TETSUGAKU 32 : HIGH SCHOOL ERA

 

– What criteria did you use to choose a high school?
[Nah, I just went. Educationally (laughs).]

– What sort of clubs were you in once you started high school?
[None. Just like in middle school, I was in the go-home club.]

– What sort of changes were there in your lifestyle, going from middle school to high school?
[I got more serious about wanting to start up a band. The rest didn’t change. The “must cram” feeling got even stronger, in high school. It felt like I was constantly at cram school.]

– You felt like high school and cram school were merged together, then.
[I didn’t spend that much time thinking about “school” in general. I remember wondering why I was supposed to worry about it so much. Education until middle school is required by the national government, but after that, you’re free to choose whether to go to high school or not, aren’t you?]

– Certainly, that’s the case for high school.
[I decided on my own. Still, it felt like it was all cram school. Personally, I figured that since I chose to go to high school, I would stick with it until the end. Basically, I didn’t think that I’d need what I was studying at all once I got out into the world on my own. Especially so during high school. So then, the reason I willingly chose to stay in high school until the end, even though I thought it was useless, was that I wanted to see if I had enough perseverance.]

– It wasn’t to test your learning abilities, but rather to test your perseverance. I don’t think there are many people who go to high school with that kind of mentality. How did you come to think that way?
[Because, if you go to high school and say “I hate this! I quit!”, you’ll find that once you start working in a business, there’s lots more to hate. In school, it’s still safe to say “I hate this, I hate that, I’m gonna quit,”, but in business, I don’t think you can do anything about it. Then as soon as you find something slightly disagreeable at work, you’ll say “I quit!” right away. And then, you won’t do any work. So, even though I hated high school, I stayed in just so I could test my own willpower and perseverance. For instance, if a teacher I hate says something nasty to me, and I can endure it, well, when I get a job somewhere, there will probably be people like that, there, too. I think that treating high school as training for that kind of thing is a good way to look at it. Lastly, when it comes to having graduated high school, I don’t think you can do anything if you don’t at least have that academic background, can you?]

– I see. You made the decision while looking ahead at your ultimate goals in life. Then with that in mind, you started high school. What was your homeroom teacher like?
[The homeroom teacher for my first class was a male. He was young, so he was close to our age, and he was easy to talk to. And he had a sense of humour. Without that, we couldn’t have had fun, right? He wasn’t the kind of teacher who taught anything out of the ordinary though, so after graduation I forgot everything I learned from him. In the end, it’s the humourous teachers you remember more, isn’t it?]

– Did your homeroom teacher give you any advice about your wanting to start a band?
[His stance was to neither discourage me nor encourage me.]

– Since you wanted a band that badly, surely you must have met some opposition?
[I didn’t. There wasn’t any, but some people did see me badly. “There’s no way you’re ever gonna pull it off,” they said. When I used “I have band practice” as an excuse not to do something or go somewhere, the usual reaction was “That’s totally pointless. You ain’t gonna feed yourself with a band!” and things along those lines.]

– In your high school days, did you still go to your senpai’s house after school, where you, the senpai, and ken-chan would hang out listening to records?
[By the time I started high school, we weren’t doing that anymore, really. Senpai and ken-chan both went to a different high school. They were in a different grade, and they couldn’t spend so much time goofing off the way we did in middle school. We each ended up in separate bands. With our respective school buddies. So, it was only occaaaaasionally that I’d play music with my childhood friends.]

– Holding band practice and renting studios costs money, doesn’t it? Were you already working part-time jobs by high school?
[I was. In fast food. Making taiyaki and yakisoba (1). Japanese fast food places. I always followed a manual, so if you asked me to make some now, I wouldn’t be able to (laughs).]

– Your high school allowed part time jobs, then (2).
[It was against the rules, actually (laughs). But my parents were the type to say “Get a job. Never mind their rules.” (laughs). In the end, the Japanese constitution is more important than the school rules. As long as it’s within the law, little things like breaking one school’s rules don’t really matter, do they? Would they have arrested me for that? In my family, we did things our own way. I think that might be why I go against the stream (laughs). I didn’t do anything legally wrong. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t shoplift, I didn’t even ride a motorcycle. I mean, I just had a job, and what about those guys who were smoking?]

– Who were the members of the band you had in high school?
[We had members who came from a different school. You know how they have amateur nights in live houses sometimes? I’d go to watch my friends’ bands on those nights, when they played. I had lots of opportunities that way. That’s how we ended up forming that band.]

– By the way, what name did you use for that band?
[Byston Well. I picked it. I took the name from an anime I liked. Anime fans will get it right away.] (3)

– What kind of band was it? Both stylistically and in terms of people.
[We were a group of four. The life of that band was doing covers of Dead End. We had a few original songs, later.]

