Three Blind Mice: Japan's Blue Note

In the mid-1970s, according to Takeshi Fujii's memory at least, you could not walk through Akihabara, Tokyo's electronics district, without hearing one of two records playing somewhere along the strip: Tsuyoshi Yamamoto's Misty or Isao Suzuki's Blow Up. Both came from the Three Blind Mice record label, which Fujii had started in 1970 with two friends. It was a time, he says, when a decent stereo was a uni student's dream, assembled one piece at a time, speakers first, then turntable and amplifier, and he made his records for exactly that listener. TBM is often called the Japanese Blue Note. Fair to the sleeves and the ambition, but by Fujii's own account, completely wrong when it comes to the sound.

What Fujii wanted, and what his engineer Yoshihiko Kannari spent a decade perfecting, was the band as you would hear it live. No isolation booths, no equaliser tricks, no nudging the piano up for the solo. It was a simple brief; following it was much harder. Fifty years on, the records still sound great and originals now command a premium, and they are still the best way into Japanese jazz of the 1970s.

Waiting for someone else to do it

Fujii was born in 1941 and grew up during the US occupation of Japan after WW II. On the radio he would hear late-night programmes of American pop, and Chiemi Eri singing Patti Page's "Tennessee Waltz". Bebop came later, just before he started high school, when a neighbour lent him a copy of Jazz at Massey Hall. Parker and Gillespie floored him, and so did Mingus, whose bass drove the band in a way totally unlike the swing records that came before. The neighbour, Urushiyama, ended up running TBM's liaison office in New York.

Towards the end of his final year at school, Fujii noticed a gap in the jazz he was listening to. There was no Japanese musicians. Reading around, he found that much of the American music he loved had been recorded by small labels whose owners produced the sessions themselves. Japan had major labels, but it had nothing like Prestige or Blue Note.

For the moment he could do nothing about it. The family ran a disinfection business, so Fujii studied pharmacy, graduated in 1963 and took over from his father. But he made himself a promise: if nobody had started that kind of label in Japan by the time he was 30, he would do it himself. He jumped a year early. In 1969 the guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi formed New Direction, the bassist Hideto Kanai released Original with his Kings Roar group and the pianist Yosuke Yamashita recorded Mina's Second Theme. Fujii, watching the music move, was afraid of being left behind.

Three Blind Mice opened in June 1970. There were three of them, Fujii and two friends, one of them an architect, and none knew the first thing about making or selling records, which is where the name came from. He liked the Japanese proverb that goes with it, too, the one about the blind having no fear of snakes.

The label's first advertisement picked a fight with the very people it was meant to win over. "Are you, perhaps, prejudiced?" it asked, in translation (not the usual way to introduce a record label). If you think only American jazz is the real thing, the copy went on, that is not your fault, since until now nearly all Japanese jazz had been a copy of the original, a few fine players aside. Fujii wanted a reaction, and the prejudice was real enough. Japanese jazz fans treated Blue Note and Prestige as gods. TBM lost heavily for three years, scraped into profit in its fourth, but by its fifth year the tide was starting to turn and Fujii even began paying himself a small salary.

Two records nobody asked for

Fujii's rules for the catalogue were short. Record only the players who excite you, famous or not. Leave alone anyone with a chance of a deal elsewhere, but take the veteran nobody else is bothering to record.

His first choice was Kosuke Mine, a saxophonist in his mid-twenties who was then playing alto. Of the eight albums TBM released in its first two years, Mine led two and played on four. Mine (TBM-1) was a young unknown leading a band through mostly original tunes, in a sleeve Fujii cheerfully admits did it no favours, and it was never going to sell. The other opening record came from the pianist Masaru Imada, whose recital at Kinokuniya Hall in March 1970 had been the most striking thing Fujii heard all year; he went backstage with a business card, and Now!! (TBM-2) was recorded that August. As statements of intent go, opening a label with two records nobody was asking for takes some beating.

