“If there was no music, I don’t think I’d even survive,” said Yoshiki, the lyricist, drummer, pianist, and creative center of the glam rock band X Japan. Over the course of their career, they band has only released five studio albums, which have sold more than 30 million copies combined.
Their music is a unique combination of heavy metal mixed with a symphonic edge, which is rounded out with Yoshiki’s lyrics, lifted from the events of his own life. While they’re largely unknown outside of their native Japan, they can sell out the Tokyo Dome, a 55,000-seat arena, 18 times over the course of their career. It’s a testament to their rabidly devoted fanbase, as well as the band’s considerable impact on music, fashion, and Japanese culture on a whole.
Success and massive influence aside, X Japan’s journey has been earmarked by tragedy. Founding member Toshi was brainwashed by a cult throughout the 1990s. Guitarist hide [pronounced hid-day] seemed to have committed suicide after the band’s breakup in 1997. Years later, Taiji, their former bassist, committed suicide in a jail cell in 2011, less than a year after reuniting with his former bandmates in 2010.
It’s the kind of story that documentary filmmaker Stephen Kijak, who directed the 2010 musical documentary Stones in Exile, compared to a “rock opera,” and is what drove him to helm the documentary about the band called We Are X.
Focusing primarily on the life of Yoshiki, We Are X wrestles with the idea of the physical and spiritual pain that are often inseparable from the creative process.
After debuting at Sundance in January, the film has received rave reviews on the festival circuit throughout the year, and after opening in Los Angeles last weekend, is getting a limited release across the country starting this Friday. We got the chance to speak with Yoshiki about having his story told on the big screen, and director Stephen Kijak about how he came to tell it.
While he wasn’t familiar with X Japan’s music at first, Kijak became interested in the project as soon as he met with Yoshiki personally. “He’s got a vibe,” he said of X Japan’s unofficial leader. “I felt this presence, it really was extraordinary. My gut told me ‘you’ve got to do this.'”
For the narrative, the film is anchored to the four days leading up to the band’s 2014 performance at Madison Square Garden. “That was very easy, they were in New York, ready to do a show, those were the specific number of days leading up,” said Kijak, who added that throughout filming, there was a real sense of “Oh my god, will he pull it off?”
That unease comes across in the film, chronicling the disorganized rehearsals that ran behind schedule, which caused everyone to race agains the clock. Kijack said that here always seemed to be “some kind of battle.”
“It was always Yoshiki in the middle of it trying to conduct the chaos,” Kijak said. “He had to push this thing forward from atop his little drum platform, barking orders at people through his microphone. Which is kind kind of amazing — there’s no artistic director. It’s just him shouting at everybody and making it work. He does so much already, so we all felt a little nervous.”
To describe those rehearsals as a battle, it turns out, was more than a simple turn-of-phrase — it’s central to Yoshiki’s idea of what it means to be creative. He started playing classical piano at the age of four, and was only allowed to listen to the likes of Beethoven, Chopin, and Mozart. Six years later, he’d lose his father to suicide, which lead him to his discovery of rock music. In his case, that journey began with a copy of the KISS single “Love Gun.”
“When I lost my father, I was so angry, so sad,” said Yoshiki. “[I was] screaming, crying out like every day. Finally, when I found rock, so I put my entire energy all my emotion into music. I started writing lyrics, I started playing drums, I started playing piano. That kind of music helped me.”
As his tastes evolved, he wandered through the genre of heavy metal and veering into classic rock staples, eventually drifting toward bands like The Sex Pistols and David Bowie, explaining that he “went to more punk rock and new wave.”
The new wave influence was prevalent throughout the early part of X Japan’s career. They wore elaborate stage makeup, styled their hair and wore outlandish outfits, and would later be considered founders of Visual kei, a sort-of Japanese version of glam rock. The movement even took its name from X Japan’s slogan “Psychedelic Violence Crime of Visual Shock.” It turned out that their look was making as big an impact as their music, and gave Yoshiki his first clue just how influential they were becoming.
“30 years ago, we had blonde hair, [and] we couldn’t even grab a cab,” he said. “No cabs would even stop, Japan was such a conservative country. Then, when we started playing all over, people started dressing up like us. Then, eventually, you started seeing those people, in Tokyo or wherever, with blonde hair, red hair, blue hair, it’s like ‘I think we did something to the culture.'”
Conveying a band with such an incomparable influence on a grand scale wasn’t an easy task, but Kijak felt up to the challenge.
“These are never easy films to make,” he explained, “Especially when you’re trying to chew off a whole career and a whole life. Not that the Exile movie [Stones In Exile, which he made in 2010] was any easier, but it was a more contained story, you know. One record, very easy to go in and go deep. This, my god. It was so sprawling and epic. I think when you examine it, it has a real archetypal shape. There were real mythic shapes and structures that were kind of embedded in their story.”
X Japan’s story, whether it’s been captured on film for We Are X, or the one that’s still unfolding, Yoshiki’s philosophy has always resonated throughout: Creativity is combat.
“When you’re creating art, there’s something… Celtic going on,” said Yoshiki, with a laugh. “It’s something not normal. When I compose a song, sometimes the melody comes from the sky or something, and it’s ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ Sometimes it takes weeks just banging my head to the wall. It’s not a normal process. It’s not a normal state of mind. I think every single kind of artist has experience that kind of thing.”
“We felt like we were doing battle along with him,” said Kijak, who said Yoshiki’s outlook influenced the film a lot. “He became a great driving force in the cut, aside from him saying ‘anything is possible.’ It’s one of his favorite phrases, [and] you roll your eyes at it initially, but I think he’s completely right.”
Of course, you can’t have combat without a suit of armor, and Yoshiki has one of his own, which he created after the suicide of guitarist hide. While thousands of fans were grief-stricken, and were even attempting suicide themselves. Yoshiki explains that he created what he called “a positive Yoshiki” so he could be there for his fans. “I do have a positive side inside of me, and a dark side, too. But when I’m in public, I try to show a more positive side, especially around that time when [hide] passed away. I wanted to support my fans.”
Despite everything, Yoshiki considers himself an optimist, a man who’s grateful for the chance to make the stage his home for the better part of three decades, and whose personal life has become inseparable from the story of X Japan.
“I try to be positive, I think I’m positive,” he said. “I’m always going back, standing on the edge of that line. I’m trying to be at least 1% to the positive side, but I’m always standing on the line. I think everybody has that kind of thing. I was just having a conversation with Gene Simmons from KISS. He put on all this armor, makeup and everything. He said an interesting thing, he said he didn’t want to get hurt. Also, when I met David Bowie, I asked him ‘Where do you draw the line, you being on stage, vs. just being your normal life?’ He couldn’t answer that question.”
In short, it seems like Yoshiki can’t, either — despite the band’s thirty year history, X Japan shows no signs of slowing down right now. The band had a date at Wembley Stadium in London scheduled for March of 2016 to correspond with the release of ‘We Are X,’ that was postponed and rescheduled for March 4th, 2017.
Then, the band plans to embark on a world tour, which includes several dates in the U.S. In addition, Yoshiki will get the chance to show off his classical side with a string of solo shows, including performances at Carnegie Hall. Tickets to those shows are available here.
