When I first embarked on my attempt to visit every prefecture in Japan and learn about the local indie music scene in each one, the idea that I would be able to draw any meaningful generalizations from the adventure seemed ludicrous. The music scene of Tokyo alone is an incomprehensible mess, so how would I even begin to sort through an entire country's worth of information and find any sort of clear story?

Nevertheless, as time went by and the hills, highways and housing developments flickered past, I would be lying if I said that places didn't start to feel the same. While each city certainly has its quirks, patterns nevertheless emerged. A population of 300,000 to 700,000 will tend to support three or four dedicated live venues and a handful of oddball cafes, shops and arts spaces that occasionally put on music events, from the gorgeous Shofukuji Temple in Niigata to the newly built riverside space Nu in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture. In these smaller live environments, artists will usually be thrust together with little regard for genre or style; a population of a million or more is usually required before a scene can fragment enough to cater in a dedicated way to more niche tastes.

The sound of major label J-rock bands such as Back Number and the emo-rock-esque One OK Rock dominates the small towns of Japan, with the alternative fringes defined by the influence of Rockin' On magazine. For someone who finds the greatest delight in the abrasive squalls of the arty underground, this homogeneity is depressing, but it's an inevitable result of both too much and too little information. The internet has given everyone access to more info than they can usefully use, but an increasingly narrow mainstream now seems to dominate those channels. Regional oddities born from happy misunderstandings appear to be in decline.