Kannari and the room

The engineer arrived on a critic's recommendation. Yoshihiko Kannari had made his first jazz recording as lead engineer in the summer of 1969, Akira Miyazawa's Iwana for Victor, cut at Aoi Studio in Azabu with the critic Shoichi Yui supervising. Yui liked what he heard and introduced Kannari to Fujii. By Kannari's own account, in a 2024 interview with the Japanese magazine otonano, he had not listened to much jazz and did not recognise Yui's name. He simply found that jazz came out better under his hands than anything else he recorded, which is either luck or the best kind of instinct.

On Mine he was the assistant, and the senior engineer, Katsuo Ohkawara, recorded straight to two-track. A week later Fujii asked Kannari to engineer the next session himself, and he recorded to three or four channels instead, so he could weigh the balance afterwards. From then on he engineered almost everything the label made, more than 120 albums.

Fujii wanted the sound natural and powerful at once, and he asked Kannari to leave the equalisers alone beyond the bare minimum. Nobody went into an isolation booth. Bands played together, all at once, and when the singer Ayako Hosokawa recorded Call Me with Toshiyuki Miyama's New Herd big band, she sang live with the orchestra; the channel kept spare for a vocal repair went unused. Rudy Van Gelder, Fujii said, would lift the piano for a piano solo and bring the bass forward for a bass solo, which is a perfectly reasonable way to steer a listener's ear. Fujii didn't want to steer anyone. His own phrase for the result, translated, is "natural, but strong", and I have not read a better description of the TBM sound.

Not everyone hears a miracle. Wojciech Pacuła of the Polish magazine High Fidelity notes that Van Gelder recorded straight to stereo while TBM's sessions at Aoi Studio went to multitrack tape and were mixed afterwards. He also argues that TBM was not the only great-sounding Japanese label at time or even the best of them; that title, for him, goes to Okihiko Sugano's Audio Lab Record. Fair enough maybe but the case for TBM was never that it had the cleanest sound in Tokyo. It is ultimately the music itself that matters the most, and Fujii's commitment to a particular aesthetic of sound. On those counts, the records still deliver.

Fujii put the engineer's and the designer's names on the sleeve, on the sensible theory that people do better work when it is signed. The designer was Ben Nishizawa, whose mock-up for Mine won Fujii over on first sight and which, half a century later, he still calls shocking. Beyond adding the logo, Nishizawa was given no instructions at all when it came to cover design. Production stayed with Fujii alone. Everything else, from sales policy to the newsletter, went to a monthly meeting chaired in turn by every employee, including whoever had joined that week.

He tested the one-man principle exactly once. Around 1976 and 1977 TBM ran a talent contest, the Jazz Grand Prix, with cassette entries, a set piece and a final at Yamaha Hall in front of ten judges. It turned up one properly odd group, Jimmy, Yoko & Shin, who went on to make Sei Shōnagon for the label in 1978, and after two years Fujii scrapped it. Ten judges, he found, always reward technique and he didn't want that. He wanted the players doing something nobody could quite explain.

Ten records

Fujii's taste ran from free jazz to big bands, and the catalogue is too big to take in all at once. These ten, in the order they were made, tell most of the story.

Mine (1970)

Mine (TBM-1) is a young band with an electric edge. Kosuke Mine on alto and soprano, Takashi Imai on trombone, Hideo Ichikawa on Fender electric piano, Takashi Mizuhashi on bass and Hiroshi Murakami on drums. They recorded at Aoi Studio on 4 August 1970, finishing "Work I" the next day. All four pieces run long, the shortest at nine minutes and the longest at almost fourteen. Mine wrote the opener, "Morningtide", and Ichikawa the two pieces on side two. The one outside tune is "Isotope", from Joe Henderson's Blue Note album Inner Urge, which for a label that would spend the next fifty years being called the Japanese Blue Note is either a tribute or a dare. Shoichi Yui, the critic who had sent Kannari to Fujii, wrote the liner notes. 

Blow Up (1973)

Isao Suzuki was 40 before he made an album under his own name, with years in George Kawaguchi's Big Four and a spell in New York with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers behind him. Blow Up (TBM-15), recorded at Aoi Studio on 29 and 30 March 1973, rests on one good idea. On the trio tracks Suzuki plays bass with Kunihiko Sugano on piano and Fender electric piano and George Otsuka on drums; on the rest Takashi Mizuhashi joins on a second bass, which frees Suzuki to pick up the cello. Two low string instruments in a small band, recorded close and without decoration, are a gift to anyone with decent speakers. Swing Journal gave the record the Japan Jazz award at its 1973 Jazz Disc Awards, and Kannari still plays its opening track, "Aqua Marine", to everyone who comes to record at his private studio in the Nasu highlands. Suzuki died in 2022, aged 89. If you only ever own one TBM record, make it this one.

