B-side "Talk Talk" Format 7" square record
CD Length 3:41 | Released 1980 Genre New wave
power pop Label United Artists | |
"Turning Japanese" is a song released by English band The Vapors, from their album New Clear Days, and the song for which they are best known. The lyric consists mainly of the singer talking about pictures of his love. It prominently features an Oriental riff played on guitar.
Overview
Songwriter David Fenton explains: "Turning Japanese is all the clichés about angst and youth and turning into something you didn't expect to."
The band knew they had a success with "Turning Japanese", so much so that they waited until their second single before releasing it, fearing that if they released it as their first they would become "one-hit wonders". They never matched its success.
The song enjoyed some sales in Japan after its great success in Australia, where it spent two weeks at No. 1 during June 1980.
"Turning Japanese" was believed to euphemistically refer to masturbation — i.e. the act causing the man to squint and therefore resemble a Japanese person's eyes "It could have been (turning) Portuguese, Lebanese, anything that fitted with that phrase. It has nothing to do with the Japanese...The first time the idea of masturbation came up was when we were touring America. It was written about that 'turning Japanese' was an English phrase for masturbation, which it wasn't."
Guitarist Rob Kemp went on to say, "It's a love song about somebody who had lost his girlfriend and was going slowly crazy, turning Japanese is just all the cliches of our angst... turning into something you never expected to."