Inside Japanese hardcore: Photos and flyers from the apex of J-core

The underground world of J-core, Japan’s hardcore techno scene during the 1990s and early 2000s, has never been well known outside its circle of participants. Hardcore, a chaotic and overwhelming music genre featuring sped-up beats, distortion and unexpected noises, has always been a niche interest, and the Japanese version was no exception. 

In addition to the music, a unique sub-subculture emerged where raving fused with gaming, forming nights like Newtype Gamer Nights, Osaka-based raves where clubbers played the latest games on Sony, Sega and Nintendo consoles while DJs played. Early Japanese hardcore act Out of Key released the track “Sega Junky”, which sampled Sega’s sounds. In 1998, Sega itself was sponsoring hardcore raves in Tokyo.

According to photographer and illustrator Yamamoto Shigetomo, who documented the Osaka scene with slide film on his Canon SLR, the late 90s were a golden era. The scene was unique, he explains, “even within the broader club culture, hardcore techno was an outlier – underground and outside the mainstream... But precisely because it was so niche, it attracted a unique group of eccentric DJs, artists, and creatives who found a kind of freedom in that sound. Everyone from noise musicians, punk and grindcore artists, to students from art schools, designers – a melting pot of subcultures. A lot of creative collaborations came out of that era.” His contribution included organising events, publishing zines about music and graphic design, and taking a lot of photographs as a means of both documenting the scene and as material for creative projects.

Years later, this unique and somewhat extreme scene caught the eye of one of the rave industry’s leading curators and cataloguers, Gabber Eleganza. His archive of thousands of flyers and artefacts from the underground rave movement, spanning the 90s and early 00s, offers a rare and unfiltered glimpse into a subculture that had remained largely unseen outside of Japan. This ephemera can now be viewed in his recent publication Manga Corps: An archive of Japanese rave artefacts – the first book of its kind to document over a decade of the J-core scene.

Eleganza, real name Alberto Guerrini, is an Italian artist, archivist and DJ who has taken on the mission of documenting various little-known clubbing scenes from around the world. Speaking to Dazed, he recalls first hearing of J-core 20 years ago, when buying a mixtape by the HammerBros “from two Japanese kids in Milan who were making music on Game Boys”. He explains, “The artwork, the sound – everything felt completely alien to what I knew at the time. That tiny tape and the brief conversation I had with those young Japanese ravers opened a door to an entirely new universe.”

The Western view of Japanese culture as predominantly conventional, making their subcultures all the more extreme as a reaction, is partly true, according to Eleganza. He explains, “It unfolds in two phases. The first is a kind of mimicry, where Western subcultures are adopted with their rules and frameworks intact. But then something shifts, there’s a local awakening, a transformation. The subculture takes on new meaning by absorbing folklore and context, evolving into something uniquely Japanese. That second phase is where my interest lies.”

As contemporary nightlife faces an existential threat, culture has turned to nostalgia. “My work often taps into the past, and it can carry a nostalgic tone, but I’ve never been into the whole ‘things were better back then’ narrative,” Eleganza tells us. “On the contrary, I’m always curious about what’s next, how aesthetics evolve, how sound and subcultures shift.” In the digital age, clubs rarely hand out physical flyers. “When everything moves too fast, nothing really stays,” Eleganza says. Instead, adverts are more rapidly generated and disseminated digitally. “There’s no room for anything to become iconic or cult when we’re bombarded with thousands of posters and artworks every single day.”  

While Eleganza is concerned for the future of clubbing overall, he still recommends current visitors to Japan to sample the nightlife; “Definitely check out Murder Channel events and talks. And tune into Community Radio – it’s a great entry point into the scene.” And Shigetomo suggests: “In Japan, the real energy is often in the smaller venues: intimate clubs, bars, and live houses. Many parties now end around midnight. So start your night early!”

Manga Corps – An archive of Japanese rave artefacts is out now, published by Never Sleep.