Let’s get this out of the way:
“Turning Japanese” by The Vapors isn’t about masturbation and I don’t know how that rumor got started.
It has all the hallmarks of a classic New Wave song.
- An uptempo, danceable beat.
- A catchy verse melody.
- An earworm of a chorus.
So it may have been a hit even without the rumor. I remember hearing it and liking it a lot.
And that was before I heard a DJ on WBCN in Boston say it was about, and I quote, “the look a guy gets on his face when he’s twiddling his diddle.”
That’s the first of many euphemisms for onanism in this article. Proceed at your own risk.
The Vapors were from Guildford, about 30 miles southwest of London.
They formed in the late 1970s and were part of that Post-Punk, New Wave trend of UK bands that merged Pub Rock energy with Pop melodies.
They were in the same scene as Graham Parker & The Rumour, Eddie & The Hot Rods, and Brinsley Schwartz. There are no interviews where they specifically mentioned their influences.
But they did say they admired Punk’s “anyone can do it” energy and listened to John Peel’s show on Radio 1 featuring the latest interesting underground hits.
Their classic lineup was David Fenton on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Edward Bazalgette on lead guitar, Steve Smith on bass and Howard Smith on drums.
Despite the same last name, Steve and Howard were not related.
They had been playing around England for a few years when Bruce Foxton, bassist of The Jam, heard them, saw them, and liked them.
He became the band’s co-manager along with John Weller, whose son Paul was the guitarist in The Jam.
They brought The Vapors on as the opening act for The Jam’s Setting Sons tour.
The tour and the band’s demo recordings eventually led to a record deal with United Artists, and those sessions produced their best-known song and their album New Clear Days.
The album title is a pun on “nuclear” because it was the 1980s and we were all worried about nuclear annihilation.
No one seems to know who started the rumor that the song was about charming one’s snake. David Fenton, who wrote the song, has explained that it was about something much less salacious and more serious.
When Franz Kafka wanted to write about alienation, he had his main character wake up one morning and find he’s turned into a giant insect. When Fenton wanted to write about alienation, he wrote about turning into, not a bug, but a different ethnicity.
“Turning Japanese” is about alienation, loneliness, heartbreak, and regret.
Fenton mixed frustrated longing with the vivid and uneasy feeling of young adult angst.
He, or the song’s protagonist, pines over a photograph of his ex and feels like, without her, he’s changing into someone he doesn’t recognize.
The lyrics, however, are vague and can be easily interpreted in other ways.
Fenton said the chorus, with its memorable line “I think I’m turning Japanese,” came to him in the middle of the night and stuck with him. “It could have been Portuguese or Lebanese or anything that fitted with that phrase,” Fenton said in a later interview, “it’s nothing to do with the Japanese.”
For whatever reason, he picked Japan and used the familiar melody that represents Asia.
“The motif itself,” he said,” isn’t actually Japanese — it’s Asian, certainly, but it’s more likely to be Chinese, so I got that completely wrong!”
Carl Douglas used the same melody on his #1 hit, “Kung Fu Fighting,” to represent China or, at least, funky Chinatown.
“Turning Japanese” is not about Japan any more than it’s about the look one’s face gets when scrunched up while focusing on one’s personal needs, but that’s what a lot of us, mostly in America, believed at the time. We thought it was a clever — if a little racist — way to get radio airplay for a song about a ménage-à-moi. It’s a good song, and the mistaken rumor helped its popularity.
After all, disc jockeys and music journalists need something to talk about.
And nothing brings in listeners and readers more than sex, even if it’s just about playing a little five on one. And the rumor spread like crazy. It was quickly accepted knowledge coast to coast.
Before releasing “Turning Japanese,” the band felt it was going to be a hit, but they didn’t want it to be their first single.
Their thinking was that none of their other songs would be as popular, and they didn’t want their second single to be seen as a failure. So they released “Prisoners” first.
It’s not a bad song and certainly fit in with the other New Wave songs on the radio, but they were right about it. It didn’t chart.
They were right about “Turning Japanese,” too.
While it only got to #36 on the Billboard Hot 100, it hit #1 in Australia, #3 in the UK, #4 in Ireland, and #6 in Canada.
That popularity grew as the rumor spread.
Pop culture loves an easy, naughty explanation, and once a juicy rumour is out there, it spreads quickly. Every DJ or writer who told it helped the idea stick.
In the years since, Fenton has repeatedly said the song isn’t about grinding the pepper, but he wasn’t too vocal about it at the time.
He’s admitted he wasn’t upset that the rumour circulated because the lascivious angle helped the single get attention.
This isn’t the only time a false story helped a song’s sales.
- “Louie, Louie” by The Kingsmen was rumored to contain obscene lyrics. The FBI investigation brought massive publicity.
The Bureau eventually found the lyrics unintelligible, not pornographic, and the story cemented the song as a teenage rebellion classic.
- Likewise, “Love Rollercoaster” by the Ohio Players has a scream that’s sort of in the background.