– Did you write any songs, back then?
[I wrote a few tunes. But what I wrote was really second string stuff for this band. Strictly speaking, I had changed the band’s name. At first, it was called Prisoner. Then, their bassist quit, and I joined the band. Until I joined, they had been doing covers of Reaction(4). And some of Sniper! too, but then I said “I like Dead End” and pretty soon we started covering Dead End instead (laughs). And, “Since I’m in now, wanna change the name?” Then I got the band name changed to Byston Well. In that band, even though I was the last member to join, I ended up becoming the leader (Both share a big laugh), before I knew it.]

– You don’t feel you took over the band, now do you? (laughs)
[So anyway, our guitar player wrote songs. I still think they were pretty good. There really weren’t many high school bands around who were playing original stuff. Around there, anyway. That band had good tunes, and good technique too. That’s why I joined them. Until then, I thought I was going to have to manage my members. “You be drums” or something like that. But I didn’t have to (pained laugh). “You guys are great doing what you’ve always done.” That’s what I figured when I met them. We became good friends. It started with “We’re lookin’ for a member” and “I do bass.” And then a little while later we had a talk on the phone. “Our bass just left, so you wanna join?” was the gist of it. I went “Lucky~!” (laughs). Really, I was, suddenly finding a bunch of talented people, and doing a band with them. I think that was in first or second year of high school.]

– Were the members classmates of yours?
[Actually, they were a grade or two below. But when I first met them at a live house, I thought they were older. Cause they were so good. They were doing covers of Sniper and sounded exactly like them! I figured they were young looking university students. Oh, and they had blond hair, even (laughs). And they were using incredible equipment. I think the drum kit had a double bass; anyway it was an expeeensive looking drum kit. And the guitarist was using a Marshall (amp) too. Looking at that equipment, and at their technique, you wouldn’t have thought they were in high school. I thought “They gotta be older,” but they turned out to be younger (laughs). But I still felt lucky to get to join their group.]

– And once you were in, before they knew it you were injecting them with your own chosen colours (laughs).
[Yeah, yeah (laughs). Maybe that’s why the members left (both laugh). Since they didn’t like my way of doing things, two members left at once. The guitarist and drummer. So then, I got ken-chan to come be the guitarist.]

– Wha! You were in a band with ken-chan back then?
[Yep. But my asking ken-chan to come join that band wasn’t the beginning of L’Arc (laughs).]

– Is that so? That’s the first time I’ve heard this story.
[Yes! Well, I am telling it more politely than usual (laughs).]

– But how did the incident where two members left at once come about?
[Well, they’d been in a quitting sort of mood for a while before that. Before, there was sort of two-against-two atmosphere. Then they said “As soon as we’re done here, we quit.” The last thing we did was enter a contest, and we were the winners. We appeared in the next Kansai-Shikoku-Okinawa rally (laughs). And they put us on TV too. There was a misunderstanding concerning that. It was an hour long program, but in the end credits, they had a close-up of me, only (both laugh). Why did they use a shot of me? Don’t they usually take close-ups of the vocalist? But instead of showing our vocalist, they picked me. And they only did that to our band.]

– It’s impressive that you won that contest, and even more impressive that you got that close-up shot.
[Anyone who saw it must have wondered who it was! (laughs)]

– Yes, yes, I understand your feelings.
[“They’re turning me into a representative of Japan, next they’ll be wanting me to go to the World Cup.”]

– Suddenly, the topic jumps to soccer (laughs).
[Well, soccer’s a good example, since you can get the same sort of misconception. “Without doing much work, you can somehow get turned into a pro.” In the end, no one’s going to be cheering (laughs). That’s the misconception. I think I’m happy with the results, though. If we had really become pros that way, I think we would have ended up as rotten people. Besides, none of us had been serious about becoming pros, yet. But looking back on it now, the people who’d been doing the image editing were incredibly good. That boy they did a close-up of turned out to be tetsu of L’Arc~en~Ciel (laughs). And so, once the contest was over with, the two of them left, our drummer and our guitarist, who had also been the main song writer, and then ken-chan joined us. And then we got a good, reckless drummer to join. They called him the local Higuchi Munetaka (5). After winning that contest, I wanted us to power up even more. With ken-chan and the new drummer there, we were able to pull it off ideally. Powering up the band. ken-chan was writing songs, so we started playing those, too. Somehow, a few songs from back then turned into songs that L’Arc used to do (giggles). Which songs, again? …….. They’re songs we played a long time ago, and I’ve forgotten the titles.]

