How to read this map
Every circle is a band, every dashed circle a person who moved between bands, every square an institution: a label, a festival, a magazine, a venue. Colour is lineage. Rose rings mark all female bands. Node size follows how connected a node is, so the hubs of the scene stand out on their own.
Lineage lays the scene out on a timeline, left to right by founding year, with each lineage in its own lane. Network lets the connections pull the map into clusters, which is where you see who really sits at the centre. Cities puts everything on a map of Japan, clustered around its hometown, because a scene is a place before it is a genre. The amber pin is a city’s true location; hubs slide apart where Kanto gets crowded. Everything based outside Japan sits in its own cluster off the coast.
Play runs the timeline as an animation: the scene grows year by year from 1967 to 2026 in whichever view you are in. Pause it anywhere and the year slider stays where it stopped.
Solid lines are people and bands moving: members, founders, one band spawning another. Dashed lines are influence. Dotted lines are labels, festivals, collaborations and guest support. Click any node and the panel on the right tells its story and lists every connection; Trace lineage lights up everything upstream and downstream of it.
Scope and rules. The map covers the Japanese heavy music ecosystem, 1967 to 2026: metal in the narrow sense plus the proto metal, hardcore, noise, visual kei and idol metal acts that share its people, venues, labels and audiences. A node is on the map when it has a documented personnel, spawning, label, festival or declared influence link to at least one other node. A person appears when they moved between two or more nodes, or when an official source records a time bounded guest support relation to a band on the map. Hub region is the place of formation, or the home base a band states for itself, folded into a metro hub: Tokyo includes Hachioji, Kichijoji, Meguro, Shinjuku, Saitama and Kawagoe; Kanagawa includes Yokohama, Kawasaki, Yokosuka, Hayama and Hadano; Chiba includes Funabashi, Tateyama and Makuhari; Osaka includes Kobe. Every count by place uses that hub, so Tokyo means the Tokyo metro hub and Osaka the Kansai hub. Women's scene flags: all female means every member is a woman; female fronted means a woman leads a mixed band; co led means a woman holds a core or co lead role. The female led scene is mapped at the finest grain, every member migration from Destrose, Aldious, Cyntia and Mary's Blood through Lovebites, Nemophila, Fate Gear, Zilqy and Heavy Metal Princess Academy.
Current cases. Nemophila, Broken by the Scream and Bridear are singled out in the sidebar because each illuminates a different mechanism by which Japanese heavy music travels. A case is featured only when it rests on at least one official artist, label, promoter, festival or campaign source, an independent source for any historical, financial or superlative claim, a date, a defined relationship or event, a separation of completed from announced activity, and no reliance on private communications unless explicitly authorized and archived. Node size and centrality are computed from the dataset and are never adjusted for a case.
Evidence. Data are current through . Activity after that date is described as announced or scheduled, never as completed. Each node carries a confidence grade and source ids in its panel: High means an official announcement or two independent sources; Medium means Wikipedia, Metal-Archives or a single press report; Low means a detail still flagged as unverified. Connection counts and betweenness are computed on this dataset, with every edge type weighted equally, and describe position in the map, not popularity or sales.
Downloads: PDF reference · Node and edge dataset (Excel) · data.json