I brought this site back after seven years
It has been about seven years, I realise. I have finally revived the personal site I left untouched for all that time.
The reason is, honestly, a rather casual one. Twenty or thirty songs I wrote before my mid-twenties were still sitting on my hard drive. Now that AI is something anyone can pick up, and one person can carry an idea all the way through on their own, I thought: "Why not put them out there?" That light impulse is what set this in motion.
A neighbourhood child and a guitar
Looking back, though, there may have been another reason.
I live in what Japan calls a genkai shūraku — a village so depopulated it is close to ceasing to function. In a place like that, by pure chance, a child living nearby took an interest in the guitar, and I began teaching them how to play.
Eyes shining, practising with everything they had. Watching that was heartwarming — and at the same time it turned me around to face my own ageing, and the regrets I had walked away from.
I believe music needs a story
I think music cannot do without a story. Not only heard, but given images to sit alongside it — that, I suspect, is when it finally stays in a listener's memory.
Game music is at its best precisely because there is a story you experience with your eyes. Anime and film are the same: sight and sound combine, and only then does the feeling rise into "this song is good." Live performance works the same way.
Moving someone through the ears alone is, in fact, very hard.
The excuse called "too late"
Unlike my early twenties, when the road called dream shone so brightly I could not look away, the more years you gather, the more your experiences can start pulling in the wrong direction.
"It's too late now." I know perfectly well, in my head, that this is just a presentable excuse for not acting. And yet the strength to overrule that excuse had gone out of me. By the time I noticed, I was already in my forties.
Once you are there, all that is left is to ask someone else. You end up waiting for a person to say, "Your songs are incredible — let's do this!" But the odds of that are lower than the odds of Billie from Green Day knowing I exist.
Feeling like doing it. I have come to think that this is a genuinely important emotion.
I will keep going until my heart breaks
So I have to make myself feel like it.
I have no idea how long I can sustain this. Even so — I will produce myself, at least until my heart breaks. That is the resolution I made.
Not "a good song" but "who made it"
With that, I thought about how to approach this. Not a strategy, exactly; nothing that grand.
Social media looks set to define the next while yet. And in that world, "who made it" matters even more than whether it is a good song. Which means self-production has to come first.
To be frank, this is far harder than finishing a song. Seeing yourself objectively takes more out of you than you would imagine.
From Tokyo to a dying village in Okayama
Let me introduce myself a little.
I was born in the city and spent my twenties in the middle of Tokyo. Then, past thirty, I moved into an old farmhouse deep in the mountains of Okayama Prefecture, in a village people call a genkai shūraku.
The reason was simple: "Is it really that hard to live somewhere with no jobs and no young people?" I wanted to find out. I will leave the long version for another time, but it has been nearly ten years now.
That said, I am not chasing the "slow life" that many people who move to the countryside picture, and I am not trying to live a countryside life in a countryside way.
Because I could already work online before moving, I have started a restaurant here from nothing, and used a closed-down school to draw people in. "Even out here, could there be a smarter way to live in the years ahead?" That question is what keeps me going. These days I write music and develop software surrounded by nature, and grow vegetables when I have time.
Matching a life to a body of work
So my version of self-production is, I think, matching this way of living to the work.
On this site I will publish what I make — music, software — and write down what I notice about daily life out here, as a way of putting myself forward.
I have not walked every dying village in Japan, so my view is certainly skewed. If any of this interests you, I would be glad if you took an interest in the region I live in as a whole.
In closing
It will be clumsy, and it will go at my own pace, but I will keep updating.
Thank you for reading, and for anything you send my way.