The Emotional Power Of Seiko Oomori
How my exposure to a variety of musical styles lead me to discovering one of Japan’s best kept musical secrets.
In early 2014 I was at what I thought was the lowest point in my life (2020 would like to have a word, 2014). An alienated, punk-rocker high school senior barely eligible to graduate because the American school system doesn’t cater to anyone on the less visible side of the autism spectrum, I had recently graduated at a bartending school I attended on the weekends vocationally and was working at a dive bar. I was on my third and second-to-last ‘off’-period with my then on-and-off partner and spent my time either miserable at the bar, miserable at school, or miserable at home trying to write some kind of big-brained, profound expression of sadness to call an album.
I had spent my entire life surrounded by music, allegedly in love with music since before I can remember. One of my earliest memories in life also happens to be my first memory of my emotional connection with music. I was a “hyperactive” child, only just this month coming to terms with that word actually meaning “ADHD” at the young age of 25. My mother would often play umbrella-classical music to calm me down. I most vividly remember her playing the 1940 soundtrack to Disney’s Fantasia to lull me to sleep, which in retrospect might not have been among the wisest selections, considering its inclusion of Igor Stravinsky’s ferocious masterwork The Rite Of Spring towards its tail end.
However, it was the ‘Arabian Dance’ movement of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s own opus, The Nutcracker Suite, Op. 71a. that tied to me. You see, I frequently had nightmares as a child before receiving a dreamcatcher (that I still have and use to this day, everything be damned) as a gift. One of my earliest memories — and you’ll have to forgive my lack of detail in its recollection; I was 4 — involved waking up from a nightmare to the ‘Arabian Dance’ with tears rolling down my face. It is quite a unique and odd piece in both classical terms and in the context of what a 4 year old is listening to, one that while researching just to even find out the name of for the sake of this piece, actually gave me chills — in the bad way — once again for the first time hearing it in nigh 20 years. I don’t believe it was the music that moved me to tears, but rather the arrival back into reality from a morbid and supernatural nightmare soundtracked by a piece that sounded as alien as what I had just seen in my sleep, furthering my discomfort.
My emotional experiences with music continued from there. I vaguely recall asking my dad from the back seat of the car to “put that Offspring tape in”, referring to Ixnay On The Hombre and more specifically, the song ‘Gone Away’. My parents claimed I knew all the words to it before I was speaking in complete and clear sentences, which I find a little ironic seeing as until I looked the lyrics up around the age of 15, I had interpreted the words “air-crosses and” as “akro-zan-zan” or some other kind of gibberish I thought might have just been a fancy grown-up word as a little kid. My adoration for the high energy and clean production values of mid-’90s relics like The Offspring or post-Prison Bound-era Social Distortion were likely the earliest cornerstone in my interest in punk rock.
I remember going on a weekend vacation to the Willow Valley resort out in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania. In between getting in some button-mashed rounds on a nearly-broken Marvel Vs. Capcom machine up in the arcade across the atrium, my brother and I frequently retreated back to our room to play Kingdom Hearts on our brand new PlayStation 2. Something struck a chord with me when the PLANITb remix of ‘Simple And Clean’ played upon pressing start.
Every January, we would take a likely very expensive trip to Walt Disney World. It was at Disney Springs (then known as Downtown Disney) at the Virgin Megastore that the hybrid-restaurant/bowling alley now stands at that I ‘bought’ my very first CD. It was Utada Hikaru’s 2002 R&B classic, Deep River, imported right from Japan and somehow sitting right there with a big sticker that said something about the song from Kingdom Hearts. I use the light quotation around the word ‘bought’, because I was 7 years old and asked my mom if I could hand the money to the cashier myself. If we’re speaking in these terms, you could say I also bought the .hack//SIGN 4-disc series boxset for myself and volumes 3 through 9 of Berserk for my brother.
I remember getting in the rental car to drive back to our hotel and putting the CD in my little Sony CD Walkman. What I once thought of as just noises that sounded pretty had just become something profound, as the snare roll set loose into ‘Sakura Drops’. Tears rolled down my eyes. I didn’t understand a single word this girl was saying, but I equally felt every single one despite that language barrier. This was the first time music had ever felt like more than just pretty sounds. This was like magic.
