Seppuku Pistols: the punk band playing traditional Japanese music
One of the several ironies about punk rock is the fact that people tend to have very strict ideas about what the genre is and what it is not.
Which is stupid, right? The whole point of punk should be flipping off normalcy. Of pushing the boundaries of acceptability and doing whatever the shiny hell you want to do. Yet punk rock is also, unfortunately, a community act. Nothing ruins cool things like other people. Turning up late to your shows, taking one look at the people on stage actually doing something with their lives, then smugly rolling their eyes and saying, “Oh, someone likes that new Turnstile record, right?”.
Except sometimes, other people aren’t a colossal waste of time and effort. Sometimes people really do understand that punk works best as a medium, rather than a rigidly defined genre. Sometimes you get a band like the Seppuku Pistols, who are something truly rare, not just in punk but in music in general. A band doing something genuinely, proudly unique. In their case, taking raucous, righteous punk rock but only use traditional Japanese instruments to play it with.
Which leads to the incredible sight (let alone sound) of a group of well over ten musicians crammed onto a rock club stage or packed onto a street corner. All dressed in Edo-era Japanese farm wear, complete with Noragi-style kimonos and Geta sandals, thrashing away at an ear-bleedingly loud cover of ‘Too Drunk to Fuck’ by the Dead Kennedys. Except in this particular case, it’s played on shamisen, taiko drums, shakuhachi and bamboo flutes instead of guitar, bass and drums.
The project began life as a solo performance art piece by Danko Lida on New Year’s Eve 1999. Over the next ten years, Lida first turned the project into a more traditional punk band, one that had some Edo-era Japanese instrumentation but was still at its core a punk band that played modern, electric instruments. However, Lida doesn’t consider this period a true version of Seppuku Pistols. In fact, he refers to that period as nothing more than “a struggle”.
No, instead, he believes that the group really came into their own in 2011. This was a dark year in the history of Japan due to the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear power plant explosion, and the modern incarnation of the Seppuku pistols is a direct response to those events. In the band’s words, “these events made us feel lame that we can’t do shit without electricity. So we withdrew these old tracks and changed our style from electric to acoustic, using only Japanese traditional instruments.”
Which brings us to the band we know today. One who remained a strictly live proposition for the next decade and a half, such was their commitment to doing things without the aid of electricity. In fact, they rarely played in concert halls for most of that time, preferring to play guerrilla gigs on street corners, temples, and anywhere else that could fit their many (many) members. They only started recording their music in 2020, releasing their first album Ookami Shinko (or Wolf Worship for us baka gaijin) before following it up in 2024 with their second album Nanoriage Koujyou (A Ceremonial Self-Introduction).
The Seppuku Pistols might not have anything in common with your favourite punk band. However, that might just make them more of a legitimate punk band than any other band of liberty-spiked posers in Crass T-shirts you care to mention.
Kyōdai-tachi yo, shin’nen o suteru na.