Japanese Shoegaze

You're asking about a scene that mostly didn't exist on vinyl. Japanese bands took the Creation Records template and kept the melody up front — the noise is thick, but there's a pop song underneath nearly every track.

Most of it came out on CD in runs of a few hundred, which is why the last five years have been a reissue scramble.

MBV and Ride landed in Japan in the early 90s and the response was immediate but scattered: Coaltar Of The Deepers formed in Tokyo in 1991, Luminous Orange around the same time. The infrastructure arrived later.

Tokyo's Vinyl Junkie ran a shoegaze roster and a Seven Winters festival; Scott Cortez of Astrobrite flew to Tokyo for Seven Winters in 2001 and the trip built lasting ties with the Japanese shoegazer community, leading to a Tokyo-recorded album featuring Narasaki of Coaltar Of The Deepers and members of Melt-Banana.

Hartfield's debut came out simultaneously in Japan on Vinyl Junkie and in the US through Clairecords — the Japan/US indie pipeline in one release. Small labels carried the rest: abcdefg*record, Submarine, n_Ingen.

The 2010s brought Kinoko Teikoku and For Tracy Hyde; Tokyo Shoegazer debuted in 2011 and contributed two covers to the all-Japanese Loveless tribute Yellow Loveless. Then streaming found it all.

Who: Shimokitazawa and Koenji live houses, Daizawa and Vinyl Junkie, bands often built from two multi-instrumentalists rather than full line-ups — Pasteboard was a project by two members of indie-pop band Roly Poly Rag Bear, formed 2001.

What: layered guitar, buried vocals, but always a chorus; female and male voices traded or doubled; tempos quicker than the British template. How a record gets in: it was pressed on CD in Japan, sold at shows and Tower, never charted, and resurfaced online a decade later.

RYM files the sound under shimokita-kei as much as shoegaze — the neighbourhood is part of the genre.