Nearly every teacher of English as a second language who has worked in Japan longer than a year has wondered at some point, "What the hell am I going to do when I go back home?"

For Johnny Siera, guitarist and vocalist with The Death Set, the answer turned out to be a career in music.

Siera spent 2004 and 2005 working at an eikaiwa (English conversation school) and as a junior-high-school assistant teacher in Tokyo. Hailing from the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, Japan's most densely packed metropolis was the polar opposite of the retiree-dominated surfing town where he was raised and from where he had long looked beyond.