Issue #94: Another Seraph
This Side of Japan returns to discuss the new nyamura album, Hiroko Yakushimaru's "Tantei Monogatari" and TikTok music from Q2
Hi! Welcome to This Side of Japan, a newsletter on Japanese music, new and old. You can check out previous issues here.
Six months since its release, “Ai Scream!” has lived so many lives once its live-call section of a bridge spread on the app, and the memes have become progressively more bizarre with each evolution. I am not going to explain the song, the group behind it or the initial breakout of the meme here; I’ll let our friend of the newsletter Patrick St. Michel do that for you. Instead, I want to share my favorite twisted iterations I’ve seen on the app these past few months, roughly in chronological order in which I’ve come across them.
“Ai Scream!” by AiScReam (2025)
THE EDITS, TRADITIONAL: In traditional TikTok fashion, the song became a popular track for edits, acting as a cutesy filter to overlay on someone’s showcase of their pop faves. As the song grew in visibility on the app through its adjacent meme of people lip-syncing the live call spreading more and more, the subject of these edits started to stray further away from the pop-music constellation in a semi-ironic way. While my first encounter of this genre of the meme highlighted LeBron James, the most can’t-help-but-laugh version that I saw featured cardinals who were candidate hopefuls to be the next Pope at the time.
THE EDITS, THE SCREAMS: As the meme spread, people began to narrow the focus of its punchline on the haaai! portion of the live call, the response from each of the voice actresses when her respective character’s name gets called. Soon, the edit-makers spliced clips of their pop faves and inserted some of the most obnoxious screams done by them in place of the actual live call and response. I’m fond of this Twice one where after each introduction of Chaeyoung, Nayeon and Momo, you hear the most ridiculous squawk, squeal and howl to ever come out of each of them.
PLANES, TRAINS, AUTOMOBILES: The two above genre of memes fused and mutated into one warped strain, where the subject of the edit became a motor vehicle with the loudest klaxon. My local public transit system for example posted one of their trolley trains, and where Ai Furihata would be answering haaai! in the song is interrupted by a deafening horn. I don’t know why they have a TikTok account either!
KLAXON AS PRANK: I want to think this next step was inspired by the horrifically loud meme above, but by the spread of this portion, the original lip-syncing version of the meme was well known enough that if you caught someone’s attention with the song while recording a TikTok, that person would know the drill on what to do for the meme and be able to join in. However, people started to prank these unassuming bystanders with a different version of the audio where instead of Ai Furihata’s haaai!, you heard a blaring car horn in a volume that honestly demands a warning label for the viewers at home. These poor subjects are absolutely stunned, their expressions frozen, lost. (Here is QWER’s Chodan, half asleep, harassed by Magenta with this ear-splitting meme—again, please be careful because it is loud!)
“AISCREAM” DANCE ROUTINES: It’s actually amazing it took this far into the song’s lifecycle on the app for me to come across dance routines done with it in sincere appreciation of the song for song’s sake. Maybe it has come full circle, back around to pure music. And after all the wild path it has gone, “AiScream” needs a re-appreciation for what it is: a pretty good anison single. The track’s entire front half gets no attention, especially its intro arrangement, which is a shame since it should please anyone fond of anime-adjacent electro-pop from the early 2010s, like ClariS’s stuff produced by kz of livetune.
But don’t mistake this recommendation as me being sick of the section that started this whole craze. I’m an idol fan after all, and I’m a sucker for when idol songs feature non-traditional elements as a hook or bridge like, as of recent, CUTIE STREET’s new single where they abruptly stop the track to play a game of Red Light, Green Light. I can go for another half of the year of Ai Furihata screaming haaai and the mad memes it will inevitably inspire on the app.
And if you can give me a moment, I want to offer thoughts on a few more songs that I’ve come across my TikTok feed these few months.
…And we are back! Apologies for the delays, but welcome back to a new issue of This Side of Japan! If you were not asking for a couple thousand words on TikTok music, well, there’s more music down below from other corners of the internet as well as indie rock. There’s even words on a film if that’s something you’re into in our Oricon column on an idol-song classic.
Happy listening!
Album of the Week
Another Seraph by nyamura [self-released]
*Recommended track: “Tadashisa No Yukue” ft. suisoh | Listen to it on Spotify
Since her early years on Soundcloud, the lullaby-trap tracks by nyamura seemed crafted while holed up with her computer. The circumstance imagined from her uploads lent her soft-spoken lyrics a feel of a late-night dispatch from a locked account, especially with its content perhaps best left behind closed doors: “I killed you again and again,” she sighs about her ex in her breakout song, 2023’s “you are my curse,” over a lonely loop of wispy synths and flickering drums. Her woeful, spilled-secrets vibe crystallized into a tight aesthetic of melancholic pop; in her debut full-length, Another Seraph, nyamura now expands the boundaries of her bedroom-born music.
