO LIFE. I quickly scanned over some records in the R&B/Soul section until my fingers came across a familiar purple color. It was Betty’s final album Crashin’ From Passion, which was recorded in 1979, previously unreleased, and contains the liner notes I was privileged to write for it while Betty was still alive in 2020. Although I had looked at the album cover a thousand times before–as one does after getting the chance to compose liner notes for their favorite musician’s albums–I was still mesmerized. The sight of Betty Davis took my breath away. Her effortlessly cool pose. The cascade of fringe falling over her leather pants and knee-high boots. And her fierce gaze staring back at me.

The sensation was very similar to how I felt when I first laid eyes on Betty in 2007, following the re-release of her debut album. However, unlike that first moment with one of her album covers, this time I was staring at Betty Davis the funk goddess and Betty Davis the person–a woman who I knew to be funny and fragile, curious and stubborn, and saucy as hell. I felt Betty’s presence so strongly in that moment and knew she would have been proud of what we accomplished here in Japan. I held her record in my hands for a while, and then I said goodbye.

Back in 2016, during only our second meeting together, Betty casually told me about her stay in Japan over lunch. She couldn’t recall the year or how long she was there, only that she performed with a band called Arakawa at The Crocodile Club in Tokyo and that she visited Mount Fuji with a musician named Fumio Miyashita and a Shinto priest. Sitting across from the long retired and infamously reclusive foremother of funk-rock certainly wasn’t something I was accustomed to doing (though, if I’m being totally honest, it always felt a bit surreal even after six years of friendship).

“That sounds incredible,” I replied to her story, unable to produce a more eloquent response.

“It really was,” she said in her gentle way, as a soft smile washed over her beautifully aged face.

Like so many fans, I had questions. But I knew this relationship was more important than the immediacy of having those questions answered. This was about building trust and establishing camaraderie. In those early months of knowing Betty, I simply listened to whatever thought or memory she felt like sharing. Soon enough, she and I developed a rhythm and a timing.

Sharing and listening to music together remained the cornerstone of our relationship until the end of her life. Despite her choice not to own a computer nor have access to the internet, Betty still managed to introduce me to new music. She had a vast knowledge of Japanese composers and musicians, including Makoto Yano, Shimoda Itsuro, Shigeru Umebayashi, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. It was through these artists, along with her Shinto book collection, that Betty revealed her deep admiration of Japan to me over the years. Listening to that music together with Betty, as she’d light her favorite incense and brew her favorite tea, was more than a superfan and aspiring scholar like me could’ve ever asked for. I never thought that, years later, I would have the honor of visiting Japan in Betty’s name and meeting with some of those very same musicians. But when she passed away on February 9^th in 2022, her inner circle of friends knew we needed to carry out her final wishes: to have her ashes spread under a beautiful tree at Mount Fuji. After two years of planning, and with the support of Betty’s remaining family, it finally happened.

As an ethnomusicologist who continues to write about Betty’s life and career, this week provided a powerful bookend to an iconic musician’s career. And as a friend who still acutely feels the loss of a remarkable person in my life, this trip was a deeply healing part of my own personal grieving process.

During this amazing week with Betty’s chosen family, I heard firsthand from Tatsuhiko Arakawa about how she seamlessly stepped back into the role of bandleader by teaching the Arakawa Band her original songs, despite not knowing the language and not having performed since 1977. I was told by Tetsuya Nishi about how Betty used to command the stage of his Crocodile Club and captivated the Japanese audience. I learned how Betty’s fierce drive to collaborate stayed with composer Shigeru Umebayashi for decades, eventually leading to the last song in which Betty’s voice can be heard–a track called “Two Hands.” From musician Itsuro Shimoda, I was reminded of the soft, poetic side of Betty who craved human connection and intimacy as we all do. Fashion designer Yuki Torimaru told me all about what a wonderful friend Betty was to him and how her presence and style uniquely affected the energy of any room she entered. From Alex Easley, who knew Betty since childhood, I surmised the impetus for her trip to Japan and the role that family trauma and heartbreak at home had played in that decision.

