Make Believe Mailer #161: Guilty Parties

Gesu no Kiwami Otome, "Ryoseibai" And Lost Paths

I have a list of artists I dream about interviewing. I’m quite fortunate in my career to have crossed off many names off this list, but a select few remain elusive. Tatsuro Yamashita, Sheena Ringo, Ventla.

Yet there’s one near the top of this collection that isn’t just hard to reach, but also presents what I imagine — and boy, have I imagined what it would be like — would be as difficult a tightrope to balance on as possible.

I wish I could talk to Enon Kawatani.

I’ve pictured it far too often. I’d definitely hit all the boilerplate questions about creativity and process, go off on some tangent regarding his fascination with netlabel-adjacent producers and wonder how he made one of the good f5ve songs. Yet at some point I’d have to go full Jay Leno and ask him…what the hell were you thinking?

Because it would be impossible to talk with Kawatani and not get into the scandal that dominated Japanese media a decade ago and genuinely altered the trajectory of J-pop going forward.

I’m not sure Kawatani is necessarily sipping on the sweet nectar of yesterday when thinking about January 2016. Sure, this month marks the 10th anniversary of his band Gesu no Kiwami Otome’s second album Ryoseibai, a release that should have turned the group into the vanguard of J-rock in the latter 2010s. Should being the key word, as weeks before it came out that Kawatani was not only secretly married but cheating on his mystery spouse with TV talent Becky in an affair that torpedoed both of their careers…also having turned ten as of this month.

As entertainment scandals go, it’s really quite quaint in retrospect — like, we finally saw J-pop power player Johnny Kitagawa’s legacy reckoned with for decades of abusing children — but in 2016 this was a true crossroads moment for the country. This story got a surprising amount of coverage from Western media owing to its seemingly disproportionate punishment distribution, to the point where I think this was the only time I’ve ever interacted with Justin McCurry. And indeed there’s a lot to unpack with how it was only Becky having to face the media while Kawatani dealt with it from afar.

Yet to pretend Kawatani didn’t suffer big blowback from this would be ridiculous. The year prior he and Gesu scored a massive year-defining hit with the existential “Watashi Igai Watashi Jya Nai” (above) and had turned into the next big thing in Japanese music. Remember, this started in 2015, the dying days of the AKB48 empire and when Nishino Kana’s “Torisetsu” was the big hit of the day. A nervy rock number dwelling on the self delivered with funk aplomb was a welcome shift, and Gesu appeared ready to shift the Japanese mainstream into a new era. Variety shows devoted significant time to them, and they even crashed NHK’s Kohaku Uta Gassen.

In 2016, they should have been a major player, but they ended up being a Shukan Bunshun sideshow. Which is especially disastrous since that year ended up being the pivot point for Japanese music at large, with the arrival of Spotify into the market and the rise of YouTube as the primary place to create mainstream hits. In that linked article, Gesu served as cautionary tale while the likes of Hoshino Gen and Pikotaro thrived.

Ryoseibai, the album that in theory would have cemented this, still did well. It topped the Oricon album charts and moved numbers most bands flirting with math rock could only dream of. Yet when I talked to Unborde head Ryoma Suzuki a few months after for The Japan Times, he admitted to me that the whole ordeal had absolutely impacted the group, and they sold less than they expected. It sounded like a headache, really.

I would love to ask Kawatani himself about all of this — what it was like in the moment, how he approached music during this, why he didn’t go into hiding for two years — but honestly those are all secondary questions to the big one I have. If he was sitting across from me and his management team was distracted for a second, I would want to know:

“Ryoseibai is totally about all this, right?”

Ryoseibai translates to “both sides are at fault,” and in some alternate reality where Kawatani doesn’t link up with Becky perhaps that title simply ties in with the existential and often exhausted lyrical focus he had been bringing to Gesu and his more conventional rock group indigo la End.