– Wow! Do you really have songs from so long ago?
[We do. That band was the prototype phase. Then ken-chan had to go off to school, so he quit. Left that band. It’s not that we had serious discussions about him quitting or not, I think it was just that he was going to be busy with school (laughs). And that band was just a hobby. So, we changed guitarists again. I think we went through two other guitarists after ken-chan, and neither one was any good at writing songs (bitter laugh). That’s how it was. Since it was necessary, I wrote a few songs, too. That was around third year, or maybe right after the end of high school. “I could write better songs than what he’s making.” That was my first opportunity to write songs. Until then, we were doing hard rock, heavy metal music, so in my view writing songs was something the guitarist is supposed to do. On most of the albums I was listening to at the time, the guitarist wrote the music. Though sometimes, one or two songs on the album would have been written by the bassist. But I always figured those were on the part of the album that no one cared about (both laughed). That’s generally how it was.]

– How did you go about writing that first song?
[I started with the guitar riff. The first one I made went “Gaaga, gagagagah!” with the sound of a black metal riff. It was a crawly feeling song (laughs).]

– When you composed that song, did you also write the lyrics for it?
[I didn’t. I thought that the vocalist had to write the lyrics, at the time.]

– What happened to that band, later on?
[Eventually, nobody wanted to play guitar for us. The music wasn’t the same anymore. In terms of technique, we couldn’t get anyone who played as well as our first guitarist. “No good.” Naturally, we split up. After that, I decided I wanted to start a band from scratch and started looking for members. That would turn into L’Arc~en~Ciel.]

– You said your band naturally split up. Was that around your high school graduation?
[I think it was. A bit after graduation. I don’t remember much of what happened. In the later days, we weren’t doing many lives anymore. But when we did do lives, we pulled in a few customers. My face was well known, locally (laughs).]

– Before you graduated, what were your plans for after high school?
[Back then, I didn’t have any specific goal for my future. Any sort of job, at least. I just remember that I didn’t want to give up on my band. I still wanted to be in a band, so I graduated with the idea of being a freeter (6) while working on that.]

– Then you mean that you went through your high school graduation without having any idea where you were going to end up working?
[That’s right. I was the only one who graduated in that situation (laughs). Everyone else had decided on a career, or picked out a school. I was the only one who hadn’t decided anything. I’d had a part time job the whole time. So, after the ceremony, after high school graduation, I wasn’t just working after school, so I put myself on a job rotation, so my “morning come-in time” would always change. That was the biggest change in my life after graduating.]

– Since you were the only one with no plans for a career, didn’t your teachers talk your head off about it?
[They talked to me. My homeroom teacher never said anything, but other teachers said “There’s no way you can live on your music. Try a bit harder. After graduating, you need either more school or a real career.” They were always telling me things like that.]

– What did you answer when your teachers gave you that talk?
[“First of all, I can’t decide right now what I want to do for a living. I’m going to be a freeter while I look for what I want to do, and that’s good enough for me.” is what I said. I figured if I found a part-time job I wanted to stick with, I’d do that. Or if I discovered something I wanted to study, I could go back to school. While doing that, I was also searching for new band members, and that’s when I met hyde. L’Arc started up, and that leads us to the present (laughs) or that’s how it feels.]

– You can’t suddenly skip to the present (laughs). When you were thinking about your life after high school, you had no interest at all in going the way of higher education and applying to university?
[Hm. Somehow, I didn’t like the idea of doing something that would have me living off my parents after graduating from high school. Whether it’s university or trade school, the student life is pretty fun, isn’t it? Calling yourself a student is a sweet title. I realised it would be the most fun, but I didn’t think my parents would accept that explanation. And I didn’t like the idea of them wasting money on me. But looking back on it now, I realise my parents probably thought that my being a freeter was worse (laughs). But even if I had gone to another school, I probably wouldn’t have studied. And if I’d stayed at home, I’d have done nothing but band stuff. So I concluded that moving out and being a freeter was the best path, for me.]

– You decided on your own that you would live as a freeter, but how did your family react when you first told them what you were going to do?
[We’re pretty laid-back at home, so they didn’t say anything. But, if by age 23-24 I still hadn’t reached any sort of conclusion about my future, it would be too late. Whether it’s studying or getting a job, the older you get the harder it becomes. It was like “Make sure you decide what you’re going to do with your life before you turn 23.” Or something like that. My parents said that, and I felt age 23 was a good target. At the time.]

– You weren’t going to be a freeter forever, you had decided yourself that it was only for a set period.
[That’s right. …..To tell the truth, until graduation I had been thinking about more school.]

– Ah, did you?
[Going to school would have been easier. However, it was around then that my friend died. That’s when I thought “No waaay am I going to another school.” Also, once in a while I’d run into my senpai, who was in university at the time. When he told me “I think you should come to my school,” I told him “No way.” “I’m not going to waste my parent’s money on it.” And so, I gave up on schooling.]

-Interviewer : Toujou Sachie
Translated by Natalie Arnold.