Kaze Fujii announces a 2023 Asia tour, and debuts a new throwback look

So, Kaze’s been real quiet since that mess where an old video of his surfaced where he covered a Nicki Minaj song and didn’t self censor the world n***a. Smart move from his PR team. A lot of the girls in the US could learn a lesson about just being quiet and coming off social media for a minute when shit pops off. But now Kaze’s less quiet as the result of a new tour, which comes with an image switch up that most would reserve for a new album.

Now whilst this image change may just seem like an image change, I THINK there might be more to it. Lemme put my Eric Voss New Rockstars T-shrit on and theorise this shit. Because I think this image change is very specific and deliberate.

Kaze Fujii’s new tour is titled The Man and a piano tour and is being promoted as a one man show. Kaze used to do a lot of these one man shows early on in his career, before he even had a major record label deal. It’s a large part of what helped him not only secure a deal but build up the big fanbase that he has now. And it’s kinda interesting that despite the generation of music that he’s a part of, that he actually has a relatively old school path to becoming a signed recording artist.

Kaze’s image change for this tour hearkens back to how he looked back before Help Ever Hurt Never. When he was still in school, doing gigs with his keyboard and uploading covers to YouTube. So this image change COULD be a conscious throwback to his earlier years. It’s a smart move in terms of blocking periods of his career, and making his high school days part of his career proper in some form.

Something I don’t think enough people talk about when it comes to Japanese music, is that when it comes to albums and tours, they have always been very defined by specific images and looks. Long before the term ‘eras’ became a pop culture term to describe each phases of a music acts career. When you think of acts such as Ayumi Hamasaki, Kumi Koda, Perfume, Hikaru Utada and even go further back to Chisato Moritaka and Mariya Takeuchi. Each phase of their career is defined by an album cover or a music video, and it’s always been the case. Eras are sometimes a little more nebulous in Japanese music because they tend to not really be definitive until an album actually releases.

The term ‘World’ and ‘Asia’ have become a little too freely used these days in the contexts of world tours by Japanese and Korean acts. An acts would do 2 dates in North America and it’s a ‘world tour’. An act will do a couple of gigs in Shanghai and it’s an ‘Asia Tour’. But Kaze’s Asia tour is actually more of an Asia tour. East Asian to be specific. You could argue if it were a true Asia tour, he’d take that shit to Kyrgyzstan and India too. But I get it. Asia tour sounds better than East / South East Asia tour, and technically it’s still a tour taking place in a region of Asia. Far less egregious than a North American tour being touted as world tour.

I just know the performance at the Hong Kong Baptist University is gonna be churched up. Candles. Barefoot. Frankincense and myrrh. All that shit.

I think there’s a strong likelihood that we’ll get a new song right before this tour kicks off. As Kaze often ends up releasing something new around his tours.