Twenty Years Ago, a Japanese Exchange Student Accidentally Became the Man Who Knows Chinese Rock History Best

The Japanese writer Yoshii Shinobu, who writes in Chinese, came across a "magical rock website" — this is the story behind it.

The last time I was in Beijing, a friend took me to a show, and we got to talking about a "magical rock website" built by a Japanese man. It appears to have collected every scrap of information there is about Chinese rock musicians. Look up any Chinese band — even a short-lived little outfit or a campus band that Baidu has never heard of — and the site "Chinese Rock DATA BASE" will have something on it. Quite a few Chinese friends have tried it without expecting much and found the name of a band they once played in, along with its gig history: delighted, moved, clicking their tongues in amazement. The pity is that the site stopped updating in February 2012. Perhaps that is exactly what gives it its air of mystery, like some enormous old ship in the great universe of the internet, running on in silence with countless memories and enthusiasms in its hold. Will the site and everything on it drift away with time, growing further from us, until the server lease runs out and it disappears from in front of our eyes?

Creator and Caretaker

I eventually got in touch with the site's creator, Katori Yoshito, and learned he was planning a trip home to Japan. So on an ordinary day in early summer 2018, close to noon, we met at the ticket gate of a station in Ibaraki Prefecture. He is past forty, with a gentle, scholarly face; thin, in a small-checked shirt, he still looks very much like a student. We found a café nearby and sat down to talk through the ups and downs of more than a decade of "Japan's number one Chinese rock website."

The "Beijing Baptism" of His First Months Abroad

Katori comes from Ibaraki Prefecture in Japan's Kanto region, about an hour by train from Tokyo. He had loved Romance of the Three Kingdoms since childhood, and before he started university he saw Cui Jian's music video for "Flying" (《飞了》) on Japanese television and was floored: this, he decided, was real rock. Japanese rock bands of the time were good enough, he thought, but most of them worked inside frameworks laid out by big companies, and they did not stand as close to their fans as Chinese bands did. When he entered university, he naturally chose to study "Oriental history" (one of Japan's academic categories, meaning mainly ancient Chinese history), and in 1997, in his second year, he set foot for the first time on the mainland Chinese ground he had dreamed of for years.

"Later I got into a long-term study-abroad program, and from March 1998 to January 2000 I studied Chinese at Minzu University of China." Almost every time he was asked when something happened, Katori gave the month along with the year. Clearly he has a good memory and pays attention to detail. He was very happy studying in Beijing and quickly made a lot of local friends — and then, less than a month in, he was in a traffic accident.

"The university had Chinese students from all over the country. I had two close friends at the time, one Uyghur and one Hui, and both of them loved rock. In April 1998 they told me about a rock show put on by Modern Sky. A ticket cost 50 yuan, which was expensive at the prices of the day, but we decided to go. We set out from campus in the evening, and just as I was crossing the street I was hit by a minivan."

His friends flagged down a taxi and got him to a clinic near Xizhimen. Through the pain and confusion, one image stayed with him: the doctor treating him while eating a popsicle. Perhaps because he was a foreigner, the small clinic could not handle the case, and that same day an ambulance took him to China-Japan Friendship Hospital, where he stayed for a month. "Luckily nothing was broken, but I was hit pretty hard, so I had to lie there every day and recover. I had a VCD player with me, and I spent whole days in bed watching music videos by all kinds of Chinese rock bands." Two weeks later the doctor told him to move around for rehabilitation, so Katori often walked out to the little street beside the hospital and browsed the roadside stalls, where he bought a good many rock cassettes and records — getting his exercise and improving his Chinese at the same time. As for the minivan driver, he turned up later with two bunches of bananas. "I wasn't actually in the crosswalk when it happened, and I knew I'd have no advantage if we argued about it. The insurance I'd bought before leaving Japan covered all the medical costs anyway, so the two of us left it there."

The First Version of "Chinese Rock" Is Born

"Chinese Rock DATA BASE" sprouted during those student years, in the late 1990s. In 1999 Katori met a Mr. Ito, a Japanese exchange student at Beijing Normal University. Ito, now an IT engineer, already knew computers well and loved Chinese rock, so he had started a rock mailing list (ML).[1] "The members were both Japanese and Chinese, a bit over two hundred in all, and about ten of us posted and shared information most actively — I was one of them. In the 1990s Japan's JVC Records introduced Japanese listeners to Black Panther and a number of other bands, and some JVC staff were on the list too. The circle of people who liked Chinese rock was small, and back then that mailing list was a crucial channel for getting information."

