I think most fans of Japanese independent music have some serious misconceptions about the actual Japanese music scene, myself included. When I first came to Japan, I didn’t expect anyone to know who Makoto Kawabata was, but I thought they might know Cornelius. I’ve lived here for eleven months now, and met one person who’d heard his name before. And i met two Boredoms fans. I saw one interview with Takemura Nobukazu in an English newspaper. That’s it. With the sheer volume of Japanese independent music that is exported to North Amerika and Europe, you’d think that some of it would be for domestic consumption as well. But mainstream pop has an even stronger grip on everyday music here than it does in Vancouver, where I’m from.

But there is one great thing about Japan. You can play music in the street, at all hours of the day and night. In Vancouver, you can grow hundreds of pounds of pot a year, but if you try to bang on your acoustic guitar on a downtown street corner without a permit, you get busted. By contrast, when you come out of the main train station in Osaka, you can hear music coming from four different directions at once. There’s a four-piece generator-powered punk-pop band playing on a highway overpass: there’s a guy in the stairwell busting rhymes over portable turntables: there’s three highschool girls singing an Ayumi Hamasaki song and banging tambourines behind you: and there’s a guy practicing the flute on the other side of the street.

Now it’s November, and it’s getting chilly, but people just put on gloves and keep going. It’s impressive. Most Friday nights when I finish DJing at 3 am, there are half a dozen groups of teenaged girls and boys hanging around the train stations, strumming pop songs or practicing breakdancing, smoking, eating 7-11 sandwiches and waiting for the first train to come. It’s cool. I guess they aren’t allowed to play guitar at 3am in their parents’ homes, but out here on the street, despite the cold and the cacophony, there’s a community.

Gasoline-powered generators are sold in guitar shops. Small guitar amps come with batteries. If you cant get a gig in a club, that’s ok - you’ll probably make more money and more friends playing in the train station. For myself, before I got a chance to DJ in that little restaurant/bar in East Osaka, I would just grab 4 AA batteries and a pair of portable speakers, plug them into my laptop, and beatmix with Ableton Live while sitting outside the Hep 5 Department store. That’s democracy, baby.