The Birth of US/JP Underground Alliance

What do you call a one-way alliance?

US/JP Underground Alliance. The last update: 2005

The Link Page

Around early 2002, I first heard Envy from an mp3 sample on the Dim Mak Records website. It immediately lit up my brain and set me furiously trying to understand where this music had come from. Living in Nashville, this really meant scouring the internet. Although, I did eventually order a few Envy CD’s through Off 12th Records (RIP), that pulled in some stuff from HG Fact occasionally.

dimmak.com/mp3s circa 2002

Months later, I was planning to study abroad in Japan, and part of my preparation was to understand as much about the Japanese Underground as I could. There wasn’t a lot of information on the internet, especially in English.

But there were a few band websites. From there I could look at a band’s upcoming shows, follow the threads on their link pages, and learn more and more about what was going on. I looked at the “thank you’s” in the few releases I could get my hands on. And I looked at the band t-shirts they were wearing in photographs.

Although not released at the time, Gauge Means Nothing’s thanks were legendary. Just look at all the bands! What a goldmine!

As I was researching, I started a site to collect the links I was finding and gather information about the bands. Not just for me, although I used it like an address book, but to help others that didn’t speak Japanese. The necessity of a site like this might seem weird in our current age of the internet, but no social media existed then, and search engines barely crawled all of the US websites (Here’s a Wikipedia explanation on link pages). Japanese sites were even more difficult to find unless you already knew a site’s URL. Another fun issue is that web browsers often didn’t use the correct encoding for Japanese pages, so they would end up as a bunch of illegible symbols (not Japanese). Oh! And when you did get to a page in Japanese, there weren’t any automated ways to translate the page. I had a 2000 page Japanese kanji dictionary I used to figure out what the bands were saying on their sites.

I called the link page “US/JP Underground Alliance”. By the magic of the Wayback Machine, you can still view some snapshots of it, in all its pistachio green glory. The snapshots of it didn’t start until a year after I first created it. I think I kept on updating it, even introducing a news section, for many years. There are snapshots under the first domain (http://usjp.cjb.net) and its final resting place (http://usjp.childismine.com).

Towards the end of the updating (around 2005), I was also getting excited about bands outside of Japan, and stood up pages for Asia and Europe.

Looking back, I’m really impressed with the news portion. There’s so much there that I’ve totally forgotten about. Also, it’s painfully apparent how difficult it was to access a lot of things overseas back then. There were so many new releases I knew of due to band’s websites, but couldn’t get ahold of. I still remember going to the post office to purchase an international check to send to a band or label for merchandise. Shipping was prohibitively expensive (it’s kinda back to that way again after being cheap for awhile), and getting a response from bands wasn’t very easy.

The Compilation

Skipping forward a lot in time, around 2014, I was getting re-energized by the fourth wave of Japanese screamo, and was brainstorming ways to help Japanese bands get more exposure in the west. I had the idea of a split compilation, half American based screamo bands, half Japanese screamo bands. The name? US/JP Underground Alliance.

I contacted bands I was friends with in both countries, and approached others that formed into new friendships. I tried to target some US bands that had toured Japan recently (like The Caution Children and Calculator), or were interested in touring. Looking back at the line up, I’m really impressed with how good a lot of the picks were. It still really holds up. I mean, look at this tracklist:

1. Chalmers - This Is a Highway Psalm

2. Ghostlate - your brain biased, to be melted

3. The Caution Children - Psalms

4. Hue - OFFLINE

5. Calculator - Guided By Moonlight

6. Fredelica - お前なんか誰も見てない (Nobody is looking at you)

7. Ittō - Death Frenzy

8. The Sky Above and Earth Below - All Show Me

9. shuly to 104kz - 花 (Flower)

10. Autarkeia - Bottled Air

11. Kiji - ISHI

12. Vowel - Small Trenches

For artwork, I asked my friend Derek Riley. We’d met virtually after he had contacted me about the blog I was doing at the time. We had a lot in common, from art degrees to similar tastes in screamy music, and I loved his art style. He was doing a lot of flyers, album artwork, and even the MEATCUBE logo. So I gave him the prompt and set him free. I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.

I even had some posters printed. I still have copies too! Will put the up in the webstore eventually.

The Future?

Why am I writing this now? Partly it’s nostalgia from the old site. As I mention often on here, I’m working on the Japanese Screamo Disc Guide, which requires a lot of research. Ive gone back to the old site many times to grab contemporaneous website links to plug into the wayback machine. I’m also using a new method to collect all my research for the book, which is visible on the research site here.

And last year, I visited Japan for the first time in 22 years. It was refreshing, motivating, life-affirming. I’ll write more about it later.

Now I want to do another compilation. US/JP Underground Alliance Vol. 2. Maybe publicly announcing it will hold me accountable, haha… Anyways, keep your eyes open for that.