Having piled up a fair number of cassettes and discs as a student, Katori started using Excel to get a systematic grip on his collection, recording mainly band and album names, musicians, labels and release years. When Ito heard about it, he suggested putting the data online, where it could be searched quickly and shared. The two of them spent a few days roughing out the first version of the DATA BASE, with information on about a hundred albums: type in a musician's or band's name and the record titles came up.

13,000 Bands! The Third Version, Waiting to Be Born

By the time Katori went home in 2000, he had a firm grasp of site management and the database had been upgraded to its second version — the one still in front of us today. The categories were finer, the musicians covered had expanded from Beijing to the whole country, each musician had a page of their own, and links to musicians' official sites had been added. The level of detail is astonishing; some people even called him a spy, which he finds a little exasperating.

"There was nothing special about how I gathered information. At first it came off cassettes and record sleeves, and later, once everyone was setting up blogs and websites, I went through them one by one and wrote down what was relevant. The more shows I saw, the more band members I got to know, and talking with them told me the latest news in the business. There's far more online now than there used to be — Weibo, Douban, WeChat official accounts, all sorts of music pages. Piling it up like that is how my site got detailed enough. A few people once came to me with proposals for a book. But a printed book has a problem: its contents stop at the state they were in on the deadline and can't be updated. And I never meant to make money off the site." After more than ten years of running it, he stopped updating in 2012. Nothing in particular had happened, and it did not mean he had lost his passion for Chinese rock — quite the opposite. Through those years of silence he quietly kept renewing the server lease, kept diligently collecting more material, and the stacks of records in his Shanghai apartment kept growing.

Katori now lives in Yangon, where he is general manager of the Myanmar branch of a Chinese garment-inspection company; his wife has stayed behind in Shanghai. His workdays are packed — getting home at 11 p.m. is normal, and a few weeks before the interview he had to pull an all-nighter. What I find frankly admirable is that in the middle of all this he is still preparing a third version: 13,000 bands, plus 2,200 musicians (guitarists, drummers and so on), as many as 2,800 albums, and more than 1,000 EPs.[2] Searching the current second version is fairly crude — you pick a letter or a category and jump to the relevant page. The new version will be easier to use, with a search closer to Wikipedia's: type in a keyword and everything related on the site comes up.

"Sometimes I think about finding a friend to run the site with me, but among my Japanese friends there really aren't many who both love and understand Chinese rock, so for now I'm handling it alone. And I have a bit of a craftsman's temperament — there's a very clear line in my head, and if the new version doesn't meet a certain standard I won't release it. I began thinking about and preparing the third version back in 2011, and this is mainly why it has dragged on. Still, a lot of band and musician websites have shut down or vanished as times changed, and their trajectories, their information and their photographs now exist only on my site. The whole road Chinese rock has traveled over these years is there on my site. I feel a responsibility to keep it running."

Believing in the Power of Music

Katori has seen a great many bands play. With some of them he got to know the members back when they could draw only a dozen or so people, and real friendships grew out of it. By the time a band could fill a room with several thousand, the members would spot their old friend Katori in the crowd and happily shout his name from the stage — which gave him not just a kind of pride but, more important, a sense of belonging. From these friendships he learned that music moves people, and that it makes it easier for one person to reach another. Talking about the big music festivals of recent years, he shared a memory of Midi in October 2003:

"A festival now can easily draw twenty or thirty thousand people, but Midi then was still two or three thousand, held on the plaza of the Midi School of Music near Fragrant Hills. 2003 was the last year you could get in free — in other words, the last time the festival kept its original, undiluted free spirit. I had already started working by then, and I made a special trip from Shanghai to Beijing just for Midi."

"When a band called BRAHMAN[3] came on, some young people started throwing water bottles and eggs at them, because they were Japanese. I was up near the front and watched the eggs fly onto the stage. I didn't dare say anything or take a side — I had my precious SLR in my hands, after all. But the band on stage paid no attention and played straight through without a break, showing off everything they had in experience and technique, and in the end they won the crowd over. That was when I felt the power of music: music really can reach the bottom of a person's heart. The music critic Yan Jun later wrote a piece recalling that moment too."

Katori has watched the history of Chinese rock unfold for all these years, and his own enthusiasm for it seems never to change. He regrets some of what the Chinese music market's fast growth and commercialization have brought, but he has also found new hope in it.

