Japanese Metal Family Tree

The Music Cities™ · network and lineage map · 1967 to 2026 · data through 24 Sep 2026
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日本語の案内。このサイトは英語で書かれています。ブラウザの翻訳機能でほぼ全ページを日本語で読めます。バンド名と人名には日本語表記を併記し、検索欄には日本語でも入力できます。地図の読み方、掲載の基準、訂正の送り方を日本語でまとめたページは japan.themusiccities.com/ja/ にあります。

Work in progress. This map is not exhaustive. It presents the result of documented research at this release and changes as sources are added, corrected, or superseded. Every node is based on at least one public source and carries its sources and confidence class. If something is missing or wrong, use Correct in the node panel or the Corrections page.

Public disclosure policy. This map uses public business records, public corporate filings, property records, public calendars, public civic documents, public press coverage and public listings. It maps commercial infrastructure and documented civic activity, not endorsements, partnerships or private cultural behavior. Inclusion does not require participation, consent or approval. The map corrects factual errors promptly and considers removal requests case by case where a listing is outdated, an entity has closed, publication presents a material safety concern, or the entity is not conducting public facing commercial activity. Public commercial infrastructure is mappable; private cultural behavior is protected.

Every circle is a band, every dashed circle a person who carries, anchors, connects or temporarily supports a band, every square an institution: a label, a festival, a magazine, a venue. Color 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 center. 3D lets the same network settle in three dimensions, which separates the lineages that a flat layout has to overlap; orbit it, click a node and the camera flies to it. 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, and the Nordic studios and festivals the scene reaches (Gothenburg, Stockholm, Helsinki, Roskilde) sit in their own cluster to the north west, because Gothenburg is where this map meets the Tampa Death Metal Family Tree.

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. A band enters at its founding year and a person at their first documented activity. A node with no recorded founding year enters at the first year the map documents it, never earlier, and its panel says so under Placed at; a node with no dated link at all enters at the cutoff year.

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 make a material connection legible: the guitarist who leaves one band and founds another, the vocalist whose founding role explains a stable export band, the drummer who plays in three projects, the producer whose credit connects a 1980s label to a 2010s band, or the officially documented guest musician who joins a transition for a season. Each person carries a relationship class in the panel: personnel connector (moved between two or more mapped nodes), founding or core member, institutional connector, or guest support performer. Guest support is never counted as membership in the personnel only graph. 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, Bridear and Lovebites are singled out in the sidebar because each illuminates a different mechanism by which Japanese heavy music travels: personnel convergence and rebuilding; hybrid format export through a label and a festival circuit; independent export sustained from outside the Tokyo hub; and institutional scaling from a stable working unit. A network can seed a band, while institutions can scale it. 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.

Related maps. Built on the same engine and the same evidence rules: the Tampa Death Metal Family Tree, the Creator Economy Map, the West Dixie Music Corridor, South Dade, NMB AsiaTown and Florida Heartland Agriculture. Published by The Music Cities™.

Downloads: PDF reference · Node and edge dataset (Excel) · data.json

Read online: Home · Reference · Current cases · Index of nodes · Data · Corrections · 日本語の案内