Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on August 2014

Tokyo is a great place to form a band and play. But further success—touring, making money from your music and honing an original sound—are all frustration-inducing stumbling blocks that are nearly impossible to kick out of the way.

Like many millions of people out there, I’ve harbored a dream of being a musician through my teenage years and into my adult life. After I arrived in Tokyo, I started out playing open mic shows—which are unusually scarce for desperate musos in this city. I played shows where I would bang on a toaster and loop the sounds on my laptop. Nobody thought it was good, but I still meet people who remember me as “the toaster guy,” and it’s from this period that I met future bandmates and enthusiasts who introduced me to other events—all of which earned me no money and no fans, but at least brought me temporary satisfaction.

If you’re in a band, you’ll have to check your ego at the door and accept that a passion project is probably all it will ever be. Getting shows is rarely a way to make money; in actuality it’s more a way to make money for the venue doing you the honor of allowing you to play.

I now play in several bands to escape the reality that my day job is teaching English and my only fans are a mixture of family, friends and girlfriends. But unambitious as I am, I’m aware that even this would be more difficult if I lived in another city. If you want your own rags-to-riches success story, Tokyo is probably the wrong place to be. But if you just want to play, you can. A large percentage of Tokyo-based bands are passion projects—and if you can’t find a band to join, you’re just not looking.

People advertise the old-fashioned way, and in neighborhoods famed for music—such as Koenji—you can find lots of fliers from people searching for others with whom to play. And yes: being a foreigner helps. Japanese bands seem enamored with the “cool” factor of Western music. Bands here often have English names, write their descriptions and sometimes their attempts to find members in English. It makes the band appear more hip—even if half of it is arbitrary gibberish.

Of course, lots of these projects involve bands making music suspiciously like that of their favorite artists—the most common being soundalikes of My Bloody Valentine and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Many in the Tokyo music scene are into gadgets and gizmos, too. There are people with such huge collections of pedals and effects that just watching them set up on stage is like a show in itself. This can lead to disappointment if the final product doesn’t justify the prep time.

Then there are people into perfection, preparing the most expensive equipment money can buy—but hesitant to press the record button. Some bands have everything thought out apart from the making and recording of the actual music.

There are a range of scenes and communities of like-minded people playing shows together. Some of these are based purely on area; others are based on category. Tokyo, for example, is famous for being the “home of noise”—though I’ve always felt a contradiction in the underground noise scene here, because although it prides itself on being “out there,” there are often many rules as to what sounds and vocal styles can be used.

It’s hard to ever become fully despondent in Tokyo, though, because the population is so large there are always people out there somewhere who share your interests. There could be another guy banging on his mother’s pots and pans and recording it in his basement at this very moment. You just have to put yourself out there to find him.

There’s an earnest enjoyment of music in Tokyo, but that overt earnestness can also lead to naïveté. Many musicians accept that it is enough just to play a show or even just to be in a band and enjoy that for what it is.

Trying to make music is a strange thing to call a hobby compared to, say, golf, and many people don’t try for fear of failing—and miss the point that not trying is also failing. Everybody should try to make music if they’re interested in doing so, even just to see what kind of thing they churn out. But after a certain number of years, you have to question whether you’re getting enough of a pay-off both literally and emotionally for the time and life investment.