Music / Fishmans

Full lineup in 1992. Left to Right: Hakase-Sun, Yuzuru Kashiwabara, Shinji Sato, Ken-ichi Motegi, Kensuke Ojima

The core trio in 1995. Left to Right: Motegi, Sato, Kashiwabara

"Get round in the season."

Fishmans are one of the most beloved bands you've probably never heard of.

Starting off in Tokyo around 1987 as an unremarkable but fun Reggae band, Fishmans evolved into an eclectic and ethereal psychedelic pop group by the end of their run, anchored by the otherworldly vocals of frontman Shinji Sato.

While already having established a small fanbase due to their sound on Neo Yankees' Holiday and thanks to the single "いかれたBaby", the band started to deviate from their signature reggae/dub-influenced sound with 1994's Orange. By their next release, the live album Oh! Mountain!, they had doubled down on the weirder, experimental elements of their act. The next two releases redefined Fishmans; both released in 1996, Kūchū Camp (which contains "Nightcruising", perhaps their Signature Song) and Long Season, (a 35 minute progressive dream-pop epic) turned the group into left-field icons throughout their home country. Uchū Nippon Setagaya (a reference to Sato's hometown of Setagaya in the Tokyo prefecture) followed the next year, closing out this unnervingly strong streak with their most cohesive, extensive record yet.

It was, sadly, their last studio recording. After long-time member Yuzuru Kashiwabara's last live performance with the band, Shinji Sato passed away in early 1999, turning what was expected to be a farewell to their bassist into a finale for the entire project. The recording of that last show (98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare) is, without a doubt, their crowning achievement and a bittersweet end to a remarkable career.

Fishmans never achieved any notable mainstream recognition in the west (although 2018 seemed to show signs of this when Spotify put their music for stream), but music dorks on places like RateYourMusic and /mu/ fell in love with their distinctive, unearthly music and championed the band, giving them a smallish but intense cult following in the west. Fans of Sigur Rós and whale noises take note.

Band Members

• Shinji Sato (佐藤伸治) - vocals/guitar/trumpet (1987 - 1999, died 1999)
• Kin-Ichi Motegi (茂木欣一) - drums/sampler/backing vocals (1987 - 1999)
• Yuzuru Kashiwabara (柏原譲) - bass (1988 - 1998)
• Hakase-Sun (ハカセ・サン)^note No Full Name Given - keyboards (1990 - 1995)
• Kesuke Ojima (小嶋謙介) - guitar/backing vocals (1987 - 1994)

Studio Albums

• 1991 - Chappie, Don't Cry
• 1992 - King Master George
• 1993 - Neo Yankees' Holiday
• 1994 - Orange
• 1996 - 空中キャンプ ^note Romanized: Kūchū Camp, English: Aerial Camp and Long Season
• 1997 - 宇宙 日本 世田谷 ^note Romanized: Uchū Nippon Setagaya, English: Space, Japan, Setagaya, although "Uchu" itself could mean "Universe" as well, so the albumt title could be Universe, Japan, Setagaya

Live Albums

• 1994 - Oh! Mountain
• 1998 - 8月の現状 ^note Romanized: 8 Gatsu no Genjō, English: The Current Situation in August
• 1999 - 98.12.28 男達の別れ ^note Romanized: 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare, English: December 28, 1998: Farewell of Men
• 2016 - Long Season '96~7 - 96.12.26 Akasaka Blitz ^note The performance was recorded in 1996 at Akasaka Blitz, the same venue the band would perform at for their accidental final show.
• 2021 - 2nd March 1996 at Shinjuku Liquid Room

EPs

• 1991 - Corduroy's Mood
• 2016 - I Dub Fish ^note Self-released cassettes sold at the 2016 reunion tour consisting of re-recordings of some of their original songs with a guest vocalist.
• 2021 - Early Year's Tracks ^note Reward for crowdfunding backers of their Rockumentary Movie: Fishmans. Contains two early live tracks.