As the era of CDs came to an end and the era of iTunes, Napster, and mp3s began, my brother would often burn me mixed CDs and occasionally the full album if I begged for it after falling in love with a particular song on one. My interest in music grew more and more with every CD he gave me. I remember falling in love with three particular Iron Maiden albums, namely 1986’s Somewhere In Time, 1992’s Fear Of The Dark, and most vividly, 2000’s Brave New World, still my personal favorite Maiden album to this day; an album that my brother, in a rare act of adolescent kindness, gifted me the original CD out of the case of rather than burning a copy. This CD however would soon be confiscated by my father as we were all getting in the car probably to go on some other expensive vacation for all I remember, but it was nevertheless an act that I’ve never forgiven him for to this day, one that he refuses to take accountability or even so much as admit had occurred.
This fueled the fires of rebellion that would plague my metal and punk phases. You see, my friend who lived a few houses down the block also had an older brother who was into metal music. I vividly remember hanging around his house as a retreat to play M-rated video games like Mortal Kombat Deception or Halo and listen to horribly offensive music like Iron Maiden and Linkin Park.
Blind Guardian’s 2002 epic A Night At The Opera in particular gave me another ‘profound little moment’ of music in my life, and that in turn drew me back to further appreciating the classical music I was raised on, finding the complexities of symphonic arrangements seamlessly blended in with the heavy metal sound my brother had exposed me to. These sounds weren’t just guys playing guitars or violins; it was both, it was dare I say epic, like a musical interpretation of the Peter Jackson Lord Of The Rings adaptations that were sweeping the nation and captivating the imaginations of adolescent nerds like myself — little did I know upon my first listening to this album that opens with a song about Jesus Christ just how profound of an influence Tolkien’s legacy had on a band like Blind Guardian.
My brother’s taste in just about everything shaped my interests for a good part of my childhood. He would go on to show me video games like SoulCalibur 2 — the 6th iteration of which I now play competitively on a team — as well as more local gems like a tiny band playing basements around 40 minutes north of where we lived called My Chemical Romance who had just released their second album, Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. I found myself scouring the internet for more bands that sounded like that. I stumbled upon other local gems like The Bouncing Souls on my own and more suggestions from my brother like The Gaslight Anthem, before diving into similar-sounding bands around the country like Fugazi and Rise Against, and even foreign bands like Number Girl and the Carsick Cars.
From 2012 to 2015 I found myself in a half-abandoned bowling alley on the beach just about every weekend. By far the most profound musical moment I had in my teenage years was not just my discovery of The Menzingers via some blog on Tumblr raving about their latest album On The Impossible Past, but in my discovery of the Asbury Lanes, that half-abandoned bowling alley on the beach. Both of these things coincide. While The Menzingers may have been a Philly (and at one point, Scranton) band, like any band in the know enough to come through town, they called Asbury Park, New Jersey their second home. Not because of the venues of mainstream legend like The Stone Pony, The Wonder Bar, or Convention Hall, but because of a venue that wasn’t even listed as a venue but as a bowling alley. Ironically, among my few hundred nights spent in that dimly-lit dive, I had only seen the lanes themselves used for bowling twice, the second time of which being myself bowling with members of Anti-Flag after one of their shows.
My first show there was an afterparty for one of The Bouncing Souls’ annual four-night Home For The Holidays shows. Rumors had been swirling all week about a secret Menzingers show. It would be an understatement to say they weren’t the most buzzed-about band of the year. On The Impossible Past received universal critical acclaim and still stands to this day as my second favorite album of all time, behind a tie of Perfume’s LEVEL3 and Frank Ocean’s Blonde, albums I love equally. On a whim while waiting between openers inside of the Pony to go on that night, we just shot a tweet out in the dark at them and to my surprise they responded. They’d be playing at a place the next night that rhymed with Shave Andy’s Brains, proceeding to @ the now defunct Philly band LUTHER, whose drummer was a producer named Andy Clarke. After the show, we stumbled across the street to the Asbury Lanes and noticed a flyer on the wall: “The Zing Dogs, December 27th.” That’s all we needed to know.
The next night of the Home For The Holidays shows, my friends and I met at the back bar and left in the middle of ‘Night On Earth’, a song The Bouncing Souls would often jam out the end of as a pre-encore ‘closer’, and were the first ones lined up outside of the Lanes. As we heard the final notes of ‘True Believers’, the definitive Bouncing Souls encore song, the doors of the Pony opened, and a crowd flooded out, most seemingly aware of the afterparty. Maybe the band announced it on the PA? I’m still not sure to this day. What I do know is that it got bad bad. Hundreds of people turned away at the doors because of the already exceeded capacity. My friend, we’ll call him “Cheese”, he couldn’t get in at all. I had several missed phone calls from Cheese, but we were sat firmly on one of the uncomfortable bowling table seats waiting for The Menzingers to go on for several hours. They finally went on at — and I don’t want to exaggerate — around 3:00 AM, and played through almost the entirety of On The Impossible Past out of order, as well as covers of Operation Ivy’s ‘Knowledge’ and Rancid’s ‘Roots Radicals’. I remember getting back into my frosted-over Pontiac Sunfire, my ears ringing to almost deafness, but still able to clearly hear my friend who we’ll call “Alcatraz” getting screamed at over the phone by her mother for being out so late. It was a perfect night. I wish I could relive it.
