Beyond Language: Shuhei Kato and Tomoki Kuwajima’s Journey into Deeper Communication

The Struggle to Close the Distance Between Two

Could you share how you both first met?

Kuwajima: It was around 2016. Stylist Hiroaki Iriyama was working on a project to create a ZINE, where stylists would style band members. I got invited by stylist Masayo Morikawa. It turned out the band was NOT WONK.

Kato: We went to a studio in Roppongi, and they had us dressed in these incredibly expensive, shaggy outfits.

Kuwajima: The shaggy clothes were shedding so much lint that I was worried if it was even alright, [laughs].

Kato: That was our first meeting. Then, there was a release event for Iriyama’s ZINE at Shibuya WWW, and Kuwashima came to see it.

Kuwajima: I listened to the album they had at the time and thought, “Wow, they’re really cool,” so I went to check it out. Then I went to their live show at Liquidroom in Ebisu. That’s where I heard “Down the Valley.” It starts with that driving four-on-the-floor beat, right? I really love four-on-the-floor, so I thought, “What is this? This is so cool!” [laughs]. After that, I wanted to take photos, so I joined them on their tour.

Kato: You came to all the shows in Sapporo, Osaka, Kokura, Fukuoka, and Tokyo.

Kuwajima: The first one was at Bessie Hall in Sapporo. I felt a bit bad going as a photographer when Sato, who has been taking photos of NOT WONK for a long time, was also there. I hadn’t really taken a lot of live photos myself, but I was excited to be in the front and capture them since I love it.

Do you have any memorable experiences from that tour?

Kato: At that time, we hardly spoke; we were in the same green room, but that was about it.

Kuwajima: I was hesitant to approach you before the performance. I wasn’t sure if it would be appropriate. I didn’t even know how to select the photos; I was thinking it might be better if your face was visible, you know? [laughs] Then, during the “YOUR NAME” event we did at ELLCUBE in Tomakomai, I put together a fan zine featuring the photos I had taken up to that point.

Your relationship started when you joined the tour to take photos, but you seem quite reserved for someone who reached out to sell yourself.

Kuwajima: I tend to be a bit shy. Everyone was younger than me, and I wondered if my actions were okay [laughs].

Kato: I always thought of Kuwajima as someone who was born and raised in Tokyo and really sharp. We chat on LINE, but when we meet in person, we don’t talk much. I mentioned to the members that since he’s always coming to our shows, it feels wrong not to treat him to a meal, but I wondered if he even eats at izakayas [laughs].

Kuwajima: That’s how I’m perceived.

Kato: I mean, he probably doesn’t eat things like French fries, right? [laughs].

Kuwajima: But I understand that there’s a bias at play. I want to bridge the gap, but I worry about my own sharp edges hurting the other person.

Kato: So after our live performance at FANDANGO in Osaka’s Juuso, I boldly asked, “If you’re up for it, how about grabbing dinner today?”

Kuwajima: I was like, “Yes!” [laughs].

Kato: We went to a sushi izakaya. It was the kind of place where sushi is served on wooden geta, but since there were four of us, some would definitely be left over. So we decided to have a rock-paper-scissors game to see who would get to eat the sushi.

Thanks to that sushi rec, we quickly became closer. Plus, Kuwajima is really bad at rock-paper-scissors, so instead of treating him, we ended up eating all the sushi ourselves [laughs].

Kuwajima: But if I won and was eating a lot of tuna and salmon roe, that would be super awkward, right? So every time I lost, I thought, “Thank goodness!” [laughs].

That’s quite humble of you.

Kato: A very humble beginning! [laughs].

Kuwajima: I Was in an Denki Groove Cover Band in High School

It was your first experience to fall in love with a musician and take his picture, wasn’t it?

Kuwajima: I have mainly focused on commercial photography, so I haven’t really had the chance to take photos for my own projects. That’s why it was so enjoyable. It felt great to shoot exactly what I wanted, especially being able to watch my favorite band perform right in front.

