"I didn't know anything about Japanese, or Japan at all, and I spoke English on stage and no one understood what I was saying."
When Scott Murphy first hit Japan with the Chicago-based pop-punk band ALLiSTER in 2001, he wasn't the first Western musician to play half a dozen sold-out shows here. But, unlike most, he took it a step further.
"We were coming back in four months," he continues, "and so I just used that four months for hardcore Japanese study, and it just kind of snowballed from there."