From Ballrooms to Anime Afternoons: Filipino Roots of Cantopop

As I wrote in an earlier piece on children’s music before the handover, children’s songs in Hong Kong have long been woven into the city’s cultural fabric in ways that are neither accidental nor trivial.

For decades, daytime television in Hong Kong was saturated with imported Japanese anime. Two or three hours of programming each afternoon was hardly unusual, embedding the genre deeply into the everyday rhythms of childhood. For many schoolchildren – myself included – the routine was simple: school, sofa, television. Waiting for your favourite series to begin was one of the defining joys of youth. Episodes typically ran for around 20 to 25 minutes, which meant the opening and closing themes became central to the viewing experience.

The music industry quickly recognised the opportunity. As in Japan, anime themes became a strategic entry point into the youth market. With guaranteed weekday airplay, they offered a level of exposure few other formats could rival. Record labels routinely assigned rising stars to perform the year’s most anticipated openings, using children’s programming as a launchpad for up-and-coming singers. The tactic proved effective. Across different generations, pop stars such as Eason Chan, Kelly Chan, Miriam Yeung, Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui all recorded anime tie-ins that became formative listening long before they secured their status within mainstream Cantopop.

Yet most of these themes were not original compositions. They were adaptations of the original Japanese themes. “Adaptation” is the more accurate term: the Hong Kong versions were typically rearranged, often stripped back, their instrumental textures softened to align with the prevailing Cantopop aesthetic of the time. The melodies remained unmistakably Japanese; only the Cantonese lyrics were newly written. The result was an interesting hybrid – culturally local in language, musically imported in structure.

There were exceptions. One of the most enduring is the 1989 theme for Maison Ikkoku (相聚一刻), arguably one of the finest original anime themes produced in Hong Kong. Its pop construction is so assured that it scarcely sounds like a children’s song at all – that is where the irony lies. Anime was automatically categorised as childish; theme songs were often regarded as disposable. Yet both the series Maison Ikkoku and its Hong Kong theme resist that simplification. The song’s melodic contour and harmonic sophistication would not feel out of place in a Japanese city-pop catalogue, nor alongside the work of Cantopop heavyweights such as Koo Ka-fai or Lai Siu-tin. It was composed, however, by the comparatively little-known Eugenio “Nonoy” Ocampo (奧金寶), better recognised for his arranging work and collaborations with Lai and Koo.

Ocampo’s background points towards a largely overlooked dimension of Hong Kong’s music history. Born in the Philippines, he was one of many Filipino musicians who shaped the territory’s sound from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Their presence was no coincidence, but the product of a series of historical shifts that paralleled Hong Kong’s own rise as a financial and cultural hub.

In the 1920s and 30s, Shanghai experienced a period of economic dynamism and cosmopolitan nightlife during China’s turbulent republican era. It was there that Chinese popular music first flourished under the banner of shidaiqu (時代曲) – a genre inflected with jazz and big-band arrangements. Ballrooms and nightclubs thrived, providing employment for highly trained Filipino musicians proficient in Western harmony and orchestration.

Zhou Xuan’s “Night Shanghai” (夜上海, 1947) still captures something of that moment. “Night Shanghai, Night Shanghai,” she sings, “you are a city that never sleeps. The lights flare up, the music swells; all is song, dance, and prosperity.”

The tide turned in 1949. Following the Communist victory, shidaiqu was denounced as a decadent remnant of Western imperialism, accused of “sapping the fighting spirit and corrupting the soul”. Condemned as “yellow music” – with “yellow” implying moral decay – it was formally banned in 1952. Ballrooms and nightclubs were shuttered. Filipino musicians, suddenly displaced, left Shanghai; many resettled in Hong Kong.

In post-war Hong Kong, their expertise proved foundational. With stronger exposure to Western harmony, jazz structures and orchestration, they became bandleaders and hotel musicians during the city’s transformation into an international financial centre. Before the rise of Cantopop, when English-language pop still dominated the market, family bands of Filipino heritage gained prominence across Asia. The Reynettes and D’Topnotes were among the most notable, the former remembered for the classic “Kowloon Hong Kong”.

Through the 1970s to the 1990s, musicians of Filipino descent, with many connected to families who had relocated from Shanghai, continued to shape the industry from behind the scenes. They were central to recording sessions, live performances and orchestral arrangements. Names such as Chris Babida (鮑比達), Antonio Arevalo Jr. (盧東尼), Romeo Díaz (羅迪／戴樂民), Joey Villanueva (韋祖堯) and Andrew Tuason (杜自持) recur throughout the sleeve notes of Cantopop’s most beloved albums.

From its formative years in the 1960s, Hong Kong’s music industry was inherently international. Its sound has always been an eclectic convergence of imported forms, migrant musicians and local reinterpretation. The texture of Cantopop itself is a product of racial and cultural hybridity. It is therefore utterly ridiculous that, in later decades, singers have become mouthpieces for the Chinese state, singing the government’s praises. Hong Kong’s music has never been culturally pure – Chinese, or even strictly local; it has always been assembled from elsewhere.

References:

Filipino musicians’ post-war fame in Hong Kong

Filipino Musicians Drive Hong Kong’s Music Scene, but Gigs Have Dried Up