To get to Chiba LOOK from northern Saitama, I transferred through Hikifune and Kameido. I was in my first year of high school.

An inefficient route. But I made every connection, and arrived at the venue mid-morning. Hours before doors. I might have had a Budweiser. I watched the load-in. I watched soundcheck. Looking back, the transit itself — the movement, the time, the journey — made up more than half of the experience.

Maybe music wasn’t the point. Maybe it was escape from the everyday. Or maybe both. Either way, it was a juvenile act, in the best sense.

I can now explain what happened to the bands on that bill.

SOFTBALL played that day. They were pure from the start. The set I saw at Chiba LOOK was their origin — raw first-impulse energy, original bassist still in the lineup. By that summer, at a free outdoor event in Yoyogi Park, the bassist had changed. Their media presence was expanding, commercial tie-ups accelerating. The band was beginning to shift.

The resistance to that shift became radicalization. Hakko Ichiu — a violent tilt toward nationalism and right-wing ideology. By weaponizing what the system couldn’t handle, they refused to become consumable icons. In 2003, they suddenly disbanded.

Hi-STANDARD, for instance. They tried to protect themselves in a different way.

“Distribution through Toys Factory (major), management through Howling Bull (later PIZZA OF DEATH)” — this carefully constructed arrangement had served as a seawall. A system where the band held the leverage, made possible only by exceptional talent.

But the moment they achieved full independence and went platinum, the seawall dissolved. The entire scene’s weight concentrated on them. Deification became gravity. Mental illness followed. Twenty years of silence.

At the root of this, I think, was Japan’s Radio Law.

The monopolization of finite bandwidth and the exclusive vested interests it created. Trends were short-cycled and recycled; artists were ground down as disposable symbols. Against this, the American cable TV model had fragmented audiences into niches, enabling self-sustaining micro-economies like Fat Wreck Chords. A structure where indie artists could survive without selling their souls to terrestrial broadcast.

I sometimes think: if today’s SNS and distributed platforms had existed back then, SOFTBALL and Hi-STANDARD might never have been driven to that point.

Alvin Toffler proposed the concept of the “prosumer” in 1980.

What those of us in that scene were doing — picking up instruments, joining band communities — was, in retrospect, a pioneering enactment of that idea. A teenage resistance to pure consumption. A critical eye for the threshold between consuming and supplying. Without knowing it, we were standing exactly where Toffler had prophesied.

And now, with SNS and platforms fully developed, it’s completely implemented. Circuits running everywhere where fans consume and simultaneously supply and create value within culture.

Once you enter society and learn the system from the inside, the structural grief of that era becomes visible.

The nature of the anguish the bands couldn’t process. The structure of exhaustion the media imposed on them. Why things that were once pure became something else.

I understand. I can explain it now.

But the moment I could explain it, I could no longer go back to that seat. The seat where I waited for doors to open at Chiba LOOK, mid-morning, as a kid — I can’t sit there anymore.

That is the messy reality of this story.

And yet — knowing all that, there is still a version of me that can hold the bands in that clumsy, life-or-death era with tenderness. The taste of that Budweiser. All of it.

To be able to love something even after understanding its structural grief. Maybe that’s a rich and absolute kind of real — one you can only arrive at by having cleanly marked the time yourself.