I can’t HEEEEEEAR you!
Mamoru Samuragochi (sometimes Samuragoch) is a famous Japanese composer with a fascinating personal story – mostly lies.
His fame rests partly on his music, which includes the classical compositions “Sonatina for Violin” and “Hiroshima Symphony No 1.”, and video-game soundtracks for Resident Evil: Dual Shock Ver. and Onimusha: Warlords.
It also rests partly on that story. The child of survivors of the Hiroshima bombing, he began playing piano at 4. A self-taught composer, he didn’t go to music school or university because he dislikes modern methods of composition. Stricken with progressive hearing loss, by 35 he was completely deaf. Still able to compose music, which he hears in his mind. Naturally, he’s likened to Beethoven, who also went deaf and kept composing.
He wears dark glasses, carries a cane, dresses in black leather, keeps his hair shoulder-length.
He has been hugely celebrated in Japan. Last year a TV documentary about Samuragochi followed him as he visited survivors of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. “The film showed Samuragochi playing with a small girl whose mother was killed in the disaster and apparently composing a requiem for her,” wrote the Sydney Morning Herald.
His sales were amazingly high for classical music. Top figure skater Daisuke Takahashi created and performed a short program to “Sonatina for Violin.”
This is not Sumac, this is not a fingerless blogger, that is not a helper monkey, and you’re not supposed to let the macaques climb on you. Still, kind of uncanny, right?
He so reminds me of myself! I compose superb long blog posts, articles, and entire books despite having lost all my fingers as a child. That’s why I wear dark glasses.
Also gloves, and I kind of have partial prosthetic fingers, and that helps. Dressing in black helps. My canes are custom-made. Best of all is my adorable helper monkey, who has his own Twitter feed.
Sure, some people are caught up in the drama of me LOSING MY FINGERS and being FINGERLESS, and wearing my hair this way, and my TRAGIC LIFE STORY with its TRIUMPHANT REDEMPTION, but I’d like to think it’s my writing that captures and holds their attention. The writing, and not my enchanting personal narrative, is certainly why Olympic bobsledder Bootsy Borowitz listens to selections from my work on his iPod before plunging down an artificial mountainside and has my likeness tattooed on the back of each hand along with little dotted lines to show where each of my fingers ends.
Sorry, Bootsy.
So naturally it was a shocker when Takashi Niigaki, an obscure music lecturer, came forward to say that he has been Samuragochi’s ghost composer for years. He wrote the Sonatina, he wrote the Hiroshima symphony, he wrote the video game sound tracks.
For all this he was paid on the order of $70,000. When he tried to stop, he said, Samuragochi threatened suicide. So he kept on, until he heard that Takahashi would be skating to the Sonatina at the Sochi Olympics. That was too much, and he went public.
Daisuke Takahashi in 2011. It’s incredible the stuff you never even think of worrying about.
The media and the public were horrified. They were also horrified when Niigaki said that as far as he could tell, Samuragochi doesn’t need a cane, and isn’t actually deaf. That was “just an act.”
Samuragochi claimed that he had a tiny bit of partial hearing in one ear, so that with the use of a hearing aid, he could struggle through conversations. When he and Niigaki would meet, he’d struggle at the beginning, but then would soon move to easy regular conversation with no signs of hearing difficulty.
That’s quite a hearing aid.
People were pretty mad about Samuragochi pretending to compose music, but who hasn’t at least been tempted to do that? But then pretending to be deaf? That’s upsetting. That means you could have been talking about him, thinking he couldn’t hear, and he really could. Creepy.
So now there’s a new story. Less poignant, more enigmatic.
Samuragochi issued a brief apology through his lawyer when this first came out. “Samuragochi is deeply sorry as he has betrayed fans and disappointed others. He knows he could not possibly make any excuse for what he has done.”
Too terse. Too vague.
Then he came out with a handwritten eight-page apology. With excuses. Explanations. Bargaining. And maybe more lies.
“I am deeply ashamed of living a life of lies,” he wrote. “I’m determined to quit telling lie after lie.” And “I swear by heaven and earth that what I write here today is the truth.”
He said he couldn’t hear when he first hired Niigaki to ghost for him, but has since regained some hearing. “I am occasionally able to hear people if they speak clearly and slowly near my ear, although their voices sound muffled and distorted.” He lied about his hearing at first, because “I was thinking only of what would happen after news broke about Mr Niigaki writing my music, and was unable to tell the truth due to fear.” (I know I didn’t want to bring it up when my fingers grew back.)
Beethoven, by Joseph Karl Stieler. Black leather jackets were cut differently in those days. And most portraitists refuse to paint the dark glasses. But note haircut.
He said he would apologize publicly soon, and said he’d be willing to have experts test his hearing. He said he would be willing to forfeit his government disability certificate if he was found fit. That certificate is Grade 2, given to people so deaf they cannot hear anything under 100 decibels. Snowmobile level. Jackhammer level.
He said Niigaki’s ghosting for him was so secret his wife did not know.
He apologized to Takahashi. He apologized to the 2011 disaster survivors.
He said “I can’t excuse myself if people think I did it for a publicity stunt.” Um. Yeah. That is what we think.
In my non-Japanese-speaking ignorance, I can’t read the 8-page apology, only the translated excerpts. But those make it seem like a bad apology. Humble, but still not honest. The story of his come-and-go hearing is highly suspicious. It’s good that he apologizes to Takahashi. It’s good that he apologizes to the disaster survivors who were used as props in his sentimental saga. But he doesn’t seem to have taken responsibility for introducing mammoth falsity into public life.
The apologies that truly fascinate me in this story came from Japanese media outlets. They reportedly criticized themselves for falling for the story and promoting it. Asahi Shimbun wrote, “We want him to explain his behavior, but the media must also consider our own tendency to fall for tear-jerking stories.”
That’s a great point. Fact-checking doesn’t get the respect – and financial support – it deserves. I can’t immediately see how to check that a composer or writer created the works they put forward. But as far as deafness goes, why not get someone to coo “Hey there, dreamboat” from behind Samuragochi and see if he turns his head? (I saw this ploy in use in the seventh-grade cafeteria. It’s not a post-doc level technique.)
A story that touches the heart isn’t necessarily a true story. Reporters, like other people, are usually reluctant to display skepticism about tragedy, but that’s part of the reporting job.
For example, I wonder if Samuragochi’s really the child of Hiroshima survivors. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be. People are. Except that it makes his story more poignant, and at this point anything that makes his story more poignant is suspicious.
The example the Japanese media sets is a good start. Time magazine did an affecting story on Samuragochi in 2001, depicting him teaching schoolgirls to sign to a pop song. “When they start singing to the music, I can’t hear it. So it is kind of lonely,” he is quoted as saying. There’s a lot of the reporter imagining what it’s like to be deaf.
Time has covered the recent revelations of deceit – but without a hint that Time itself ever fell for the lies and passed them on. Ahem.
