The Gate Opened from Outside

On New Year's Day in 2010, a twelve-year-old boy plays piano in a cafe in Satosho, Okayama. His father is filming. His father cannot play an instrument himself. All he has is an intuition: the age of YouTube is coming. Out of love for music and his children, he is said to have learned enough to teach his son. Fujii Kaze's starting point was neither a music agency nor an elite musical upbringing. It was the piano in his family's cafe.

Classical music, J-pop, songs from overseas: he picked them out by ear. He spent much of his teens playing other people's music this way. When he emerged in January 2020 with 'Nan-Nan w', his singing carried the language of Okayama. He called himself 'washi', a regional way of saying 'I'. For a long time, Japanese pop had largely spoken standard Japanese. To sell, you were supposed to smooth away the edges of your language. He simply walked past that convention.

Then came the summer of 2022. 'Shinunoga E-Wa' suddenly crossed the sea.

A few details matter. The song appeared in May 2020 on his first album. It was not a single. It had no music video. In other words, nobody was pushing it. After sitting quietly on the album for two years, it began appearing in videos made by Thai TikTok users in late July 2022. It went on to reach number four on Spotify's Global Daily Viral chart and number one in seventeen countries and territories. Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Egypt, Canada, France: the map of its spread followed no obvious logic.

This is the most interesting part. Until then, Japanese songs usually had a familiar route to overseas listeners: becoming an anime theme song. The work travelled abroad, taking its music along as luggage. It was an official, respectable gate. Yet the first spark for 'Shinunoga E-Wa' was reportedly a video of roughly twenty seconds, made by someone in Thailand who cut together footage from Jujutsu Kaisen and set it to the song without authorization. Anime had not disappeared. Its role had changed. What had been a promotional gate became material fans could use freely. The audience became the gatekeeper.

Still, it would be hasty to read this as one genius overturning Japanese music. Algorithms did a great deal of the work, and other Japanese songs crossed borders around the same time. Rather than someone who broke down a gate, he may have been someone standing perfectly naturally where the gate had already ceased to function as one. That seems closer to the facts. Genius is a useful word, but it explains nothing. The cafe, the dialect and the unpromoted album track explain rather more.

Then the story turns again. His third album, Prema, meaning supreme love, arrived in September 2025 with lyrics entirely in English. It topped Billboard JAPAN's overall album chart. The person who reached the world singing 'washi' is now singing in English. His tour begins in Sapporo this summer, heads to domes in Fukuoka, Osaka and Tokyo at the end of the year, and then to Europe and North America in 2027. Surprisingly, this is also said to be his first appearance at a Japanese summer festival.

What was most rooted in his own place carried him furthest. Did he need to let go of those roots to travel further still? Or was it the other way round: having travelled so far, was he free to choose the language he sang in? We cannot yet say. But once we know a gate can open from outside, predicting what happens next becomes a little harder. That is probably no bad thing.