A scene is a network before it is a genre
Every node on the map is a band, a person or an institution. Bands carry the lineage color. People appear 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 bedroom band, or the officially documented guest musician who joins a transition for a season. Institutions are the labels, festivals, magazines and venues that decide who gets heard, and they have equal standing with the bands because the project treats a scene as the whole system that gets music from a rehearsal room to an audience.
Connections come in three weights. Solid lines are personnel and spawning: a member, a founder, a band that came out of another. Dashed lines are influence, used sparingly and only where the descendants have said it themselves. Dotted lines are labels, festival appearances and collaborations. The interactive map lets you switch any of the three off, so the personnel skeleton of the scene can be read on its own.
The map covers the Japanese heavy music ecosystem from 1967 to 24 September 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. It treats the female led scene at the finest grain, because that is where personnel move most and where the chains are best documented; the older lineages are mapped at the level of the bands, the founders and the hubs.
Inclusion rules. A band, person or institution is on the map when it has at least one documented link of the types below to another node; the rule for people is set out below. Punk, noise and idol acts such as The Stalin, Boredoms, Zelda and Ladybaby are included because they hold such links (a covered band, a shared member, a festival, a declared influence), not because they are classified as metal. Hub region means 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; Fukuoka is the city. Tokyo therefore means the Tokyo metro hub and Osaka the Kansai hub, and every count by place in this document and the workbook uses the same rule. A band belongs to one lineage, the one that best describes the network it sits in, so Exist Trace sits in the women's scene rather than visual kei. The women's scene flags are: all female, every member is a woman; female fronted, a woman leads a mixed band; co led, a woman holds a core or co lead role. Edge types are: member of, founded, moved to, spawned (a band formed by members of another), became (a rename or direct successor), side project, produced, label or agency, festival or venue, collaboration, guest support (a time bounded stand in, never coded as membership), and influenced (used only where the descendants have said it themselves).
Timeline placement. On the lineage view and in the Play animation a band enters at its founding year and a person at their first documented activity, taken from the earliest dated relation on the map. A node with no recorded founding year enters at the first year the map documents it and never earlier; the interactive panel labels these under Placed at, and the Nodes sheet carries the basis in its Place year basis column. A node with no dated link at all enters at the cutoff year. Influence relations never date a node.
People on the map. The map does not list every musician in every band. A person appears when they move between two or more mapped nodes; when they are a founding or core member needed to explain a mapped band's formation, continuity or public identity; when they create a documented production, management, label, festival or institutional connection; or when an official source records a time bounded guest support role. Each person is labeled by relationship class in the workbook and in the map panel: personnel connector, founding or core member, institutional connector, or guest support performer. Guest support roles are visible in the full map and are never counted as membership in the personnel only graph.
Three ways to look at it. Lineage lays the scene on a timeline, left to right by founding year, one lane per lineage; it shows how late the women's scene arrives and how fast it grows. Network lets the connections pull the map into clusters, which shows which nodes carry the most connections in this dataset: Lovebites, Loudness, Destrose, Babymetal, JPU Records, Loud Park. Cities places everything on a map of Japan by hometown, and that view is the one to use when the question is what a place produced rather than what a genre did.
Network interpretation. Node size on the map and the centrality figures in this document are computed on this dataset, with every edge type weighted equally and parallel edges counted separately. They describe position in the map, not popularity, sales or importance; a band with one label deal and one influence line is small however large its audience. A ranked table and the counting method are in the Network metrics section.