Unicorn (1973)

Unicorn (TBM-18) is the odd one out. It was recorded in New York, at Sound Ideas Studio on 18 May and 8 June 1973, and engineered not by Kannari but by George Klabin, who co-owned the studio and, decades later, founded the archival label Resonance Records. Even the sleeve is someone else's. Teruo Nakamura was a Tokyo-born bassist who had lived in New York since 1964 and joined Roy Haynes's band in 1969, and this was his first album as a leader, produced by Nakamura and Fujii together. He called in New York friends: Steve Grossman, who had replaced Wayne Shorter in Miles Davis's band, on tenor and soprano; Lenny White, who drummed on Bitches Brew, sharing the drums with Alphonse Mouzon; and George Cables and Hubert Eaves III, later half of the dance act D Train, on electric piano. With its mix of jazz, rock, funk and Afro, the record was well ahead of its time. If TBM is the sound of a room, this one was made in somebody else's, and it tells you more about Fujii's ears than about his methods. None of this troubles the people bidding on originals, and going by the sales history Unicorn is now the dearest TBM original of the lot.

Midnight Sugar and Misty (1974)

Tsuyoshi Yamamoto was a self-taught pianist from Sado Island who had already toured Europe as a sideman by the time he became house pianist at Misty, a Tokyo jazz club, in 1974. Midnight Sugar (TBM-23), cut at Aoi Studio on 1 March that year, opens with two of his own blues before turning to ballads. Misty (TBM-30) followed on 7 August with the same trio, Isoo Fukui on bass and Tetsujiro Obara on drums. It is mostly standards, Erroll Garner's "Misty" first and "Yesterdays", "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" further in, played with a light, bluesy swing and plenty of air between the notes.

The reservation is that none of it is adventurous. Yamamoto is a charming, easy player rather than a searching one, and anyone coming to Misty for the tension of Blow Up will leave disappointed. What it offers instead is ease, three instruments sitting in front of you without any of them leaning forward. It has been reissued more often than anything else on the label (eighteen versions on top of the original LP and tape), which tells you a lot about what buyers want from TBM.

Green Caterpillar (1975)

Masaru Imada had been there from the first week, with Now!!, and had kept recording for Fujii ever since. He was 42 when he went back into Aoi Studio on 20 and 22 January 1975, and Green Caterpillar (TBM-39) is all his own writing, four pieces of ten or eleven minutes each. The rhythm section is the one from Misty, Isoo Fukui on bass and Tetsujiro Obara on drums, with two more added: Yuji Imamura on congas and percussion, and Kazumi Watanabe, a 21-year-old guitarist who would turn up on four more records in this list over the next thirteen months. Imada plays electric piano on side one, where the band settles into a funk groove, and returns to acoustic piano for side two. Play it after Misty, made five months earlier with Fukui and Obara, and you can hear how little the TBM sound decided about the music. Same bass, same drums, a different record entirely.

Orang-Utan (1975)

Two years after Blow Up, Isao Suzuki went back to its one good idea and made it bigger. Orang-Utan (TBM-44), his fourth album as a leader for the label, was recorded in Tokyo on 4 April 1975, and once again a second bassist, Osamu Kawakami, leaves Suzuki free to move between bass, cello and electric piano. Kunihiko Sugano is back from Blow Up on piano and Fender organ, Kenji Mori plays alto, flute and bass clarinet, Shinji Mori is on drums and Watanabe on guitar, and Mari Nakamoto, who would make her third album with Suzuki and Watanabe that November, sings "Where Are You Going?". Suzuki's own "Blue Road" opens side one and his title track closes side two, at just over fifteen minutes. Where Blow Up is all close detail, this is a bigger, freer, more electric band stretching out. A month later, on 26 May, the same players minus Sugano took both long pieces to a Tokyo concert hall, a set that sat on tape until Days of Delight released it in 2022 as Blue Road.