The stage was built on the center of the bowling lanes. Underneath all of the mud on the floor you could still see the markings and filled-in divisions of the 3 unused bowling lanes the mosh pits would dance on top of and you could see the cavities behind the stage. Bands wouldn’t just play their set and go backstage like any other venue. I met my idols here, I shared drinks (non-alcoholic of course, because I was underaged at the time and that would be illegal) with them. I was an extra in a Dave Hause music video that he filmed there, standing in between Bryan Kienlen from The Bouncing Souls and Brian Baker from Bad Religion in a tiny mosh-pit with a lot of smoke and mirrors to look bigger in the video than it was in person. I had tater tots with Brian Warren from Weatherbox. So many Brians. Jeff Rosenstock gave me a hug while I was talking to Chris Farren and Derek Perry from Fake Problems. I asked Tom May from The Menzingers to play a song they hadn’t played in years (2007’s ‘Alpha Kappa Fall Off A Balcony’) because he just happened to be sitting at the bar as I went for another age-appropriate drink.
And in 2015, I saw my final show there. My dreams of playing at the Asbury Lanes with my own bands were crushed, though not instantly; the owners at the time had tried to ease our spirits by giving a simple “we don’t know what will happen, so let’s hope for the best”. We received the worst. But those last two nights, I got to see my own friends play there, members of my own band, The Boring Twenties, currently playing with my friends from Teenage Halloween, whose self-titled debut album just released this October to critical acclaim on Don Giovanni records, along with Sorority Noise of note. The final night at the Asbury Lanes was played out by underrated local heroes like The Holy Mess, Lost In Society, and Beach Slang, among a handful of other bands my 100% sober memory can’t remember. The city had already been going through a pretty unique thing called “gentrification”, and the Asbury Lanes was not qualified as a historic enough of a landmark to be spared of its evils the way the more fabled venues like The Stone Pony — a venue for which I’ve seen my fair share of abusive security guards at, but let’s talk about that some other time — would be. My last night at the Lanes I sliced my arm open on the stall door of the now gender-neutral restroom (formerly the “lady’s” room, but the “men’s” room was apparently so destroyed by the end of days at the Lanes that they just boarded the door closed altogether) and thought all night about how I probably got tetanus; of course, all I did was ask the person at the doors to borrow some tape and ask my friends to wind it around the paper towels I had covered my arm with, and immediately went front and center to wait for The Holy Mess to go on.
When the Lanes reopened, it looked exactly the way you’d expect a tourist trap renovation of a town that the bulldozer of seedy upstarts chased all marginalized groups out of to look like: an entire wall of hollowed out amplifiers and PA systems, an American flag made of fake foam balls (they’re supposed to look like bowling balls, but you and I and anybody else who’s ever gotten close enough to them in person all know they aren’t), bean bag chairs, distressed wood and pre-oxidized metal lined the walls and adorned the tables and chairs; I think the finest touch was the fake dents somebody hammered into all of the cafe tables before the hilariously embarrassing opening night hosted by none other than New Jersey’s most embarrassing sellouts like The Front Bottoms and Big Boss Bruce Springsteen himself.
I only went to one show at the new place, a makeup concert for the rained-out Frank Turner, Murder By Death, and Against Me! concert set to take place on The Stone Pony’s outdoor stage. Mind you, this was before Frank Turner went more public with his right-wing politics and released his 2019 album where he mansplained the story of a different historical woman as the lyrics for each song. Thankfully, Frank Turner was far too big of an option for the newly-reopened excuse for the “Asbury Lanes”, so it was just down to Against Me! and Murder By Death. Against Me! was my first punk show at The Stone Pony all the way back in 2008 or 2009; when Laura Jane Grace came out and subsequently released Transgender Dysphoria Blues in early 2014, it helped me finally start to explore my own queer identity; I wasn’t going to miss this show. And all it took was the one show to understand what a joke the place was.
