The phrase “big in Japan” is double-edged, evoking a dream of fame in faraway lands as well as a cynical undercurrent of implied underachievement at home. It’s also a phrase that’s gradually losing meaning as an increasingly conservative music industry ensures the routes to genuine Japanese popularity become ever narrower to domestic and overseas artists alike.
If you want to get a proper Japan tour with a professional promoter, the first thing you should probably do is get famous somewhere else – ideally the UK or US. The music market in Japan is dominated by domestic artists, and touring acts from overseas occupy a vanishingly small part of the industry’s sphere of interest.
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However, for a basement-dwelling indie or punk band willing to take a brutal financial hit either as a jumped up vacation or in pursuit of a longer-term goal of building audience and connections, the live circuit in Japan has a lot going for it. Live venues typically come equipped with top-of-the-line PA systems drum kits and a full array of amps, eliminating the need for bands to lug vans full of equipment around with them everywhere they go. Venues tend towards the intimate as well, with most boasting capacities of no more than 100-150, which can sometimes make for a ferociously intense live experience.
And it’s in these tiny black box venues that you can find much of the country’s most extraordinary music, from the gasoline roar of the garage rock’n’roll scene to the fractured, post-everything rhythms of Tokyo’s art rock underground, via sparkly, pastel-toned technopop, crashing sheets of earsplitting machine noise and everything else inbetween.
The first thing to understand about all these bands is that none of them are making any money. In fact, the situation is typically the reverse, with every aspect of Japan’s music infrastructure set up to extract money from musicians.
While pay-to-play venues and events nibble away at the fringes of music scenes in places like Australia and the US, in Japan it’s easily the dominant system on which the live circuit operates, with bands guaranteeing quotas of between 10 and 25 tickets to the venues in return for their half-hour stage slot.
The good thing for an overseas touring act is that you will nearly always get a pass on these kinds of charges, although a tiny fraction of venues will apologetically insist on billing you for equipment rental. While a band from Australia isn’t exactly an exotic draw for local audiences in cosmopolitan Tokyo or Osaka, the extreme atomisation of underground music in Japan, fragmented into introverted little scenes, means that fresh faces from outside still carry a frisson of excitement to jaded audiences and band members alike.
This means that as long as you mail round enough venues (there are 800+ live venues of various sorts in the Tokyo area, and a typical mid-sized Japanese city will usually have at least three or four), and give enough advance warning of your trip, you’ll find plenty of booking staff who are happy to put you on.
Whether those shows are worth playing or not is another question. The bookers at most Tokyo live venues are putting together lineups of four or five bands a night, seven nights a week, so the quality control can be scattershot. And because they are taking charge of so many nights, promotion and audience-gathering is mostly left to the bands. At its worst, this can lead to some pretty grim Tuesday nights, with sparse crowds fading away to nothing as their friends’ band finishes, leaving a visiting band with little more than a pity-watch from a couple of semi-curious members of earlier acts.
Part of the problem is the strangely early open and start times for events, with doors typically opening around 6PM and the music wrapping up around 10. This, combined with ticket prices that typically hover around ¥2,000 plus a compulsory ¥500+ drink, means that audiences are naturally cautious about committing themselves to a show. Venues tend to be pretty relaxed about smoking, which can be a good or a bad thing, but can also be extremely uptight about re-entry.
These sometimes riotous after-parties are a key venue for inter-artist bonding …. forged in a tornado of alcohol and defiantly non-vegan food.
On the plus side, however, the early finish times can be a great chance for bands and audience members alike to decamp to a bar or izakaya-style restaurant. These sometimes riotous after-parties are a key venue for inter-artist bonding, with new events planned, bands formed, and friendships forged in a tornado of alcohol and defiantly non-vegan food.
Making friends with a local indie promoter or organiser is the best way to ensure your place on a solid lineup with a lively crowd (and more often than not a small guarantee). Most of the best parties in Japan are put on by bands themselves or passionate amateur organisers, who have built up dedicated audiences and developed good enough reputations that they can afford the wiggle room needed to take a chance on an unknown visiting band.
Finding these parties and then coordinating your tour schedule to accommodate them is the challenge, and again this is partly a problem of the fragmented nature of underground music culture in Japan. There is still very little curation of reliable information about the music scene, even in the Japanese language, and event organisers tend to throw parties according to irregular schedules, promoting them within opaque and esoteric-seeming social circles.
Word of mouth is still the main way people get information, and the indie scene places a great deal of value in personal endorsements. If your friends have toured Japan before and managed to get through the experience without smashing any light fittings or punching anyone, a good word from them might be all it takes to get you a hookup with one of the best gigs you’ll ever play in your life.
The other thing the music scene in Japan rewards is persistence. Everyone is slogging through hardship with little-to-no hope of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but approach Japan with a willingness to muck in with everyone else and you’ll find some extraordinary warmth, amazing talent and incredible experiences. And next to no money.
Ian Martin is a Tokyo based music writer. His book ‘Quit Your Band! Musical Notes from the Japanese Underground’ is available now through Awai Books.
