One Band, Three Famous Ghosts
Here’s a game. Take a Japanese metal band that has no English Wikipedia page, and count how many of the biggest names in Japanese popular music passed through its orbit.
The masked singer who sang every track on the guitarist’s 1985 solo album was Koshi Inaba, three years before B’z existed. A song from BLIZARD’s sixth album was rewritten into the B-side of ZARD’s debut single. hide went to their shows, and when he assembled his first solo tour, BLIZARD’s guitarist was in the band. Their debut album carried two songs written for them by Journey.
Three of those four sentences are about acts that sold tens of millions of records. BLIZARD is the connective tissue, and the connective tissue is the part nobody writes about in English.
The Being Band, Before Being Was Being
BLIZARD formed in 1983 and were signed to Being — the agency that would, within a decade, become the most ruthlessly effective hit factory Japan has ever had. B’z, ZARD, WANDS, DEEN: that whole chart-dominating 1990s empire came out of the same operation.
In 1983, none of that existed. Being had a metal band.
The debut, Ankoku no Seisho BLIZARD OF WIZARD, came out on 10 July 1984 through Warner-Pioneer. Two of its nine tracks — “Only the Young” and “Liberty” — were written by Neal Schon, Steve Perry and Jonathan Cain, and recorded with Japanese lyrics by the band’s singer. Journey didn’t release their own version of “Only the Young” until the following year, which means the version that reached shops first was the Japanese one, sung in Japanese, by a band on their first album.
Sit with that for a second. It is a genuinely strange thing to find on a Japanese metal debut, and it tells you exactly what kind of operation this was: a band put together by an agency with the connections to get Journey material, and the nerve to open with it.
Six more studio albums followed — seven in total across six years, and two labels. Warner-Pioneer through Hard Times in 1986, then CBS/Sony from the self-titled BLIZARD in 1987 to Danger Life in 1990. Seven albums in six years on major labels is not a hobby.
They were sold on looks as well. The press filed them under bikei — pretty-boy metal — and later writers have placed them in the lineage running toward visual kei. Being scouted them and built them that way deliberately. Whether that helped them or boxed them in is an argument Japanese fans are still having.
The Inaba Thing
In November 1985 the guitarist, Toshiya Matsukawa, released a solo album titled Burning Randy Rhoads ni Sasagu — “dedicated to the late Randy Rhoads.” Every vocal on it was sung by a guest credited as Mr. CRAZY TIGER, in a mask.
Mr. CRAZY TIGER was Koshi Inaba, then a university student. B’z would not form until 1988.
He came back: Inaba sang backing vocals on BLIZARD’s self-titled 1987 album. If you want to hear the voice that would go on to sell more records than almost anyone in Japanese history, before anyone was listening, it is sitting in a 1985 metal record that collectors now pay real money for.
The ZARD link runs the same way. “Empty Days,” from 1988’s Show Me the Way, was reworked into “Ai wa Kurayami no Naka de,” which came out as the B-side of ZARD’s debut single “Good-bye My Loneliness” in February 1991. Matsukawa wrote for ZARD directly as well.
Where Everyone Went
Seijirou Shimomura sang from 1983 until he left in 1989. Matsuya Mizuno took over. The band froze in 1992 — which in practice meant it was over — and reformed in 2014.
Matsukawa’s afterlife is the clearest measure of what he was. He ended up backing hide, and in 1994 he played hide’s first solo tour alongside PATA. Of the two guitarists X JAPAN’s guitarist chose to tour with, one was his own bandmate and the other was the guy from BLIZARD.
There’s a 1989 date worth knowing about too. At a Club Citta Kawasaki event, BLIZARD shared a bill with Marty Friedman, then in Cacophony, a year before he joined Megadeth. Also on that bill: PRESENCE and FORT BRAGG. A room in Kawasaki, a few years before Friedman moved to Japan for good and became a face on Japanese television.
Why This Matters
The standard English-language story of Japanese heavy music runs LOUDNESS, then a gap, then X JAPAN, then everything else. The gap is where BLIZARD sits, along with most of their generation.
They were a major-label metal band with seven albums, built by the agency that went on to own the Japanese charts, staffed and circled by people who became enormous. Then the agency worked out that the money was in pop, and the metal band stopped being the plan.
Start with the 1985 live footage their original singer has posted himself. The band at their peak year, in a room, doing the job — no remaster, no reissue campaign, nobody selling you a narrative.