For starters, they had two big expensive curved PA speakers hanging from the ceiling on each side of the stage. The hollowed out “warehouse” vibe that all gentrified venues go for made the type of early reflection reverberation those speakers produced almost unbearable. There was more clarity in that single blown-out speaker that sat on the stage floor at the old Asbury Lanes than this massive and expensive sound system the pea-brains who bought the place blew their money on. On top of that, there were a lot of tourists just sitting at the bar (you can kind of tell by the way they dress, especially at a punk show at what was once the east coast’s most legendary punk venue, CBGB be damned). The old Lanes was a community, and as such, there was never a need for security, even in what was at the time was possibly the Jersey shore’s most dangerous neighborhoods to be in after dark. “If someone falls down, pick them up” was a frequently heard punk mantra, and that truly was the case. I’ve taken quite literally hundreds of tumbles in the pit in my life, and not a single time at the Lanes was I not immediately picked up and given a rotating thumb asking if I’m okay or not okay. Sometimes I wasn’t okay, but even that was okay. One thing I know for sure is that the new Lanes must have been outsourcing their security from The Stone Pony across the street; during the first few songs of Against Me!’s set, this one skinhead bouncer in particular came into the pit just to hit kids. It didn’t take more than another song or two before nearly everyone in the pit just trying to have fun beat on the big bastard and chased him back to the barrier at the front. There was no barrier at the old Lanes either. Want to climb up on stage, scream your favorite lyric into the bassist’s mic, and proceed to backflip into a pool of hands? Well you can’t anymore.
The security at the new Asbury Lanes was so bad that Joyce Manor, the band who received some substantial attention and minor backlash for their Fugazi-esque stance on rough-playing showgoers, even acknowledged how violent and power-tripping the bouncers can be with crowds that they think are having too much fun.
So why exactly have you been reading my memoir in what was supposed to be a quick-read article with a title indicating that it should clearly be about Seiko Oomori? Well, for starters, I can’t tell a short story for my life. It’s just in my blood, I love the details. But secondly, my story correlates to the story of a young punk girl from Koenji — a neighborhood in Tokyo wildly regarded as Japan’s punk rock nervous system — playing concerts in abandoned churches, in shopping malls, and tiny underground live houses lined with stickers and mold not far unlike the Asbury Lanes some several thousand miles removed around the other side of the world.
It was because of the Asbury Lanes’ fall from grace that I fell further out of punk and into a newer community: J-pop. Around the time that I was going to shows at the Asbury Lanes, something not too different was happening across the sea (haha like the Weezer song, get it? yikes.) — in 2011 an idol group busted onto the underground music scene in Japan with a sound so aggressive that nothing similar had been heard out of the country since Jun Togawa in the 1980s. BiS, which stood for “Brand-new idol Society”, was making a small wave for their fusion of punk rock and idol tropes; synchronized but poorly-choreographed dancing, off-key unison vocals, catchy hooks, and fast drums.
Come 2012, they had been preparing to release what would be their second album through a unique stunt that would change the history of idol music as we know it. They released a new ultra-sugary pop single called ‘Idol’ (spelled in Japanese), the music video for which featured the previously rag-clad members in maid outfits, crooning into the camera. To say that their fans were pissed would be Understatement Of The Decade. But not even a day later, the video was taken down and replaced with a different one called ‘IDOL’ (spelled in English, in all caps). This track was full of screaming and heavy metal guitar riffs. The video depicted the members being crucified on the streets of Shibuya. It was all a trick, a publicity stunt. Their second album IDOL iS DEAD released to an absurd amount of buzz in the worldwide J-music community for its uncompromisingly violent sound and aesthetics, as well as the political ideologies and ethics of the group, not led by an agency, but by a single girl, Pour Lui, who started the group after a failed solo-career as a way of giving her manager who she loathed a hard time (and after seeing the post-2015 BiS “revival” he started, I loathe too).
Using these same shock-promotion ethics, a girl from Koenji named Seiko Oomori started making a name for herself in promotion of her own sophomore album, Zettai Shoujo (roughly: Absolute Girl). It was through my adoration of BiS’ sophomore effort that lead me to discovering Seiko Oomori while looking up anything else like BiS. She was billed as a cutesy, pink-adorned idol with candy-coated pop songs. What would end up happening however, is a girl dressed in bloodied nurse outfits (did someone say “Ringo Sheena”?) thrashing on an acoustic guitar and screaming her brains out, often not even into the microphone. Zettai Shoujo is an almost-perfect album, my third favorite of all time. It starts with its only two bubblegum pop singles, ‘Zettai Kanojo’ (roughly: ‘Girls Are Absolutely…’) and ‘Midnight Seijun Isei Kouyuu’ (roughly: ‘Innocent Sexual Relations At Midnight’) but then immediately becomes a 100% acoustic album with the third track ‘ENDLESS DANCE’, a fairly relaxing song that immediately begins with simple but shocking lyrics based on the previous two songs: “Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate”. After this era, Seiko began to evolve from playing big live concerts solo and acoustic to performing with many different live bands including her own Seiko Oomori & The Pink Tokarev and Lai Lai Lai Team among others while also dropping the core “idol-shock” marketing altogether.
