Word: oyamada
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...Oyamada was born in Tokyo and reared primarily by his mother after his parents divorced when he was eight. His father was a singer and ukulele player for the Mahina Stars, a group that plays Hawaiian pop and is well known in Japan. It was while studying in art school that he started a kitsch pop band called Flipper's Guitar with former junior-high buddy Kenji Ozawa (nephew of conductor Seiji Ozawa). A demo tape of theirs found its way to Polystar Records (where Oyamada is still based) and the duo were immediately signed...
...What's impressive about Oyamada is for the amount of creative risks he takes, his records still end up selling," says Kazuo Suzuki, a professor at the Tokyo School of Music, who directed Flipper's Guitar's radio shows in the late 1980s. "Like those free headphones he included in the initial pressing of Fantasma. He's certainly no businessman?more like a record company's worst nightmare." Actually, he could become a music mogul's dream: the guy has moved 300,000 units worldwide and looks ready to break...
...Oyamada's whole career, somehow, seems like a whim that has grown into a full-time job. Even the inspiration for his pseudonym was arrived at by happenstance. For several nights following Flipper's Guitar's breakup in 1991, Oyamada would come home late and zone out in front of the TV, watching old Planet of the Apes series reruns...
...found out later that the French author Pierre Boulle got his story idea while he was a POW under the Japanese. He saw himself as the human and the Japanese as apes," says Oyamada with a laugh. "But since Cornelius' character is a sort of intermediary between the apes and humans, it kind of makes sense for me to have that name...
...When he's asked about what sort of wisdom he might impart to his young son, Oyamada stumbles for an answer. Then, after a long pause, he says, "I'd really like to learn something from...