This is not that world, though, and Ryoseibai arrived at a time when, indeed, both sides were at fault. It almost seems too coincidental for a much-hyped album arriving against a backdrop of romantic scandal, and I’d be tempted to turn conspiratorial if this whole affair didn’t basically combust both of their careers. Plus, there’s the actual songs within…

Ryoseibai is the most miserable album ever released by a major Japanese label.

Not in terms of the sound. A hard fact to accept is Enon Kawatani is a great songwriter. Before, during and after all of this mess — he twists rock into a form capable of both anxiety and despair, and on Ryoseibai he helped add dramatic flair to it all via pronounced piano melodies, female backing vocals and zanier detours that never become too sonically indulgent. He’s able to thread his sing-speak into all this. “Watashi Igai Watashi Jya Nai” is full of weird musical moments — those solos serving as a bridge — but always feels like buoyant pop, while “Romance Ga Ariamaru” turns zippy keyboard and guitar playing into catchy moodiness. At over an hour long, Ryoseibai is certainly overstuffed but the highs here are the best work Gesu ever did, creating something like a more drama-kid version of Sotaisei Riron.

No, the misery comes from Kawatani’s lyrics. He seems to hate the whole world around him over the course of Ryoseibai, an album whose hour-plus run time turns it into something almost feeling like a no-holds-barred therapy session. It would still seem pretty damn dour even without the real-world scandals clouding his songs, but this is one of those cases where it’s near impossible to separate the circumstances from the final piece of art.

Kawatani frequently talks about people “being in the wrong” and facing “judgement.” He — or his protagonist, who knows — is constantly in conversation with someone who seems to also be wrapped up in this mess with him. On one song he’s saying goodbye to them, the next he’s sitting alone at a dinner table pining for them. “Tsutomeru Real” is the rare moment of Kawatani stepping into another’s skin, becoming a 29-year-old office worker with no ambition and no plans frittering his life away. Is it a stand-in for him, or an actual exploration of a salaryman’s existence? Either way, one thing is clear — he sounds like an asshole.

Above all else, Kawatani fucking hates himself. “I’m not an adult” he whines on “Otonachikku¹” (“Adult-ish”), with the voices of female members Chan Mari and Hona Ikoka serving as a Greek chorus further drilling in his pathetic nature. He’s always at fault and revisiting his mistakes and discussing loneliness and letting memories turn him sour. He complains that his identity was taken from him on “Sidentity.” He calls himself a serial singer on “Serial Singer.” On “Ikeinai Dance,” he comes close to tears while seemingly cutting it up at a club. There’s moments of a more pronounced heel turn to come — he makes a joke about the “sexless” at one point, while “Romance Ga Ariamaru” fixates on how he just can’t handle all this love coming his way dear god man — but Ryoseibai is mostly self-flagellation.

With Sotaisei Riron, singer and songwriter Etsuko Yakushimaru turned the abstract emotions of teenager-dom into evocative numbers more about the feeling of feelings than anything specific. Enon Kawatani is kind of the opposite. He can only fixate on misery and drill into it, to the point where any kind of metaphorical reading crumbles and is replaced by something diary like. Maybe it isn’t — but Ryoseibai really does come off like a record made by someone who knew he was actively ruining his life because of how horny he was. What changed in January 2016 was that everyone else knew that now too.

If the Kawatani and Becky business happened today, I’m not sure it would have festered as long as it did a decade ago. It would definitely be big news, but I think it would have lasted a month, tops. Back in time, though, this was the scandal of the first half of 2016, only overshadowed by the dissolution of cultural institution SMAP come the summer.

Becky took the brunt of it because she was the more famous of the two. Kawatani was an up-and-coming artist who the type of person going to ROCK IN JAPAN Fest every year might know, but the average middle-aged TV viewer wouldn’t, especially compared to variety-show-staple Becky. Yet Kawatani absolutely suffered too. Sure, he didn’t have to give a teary-eyed press conference, but Gesu’s stock plummeted in the wake of this and public appearances from this period show that Kawatani himself looks near catatonic.

