Jinggang Mountains
The title track begins with a vocoded Sakamoto reading "Jinggang Mountain", a poem written by Mao Zedong during his visit to a well in the Jinggang Mountains in 1965. The song proper is performed in a reggae hymn style, inspired by Herbie Hancock's "Speak Like a Child" album. The piece segues into "Island of Woods", a ten-minute analog synthesizer composition designed to sound like the natural sounds of an island. The modern classical piano piece "Grasshoppers" follows. On original copies of the album, the entire first side was indexed as one 24:40 long track. The second side of the album contains varied electronic music pieces. "The End of Asia" uses the same melody as Haruomi Hosono's "Worry Beads" from "Paraiso" (though Sakamoto has claimed that the use was entirely coincidental) and the coda uses the melody of "The East Is Red", the national anthem of the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution. Thus, the album as a whole summarizes Sakamoto's then-interest in Chinese history.