i've been hesitant to make this post, but it's been genuinely bugging me so maybe it's better to get it over with? this isn't meant to be a callout or anything dramatic, just something i noticed
So Sparks played with Cornelius to kick the tour off, and it's been known that they would for quite a while - my reaction to the announcement was "Oh, neat!" because I do love a few Cornelius songs, and it seemed like a pretty nice match. cool, musicians I like admire each other, that's always neat!
Then a friend alerted me to the "bullying controversy" section of his wikipedia page:
In interviews in 1994 and 1995, Oyamada said that he had bullied students with disabilities in school.[45] In one interview, Oyamada dismissed the incidents with a laugh.[46] In a 1995 interview for Quick Japan,[47] Oyamada said he was involved with a group of bullies who had locked a disabled student in a vaulting box,[48] wrapped another student in gymnastics mattresses and kicked them,[49] made fun of a disabled student running a long-distance race.[48]
i read that and i'm like, damn, that's awful, what cruel behavior. makes it even more sick that he targeted disabled classmates. well, some people grow out of these things...there's people who were bullies when they were kids for one reason or another and then reformed themselves later...right?
then a friend alerts me to this The Times article that further delves into the bullying he engaged in (it got him in a controversy with the olympics that year, which is the focus of the article) and includes these tidbits:
A famous Japanese musician has stepped down as the composer for the Tokyo Olympics after admitting to the “inhuman” sexual abuse of disabled children as a schoolboy. “Yeah, I did inhuman things,” he told Rockin’On Japan. “I’d strip [a disabled child] naked and tie him up in string and make him masturbate. I made him eat shit and then jumped on him.” In other interviews he admitted mocking children with Down’s syndrome at a local school, and rolling a disabled child up in a mattress and stuffing him inside a gymnasium vaulting horse. One of the journalists who interviewed him said that he laughed as he spoke.
and i'm like
at a loss for words with how sociopathic and criminal that all is, WTF.
to not only have done those things in the first place, no matter the stage of your life (the article doesn't specify how old he was, but let's say, as a teenager) and be able to recall them while laughing like it was something you can just brush off is insane
even trying to give him the biggest possible benefit of the doubt cos I know how things can be misframed and people I admire have had things they've said taken out of context to seem worse than they really were - this is still kind of evil. if i'd done the things he so casually admits to having done, i'd be actively working to reform myself, not just wait for someone to call me out for it and then go I Am Very Sorry now that i've been kicked from composing for the olympics. just very very alarming in my opinion...
and i don’t know if Sparks are aware of all this or not. i wanna hope they just don’t know, but the Olympics controversy was a pretty notable moment in his career it seems, so..?