"My company sent me to work in Yangon in July 2014. As I felt it personally, that was just about when China's music market began to change enormously. When I was on the mainland the market was still growing slowly — records weren't selling, music magazines were folding one after another. Now any company of even moderate size puts on a festival, and I hear a single festival can bring in millions, even tens of millions of yuan. Of course the musicians signed to those companies, as long as they're willing to sign, can earn real money — certainly more than an ordinary band in Japan. In the past, people playing rock in China mostly had none; borrowing from friends to pay for food and drink was common. Compared with then, the change is enormous."

"The effects of commercialization are hard to avoid, but on the other hand Chinese rock has grown far more varied in style in recent years, and more young people are trying to make it abroad. As I see it, none of the rock bands that have gone out this way has really succeeded yet. The reason may be a matter of style: most Chinese bands are learning from Europe and America and haven't reached the stage of truly playing in a style of their own — Japanese bands have exactly the same problem, in fact. That said, there are bands like Hanggai, with a morin khuur, someone who can play the chor, and khoomei throat singers; they're often invited abroad to play on their own. Their music may be closer to world music, but I'd love to see musicians with that kind of distinctive style come out of Chinese rock in the future."

How does Katori Yoshito, living in Myanmar, keep in touch with the Chinese rock scene? Asked this, he smiled and told me:

"Mainly through information online. When I first arrived, the internet in Yangon was very slow, and gathering information, talking to friends on the mainland, watching YouTube — all of it was a nuisance. It's fine now: last year it reached 4G speeds and the price dropped a lot, so the network is no longer a problem. Talking with fellow enthusiasts matters too. The circle of Chinese rock fans is relatively small, but they are extremely keen, and willing to spend money! I buy quite a few records online every month myself, though within this circle I count as a light spender. Some of what I buy stays in Yangon and the rest goes to my home in Shanghai. How much do I spend a month? I still haven't worked that out. I buy several hundred albums a year, and there are already so many records, cassettes and LPs at home — my wife is the one who keeps the house running, so going forward I'll have to hold myself back a bit."

"Apart from rock I don't really have any hobbies. To be honest, I don't know whether going on like this is a good thing. Maybe I should make my life more varied, like everyone else." Before we wrapped up, Katori let this out, perhaps out of modesty. An ordinary Japanese student came to the mainland, ran into "real" rock, and has grown alongside it for more than twenty years since. He does not play music himself, but through his own digging he has compiled a place to stand that exists nowhere else, and in the seemingly boundless world of Chinese rock he keeps memories and enthusiasms safe for listeners still to come and for the musicians who once drifted across that sea. Isn't that happiness? I said as much to him. He smiled quietly, faintly, and took a sip of his iced coffee.

(The original title was "Weaving a Ship for Chinese Rock — An Interview With Katori Yoshito, Creator of 'CHINESE ROCK DATA BASE'")

About the Author:

Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who writes in Chinese, currently lives in Beijing. She graduated from International Christian University in Japan with a degree in international relations. She has studied in Chengdu, farmed in southern France, and worked as an economic news editor in Taipei, Manila, Shanghai and elsewhere. She now writes full-time, and is the author of Four Seasons Bento and Tokyo Bookstores, and the editorial reviewer of the "MUJI Light Meals" series, among other works.

About the Interviewee:

Katori Yoshito: born in 1976 in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. Founder and administrator of the well-known website "Chinese Rock DATA BASE." He studied in Beijing from 1998 to 2000, learning Chinese at Minzu University of China. After graduating in 2001 he moved between Shanghai and Qingdao, and now lives in Yangon, Myanmar, working at a garment-inspection company.

Related Website:

Chinese Rock DATA BASE www.yaogun.com

Notes:

[1] ML: short for "mailing list." One of the earliest forms of online community. A mailing list has one shared email address; any message sent to it reaches every member, which makes it easy to discuss topics and share documents.

[2] EP: short for "extended play," a mini-album format between a single and a full album, usually five to eight tracks.

[3] BRAHMAN: a well-known Japanese rock band, formed in Tokyo in 1995, which released its first album, grope our way, in November 1996. Its central member is the singer TOSHI-LOW, and the band still performs and records today.

Banner image: BRAHMAN playing the 2003 Midi Music Festival. (Photo: Katori Yoshito); lead image: Katori being interviewed on his trip home to Japan. (Photo: Yoshii Shinobu)