If nyamura sounded awfully private in her closed-off songs from the past, she has been surrounding herself with a group of internet-based peers throughout the years, many of whom feature on Another Seraph. From her more personal orbit hails KAIRUI, a producer part of the creative team PROTOCOLLON alongside nyamura, and they provide the few interludes scattered in Another Seraph. With titles like “Gates of Dystopia,” their fairy-tale instrumentals set up rich world-building for the album, envisioning an origin point of her songs as a more fantastical place than nyamura’s cold hard drive.
The album’s guests nudge nyamura out of her shell. The collaborations immediately stick out through a verve and bounce markedly opposite from her usual. “Cho-Digital Cho-Detox” couldn’t make itself more obvious as a song done with an outside hand; there’s no mistaking its wacky, cartoon chase-scene frenzy to be the work of anyone other than Sasuke Haraguchi. While the jarring switch-up in style begets a freshness in her music that she couldn’t get otherwise, the newly excavated effort still loosely taps into a familiar lineage of her musical roots. Despite the stark difference in mood, nyamura feels right at home through her and Haraguchi’s mutual appreciation for the scatterbrained whimsy often born from Vocaloid pop.
Elsewhere, nyamura doesn’t sound forced out of her comfort zone by her contributors but rather helped in locating a familiar spark in a different environment. The slinky, garage-house percussion of “Tadashisa No Yukue” done with producer/vocalist suisoh zooms by with a speed and propulsion not so existent in her vacuous dream pop. Yet as the two indulge in the delicate garage&B duet, they strike mutual ground in the one-on-one closeness nurtured by the low-key dance production style. Suisoh reached the center of the garage-house/bedroom-pop Venn diagram first in their own work, heard in this year’s FLTR; now they guide nyamura to the same place.
KAIRUI’s interludes structure Another Seraph into a side-A, side-B divide. While intro “Key to Utopia” eases listeners before the sharp drop into the electro-pop roller-coasters led by “Cho-Digital Cho-Detox,” and followed with the jittery rave of “S.O.S.G.A.L.” by KOTONOHOUSE, centerpiece “Gates of Dystopia” offers rest before settling into the album’s downcast half. “Cat Reincarnation” recalls her early Soundcloud uploads through its despondent beat and tragic lyrics. “Tadashisa No Yukue” with suisoh finds a right home at this junction despite its comparatively extroverted beat: it’s shuffling dance-pop whose singers identify with while feel sympathy for fellow lost, lonely souls.
Nyamura returns to a moody darkness in the album’s penultimate track, “Kimi No Tame No Uta.” But after dabbling with new sounds and environments, there’s a hint of change. She’s caught in a one-sided conversation with an unnamed “you” yet she’s not spiteful at the lack of response; she’s empathic, seeing outside herself. “Even if you leave me by myself / I don’t mind, I don’t mind!” She calls out. “You can live however you like / I’ll always protect you.” The stately guitar loop wouldn’t be out of place in her early music. But the production soon bursts into a cathartic breakdown, reaching for something greater than the hushed bedroom-pop of her past.
Singles Club
“Get Out” by ayutthaya [self-released]
What initially seems like dazed slacker rock with its swirling grunge riff, “Get Out” quickly grows into something furious as ayutthaya near their boiling point. The guitars start hacking away in tune to the escalating frustrations expressed by the band’s frontwoman Mio Ohta, and once she’s absolutely had it, the song gives way to a glorious chorus, cathartic as it is melodic. “But why / always repeat and suffer from meaningless things,” she cries out in the end, tired of being stuck in a loop. While the call out might be hurled toward the “mass-produced college students,” proudly in arrested development, the bitterness rings slightly personal in “Get Out,” like the band’s also sick of their listless selves.
epoch EP is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “Outsider” by ART-SCHOOL; “Am I afraid of dying?” by SAGOSAID
“win in the end” by THE LUV BUGS ft. Yunosuke & Such [THE LUV BUGS]
For a good cross-section of URL-to-IRL electronic-pop in Japan, check the roster of artists booked by THE LUV BUGS for their live-show series at the WOMB club in Shibuya but also their music collaborations done with resident artists. The project’s latest link-up finds VocaloP Yunosuke hold off on their zippy future-bass chops for a brief detour into Eurobeat. Replacing Hatsune Miku as the voice of the song is Such, a singer who’s hopped on many electro commissions like this for netlabels MOTTO MUSIC and MEGAREX, to name a few, throughout the years. Together, the two inspire one hard para para pop with thumping energy perhaps best fulfilled live at WOMB.
Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “IMASARA” by Taku Takahashi, Yackle, Aile the Shota & PORIN; “your voice” by Tokyo Den-nou
“Suiteki Wo Miru” by musbime [self-released]
Musbime’s emo-rock shuffles along at a steady pace. The twangy riffs coil up but still rather looser than the knotty grooves of math rock while the lyrics complement the drift through its impressionistic nature. Delivered in lamenting sigh, it dances around hints of an image—unexpected goodbyes, fuzzy memories—without fully cohering into shape. Yet “Suiteki Wo Miru” grows into a volcanic track with its whirlwind of a climax embodying the song’s ending scene: “the spring’s storm vanished / only left is a melancholy season / hated my ignorance, and look to the distance.” Like the season, musbime’s new single comes and goes but not without leaving its mark.
Listen to it on Spotify/Bandcamp.
See also: “Hibi” by N-FENI; “broken summer” by Vote for Pedro
This Week in 1983…
“Tantei Monogatari” by Hiroko Yakushimaru [Toshiba EMI, 1983]
No. 1 during the weeks of June 6 - July 18, 1983 | Listen to it on YouTube/Spotify
A figure stops Hiroko Yakushimaru dead in her tracks, the idol utterly stunned after locking eyes. “Like I screamed in a dream,” she sings in “Tantei Monogatari,” “my lips move, but words turn into gust.” True to such a fantastic expression of speechlessness, her words thereafter trail off without a chance to fully form and reach the dear person they’re made out for. “I love you… But… Maybe… Possibly…” The ellipses linger longer and longer, drawing out her helplessness.
For any other teen idol and her second-ever single, these lyrics might tap into the rush of blissful surrender from a love at first sight. My mind goes to a record like Akina Nakamori’s “Slow Motion,” where infatuation distorts her perception of everything passing by to half-time. But the forlorn arrangement by Eiichi Ohtaki hangs a rather tragic mood around the song’s central experience. As her voice appears from a sullen theme, Yakushimaru sounds less awe-struck than she is petrified, like she has accidentally come in contact with something that’s been kept forbidden from her.
If Yakushimaru resembles a fallen heroine in “Tantei Monogatari,” thrown into the throes, it’s not necessarily a new role for her. Though she originally turned down opportunities to record music to solely focus on acting, she was pushed to debut as the singer for the main theme of her star-making film, 1981’s Sailor Fuku To Kikanjuu. And in that movie, she plays a high-school daughter of a yakuza who’s driven to assume leadership of her father’s crime ring after his death. Both on stage and on screen, her early narrative impresses an image of a teen suddenly thrust into an adult world despite her own wishes, dealing with an environment out of her comprehension.
In the 1983 film Tantei Monogatari, Yakushimaru reprises yet another role of a young woman unknowingly stepping into a treacherous world. Playing college student Naomi Arai, she meets Tsujiyama, a private detective assigned to watch over her, and the two are soon on the run as they get wrongly accused of being accomplices of a murder. Violent crime and gang culture drive the story but also a series of thorny love affairs that seemingly every character is involved in, except Yakushimaru’s. During the third act, she asks her maid if there was any feeling of true, genuine love when she kissed her father behind her mother’s back. Her maid can’t help but laugh from such a naive question, and especially so when the film’s other relationships are tangled with matters of infidelity, love triangles and prostitution. Real love? Living in these tainted scenarios?
This land of lost innocence is where the lyrics of “Tantei Monogatari” emerges from. “A piece of glass is shining / at the bottom of the water / so you be careful,” Yakushimaru later sings a lyric that rings like premonition. And the futility in holding on to pureness projects back to the unfinished final lines of the chorus, like she is realizing her own foolishness in the middle of forming her thoughts into concrete sentences. I think back to the scene in which Naomi walks over to Tsujiyama’s room to rejoice on their proven innocence only to overhear him having sex with his former wife through the walls. Naomi never voiced her love for him throughout the film, yet at that moment, her expression changes from shock, jealousy, and surprise as if she didn’t know her feelings for him herself. She was doomed before the chance had even arrived, discovering a desire for someone who’s not only out of her reach but who she shouldn’t ever get further involved with.
Call her oblivious or stubborn, Naomi confesses her love to him anyway near the film’s end. The title song’s ghastly intro fades in shortly after, with her walking back home from his house late at night, defeated from being turned down. The scene is anticlimactic insofar as you could have seen the rejection coming from a mile away. “Tantei Monogatari” similarly makes obvious of what it will lead you down to from the very beginning: with such a doomed intro, it’s impossible to mistake the fatalistic ballad to carry any glimpse of optimism. Yet the lyrics are so enticing as they capture an arresting feeling, it’s hard not to reach for it as the beauty inevitably fades away.
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Next issue of This Side of Japan is out on June 18. You can check out previous issues of the newsletter here.
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