Apparently, The Beat Motors are an up-and-coming band in Tokyo right now. Their sound is very Jet/The Strokes-esque.  Check ‘em out…you be the judge.

Hope these music-related posts give you some insight into the younger generation of Japanese people and how different their worldviews and lifestyles are from the traditional, older generations. A lot of the stereotypes of Japanese people and their customs are rapidly changing. 

Here’s a link to a Japan Times article back in May that commented on the three major subculture movements in Japan that have changed the face and values of mainstream Japanese culture.

An excerpt:

 

The formative culture of a country is its subculture. Mainstream culture is about the present; subculture creates the future. In Japan, there have been three seminal subcultures since the end of World War II in 1945.

The first was the politically radical one of the immediate postwar period. This postwar subculture was bohemian and decadent, given its impetus by writers such as Osamu Dazai and Ango Sakaguchi. 

The second subculture movement sprang up in the 1960s, thanks to the underground theater of playwrights including Shuji Terayama and Juro Kara, and filmmakers such as Nagisa Oshima. There was a robust iconoclastic power to this movement, which at times — as in Oshima’s films in that decade — turned ideological, reinforcing the anti- establishment political trends of the day.

The third subculture, which has become mainstream and is flowing with full force today, appeared in the 1980s. It wasn’t prodding, oppositional and subversive like its predecessors. Rather it was freaky, fashionable and fun — part of what was known in the ’80s as the fuiringu jidai, or “feeling era.” Its “don’t think about it, just do it” message was embraced by a young generation sick and tired of over-serious conceptual polemics, lead-weight angst and rat-race drudgery.