“I hope that my photographs translate the vision of freedom and joy that they embody. Asian rockabillies have always been heroes I could relate to.”
Daigo “Johnny” Yamashita remembers first encountering rock and roll with Chuck Berry’s 1958 hit, “Johnny B. Goode,” when he was 16 years old.
A mash-up of rock and roll and country music, rockabilly was first popularized in Japan in 1955, when a cover of Bill Haley and His Comets’s “Rock Around the Clock” by the Japanese singer Chiemi Eri topped charts in the country. Thean urban motorcycle gang prominent in the 1950s made up of Japan’s proletariat, can perhaps be credited with bringing the earliest incarnations of the Greaser-style kitsch that now characterizes the subculture to the country.
With rockabilly’s re-found popularity came the extreme reimagining of the fashion, most of which, up until a few years ago, were most commonly found on rockabilly enthusiasts dancing near the entrance of Yoyogi Park in Shibuya, Tokyo. Photographer Alvin Kean Wong was struck by rockabilly culture when he first traveled to Japan from Singapore as a teenager.
Over the years, Yamashita has become somewhat of a rockabilly icon in Japan — amassing a collection of almost 20,000 followers and 15 leather jackets. He was nicknamed Johnny, “the most famous rockabilly name” as he puts it, when he was working at a 1950s-style bar named Johnny Angel many years ago and hasn’t let go of the name since.
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