In my eyes, bait-and-switch stunts like this were the embodiment of punk rock, creating a fake image only to burst through it with something blasphemous in an attempt to call attention towards a cause; in both BiS and Seiko Oomori’s case, a music industry plagued with toxic agencies and handlers. BiS most efficiently called this out in the promotional video for their Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra collaboration single ‘MURA MURA’, which depicted the members’ heads shaved bald, a clear and topical stance of solidarity with AKB48 member Minami Minegishi, who at the time had recently been forced to shave her hair off by her management as atonement for having a boyfriend. The industry clearly had issues, and BiS and Seiko Oomori did not want to stand by and see their fellow women being abused by men in suits.
The key difference between BiS and Seiko is however most apparent in her lyricism. Rather than the blasphemous, controversy-baiting lyrics that BiS tried oh so hard to write, Seiko’s music is inherently personal and brutally honest. Take for instance the 2016 title track from her possibly most-cherished album TOKYO BLACK HOLE, where she addresses the way her own social life traverses throughout the revitalization projects happening even to this day throughout neighborhoods like Kabukichou and Koenji, places she’s practically indebted to from her upbringing:
Zero song
The mom-and-pop candy shop across the street from the station was forced to close because of the redevelopment.
I should have drowned this town up with a water-bomb long ago.
The breeze from between the skyscrapers lifts my skirt up and your eyes land directly on my bloodstained underwear
(translation by yours truly)
As Japanese is a much more concise language than English, these lines are far more clean in both rhyme and cadence in its original Japanese, obviously. Seiko delivers these bars in an almost-hushed whisper. On the surface, these lyrics might all seem unrelated, but it’s almost poetic perfection; Seiko is talking about how the city is so easily able to run an unrelated family businesses into the ground solely so that they can build another parking lot or shut down another soapland, displacing all of the likely desperate and hard-working sex workers there all for the sake of “keeping the town safe”, meanwhile leaving girls with as underprivileged of an upbringing as her unable to even afford basic feminine hygienic essentials like pads or tampons.
Part of why I’m writing this is because I’ve noticed a lot of people arguing and fundamentally misunderstanding Seiko Oomori when watching live videos of her performing her 2019 single ‘JUSTadICE’, which was used as an opening theme song for the anime Black Clover. If anything, I think it’s perfect that Seiko managed to get this exact kind of reaction from anime fans. See, anime fans are so used to squeaky clean over-produced “anisong” as it’s called. They’re often major label artists who get paid to do this for a living, and often write their entire albums around whatever two songs they have in whatever two anime this season. The thing is though, JUSTadICE was a one-off single, it’s not on any of Seiko Oomori’s studio albums. She’s an artist through-and-through. She makes albums the way she wants to make them. She’s an artist whose first “anisong” if you could even call it at that was released seven albums into her career (PINK is a mini-album, let’s not get too deep, alright?). She’s more than just an anime songwriter. She’s an artist, a performer. Live videos of JUSTadICE are flooded with comments about how bad of a singer she is live while 100% missing the context, missing the entire point. Yes, Zettai Shoujo and Sennou were the main era for her bait-and-switch false-idol image, but she’s a punk rocker, and that vocal style has now become an integral part of her artistic vision, and that’s where there needs to be clarity. She did a song for an anime; that does not make her an “anisong” songwriter. Imagine going to a Sex Pistols concert but all you walk away from it with is “Wow, Johnny Rotten is a terrible singer”? You missed the entire point, my friend.
My youth, when you could find me equally pouring over music from likes of Utada Hikaru, Igor Stravinsky, and The Offspring, led me to this place of deep appreciate for someone like Seiko Oomori, whose music carries influence from J-pop greats just like Utada and Morning Musume (Seiko has never been shy about her infatuation with Sayumi Michishige, finally collaborating with her in 2019) as well as punk rock sound and ideology akin to J-punk greats like The Blue Hearts and The Stalin, as well as her other “anti-idol” contemporaries of the time like BiS and Oyasumi Hologram. Just take a look at a song as aggressive as ‘Zettai Zetsubou Zekkouchou’ (roughly: Absolute Despair In Mint-Condition) and tell me she isn’t punk through-and-through.