Non-Album Singles

• 1993 - Walkin'
• 1994 - Go Go Round This World!
• 1996 - Season ^note A shortened "teaser" version of Long Season.
• 1998 - ゆらめき in the Air ^note Romanized: Yurameki in the Air, English: Flickering in the Air

Video Albums

• 2000 - The Three Birds & More Feelings ^note A collection of music videos.
• 2000 - 記憶の増大 ^note Romanized: Kioku no zōdai, English: Increased Memory. An assorted collection of live performances.
• 2005 - 若いながらも歴史あり 96.3.2 @新宿Liquid Room ^note Romanized: Wakainagara mo Rekishi Ari 96.3.2 @Shinjuku Liquid Room, English: Young But Historical: March 2, 1996 @Shinjuku Liquid Room. A full live performance. Also released in audio form in 2021.
• 2006 - The Long Season Revue ^note A tribute live performance made by many original members in 2005 (including one of the last by Honzi before her passing), as well as an experimental art film dedicated to Fishmans.
• 2007 - In Space Shower TV Episode.3 ^note Yes, these are released in reverse order for some reason. Includes a half-hour long live dub session in January 1998, as well as segments of a performance in December 1997. Also contains a video of Fishmans racing in a triathlon & a video of them attending a wrestling competition.
• 2007 - In Space Shower TV Episode.2 ^note Includes some original concert footage not found elsewhere, some segments of 96.12.26 and a music video for "Long Season".
• 2007 - In Space Shower TV Episode.1 ^note Includes a full live concert from 1992 that features songs that were never released in the studio, as well as a small interview, a making-of video for "Season" and behind-the-scenes footage of the photoshoot for "Long Season".

Get round in the tropes!

