The Costume Gets There First
Look, there’s no way most of you overseas have seen this clip. Go find it. Japanese TV doesn’t get more famous than this.
I’ve been saying that for years — pulling up some grainy upload on my phone at a show in Shimokitazawa, forcing it on whoever’s standing next to me at the bar, watching their face when it finally registers what they’re looking at. That’s been my thirty years in this scene in miniature, honestly: knowing that the thing I’m trying to show you exists, knowing it’s enormous, and knowing the signal keeps getting lost somewhere over the Pacific.
Reading old Kerrang! coverage of X Japan from this side of it is that same experience in print form. The pictures land before the words do, and in the early coverage that was basically the whole story. Toshi’s white face paint. Yoshiki’s drum riser. The hair. The sheer square footage of the hair. British rock journalism in the nineties had a pretty established groove for filing “weird Japan” content, and for a while X Japan fit that groove a little too comfortably — the visual shock became the review, and whatever was actually happening sonically in those records got folded into a kind of polite bewilderment.
I don’t think that was malicious. Honestly, it was just reach exceeding grasp. Kerrang! was built on a readership that wanted its metal loud, its rebellion legible, and its hair bands to at least gesture toward heterosexual heartbreak in the California tradition. X Japan offered something structurally different: melodrama that was operatic rather than arena-rock, grief that was Romantic-with-a-capital-R, and a visual vocabulary rooted in Japanese theatre and street fashion rather than Sunset Strip. The costume read as camp to British eyes when it was, for Japanese ears, dead serious.
What the early coverage got right, almost accidentally, was the scale of the emotion. Writers reaching for superlatives found them. “Extreme” was a word that kept appearing, and in its own blunt way it wasn’t wrong. X Japan’s dynamic range — from the quietest piano line Yoshiki could produce to the loudest thing a drum kit could do — genuinely earns that word. The problem was that “extreme” got attached to the look rather than the music.
Something Shifted
The death of hide in 1998 changed the texture of the coverage noticeably. British rock press had learned by then that grief journalism sells, and there was real grief to report on. But something else happened too: writers started taking the emotional architecture of the music more seriously, because they had a frame — loss, mourning, a fanbase visibly devastated — that translated across cultures without needing an explainer. The songs stopped being curiosities and started being evidence of something. That’s not the most flattering route to critical legitimacy, but it was a route.
By the time X Japan announced their reformation and Yoshiki became a fixture at international events, Kerrang! and its peers had a different problem: they’d missed the context. The magazine hadn’t covered the original run closely enough to give readers a real sense of what the reunion meant. So the coverage became biography-lite, the kind of piece that front-loads tragedy and skips the catalogue. You’d read it and come away knowing that something important had happened in Japan in the nineties, without knowing why Rusty Nail hits like it does, or what Art of Life asks of you as a listener.
To be real: that gap still exists. British rock media handles visual kei best when a Japanese act does something that maps onto existing Western reference points — the orchestral metal thing, the arena-rock emotion, the tragic-artist narrative. The parts that don’t map get softened or skipped. The theatricality gets described but rarely explained.
What I’ve come to accept, sitting on this side of the coverage, is that foreign music press is always translating. Some things survive translation. X Japan’s ambition survives. The intensity survives. The sense that you are watching people perform at the absolute edge of what performance can do — that crosses.
The specific grammar of visual kei, the way it carries Japanese ideas about beauty and suffering and spectacle? That part still arrives in London without its luggage.