Kato: Since then, you’ve frequently come to take photos of live shows, and you even came to Tomakomai.

What was your impression of Tomakomai?

Kuwajima：I don’t mean to sound negative, but I was drawn to the parts that feel a bit run-down. I’m from Okayama, which is very neatly organized. In Hokkaido, it snows, and it feels like there’s no time for maintenance, which gives it a certain natural charm that I found appealing.

When you were in Okayama, did you go to live houses?

Kuwajima: I was in a copy band of Denki Groove in high school. The band was called “Chinese,” and there were three members: me, a guy named Sakamoto Toruichi, and the son of a construction worker. There was a copy band event that featured Judy Mari, Pistols, Lunacy, and Denki, and the construction worker’s son and the bass player of the Pistols didn’t get along very well, so every time we played together we would have a falling out.

Kato: Denki and the Pistols fought [laughs].

I wanted to ask you this once, but how much do you think the environment and music have to do with each other? For example, a band from Hokkaido is often said to be Hokkaido-like.

Kato: To be honest, I don’t really know. Hokkaido is an absurdly large island, and when people say we sound like Yoshimura of the bloodthirsty butchers, I think they are looking at the Sea of Japan, but I am looking at the Pacific Ocean. But when I went to a festival in Yamagata, Komatsu-san, the drummer of the Butchers, told me after the show that I looked like Yoshimura-san. I was like, “Well, if this guy said that about me, then I guess I can’t blame him (laughs).

I followed Shirahama for a whole year. A high school student chasing after a high school punk band by himself” (Kato)

I know we’ve talked about this in various places, but can you tell us how you got started in the band?

Kato: I have always played baseball. My older brother, who is two years older than me, was a special baseball player, and I was just like, “My brother is awesome. So no matter where I went, I was treated like a younger brother, and I was fed up with it. There was a time when I was so fed up with baseball that I used to poke myself in the knee with a baseball bat [laughs]. I thought if I got hurt, I wouldn’t have to go to practice. But I couldn’t hit it that hard because it hurt so much, so I just kept on going and going and going [laughs].

Kuwajima: That part is very junior high school-like [laughs].

Kato: I retired in August of my junior year, but I had no special talents or hobbies, so I decided to just study for the time being and set my sights on Tomakomai Preparatory School. I told my parents I was going to play baseball there! I told my parents I was going to play baseball there. It was like karma to play baseball.

Kato: I had a bass guitar that my brother, who was five years older than me, had left behind, so I used it to play Kuroyume and practice Monpachi songs at home with my classmates. Then, when I was invited by a friend to learn at the home of a senior who was good at bass guitar, a senior from a different high school told me to come to his next concert, and I went to the ELCUBE for the first time right after my junior high school graduation. I went to my first ELLCUBE concert right after my junior high school graduation, and the band of Shirahama, the man who taught me all about music, was also there. As I was watching the show, Shirahama-kun came down to the floor and hugged me through the crowd. And he said, “I’m going to be in a band! I was like, “I’m going to be in a band!

That’s how you got into rock ‘n’ roll.

Kato: I followed Shirahama-kun for a whole year. I was a high school student chasing after a high school punk band by myself. At the time, I was so Shirahama-ism-like that I was embarrassed to be seen by him talking with girls [laughs]. I talked normally at school, but when I was with Shirahama-kun, I maintained a mysterious hard-core attitude. I followed him for a long time, and in November of my first year of high school, there was an event with all the bands from Tomakomai. When I went to see the event, I decided I really had to be in a band, and that’s how I started NOT WONK.

Kuwajima: Where did you come up with the band name?

Kato: We kept talking about how it would be nice to have “NOT” at the beginning. Then I opened a dictionary and found “WONK” in the “W” column. WONK” means “hardworking,” and I thought, “This is good. I didn’t want to be like a diligent student who studies all the time. I thought, “NOT WONK, this is it. That was my first year of high school, in December 2010.

When did you start using a camera?

