Japanese Rock Turning American : Heavy Metal: The all-female group Show-Ya takes a Godzilla-size step at the Palace toward success in the West.

By STEVE HOCHMAN

Jan. 20, 1990 12 AM PT

Business management style, Godzilla movies and cartoons about big-eyed kids and flying robots. That’s the top of the list of cultural exports from Japan to the United States. Yet rock ‘n’ roll--in many ways a combination of the three--has rarely made the eastward Pacific crossing.

Show-Ya, a Japanese all-female hard-rock quintet that is a huge hit at home, conjured images of all those things Wednesday at the Palace in Hollywood:

Its career is being overseen by a determined Tokyo-based management team that made sure the show was not just a concert, but an event, replete with both U.S. and Japanese camera crews to document the evening. (In contrast, two shows at the Roxy and one at Gazzarri’s last year--the only other times the band has played in the States--were kept low-key and not very well publicized.) Musically, Show-Ya crunches like a monster on a rampage, performing rock-hard songs with accomplished flair--maybe a bit too neat and clean in its execution, but still quite impressive. And the young women perform with a sense of innocent, cute fun that one record industry observer compared, positively, to the cartoon rock star Jem.

Wednesday, it all added up to a Godzilla-size step toward U.S. success as the showcase won over an at-first dubious crowd.

“Did you hear I’m breaking up L.A. Guns to join Show-Ya?” joked Hollywood rocker Tracii Guns after the show. But Guns and the hard-rock fans and musicians he was standing with at the show were legitimately impressed by Show-Ya’s mastery of contemporary heavy-metal styles and staging, and by the band’s exuberant performance. Whatever novelty factor exists in the band’s cultural and gender make-up was supplanted quickly by the professional quality of the show.

“They’re very good,” concurred Lisa Johnson, an A&R; scout for the RCA subsidiary Zomba Records, and one of many industry representatives in an audience split about 50/50 between young Japanese Angelenos and Hollywood insiders. “They remind me of Jem . . . and also of the Runaways.”

In fact, the ‘70s all-female Los Angeles hard-rock Runaways (Joan Jett and Lita Ford were both original members) are a prime example of a U.S. group that was a much bigger success in Japan than here.

Fortunately no one was reminded of the sugar-coated duo Pink Lady, the only Japanese female pop act to make any kind of impact in the U.S. pop market, though there’s little question that the Show-Ya strategy for success is calculated to the last detail. There’s more than a hint of sexiness in the women’s stage outfits, but even that, as one observer noted, is done with a safe, doll-like quality. And lead singer Keiko Terada readily admitted backstage after the show that her trademark rose tattoo over her right breast is actually a decal.

But despite that calculation, Show-Ya--which plays 15,000-capacity and larger halls in Japan and has sold millions of albums--proved itself a band with legitimate merits Wednesday. The four instrumentalists are all solid players, if not particularly original, and the songs rock hard with memorable melodic hooks sung in a powerful yet controlled voice by Terada. The fact that most of the lyrics are in Japanese didn’t seem to interfere with anyone’s enjoyment.

But if you’re looking for real Japanese rock ‘n’ roll, look somewhere else.

When asked after the show to identify the Japanese qualities in her music, Terada, 26, demurred:

“Probably the only difference is the language, because we are trying to be like an American rock ‘n’ roll band,” she said through translator John Bell.

The three members of Show-Ya’s management team, all clad in conservative business suits, stressed that point as they sat nervously in the Palace restaurant before the concert. Massy Hayata and Osamu Horiba, president and executive producer respectively of International Artmotion Inc., a company that represents American painters in Japan and is now working with Show-Ya, and Yuji Nishi, who has been managing the group since discovering them at an amateur show nearly 10 years ago, were vague about just what the difference between Japanese and American rock ‘n’ roll is.

Nishi, a boyish-looking 34, said, “When they play in Japan they’re Japanese. In America they’re American.”

But none of them could elaborate on just what that means, referring only to a “Japanese feeling” and an “American feeling.”

Michael Jensen, the Los Angeles based publicist who has worked with Show-Ya since seeing the band at the “Music Summit” in Moscow last summer, thinks it’s inappropriate to look to Show-Ya’s music for insight into Japanese culture the way one might look to the Gipsy Kings’ music to learn about Gypsy culture.

“I wouldn’t compare them to the Gipsy Kings,” Jensen said. “But I wouldn’t call (German hard-rock band) Scorpions representative of German culture either. . . . The bottom line is I don’t think a metal-head is ready to accept the subtle nuances musically of Japanese musical culture.”

And acceptance is definitely what it’s all about.

“That is the No. 1 priority,” Jensen said. “They want to be accepted, be one of the No. 1 rock bands around the world.”

LIVE ACTION: The Smithereens and Graham Parker will be at the Universal Amphitheater on Feb. 16. Tickets on sale now. . . . Bobby McFerrin and his 10-member Voicestra will be at UCLA’s Royce Hall April 10-15. . . . The Roxy will host the Hooters on Feb. 19 and NRBQ on Feb. 20.