"If I count to four, can you make yourself feel angry?" asks bass player Kentaro Kawaguchi, founder and visionary of the band 54-71. "One. . . two . . . three . . . four . . .."
I give him my best scowl, and conjure up the most violent thoughts I can muster, but he's right: The anger isn't really there.
"If you can do it, then it is only a pose." Kentaro has been reading a lot of samurai books lately -- not the newsprint ones with blood-spattered drawings and intermittent sex scenes, but what he calls real stories of real samurai.