• Ambient: Dabbled in this around Long Season until the end of their run.
• The Band Minus the Face: Averted. The band has reunited at times, but mostly for reunion shows and having a guest member sing Shinji's parts. And even with that, they tend to go with the name "Fishmans + ________".
• Brown Note: While Fishmans are known to not induce creepy fuel if at all, Part 3 of Long Season does give some off-putting feel, in particular with Kin-ichi's drumming and the eerie atmosphere.
  • Surprisingly enough, they invoked this during the bootleg 1997.12.12 Live at Liquid Room performance with the song "土曜日の夜" ^note "Saturday Night", using, of all things, an Aphex Twin sample, giving the calm and catchy song a creepy vibe.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Shinji Sato. No explanation why. He came off as very quirky, giddy, and super energetic when performing live. Ironically, he was pretty reserved and private during interviews, if a bit stubborn. Despite that, he was known for his wacky dancing on stage, his hand-made Subway hat, and borderline being a very quirky person.
• Cool Shades: Donned by Hakase-Sun.
• Darker and Edgier: While not depressingly dark, their "Setagaya Trilogy" sounded much more melancholic compared to the mostly cheery and playful albums that preceded them, and featured lyrics that dealt with topics such as loneliness.
• Dream Pop: One of their genres anyway, but the closest one you could set them to.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Chappie, Don't Cry and King Master George were typical dub and reggae albums (although Corduroy's Mood, released between the two, was more Shibuya-kei than dub), and while Neo Yankees' Holiday ventured into more experimental territory, it didn't hint at the direction the band would later take. Depending on who you ask, either Oh! Mountain or Orange was when the band's usual dream pop sound kicked in.
  • Their even earlier recordings (before they were even signed to a label) fits this even more. Of particular note was Shinji's vocals, which, in addition to not featuring much falsetto, also had a surprising bit of punk edge to it, as he frequently shouted his lyrics as much as he sang them.
• End of an Era: 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare for the band's three-piece era. Due to the fact Kashiwabara wanted to leave the band in 1998 due to feeling he had accomplished everything and didn't want to burn out (as well as other internal issues due to Sato growing more dominant in the band), the band decided to do a final tour under the name "Otokotachi no Wakare" (translated as "A Men's Farewell") as a way to signal an end of said era and wrapping up the performance at Akasaka Blitz. It ended up becoming something else.
• Epic Rocking: Their songs tended to go around the six or eight-minute mark. Long Season however threw it into the stratosphere by being a 35-minute song. That's not even getting with Uchū Nippon Setagaya having "Walking In the Rhythm" be a 12-minute epic.
  • 98.12.28 did this as Serial Escalation with the live version of Long Season by making it 41 minutes of pure bliss and a fitting Grand Finale for their (accidental) final show.
  • The band's final single "ゆらめき in the Air" was 13 minutes, making it the longest single in their catalog. They made it even longer with the 98.12.28 performance, making it 16 minutes long.
• The Four Chords of Pop: "頼りない天使" ^note "Unreliable Angel" from King Master George uses these. It's most visible in the 98.12.28 version, where Honzi plays the chords very clearly on an organ.
• Genre Mashup: While their style can be put within Dream Pop (or dub for their early days), their true music style is all over the map.
• Grand Finale: As stated, 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare was an accidental one. The performance was intended to be Yuzuru's final show as a bassist, as Shinji and Kin-ichi were planning to continue Fishmans anyway. However with Shinji's death the following year, it eerily became just that: The band's Grand Finale.
• Gratuitous English: This is pretty much inevitable as with most other Japanese acts. They even have two songs, "Fish Is Watching You" and "I Dub Fish"^note Both B-sides, sung entirely in English.
• Gratuitous Panning: 98.12.28 has Honzi's parts panned to the right, Darts' parts panned to the left, and the Fishmans in the center channels. This roughly mimics their locations on the stage.
• I Am the Band: The band began to go in this direction around the time the Setagaya trilogy came around but became fully swing with Uchu. Shinji began to take more control of the band and wanted to go in the direction he wanted, and while he hated how it was affecting his band mates (especially ZAK who ended up departing the band as their producer after Uchu), he felt he needed to expand more of his creative talents. ZAK even believes that the band would have not existed anymore after Uchu, even with Motegi staying around post-Uchu if Shinji's death hadn't occurred.
• Live Album: They have three from within their lifetime:
  • Oh! Mountain, a document of their December 1994 tour. Notably, it's the only live release from when Hakase was still in the band.
  • 8 Gatsu no Genjo, a live/studio mix album.
  • And the one you've probably heard of already, 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare, their unintentional Grand Finale.
• Long-Runner Line-up: While the band's line-up broke from a five-piece with the release of Orange^note guitarist Kensuke left before Orange was recorded and Keyboardist Hakase-sun left a year later after it, the popular line-up of Shinji/Kin-ichi/Yuzuru stuck until 98.12.28.
• Lyrical Dissonance
  • "Melody" from Orange has the singer lamenting the emptiness of life set to a Funk Rock beat. One line of lyrics even invoked this.
    "My melody has always been a dark one."
  • "すばらしくて Nice Choice" from Kuchu Camp is literally about disregarding life and doing drugs, surprising for a Fishmans song with its peppy beat.