Kuwajima：The camera itself started in high school, but the reason why I came to Tokyo in the first place was because I wanted to become Naoto Takenaka. Takenaka-san was an actor and stage actor, did comedy in the late-night slot, and also made movies. When I was in high school, I went to see “Tokyo Biyori” and cried so hard I thought I had no choice but to become Naoto Takenaka.

I wanted to go to Tama Art University, where Takenaka went to school, but I thought Tama Art would be difficult because of the drawing requirement. But when I looked into it, I found that there was a place at Musashi Art University where you could enter even if you couldn’t draw, so I took a year off and enrolled. At first, I wanted to be an actor. But I’m a shy person who likes to show off, so I’m not very good on stage [laughs].

An innate shyness.

Kuwajima: In the end, I kept trying, but it didn’t work out, and in the meantime, I had to graduate. In the 1990s, magazines were very active. I was looking at all the cool photos in culture magazines like “H,” “SWITCH,” and “STUDIO VOICE,” so I started taking photos because I admired those magazines, and when I was trying to find a job, I thought that being a photographer might be a good idea. And then I found myself here [laughs].

Interaction through creative work

Do the two of you ever hang out together in private?

Kato: We have drinks in Jimbocho and Asakusa, and also in Tomakomai. We had Kuwashima-san come to Tomakomai to shoot the main visual for “FAHDAY.

Kuwajima: About halfway through the second day, I met up with Kato and we had a drink together. I was very happy with the offer for “FAHDAY,” but the order was, “Please shoot what you want to destroy in Tomakomai, Mr. Kuwashima! [laughs]. It was January when we shot the film, and I had just gotten divorced, so I was depressed as hell. That’s why the content was so dark [laughs].

Kato: I was like a driver and we just quietly took pictures together, but on the last day we were driving along a mountain road, dragonflies were hanging out in one place. I wondered what it was, but I found a dead deer. It was below freezing, so it had not rotted, and it was still in a very clean state. Mr. Kuwashima was taking pictures of it with great enthusiasm, and I was looking at them thinking that I would never be able to use them in “FAHDAY” [laughs].

Kuwajima： I think that things that are concrete but you don’t know why they were taken are ultimately abstract. So I kept taking pictures of things like stains on the wall, cracks, and things that made me wonder, “What is this? I kept taking pictures of things that I thought “what is this?

Like the order for the main visual, you are quite conceptual, aren’t you, Kato? Whether it is an event or artwork, I feel like you always have a clear idea of what you are going to do because you have this kind of intention.

Kato: I don’t like to do random trial and error. When I decide to do something this time, I make a logical plan that can be explained from 1 to 10. It’s the same when I make music, like if I mix this and that, it will be like this. If we had this reverb in this era, it would have this texture because it is definitely not digital,” or “If we had this kind of budget for this project, it would sound like this,” or something like that. Sometimes the result is “it’s not right,” but in that case, I try to present it as “it’s not right. I have a rule that I don’t reverse my initial hypothesis and pretend that the result is the same as the original one.

Kuwajima： When you make a song with the intention of making an album, there may be songs that fall through the cracks. Do any of the songs fall out?

Kato: There are quite a few. I think that song would be a great song, but I can’t do it now. Dimen” is made up of only such songs, and there are not many new songs that I wrote.

https://open.spotify.com/intl-ja/album/7jFjo6QaBGyv4l6DYz3l9U?si=vBihZl2tTiyU3yEagykA0g

Kato: I have a lot of fragments in my voice memos, so I just think about how I can cross them with each other. I wonder what I could do to make it interesting. But I don’t like to be like, “I’m going to do something weird! I don’t like to do weird stuff. I don’t like to do weird stuff. I like to put in experimental free jazz-like chiming, or to say that I’m doing a dance-like interpretation, only to have it be four beats per minute. Then the number of choices dwindles, and I think, “Isn’t there anyone who sings in a normal way now? I think, “Isn’t that what nobody is doing nowadays? I compose music in that kind of gimmicky industrial style.