The above video comes from a special event held by Warner Japan sub-label unBORDE in April of 2016². The finale of it was a real “J-pop All-Stars To The Rescue” mish-mash, with the likes of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, tofubeats, RIP SLYME and more bouncing around to a Coca-Cola commissioned song. It’s nothing memorable…unless you peak to the left side of the stage, which is tough because the camera people aren’t going there much. That’s because Enon Kawatani is there with BOTH Gesu and indigo…and he looks despondent. Seriously, look out for him and you’ll see a dude clapping along like someone will shoot him if he stops, with no emotion on his face.

I was there so I remember all of this well — he looked pitiful, to the point where I actually felt bad for him.

Ryoseibai exists in the category of “albums that aren’t exactly good per se, but are extremely interesting.” It might be the number-one in this space for J-pop. That’s partially for the reasons outlined above — the misery overflowing out of it and the sense it all comes from a very well-documented scandal. Yet it’s also the last time that I think Kawatani was being real about his own self loathing. You can say a lot about Kawatani during this period, but I really do think Gesu’s big expected breakout album was him being fully honest. That’s largely because after this, he seemingly leaned into the image.

Gesu — along with indigo la End and the 50 other bands Kawatani created in the years after — chugged along and eventually sorta moved on from the scandal, although they’ve never come close to approaching the excitement “Watashi Igai Watashi Jya Nai” sparked.

Yet Kawatani himself seems like he’s never fully been able to shake it (or, uhhhh, the other time he was caught drinking booze with a 19-year-old woman). In the years after he seemed almost gleeful to become somewhat of a villain. Like, watch this indigo la End³ video where he plays a caged bird. Or the Gesu clip where he’s a puppet being controlled by others. Or — worst of all — the MV above that is the closest Kawatani has come to commenting on the media circus around him in 2016, comparing himself to TEPCO officials (the people responsible for the nuclear power plants in Fukushima during the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011) and taking shots at the media ecosystem that outed his affair (plus…more puppet imagery). He even brought this energy to another now-disgraced artifact of the last decade, Terrace House, when Gesu bandmate Masao Wada joined the crew and Kawatani was suddenly all over the show.

Despite everything, Kawatani chugs on in Japanese music. To some that might seem like a failure to hold people accountable, but it’s important to remember how much he’s been written out of the country’s pop history since.

In retrospect, the Kawatani scandal served to delete Gesu from a year that proved to be J-pop’s epoch shift. In 2016, the internet (especially YouTube) became the go-to space for hit songs, whether they be domestic heavyweights or surprise global numbers. The truth is…Gesu had shown what was possible almost a year earlier with “Watashi Igai Watashi Jya Nai” which traveled primarily via YouTube and social media. They should have been central to the moment where Japanese music changed, but instead their a curio tied to Shukan Bunshun.

Yet there’s another dimension to it that only became clear in the 2020s. Ryoseibai, for all its flaws, is actually a preview of where J-pop would go in the coming decade. It’s a little too self-hating and loathsome, but the mood it creates is not far off from the gloomier pop of early YOASOBI, Ado and others. Kawatani — a prick, but a really creative one — was zeroing in on the sense of smallness one feels in the modern world and the failing of Japanese society. He was ahead of his time, with Ryoseibai as his asshole masterpiece.

I’d love to ask him about it, even if I’d be thrown out of the room instantly.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Check out the Best Of 2026 Spotify Playlist here!

1. The video, above, which finds him playing the role of tortured author…man!

2. This event — which I’ve written about elsewhere — is bizarre for many reasons, but the wildest remains that it served as the debut show for a recent unBORDE signing, who introduced herself to the world that night — Aimyon. A year later, she would be more famous than anyone else you see in that video.

3. Another interesting thing that would derail all of this…the sound of indigo la End, which used to be very “rah rah J-rock” was replaced with something that sounded very Gesu. He kind of doubled down on the sound that defined him — at his best and worst.