How Radwimps came to America

“I will never forget this,” Radwimps vocalist Yojiro Noda tells the rapt audience at New York’s Palladium Times Square theater. It’s the last night of the Japanese rock band’s sold-out North American tour, and neither the musicians onstage nor the roughly 2,000 fans filling the music hall seem to want it to end. It’s been three years since the J-rock group had to cancel their world tour due to the pandemic, and fans have been waiting. The band have been waiting. “We never expected these kinds of crowds,” Noda continues. “You, coming here. This is way beyond our imagination.”

It’s not easy to break into the American music market. It’s even harder if you are not based in the U.S. and don’t sing solely in the English language. However, these systemic barriers didn’t stop Radwimps — a band that formed over 20 years ago at a high school in Kanagawa Prefecture and rose to global prominence with Makoto Shinkai’s wildly successful anime films — from selling out eight shows across six cities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in April. 

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The tour, which continued in Europe before moving to Asia, added additional dates and moved to some larger venues to accommodate fan demand. “When we started planning the tour last year, we were willing to play for 50 people or 100 people,” Noda tells AltPress via Zoom, alongside guitarist Akira Kuwahara and bassist Yusuke Takeda. (The fourth member of the band, drummer Satoshi Yamaguchi, is currently on hiatus.) For comparison, YouTube Theater, where Radwimps played in LA, has a capacity of 6,000.

[Photo by Takeshi Yao]

Japanese musical artists don’t need to “make it” internationally to be commercially successful. Japan has the second-largest music market in the world, and, like the U.S. market, it is dominated by domestic bands and artists. Radwimps have played in arenas and the occasional stadium in Japan, where they properly broke into the mainstream back in 2006 with RADWIMPS 4: Okazu no Gohan, their second album under major label Toshiba EMI. Still, the international reception from fans has been meaningful to the members. “I think for anybody, when they start a band, it would be like a dream to be touring the world,” Kuwahara says. “But yesterday, looking at the audience in LA, I thought at that moment that my childhood dream actually came true.”

If you watch anime, you’ve probably seen Your Name. The 2016 body-swapping teen romance is the second highest-grossing anime film of all time, having made more than $358 million at the global box office. And if you’ve seen Your Name, then you’ve heard Radwimps’ music. Like all of the best film soundtracks, songs like “Zenzenzense” and “Sparkle” don’t just provide background to the film’s action; they create new depths and entry points to the story’s rich emotional landscape. “Good music is good music,” Jennifer Wong says, a Canadian Radwimps fan. “I still feel goosebumps every time I watch the meteor crashing into the shrine in Your Name as the song ‘Sparkle’ crescendos, with [Yojiro’s] booming voice, and then ends.”

Noda says working with Shinkai on the film was a “life-changer” and that the band have “met fans we would have never met unless there was an anime collaboration.” Radwimps have subsequently done the soundtracks for Shinkai’s 2019 film Weathering With You and 2022’s Suzume, which is currently in North American theaters. “Radwimps and I are two wheels of the same bicycle,” Shinkai told The New York Times in April. “We need each other, and we are pushing one another forward.” 

[Photo by Takeshi Yao]

Like many others, Wong found Radwimps when she watched Your Name. Wong grew up listening to “some of the famous anisongs of the day” (e.g. Gundam Wing, Evangelion, and Slam Dunk) as a kid in ’90s Taiwan. Later, as a high schooler and then college student in Canada, she continued to add anisongs and other Japanese cuts to her MP3 player. “It was an explosion of discovery for me,” Wong says of diving into the rich world of Japanese mainstream music, which she says is “not tied down strictly to [one] genre.” 

After two decades of making music, Radwimps’ discography is long and eclectic, with genre influences as wide-ranging as jazz and hip-hop, punk and electropop, reggae and rock. In addition to performing vocals, piano, and guitar, Noda has written most of Radwimps’ songs. In a 2017 Forbes interview, he listed Radiohead, Bjork, Elliott Smith, the Flaming Lips, Hiromi Uehara, John Frusciante, Ringo Sheena, and Chara as musical influences. “I think what initially drew me to [Radwimps’] music was how different each of their songs sounded,” Hayley says, a 27-year-old fan living in Salt Lake City who attended the Radwimps concert in San Jose. “A lot of artists have songs that all sort of sound the same, and it gets boring. But with them, their music has such a variety, and it really feels like they aren’t afraid to explore different genres and sounds.”  

Hayley is an outlier in that she found Radwimps before the band collaborated with Shinkai, stumbling onto their music via YouTube in 2009. “Even though I don’t remember the exact song or video I first saw, I know I was hooked immediately,” she says. “I spent hours and hours online looking up everything I could about the band and followed their releases and music religiously. It was hard work, as there wasn’t a lot online in English at the time, and I didn’t and still don’t speak Japanese.” 

[Photo by Takeshi Yao]

Radwimps’ Shinkai soundtracks demonstrate the group’s talent for cathartic ballads with accessible melodies, the occasional orchestral jag, and life-affirming choruses. They’re great to jump along to — on the stage, or in the pit. The band are known for their ebullient performance style, which features impressive displays of instrumental showmanship. At one point in their show, Radwimps’ members (including touring drummers Mizuki Mori and Masafumi Eno) engage in a playful battle of the mini-bands onstage, demonstrating their musical agility. “We could do that forever,” Noda says backstage after the show.

Just because a fan doesn’t speak the same language their favorite music uses doesn’t mean they can’t sing along or find resonance in the lyrics. “It’s interesting to note how we learn to sing the songs,” Wong says of foreign-language fandom. “Often, we learned phonetically to the lyrics without knowing fully the meaning. And, in particular to Radwimps, where Yojiro-san is known to be a really good lyricist with meaningful things to say, I feel like maybe we don’t get the full picture of the songs until we really dig into the lyrics.” 

Noda, who spent a few years in the U.S. as a kid and speaks fluent English, has written a few of Radwimps’ songs in English. However, most of their introspective, often melancholic lyrics are written in his native Japanese. “I believe in the power of vocals and melody,” Noda stresses. “There’s no language barrier for those.” 

Radwimps make and perform the kind of music that fills you up. Or, perhaps more accurately, that helps you realize how much is already inside of you. “I do not speak Japanese. I wish I could, but I don’t,” Hayley says. “A lot of people can’t understand why I’m a fan of Japanese music, and I can’t really explain it, either. But to me, it doesn’t matter if I can understand the lyrics. The emotion, the feelings, and the meaning are all still there, even if you can’t understand the words.”