• Meaningful Name: Long Season, which was more of just an expanded/concept suite version of the single "Season".
  • "Otokotachi no Wakare" roughly translates to "A Men's Farewell", which was meant for Kashiwabara, who was leaving the band.
• Mind Screw: Considering their underground status and the fact they never reached international success except in their home country, good luck figuring out what their lyrics are about. Or buying their CDs.
• New Sound Album: Their career. Starting with Chappie, Don't Cry, a pretty innocuous reggae album...
  • Corduroy's Mood, despite being released a mere four months after Chappie, was already a drastically different Shibuya-kei record with almost no trace of reggae.
  • King Master George was a full-on Genre Roulette, with the band experimenting with everything from dub to Jazz to Ska Punk, while also carrying the Shibuya-Kei sound from Corduroy's over.
  • Neo Yankee's Holiday saw the band settling down on a mix of psychedelia, dub/reggae, and Shibuya-Kei.
  • Orange became less reggae and more Funk Rock, while showing signs of their later Dream Pop sound, which became even more pronounced in Oh! Mountain.
  • Kūchū Camp saw their dream pop sound fully flourishing, with hints of Trip Hop here and there.
  • Long Season continued the dream pop sound, with a whole Ambient segment in the middle.
  • Uchū Nippon Setagaya featured more electronic elements mixed with dream pop and ambient.
• Non-Indicative Name: Parodied with the release of Long Season, as the promo photos for the album had them fishing.
• Older Than They Look: Kin-ichi looks like he could be in his late 20s/early 30s, but is actually in his 50s.
  • Shinji was thirty-three before his passing, yet looked like a young adolescent.
• Precision F-Strike: At the very end of the opener "Oh! Crime" on their first live album Oh! Mountain. In an exaggerated British accent, no less.
• Rearrange the Song: Many, if not most of their songs went under this treatment in their live albums.
  • One example that made it into a studio album: "ひこうき" ^note "Airplane" was originally an upbeat Shibuya-kei pop-rock song (a la something out of their EP Corduroy's Mood). It had since been transformed into a laid-back pop-reggae song featured in their debut album and stayed that way ever since.
• Record Producer: ZAK (Kazuyuki Matsumura), whose production helped contribute to the band's sound. Ironically enough, he was the engineer for Neo Yankees' Holiday, where the band's weird elements slowly began to appear.
• Reggae: In their earlier recordings, as mentioned above. Although even after the band moved on to more experimental territories, the reggae/dub (especially the latter) influence persisted, and in some songs they would straight up revisit their roots (e.g. "Magic Love" from their final studio album Uchū Nippon Setagaya).
• Rock Trio: Became this for the entirety of their "Setagaya Trilogy" in 1995-98.
• Singing Voice Dissonance: In stark contrast to his wailing falsetto, Shinji spoke with a soft baritone. This is most notable when he was addressing the audience in 98.12.28.
• Sixth Ranger:
  • Supporting members Michio "Darts" Sekiguchi (guitar) and Honzi (keyboardist, violinist, accordion and backing vocalist) were and vital to the band's sound.
  • As mentioned above in Record Producer, ZAK.
• Serial Escalation: Their music. Just listen to something off of Chappie, Don't Cry and then their later work like Long Season. The change from usual dub sound to whatever the heck they became is stark.
• Shrouded in Myth:
  • The band's history is all of this, especially for non-Japanese folks. What's known from this page and from websites like RateYourMusic is heavily dug and inferred. There's even mystique in regards to 98.12.28 mainly due to its sheer accidental Grand Finale style. While Fishmans did have a bit of a presence in Japan, it was relatively small but did have a dedicated following.
  • Shinji's death as well, but it seems to be intentional. All arguments state he passed from a heart condition he had as a child, but even then many people debate on it not being the case. Kazufumi Kodama (the producer for Chappie Don't Cry) even believes Sato himself took his own life and cites the lyrics of "ゆらめき in the Air" as evidence of it, but it's again speculation.
• Spiritual Successor: Yuzuru's post-Fishmans band Polaris, which continues the same direction Fishmans had during their late 90s era. Invoked afterward too when Polaris would cover "Season" as a tribute to Fishmans and Shinji in 2016.
• Step Up to the Microphone: "Good Morning" from their first album Chappie, Don't Cry features either drummer Kin-Ichi or guitarist Kensuke on vocals.
  • This early performance had Kensuke sing his self-penned song "土曜日の夜", which would later be sung by Shinji on the studio version and subsequent concerts.
• Stop and Go: Happened in the second verse of "頼りない天使".
• Tag Line: They had a lot of these apparently, for some reason, examples include:
  • For Orange: "...Yellow, orange, red... The sound of graduation." and "NICE CHOICE"
  • For Kuchu Camp: "...Something in the Air"
  • For Long Season: "We Are Not Four Seasons."
  • For Uchu Nippon Setagaya: "You're RIGHT, I'm RIGHT too. There's no one LEFT here."
• The "The" Title Confusion: Although they officially don't have a definitive article, they frequently address themselves as "The Fishmans", especially in live performances.
• Trilogy: Kuchu Camp, Long Season, and Uchu Nippon Setagaya are this by the band (and by fans), even called "The Setagaya Trilogy", in reference to the Setagaya prefecture in Tokyo, Shinji's hometown.
• Title Drop: "Season" obviously. Both it and "Long Season" have the title drop of "Get round in the season."
• Triumphant Reprise: Long Season features a beautiful one near the end when it repeats the same melody from the beginning.
• Word Salad Lyrics: Some of Shinji's lyrics, but most of the time they aren't.
• The World Is Just Awesome: Fishmans invoked this in their music, especially with Long Season.

—

Sayorana!