Toki (1975)

Fujii first heard Hidefumi Toki when the saxophonist was about 20, just down from Osaka and playing the Five Spot in Jiyugaoka. He suggested a record immediately but it took five years to eventuate. Toki (TBM-46), recorded at Aoi Studio on 17 May 1975, is a pianoless quartet, with Toki on alto and soprano, Watanabe again on guitar, Nobuyoshi Ino on bass and Steve Jackson on drums. The first side, "Lullabye for the Girl" and "Darkness", is slow, patient and dark-toned, nearer to late-night spiritual jazz than to hard bop, before Ornette Coleman's "Blues" opens side two. When Akiomi Hirano started the Days of Delight label in 2018 with TBM as his model, the first record he made was with Toki. Fujii thanked him for proving his instinct had been right all along.

Mari Nakamoto III (1975)

Mari Nakamoto made her TBM debut with Unforgettable! in 1973, and her second album, Little Girl Blue, had her taking on Leon Russell's "A Song for You" and scatting her way through "Bags' Groove". The third (TBM-56), recorded in November 1975, strips everything back to her voice, Suzuki's bass and Watanabe's guitar: no drums, no piano, nowhere to hide. Watanabe, on his fourth record in this list, was on his way to becoming one of the best-known guitarists in Japan, and here he plays the accompanist with a restraint that suits the record. It is the clearest evidence in the catalogue of what Fujii's approach could do for a singer, and the one to hand anyone who thinks TBM only means piano trios.

Ryuhyo (1976)

Ryuhyo means drift ice, and Motohiko Hino's band recorded it live at the civic hall in Nemuro, at the eastern tip of Hokkaido, on 7 February 1976. Hino was Terumasa Hino's younger brother and, through the mid-1970s, Swing Journal's top-ranked drummer in Japan. Here he leads two tenor saxophonists, Mabumi Yamaguchi and Yasuaki Shimizu, with Watanabe on guitar and Ino on bass, across three long pieces: his own title track, Tadd Dameron's "Soultrane" and Steve Grossman's "New Moon", back from Unicorn and now taking up all of side two. Ryuhyo (TBM-61) is one of the hardest-hitting records the label made. Not bad work for a single winter's night in Nemuro.

The rest of the shelf

The catalogue goes much further than those ten. In 1971 TBM released Ginparis Session, a tape of a June 1963 night at a Ginza chanson club. On it Takayanagi, Kanai, Masahiko Togashi, Masabumi Kikuchi and Yosuke Yamashita are trying to invent a Japanese jazz that copied nobody. A year later came Free Form Suite by Takayanagi's improvising group, and his set at the 1980 Moers festival came out on TBM as well, which makes the label one of the more surprising homes for free jazz in Japan. There are big bands, Shuko Mizuno's Jazz Orchestra '73 with the New Herd and Tatsuya Takahashi and the Tokyo Union's Scandinavian Suite among them. And there is Black Orpheus (TBM-63), recorded at Aoi Studio on 20 February 1976, which puts Suzuki and Yamamoto in one trio with the American drummer Donald Bailey.

The later catalogue is thinner. After 1980 new releases slowed to a trickle and the hits dried up, so the treasure is almost all in the first ten years. The house style was the sound and the sleeve; the music went wherever Fujii's ears took him.

Broke, and back again

Abroad, the label did better in Europe than in the US. By the middle of the decade TBM had a liaison office in New York, but Fujii could find only about seven shops there willing to stock his records. A Paris shop took the label on around 1974, and hi-fi dealers in Europe sold the records to people who came for the sound as much as the jazz. On 11 July 1979 the Yamamoto trio and Bingo Miki's Inner Galaxy Orchestra played the Montreux Jazz Festival, and both sets came out on TBM.

The business was always shakier than the records. Toshiba-EMI made and distributed at least some of the early pressings. A five-year deal signed with Nippon Phonogram in March 1979 lasted two. Trio Records took over in 1981 and shut its record division about two years later, and Fujii spent until 1987 fighting Trio to get his masters back. New releases all but stopped for the rest of the decade, the original company was wound up in September 1985, and Fujii set up TBM Video Co. that same month to keep it going. The records deserved better partners.

