tsushimamire
JAPANESE PUNK BAND TSUSHIMAMIRE JUST KEEP GOING AND GOING AND GOING.
Tsushimamire is the legendary alt-rock band you’ve probably never heard of. Unless you’re an avid listener of Japanese rock, that is. Not that it matters too much – bandmates Mari Kono, Yayoi Tsushima and Maiko Takagi have been playing together for 21 years so far, and plan on continuing until they’re at least 80 years old, which means there’s plenty of time to get acquainted with their bonkers brand of music.
Their commitment to rocking out is probably best summed up by a marathon performance in 2019, where they played 175 songs over 20 consecutive hours – a gruelling way to celebrate their 20th anniversary. “We played every album and had 15-minute breaks in between to change costumes, go to the toilet and get some calories,” says Yayoi, the band’s bassist. The ordeal left her with sausagesized fingers, and Maiko, the drummer, didn’t fare much better. “Around 10 hours in, my right wrist was so swollen I couldn’t hold the sticks,” she says. “So I taped them to my hand to keep playing.”
To witness a Tsushimamire performance – marathon or not – is a very special thing. There’s Yayoi’s head-banging and fly kicks. The guitar riffs best enjoyed blasted in your face. Then Mari’s energetic vocals, which can go from kawaii to demonic in the same breath. Even though few English-speaking fans will have a clue what Tsushimamire’s predominantly Japanese songs are about, their theatrical shows make it clear they’re there to melt your face off.
Way back before the trio was fusing rock with elements of surf, funk, pop and jazz (a strangely harmonious chaos), they were ‘Bla-gal’, a band covering Japanese rock trio Blankey Jet City, who rose to popularity in the ’90s. Mari, Yayoi and Mizue, the band’s original drummer, first met in university. (Maiko stepped in when Mizue exited in 2017.) With limited musical experience, they taught themselves Blankey Jet City’s full back catalogue, but by 1999, they’d moved on to crafting original songs under the name Tsushimamire – a combination of sounds from each band member’s name.
At the time, there were few female rock bands in Japan to look up to. All these years later, their fan mail still comes primarily from women. “At first, I wanted to be like the all-male trio Blankey Jet City,” Mari says. “But I thought the important thing was to make an all-girl rock band. Women’s thinking is a little more complicated – we all think a lot and don’t just talk about music, but life, love, food and fashion. And we want to have fun. Sometimes I saw the male bands being very business-like and it looked boring.”
In the early days, they wrote songs with surreal, nonsensical lyrics. The 2005 track “Pregnant Fantasy”, for instance, references the Lamaze birthing technique via Mari’s repetitive ‘hee hoo’ vocals. Later on, they gravitated towards writing about their own lives. “Many songs start from our conversations, our experiences on tour and on the stage,” Mari says. “At first, we just talk over alcohol. Then we imagine a song based on the most fun theme from our conversation,” Yayoi adds. Other times, tunes spring from the simplest pleasures. “We really missed Japanese food during one US tour,” Mari explains. “When we ate this really good seaweed, I told the band I wanted to sing about it, so we started recording.”
After countless albums and tours, the thing that has remained constant is their love for one another (well, that and a good beer after every gig). “We share happiness, fun, sadness and worry. Our friendship hasn’t changed,” Yayoi says. And even though Maiko joined the band only three years ago, Tsushimamire feels like family. “The goal is to keep rocking and continue the show in any way,” she says. “To us, that is success.”