Everything else I've posted lately was either attempts to stretch my muscles or a synthesis of notes from early study in a field I'm only just getting a good grasp on now.
I saved the best for Saturday evening. This will likely be re-published elsewhere, hopefully in the near future. Its something that had been bouncing around in my head for a good while, but some people I met two years ago had no inkling about it and wanted to know, so I wrote the entire history out. Its not something easy to find online either, much less in English.
To Hirasawa, taking on a genre is as as much about the ideology as the visual/stylistic appeal. When new wave & punk came at the same time, he glommed into the "breaking down of lost aims" by the past big rock movements. He'd also spent years struggling as part of a subcultural scene; from around the '80s band boom onwards those types of bands could build up a following—even succeed while remaining in the milieu—but in the preceeding eras, the mainstream Japanese music industry could only conceive of its acts as entertainment, even the most serious folksters.
YMO to most foreigners (and over time in Japan) is a bastion unto itself as the "pioneers" of electronic music, but in the context it came about, it was rock nobility staking a claim on trendy territory: Happy End & Sadistic Mika Band were already big, Ryuichi Sakamoto graduated from an elite university; the impetus for its creation was Haruomi Hosono wanting to jump on the bandwagon of disco covers of everything under the sun for maximum profit. Nothing could be more anathema to those new values than that trio.
Hirasawa was not alone in his conversion to the new dogma, quite a few punks of the era espoused the same values; the "street vs. majors" dichotomy was clear to those following at the time. But he stood out due to his charisma and Napoleon complex: P-Model was meant as a trojan horse to "overthrow Pink Lady". As he struggled with the failure of that dream, and the reality that new wave just became a fad of the moment easily swallowed by the mainstream industry, he got louder in his protestations. He was outspoken about his dislike of those Yellow Magic Phonies. The stand-out declaration being the leadup to the conclusion of his Colossal Youth review for Rockin' f magazine:1
When music called techno-pop first started appearing, the throw-yourself-out-there attitude of “if it doesn’t exist, go ahead and do it anyways” [...] was very effective against the rock scene infiltrated by pop styles controlled by the industry. And it’s true that despite having cynical, negative aspects, it did get appraised by society (although this is actually incorrect when it comes to what rock is).
There were good bands in Japan that had that level of quality [...]. However, it’s all ruined when creatures like YMO become very popular. Now, techno-pop is spoiled by the images of creatures.
Then he spent some years in post-punk territory. While that crowd openly shared his values,2 he was kind of a loner in the new wave field: others didn't care or liked that they were becoming part of the mainstream. Just from the other bands that hit big simultaneously with P-Model, each half of the Plastics "core" (Melon & Hajime Tachibana solo) signed with Alfa & got YMO to play on their albums, while the first "actual" outing of InoYama Land (Makoto Inoue & Yasushi Yamashita of Hikashu) was produced by Hosono. There's a lot more connections I could list out that keep Hirasawa only 2 degrees apart from YMO. Ultimately, while they never worked with em, at least Teruo Nakano & Hajime Fukuma are/were open fans of the band, while Katsuhiko Akiyama is fond of Takahashi in particular.3
An important part of the transition from P-Model to solo is that Hirasawa felt stifled by the public image/orthodoxy he'd developed since the late '60s, nose-turning at certain kinds of genres included; a notorious '87 interview was titled after his closing statement "To Put it Bluntly, I'm Fine With Singing Kayou-Kyouku Now". A stint backing Jun Togawa started not long after, which included making arrangements in his style of songs from her albums with YMO involvement, personal holy grails I've desperately wanted to hear for years now.
His tack when talking about the early '80s changed as well, shifting blame to the idol apparatus ("the final straw was Ikue Sakakibara's 'ROBOT'. I thought that was the end"). That said, the couple times I've seen him talk about YMO since then (one being the interview where he met Satoshi Kon) have a dismissive "They're jazz fusion, not techno-pop" attitude. Its laid out in the Mandrake Wikipedia page, but his stance towards fusion has been anything but friendly.4
Perhaps due to Hirasawa's bellicoseness during the first height of his fame, people seemed to believe the hate was mutual. An infamous rumor that circulated by the early '90s was that Sakamoto claimed P-Model was "music for virgins". Reportedly, Hirasawa addressed it on an issue of Hirasawa Bypass (his official fanclub newsletter at the time). He wrote that the comment was made by a writer interviewing Sakamoto, that then got conflated and game-of-telephone misattributed to him. Yuji Tanaka, a writer who's done in-depth Japanese techno-pop historiography with a focus on YMO (among other notorious online doings but that's a whole can of worms), has claimed Hirasawa and Sakamoto had a postive exchange about ecology, but I've no idea where/how that happened.
That misunderstanding might've also circulated because of the crowd Hirasawa attracted. By '98, the dude had a strong reputation as "popular specifically among people that work in the anime/manga industry", to the point Nippon Columbia marketed Technique of Relief directly to that crowd.5
A lot of the immediately accessible first-hand accounts of Japanese music scene dealings like this are on Twitter. One time, when trawling through the accounts of some Hirasawa associates, I came across a conversation that really caught my eye. They talked about how P-Model, Hikashu and Plastics all had clear cultural characteristics of the streets/towns/machi/[your preferred translation for the subdivisions of Tokyo] they came from; while YMO was pure agency fare. I'm honestly not sure if the average fan can make that distinction now, even the Japanese ones: its all talk from people who remember Tokyo before the bubble went into overdrive.
Really, a lot of underground Japanese music like this is deeply tied to the time and place it originated from. And these are the bands that released recordings regularly: many others only ever had live house dates to their name. It all deeply fascinates me, but the sense I'll never fully get it due to being a baka gaijin child of neoliberalism is inescapable.
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For the record, he liked the album, thought it was the good kind of techno-pop, but dead on arrival because of the fad saturation.
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Hirasawa's punk buddy Michiro Endo of The Stalin disliked Sakamoto because of a condescending comment on his radio show to either David Bowie or Ryu Murakami ("Why does Takaaki Yoshimoto appreciate Michiro?"). Because of that, Endo was hesitant to take part in a discussion with Shigesato Itoi organized by Takarajima/WonderLand magazine, since Itoi was part of the YMO "faction". But since both were influenced by Yoshimoto, they got along & had a fulfilling conversation. It was originally published in the October 1983 issue, then reprinted on Endo's solo cassette book Vietnam Legend. Assuming the same pattern that happened with P-Model's Scuba, that text is likely not part of CD reissues.
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Notoriously, there was a lot of friction between Hirasawa and Akiyama on the final months of the first P-Model lineup. It came in part from the latter's preference for clothing by Bricks (Takahashi's clothing store/brand), to the point Hirasawa avoided casual group photos. That animosity flared up again in the early '90s, when an Akiyama wasn't allowed to record vocals for a song of his own autorship due to his singing being similar to Takahashi's.
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A detail from that era that doesn't fit that page: as a support member of The Bach Revolution, SH performed at the Sound Carnival Synthesizer Land show, organized & broadcast by the radio show FM 25 o'Clock. One of the other 2 acts that night was YMO, playing their third ever show. If that was the sound that stuck with him all this time, I couldn't argue with his point of view; that was YMO at their most "fusion but almost the entire band is playing synths".
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For this flier/full page ad, they used testimonials from 4 key players in that field who got early copies of the album: Ryoko Yamagishi, Kentaro Miura, Satoshi Kon and Yuko Miyamura.