She even took on a heavily orchestrated sound on her 2017 album kitixxxgaia (that’s intended to be pronounced “Kitschy Gaia”, by the way), something I was able to appreciate as much as I did because of my love for classical music and bands like Blind Guardian, Nightwish, and Dimmu Borgir both as a kid and while studying music theory in my early teens.
This influence of an edgy punk image started by artists like BiS and Seiko Oomori eventually became the all-too-trendy sound of idol music for the latter half of the 2010s, something I grew to detest, seeing the political importance of anti-idol get thrown to the side by heavily-managed idol groups who wished to only use the image, rather than the ethics that a group like BiS pushed for, with BiS themselves getting reformed by Pour Lui’s old manager (she was part of the reunion but left almost immediately to nobody’s surprise) and becoming the exact thing the original BiS once parodied and berated.
Huge world-renowned groups started to arise, like Babymetal, who were certainly influenced by the anti-idol movement regardless of what their fairly-delusional cult of fans will tell you, though the argument usually runs around in circles the way the “Who came first: The Ramones or the Sex Pistols?” argument often does too.
This exact saturation of the market led to the disappointment of Seiko’s 6th and still best-selling album KUSOKAWA PARTY in 2018. KUSOKAWA PARTY, which was recently revealed to have originally been conceptualized as an almost full-on punk album was instead an almost full-on metal album, and between the flood of underground nobodies as well as the adoption of “the Babymetal sound” by industry heavyweights like Momoiro Clover Z on a handful of singles and album tracks, KUSOKAWA PARTY felt immediately forgettable for the majority of its runtime, save for highlights like the intro ‘Shinigami ’(roughly: ‘Grim Reaper’) and ‘VOID’. The musical impact of the album was also worsened by the strange marketing tactic of replacing tracks 9 and 10 with different songs depending on the version of the album you bought. Remember how I said ‘VOID’ is one of the best tracks on the album? Well depending on the version you bought, you might not even get to hear it.
Despite starting what’s turning out to be a PR disaster of her own idol group, known as “ZOC” (named after the song from KUSOKAWA PARTY), I think Seiko had to have also known that her fans weren’t keen on the album either, and took her longest break from solo music to date. A career that once saw her doing annual album releases, 2019 saw Seiko only releasing a handful of non-album singles like the aforementioned ‘JUSTadICE’ and rerecorded version of Zettai Kanojo featuring Sayumi Michishige. All hope was however not lost, as 2019 also saw the release of ‘Re: Re: Love’, a collaborative single with Kazunobu Mineta of punk legends GING NANG BOYZ, widely regarded by the community as one of her strongest songs to date. It was also refreshing to hear from Mineta again, as the GING NANG BOYZ had gone a bit silent for what seemed like most of the decade.
Which leads us to December 2020. After an almost excruciatingly long wait of nearly 4 years, given the bump in the road that fans often think of KUSOKAWA PARTY as, Seiko Oomori finally released a new album: Kintsugi, a nearly perfect album title, which refers to a Japanese artform in which pottery is purposely smashed and mended back together with gold to fill in the cracks. She has to know that KUSOKAWA PARTY was so poorly received by fans, you would be hard-pressed to find a more self-aware album title. The songwriting on Kintsugi is top-notch, but the emotional brevity of the album is heavy. She addresses her secret marriage to Ling Tosite Sigure drummer Pierre Nakano on ‘KEKKON’ (literally: ‘MARRIAGE’), her influence on the industry on ‘counter culture’, and her signature style of more personal and political themes on ‘Singer-Songwriter’.
The three aforementioned singles leading up the album certainly had me excited, but I also had a pit of worry that maybe the album would underwhelm at the worst. I often listen to albums lately while doing something else because of my whole “probably ADHD” thing. When Kintsugi came out, I was running through some combos in SoulCalibur 6’s training mode. But when ‘Yuugata Mirage’, the album’s opener, dropped its massive first chorus, I had to put my controller down and sit back in my chair. Tears were rolling down my eyes already and I hadn’t even noticed. Hell, I studied Japanese for most of the 2010s and got fairly rusty over the last year or two, but even through my half-understanding, the words she was saying were profound, and the chord structure felt uniquely Seiko; it was warm, well-produced, and emotionally stabbing. The lyrics are punctual, possibly addressing Pierre Nakano directly in its chorus:
If you’re only living for the sake of the kids, I’ll just leave you.
