Heading East for this lunchbreak – Hitsujibungaku in concert at Die Kantine in Cologne, Germany on October 18, 2025 and captured for posterity by Toshi Aizawa.
With all the current attention being drawn to KPop and JPop, it would only be natural that JIndie makes an entrance.
Hitsujibungaku have been around since 2011. They’ve been building a reputation ever since – although it’s taken time. They have been to the States, by way of a mini-tour of the West Coast in 2024, but bets are they will be back at some point soon.
Like all bands and artists from other countries, the fact that they are getting so much attention now is due, almost exclusively to streaming and Social Media. Even when they began, I don’t think Hitsujibungaku would have anticipated a world-wide reputation.
I say this with a goodly amount of experience, having been involved with the Japanese Psych and Prog music scene in the early 1970s – where bands, other than speaking English ones were almost totally excluded based on language barriers. It required a serious amount of digging and deep-diving to become aware that the rest of the world was a fertile field of interesting and engaging music. Few on this side of the Pacific knew about the Japanese music scene. Much the same as that for non-English speaking bands in Europe.
It’s only been recently that attention has been focused on what’s happening in Japan, Korea, China and the rest of Asia. The persistence has paid off, and bands like Hitsujibungaku are experiencing a bigger fan based than they could have imagined ten years ago. Much the same is happening in KPop, where artists are stunned that American audiences know the words to songs, even in Korean.
Obviously American Radio has had nothing to do with it. Even College stations, which have always had the reputation of being musical outliers, have fallen down on this one. Nope – streaming and social media can take credit for this (one of the few good things about Social Media lately).
Also too, the fans who are able to do a fantastic job of getting word out. This concert, for example is the work of Toshi Aizawa who has captured so many of these concerts, and concerts of other Asian artists – making this work available via YouTube to an even larger audience. He’s been doing a great service getting the word out and it’s via his YouTube site that I found this concert. At present, he has over 50,000 subscribers and running over 2,000 videos of concerts. I would say he’s doing a huge service for the Asian Indie community and you really need to check him out – he puts a lot of work into these and you’ve gotta give him credit for that. This concert, incidentally is initially on video, but since Past Daily runs audio-only, you’ll just have to go over there for the full effect. A perfectly legitimate excuse.
Back to the concert. Hitsujigunbaku are the tip of the iceberg, and a welcome one at that – they offer further evidence that contemporary music is still coming from great places, making wonderful discoveries and available to everyone. All you need is an open mind.
Even if you aren’t a fan of Asian Pop or Indie, you have almost no excuse not to do a little investigating on your own just out of curiosity.
No question we’ll be hearing much more about Hitsujibungaku in the coming weeks and months.
Press Play and get an early start.