What kept the name alive through the CD years was the sound. JVC's XRCD editions arrived in the mid-1990s, and in 1998 Fujii picked his favourite tracks for The Famous Sound of Three Blind Mice. In the United States, Cisco (later Impex) began cutting 45rpm vinyl editions in 2003. Sony issued 23 titles as hybrid SACDs in 2006 and 2007, and Disk Union's Think! Records put out 69 more on CD in 2013 and 2014. None of it saved the company. On 24 December 2014 the Tokyo District Court opened bankruptcy proceedings against TBM Records.

Even that was not the end. The catalogue now sits with Sony Music, whose three blind mice Premium Reissue Collection began in February 2024 with Misty, Ryuhyo and Mine, remastered and cut on 180g vinyl by Bernie Grundman. The series is supervised by Koki Hanawa of Disk Union, the man credited with starting Japan's wa-jazz boom (the wamono guide on this blog covers the wider revival), and Black Orpheus joined it this year.

Others have gone back to the original tapes too. In 2022 Days of Delight released two unheard live sets from TBM's two-inch masters, Suzuki's Blue Road from 1975 and Motohiko Hino's Flying Clouds from 1976, with Fujii supervising and Kannari mixing. Yamamoto and Kannari have been recording together again for the Somethin' Cool label as well. Blues for K (2022) was made at Kannari's own studio, and in November 2024 they recorded live in front of an audience at Tokyo's Onkio Haus, a studio TBM used in its day.

Buying Three Blind Mice on vinyl

I was in Tokyo earlier this month buying stock, and TBM turned up in every shop I went into. Never in great numbers, but every shop was pushing what they had. HMV and Tower Records were made great fanfare of the reissues and a fair amount of TBM merchandise too. Prices were steep across the board and steeper still for originals. Half a century on, people want these records badly and are paying accordingly.

What you will find, roughly from oldest to newest:

• Originals, from 1970. The TBM- numbers run from TBM-1 (1970) to TBM-78 (1976), and a four-digit series began in 1973. Early pressings were made at least partly through Toshiba-EMI, and many came with an obi and a booklet, which make a big difference to the price. The most valuable Japanese jazz records guide covers what originals of Blow Up, Midnight Sugar and Unicorn actually sell for, and how to spot a first pressing.
• Nippon Phonogram reissues, 1979 to 1981. Look for the TBM(P) prefix and the TBM Best 1500 Collection, numbered 15PJ. Older Toshiba-EMI stock sold in this period carries a blue tbm(F) sticker on the obi and a gold "Distributed by Nippon Phonogram" sticker on the front. These are period Japanese pressings at a fraction of an original's price, and they make up most of the vintage TBM in the shop.
• Trio pressings, from 1981. Look for PAP- catalogue numbers.
• Audiophile editions. For the label's 25th anniversary in 1996 came the 180g TBM Super-Cut Analogue Disk series. Cisco and later Impex followed with 45rpm sets, and Impex issued The Famous Sound of Three Blind Mice as a double LP.
• Sony's Premium Reissue Collection, from 2024. 180g, cut by Bernie Grundman from the original masters, with the original liner notes. The most practical way to own these records new. Affordable, numerous and excellent quality.

Which of those is best depends on your ears and your budget. I will always take an original over the Cisco and Impex reissues in a straight comparison, good as they are. Most people will be perfectly happy with a 1979 Nippon Phonogram copy or one of the Sony pressings, and a good deal happier with the price. The buyer's guide to Japanese pressings covers obi strips, inserts and grading, and When Tokyo Kept the Tape Rolling tells the other half of the story: the Japanese labels that kept recording American jazz when America stopped.

Fifty years ago you could hear Three Blind Mice from the footpath in Akihabara. Now you hear it on the footpath outside HMV in Shibuya. In between, the label went broke, changed hands and came back, and the records hardly had to change at all. Start with Blow Up, go next to Ryuhyo, and you will find both in the Three Blind Mice collection, along with everything else from the label in the shop. The merch you will have to fetch from Tokyo yourself.