Betty’s choice to live and work in Japan was complex and multifaceted, as was much about her life, her persona, and her music. When she arrived in 1983, she had already begun her transition away from the music industry and from the public altogether. The years leading up to her stay in Japan had been trying on Betty’s career and her mental health as she grieved the loss of both her beloved father and her final album (Crashin’ From Passion). Despite two decades in the music business as a singer, songwriter, and producer, her standing in the industry was obsolete, and she found herself without a band, a record label, or many viable career options at 39 years old. After having her last two studio albums shelved and dealing with her own share of personal heartbreak and trauma, Betty wasn’t interested in begging to be heard and seen by an industry that had never really understood her or her music. Traveling across the world provided her with a much-needed escape from the grind of the American music industry and the hyper-racialized, hyper-sexualized politics that came with it.

However, moving to Japan wasn’t just a choice made out of necessity or escape. It was also fueled out of desire and Betty’s lust for new knowledge and lived experiences. Like many artists of her generation, she had long been inspired by East Asian spirituality and culture, and her time in Japan further enhanced her deep-rooted interest in spiritual wellness. Indeed, her visit to Mount Fuji was what cemented her belief in the power of meditation and the healing properties of nature: two essential creeds that Betty lived by as an elderly woman. While she may have arrived in Japan in exile from both an industry that devalued her music and from a country that rarely acknowledges the taxing labor that falls on the shoulders of Black women who do pioneering cultural work, Betty Davis’s time in Japan impacted her life in profoundly positive and meaningful ways. Nevertheless, Betty returned to Homestead, PA in 1983 after an eight month stint in Japan and proceeded to live her life in reclusion.

After having the great honor of getting to know Betty as a person, I quickly grasped that she had survived unspeakable hardships (some of which I documented in this series and many that I have not). But, after my time in Japan retracing her final steps as a working musician and meeting with her former bandmates, friends, and lovers, I realized just how much of a survivor Betty was and how much she sacrificed so that we may reap the benefits of an unapologetic, feminist music culture that she helped to seed. She survived by remaining in control. Control over her sound. Control over her look. Control over her message. Control over the production of her music. Control over her privacy. And, most importantly, control over her own self-determination.

By the end of this trip, I had a clearer awareness of something I’d been slowly discovering throughout my years of research and my connection to Betty herself. That is, the supposed “mystery” of Betty’s “disappearance” that so often follows her story will never be solved because it rarely accounts for either the cultural gatekeeping Betty endured or the intentionality of her artistic and personal control. Indeed, there is no mystery about it. Betty’s absence from the music industry upon her arrival back to the US clearly points to both the indignities that Black women have long suffered in white male-controlled creative industries as well as the vulnerabilities of precocious artists who suffer them.

Like so many visionaries who paved a new way toward the future, Betty was met with shock and dismay during her career and had little security after it. But, in Japan, Betty broke away from all of that so she could exit the music industry and the public on her own terms.

…

A month after we all returned home to our respective cities, with our lives and work resuming as usual, we were contacted by Yuki Torimaru. At some point during our ceremony for Betty at Mount Fuji, where we scattered her ashes beneath a snow-covered cherry tree, one of us suggested that we task someone with visiting Betty’s final resting site after the cherry tree grove blossomed. Yuki brought news that the driver he hired for us on the trip agreed to carry out this mission and had graciously sent a picture for us to have.

The season had visibly turned in the photo, and what was once a dormant, snowy grove was now thriving with billowy pink and white blooms. Seeing Betty’s tree in this new way, with vivid color and texture enveloping it, was the most extraordinary thing. Just as her music lives on and serves as a source of renewal for her artistic genius, so too will her eternal resting place be a symbol of regeneration.

Like that cherry tree grove at the base of Mount Fuji, a global network of Betty fans and Betty’s metaphorical children has taken root–all inspired by her pioneering style of Afrofuturist feminist funk. There is no longer any question about Betty Davis’s standing in music history. Her music and her story grow more influential with each passing season.