Aren’t I free to make that choice?
Aren’t all people? Aren’t all women?
(roughly translated by yours truly, apologies for the rust)
Seiko’s music is emotional not because she speaks from her own personal experience, but because she speaks to the collective conscience of Japanese society and to people’s emotions in general. You don’t have to live in Tokyo to relate to ‘TOKYO BLACK HOLE’’s lyrics about class struggle and gentrification. You don’t have to be Japanese to relate to the way Seiko sings about the acceptance and inevitability of aging and the pressure to find a partner to listen to Björk and cook dinner with on ‘Over The Party’. While there’s certainly a language barrier, even that isn’t a necessary barrier to pass to get a satisfying listening experience from Seiko Oomori. Calling it a barrier is frankly an insult; if anything, maybe it’s a chain-link fence. Sure, you can’t see the other side with 100% clarity, but you can certainly still get the picture just by looking through; what I mean by this is Seiko’s voice is shaky and evocative. Even if you can’t understand her often complex poetry, you can still hear the points where her voice quavers, where she sounds angry, where she sings soft and her voice starts to crack up. And on top of that, there are blogs like Kittysblues dedicated to translating Seiko’s lyrics into English. The internet is a powerful tool, and it’s never been easier to get into J-music than it is now because of it.
Seiko Oomori in many ways is the voice of her generation. She might not do Gen Hoshino numbers on the Oricon charts, she may not be the latest thing on silly TV talk shows, but what she lacks for in mainstream success, she makes up for in emotional power and the way she speaks to the daily experience of the average 20 or 30-something, regardless of nationality.
I discovered Seiko Oomori’s music when I was working at a dive bar, burnt out from the dead-end feeling of a job where I served piss-quality beer to the same people who sat at the bar longer than my shift every single day, listening to the same 30 “classic rock” singles on the Sirius radio station my boss insisted stay on at all times. I was ready to give up music, but then I discovered Zettai Shoujo. I watched videos of her playing her acoustic guitar live and made revelations over the way she played her guitar and applied it to my own playing: no more boring C chords, I started lifting up my index finger to make it into a spicy CMaj7 instead. Simple changes like lifting fingers during simple chords like A-minor to give the chord more color and warmth was all I needed to want to keep making music. And while it’s obviously not something Seiko invented, it’s something I might not have found out were I not depressed and scrolling through videos of her playing live and trying to learn her songs. I would listen to Zettai Shoujo every single freezing cold morning before I went to work at that dive bar, and it got me through the day. It might have been cold outside, but songs like ‘Amai’ (literally: ‘Sweet’) made me feel warm. I would learn new words by studying her lyrics and practice my kanji by writing her lyrics out on blank receipts I printed out during slow shifts. It was like the universe gave a little nudge in the right direction to find Seiko Oomori at a time where I really needed something new, something emotional, something inspiring.
And for giving me the strength to continue making music and to get through what felt like one of the hardest parts of my life, I give Seiko Oomori my eternal gratitude.
You can follow Seiko Oomori on Twitter here and you can stream Kintsugi on Spotify here.
2022 Edit: Well, it seems Seiko Oomori had found herself last year in a bit of controversy that has overreacted to by overly hardcore fans of the opposing side, as these things usually go. Let me just start off by saying this article was written before all of this happened. Let me also say — don’t feel bad about listening to Seiko Oomori; everybody is allowed to have problematic favorites, especially when the extent of their “problematic” nature is as tame as emitting basic human emotions like anger and frustration, something that literally nobody is guilt-free of.
I find this important to address as that hastily written and conclusion-jumping Arama Japan article is still up without being edited despite having horrible and damning accusations in its clickbait headline. I’m not going to mince words, Ronald Taylor has been part of plenty of harmless discourse within these communities and I have a deep respect for him as a fellow writer and critic within the same field of specialization as me so I mean no offense to him, but Ronald should be fucking ashamed of leaving this article live without at the very least editing corrections from recent developments in. It’s the second Google result whilst googling Maro Kannagi’s name, and leaving it as-is is just beyond irresponsible and continues to fuel a fire of, ironically, hate that should have been extinguished months ago.
As far as the actual controversy goes, I want to clear up some very important points: abuse is bad, like obviously. What happened here wasn’t necessarily abuse though and I think everybody who has equated it to that too should be ashamed, as it simply perpetuates a culture of disbelief and disrespect to actual victims of actual abuse.