The urban legend was that a woman was murdered either in the studio or in the alley outside. In fact, the sound is singer Billy Beck screeching while inhaling.
Drummer Jimmy “Diamond” Williams said that once the rumor started, “The band took a vow of silence, because you sell more records that way.”
The myth that playing “Stairway To Heaven” backwards revealed satanic messages…
… or that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” was about LSD only helped the profiles of the already ultra famous Led Zeppelin and The Beatles.
And in his Alternative Number Ones column just this week, Tom Breihan wrote this about The Goo Goo Dolls: “For a while, Walmart wouldn’t sell A Boy Named Goo because people thought that the baby on the ugly-ass album cover was smeared with blood, not blackberry juice. That kind of dumb controversy is always good for a band.”
The Vapors recognized that the rumor that “Turning Japanese” was about playing solo on the devil’s clarinet helped the song succeed in the marketplace. Their denials were intentionally pretty lukewarm until decades later.
The song’s popularity helped sales of New Clear Days.
But their second album, Magnets, didn’t sell well.
Part of that is the album’s darker tone, but United Artists had been absorbed into EMI and many UA acts found themselves deprioritized by the new corporate owners. Magnets was one of the victims.
Fenton has said that the sudden stop of label support helped lead to the band’s break up in 1982.
He became a lawyer for the musicians union.
Bazalgette went into television, directing episodes of Poldark and Doctor Who.
He’s also the great-great-grandson of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, designer and engineer of the London sewer system.
In May 2025, Howard Smith was elected Mayor of Guildford.
In 2016, Fenton, Bazalgette, and Steve Smith played a few shows as The Vapors.
In April 2018, they re-released “Turning Japanese” on red vinyl with bonus tracks for Record Store Day.
A year later, they were the opening act on The Jam’s Setting Sons 40th Anniversary tour. Bazalgette left the band and was replaced by Fenton’s son, Danny. Michael Bowes joined on drums.
In March 2020, they released Together, their first album in 39 years.
The first single was called “Crazy” and it sounded like 1980 all over again. Their next and most recent album, Wasp in a Jar, was released in February 2025.
On first listen, there are no songs about having a threesome with a couple of no shows.
In fact, there never were. Not even “Turning Japanese.”
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I bought the American version of New Clear Days.
Rescuing “Sixty Second Interval” from the dungeon of latter-half side two was a smart move.
“News at Ten” could’ve charted…as the second single.
Concept album? I get Pink Floyd’s The Wall vibes. Not the whole album. Around the “Mother” part.
Most people, probably, know The Vapors for one song, just like Dexy’s Midnight Runners.
It’s a great album; it’s almost the American Too-Rye-Aye.
The original track listing makes no sense to me.
I covered this song in my musical mythbusters article a while back, and there was one commenter that would not be convinced it wasn’t a myth, even by the songwriter’s own words. We’ll see if they check in today.
Its not just in America that most people thought this was about shaking the snake. Its received wisdom here too.
Turning Japanese was on the Sound Of The Suburbs new wave compilation which was popular in my high school’s 6th form study room. A room for which the word ‘study’ was an irrelevance. It was one of the more popular songs on the cassette.
I didn’t know about the Bazalgette connection. As soon as I saw the name I thought sewers. I know my history of London’s effluent. I had to check the details when seeing he now works in TV as another Bazalgette was a big name in 90s/00s TV. Peter Bazalegette is responsible for popularising Big Brother, Deal Or No Deal and a host of other light entertainment high/low lights. Turns out Peter and Edward are third cousins.
My trivia needs are sated for the day. Thanks Bill.
OK, this song does rule, but it’s the “da-na-na-na-na, na-na-na” opening and the “I ruve you, too” parts that make it more than a bit cringe.
Playing this song for my kids evoked an “OK, Boomer” moment, and I am not a Boomer.
That’s alright. I’m sure your kids ruve you, too.
Did you see Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, V-Dog, or anybody else?
Ben Stiller plays the guy who didn’t want to compromise with a major and blows it for himself and his band mates. The band might’ve sounded something like The Vapors, judging by the fictitious publicity still. It screams power-pop.
I.R.S. must’ve functioned more like an indie than a major. The band, with no apparent leverage, passed on a high profile producer’s version of “Catapult” and got to choose their own replacement. Hearing R.E.M. with synths was a highlight of getting to know the internet, for me.
I forgot to thank you in my original post. It’s a formative album. One of those cassettes I played on a Panasonic tape recorder.
I’m not familiar with it at all. I’ll have to look it up. Thanks!
Pop culture loves an easy, naughty explanation
Don’t they ever. Whether it’s the naughty hoping that explanations are naughty or the pure, certain that everything around them must be naughty…sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. (No, Tom Breihan, “Make It with You” is not a sex song.)
For me, the weird thing is that I don’t think I even knew that this song existed until the late 90s or 2000s. I guess it was a blind spot for me.
Not sure why I can’t unbold my text…
[…] In my article last week about The Vapors, I mentioned that their second and third albums were 39 years apart. […]