There’s a lot of irony here to unpack, so let’s first establish what happened. In August 2021, an audio recording leaked of Oomori yelling at ZOC member Maro Kannagi with much of the context obscured save for a few key points. To make a long story short using the recent developments, Maro had referred to Seiko in a tweet as the “queen of menhera” or something along those lines. For those out of the know, menhera is essentially a new sub-culture and fashion style that Seiko certainly had a hand in popularizing despite rejecting the term on numerous occasions, much similar in the way My Chemical Romance popularized emo while Gerard Way simultaneously criticized the term as derogatory. Much in that same way, menhera can often be considered an insult as Seiko herself interprets it. Seiko was also heard in the audio claiming that Maro had done something and implying that it could hurt her public image.
A few months later, it was revealed that Maro was in a relationship with WACK showrunner and BiS manager Junnosuke Watanabe, who himself is infamous for real actual physical and verbal workplace abuse. Hmm…I wonder if that could be bad for her public image? Wasn’t Seiko criticizing her for doing something that could be bad for her public image? I jest. About something that shouldn’t be jested about, I suppose. Let’s all keep in mind that Junnosuke Watanabe is over a decade older than Maro Kannagi. Certainly a more normalized thing in Japan to have an age gap like that, but considering that ZOC had just recently moved their offices into the same building as WACK, it seems a little more predatory. Let’s also consider that this detail should not be waived away or overlooked because “they’re both consenting adults”; wasn’t it just a few years ago that you same lot of internet shit-talkers were trying to cancel Drake for having an age gap in his relationships with other “consenting adults”? Y’all need to be more consistent with your criticisms.
Anyways, further down in the audio Seiko briefly loses her cool, beginning to scream at Maro. Now certainly she took it too far, there’s no denying that, but absolutely nobody, not a single soul reading this, can convince me that they’ve never yelled at someone before, especially someone that they care about who they only want the best for while they’re making some kind of mistake. Now I’m no social worker, but I don’t believe you need to be one to know what abuse is — victims of abuse for example still know what abuse is despite not being social workers or experts — and one single instance of yelling at someone is not abuse. It’s just not. You can’t just make assumptions like “oh, since this was being recorded, it must mean someone was trying to expose her for doing this often”. Do you even hear yourself? You can’t just jump to a wild conclusion like that based on one single instance with its context obfuscated. If this were to happen again and another audio clip of this nature leaked? Sure, then you’d probably be right.
The Arama article also claims that she “beat” Kannagi, which again is incredibly presumptuous and contrary to what happened in the leak. There is absolutely no evidence to prove this. The sound of “smacking” in the audio clip lacks any involuntary vocal queues that such a sudden strike to the human body would undoubtedly provoke; in plain English, if Seiko had hit Maro in this clip, Maro would have said “ouch”. It’s clear that Seiko was clapping her hands and bringing her fist down to a table for vocal emphasis. Imagine a coach clapping the back of their hand into a palm as they give a pep talk or a workplace boss slamming a table and standing out of their chair (not the best example). Regardless, there’s just no basis for accusations like this.
A few days later, Seiko and Maro hashed things out on stage, released a new single as a response to this “controversy”, and overall smoothed things over with Maro seeming to forgive Seiko. I don’t care if you argue the rest of what I’ve said to this point, if you take anything from this, take this part: the one objective thing you can guarantee with this situation is that if this was truly power harassment (or pawa-hara, something taken so seriously in Japan that it has its own wasei-eigo word) then it would have gone to a much higher place of legal response. Not a single contract in a Japanese business would keep somebody locked in after a highly publicized abuse scandal. The insanely formal business standards in Japan simply do not have a loophole for a scenario of Maro being “bullied into staying with the group and making a song to lie about forgiveness”.
At the end of the day, if the people involved both say that the issue has blown over and that they forgive each other, you should probably respect that and mind your business; this doesn’t involve you and it doesn’t involve me and it never has — it’s water under the bridge to the parties involved, and if it isn’t for you then you yourself are going against the wishes of the one you claim to want to protect. I know how bad this fandom can be. I was once stalked by some unhinged alt-idol shill for claiming that BiS were feminists (they were). The response I’ve seen from both Hello! Project fans and Seiko fans alike, the death threats, the dogpiling, the “cyberbullying”, the misogyny, all of that has bordered on real actual verbal abuse, and the irony is not lost on me. I had three (3) separate Hello! Project fans tell me to kill myself for even implying that the situation isn’t what it seems. I didn’t hear Seiko tell Maro to kill herself, so are you sure you really care about bullying and abuse that badly? You people need to treat each other with the kindness and respect you pretend you want your favorites to have. Fucking behave yourselves.
