[#17] If I Were Doing a Radio Show, I'd Play Songs Like This - October 27, 2025 (Mon) Broadcast

What is this?

This is a radio show presented by us, where we say,
“I don't have much to talk about, but
there are songs I want to play,” titled
“If I Were Doing a Radio Show, I'd Play Songs Like This.”

What makes this radio show groundbreaking and significantly different from existing radio is that it is a text-based medium.

On this radio show, we collect and play songs we heard today and
songs we wanted to recommend to someone today. This time, I have something I want to talk about, so I'll be talking at length. First, here is some happy news.

With high hopes, a passionate review—

I received the TOP Award and the Matsumoto Award, which I believe has Mr. Matsumoto's seal of approval, in the August issue of the Young Magazine Monthly Awards.

I'm truly happy.
At the same time, I feel relieved.

What I'm going to talk about this time is everything that led up to this happy news.

To begin with, why manga?

People who have known me since I was a high school student
would probably describe me as someone involved in music, like a band member or a DTMer, when explaining who I am.

I've been in a light music club since high school and went on to the music course in the Department of Art Education at university.
After dropping out of that university, I uploaded music online.
Furthermore, the place I got a job at was the editorial department of a music magazine.
Immersed in music.
I even took out a loan to buy instruments.

Well, music was my identity,
my special skill, my hobby, and the basis of my self-confidence.
However, that confidence also existed as an inferiority complex.

The trigger for starting to post was my 20th birthday.
A friend who makes music and CG used their own song as background music for a pixel art video they made themselves, and posted it as a culmination of their work up to age 20.

That video, posted by a friend I respected especially among my peers,
brought both inspiration and fear.

Inspiration—of course, I was moved by the high quality.

Fear—this was the feeling of, “Can I explain my own life in a way like this?”

At that point, I was composing and playing acoustic guitar, but I had never finished a work to a quality that I could show others, or created something that felt like a culmination of my life.

I would play Minecraft from morning till night and occasionally record a video of myself playing and singing.
It was an activity at a level that could hardly be called a musician.

My friend's birthday was in June and mine was in August, so I thought, let's complete something in these two months.

As for the result,
I couldn't make it.
I could make a song, but it wasn't something I could be satisfied with.

I was frustrated to death and felt impatient.
I felt like my life would continue to end without ever completing anything.
With the COVID-19 pandemic as well, I remember that impatience in that closed environment was tremendous.

I turned 20 without being anyone, and I had nothing to boast about.
Just someone who likes instruments.

After that, I tried to make something for about two months, but it didn't go well.
Even so, as a result of continuing to wander in search of making something,
a certain work was completed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hegEpDpdVpY

Arisugawa Kodoku “Uzu”

Eerie visuals and
lyrics that are incoherent yet seem to have meaning.

The initial goal
was to make something like a strange video unearthed from the deep web.

The song title was truly meaningless, and I remember naming it with the feeling that anything would do as long as it became a trigger for it to be played.

I don't think I had set a username when I first posted it,
and I think the username was also Uzu.

After that, I forgot the trigger, but
I decided to call myself “Arisugawa Kodoku,” which popped into my head.

Thinking about it now, it's almost the same as the sound of Otome Arisugawa from Aikatsu!, so there is Aikatsu! behind my unconscious.

I had posted on Niconico Douga several times before Arisugawa Kodoku, but no matter how hard I tried, it was only about 13 views, and I had never received any comments.

Regarding Uzu, I had the confidence that it would be played if it caught people's eyes, so
I used Niconico Ads to boost the initial speed.
Then, it surpassed the dream of 1,000 views, which I had never seen before, and I got comments.

After that, miracles continued,
and with this song as a trigger, Arisugawa Kodoku started moving.
From the first song, I received fan art, and it was a series of revolutionary events.

Looking at it now, it's being played surprisingly rapidly.
At the time, 10,000 views were a dream within a dream.

I was afraid of people getting bored, so from then on, I produced and posted songs and MVs at a pace of two per month. I was just afraid of being forgotten.

From there, while struggling to reflect my thoughts or ideology in my composition, I sealed the practice of making songs just by the momentum of words,
and this is the song I made with the intention of leaving a mark on people's hearts as much as possible, and to part ways with my own weaknesses up to that point.

Arisugawa Kodoku “Garan Tokyo”

I have such an attachment to this song that I even used it as the album title.

In the midst of extreme impatience,
I really begrudged even the time it took to eat,
and I finished it by working on my laptop even while commuting.
I also made the video myself by filming on a pedestrian bridge in the middle of the night.
Anyway, I was terrified of time passing, and this song, completed in a life of compulsion where I felt I had to create something, became the catalyst that connected me with various people.

The people I met around the time of this song are still my friends today.
I'm really glad I made it.

I even felt a sense of terror that I had exhausted all the inner anger, inferiority, and aggression that had been dormant within me.

I thought I might never be able to make music again.
That's what I thought.

But as long as I kept moving, that wasn't the case.
I was trapped by the very will to create, suffered, and reached my limit before the song was born.

I walked around outside until the sky turned bright,
and I was so cornered that I thought if it was going to be this painful, I might as well just die, leaving behind the previous song I had poured everything into as a suicide note.

The culmination of my suffering.
It was like a nightmare whether I was asleep or awake.
That became the song, and it saved me once again.

There was someone who drew fan art for this song,
and I was truly happy from the bottom of my heart,
and this song also became a catalyst for making new friends.

From around this time, I thought music was the center of my life,
and that music was everything that both helped and tormented me.

However, while it was certainly true that music helped me,
the factors that tormented me increased.

The COVID-19 pandemic,
various speculations and conspiracies were swirling.

My family was swallowed up by conspiracy theories to an irreparable level,
and the home that should have been my safe haven turned into hell.
Furthermore, the stinging words of the person I was dating at the time,
and words that seemed to deny my very existence
drove me to the brink of being finished off.

I no longer had a place where I could feel safe, neither at home nor with my lover.
My only allies were myself and the people who listened to my songs.
But listeners will leave if you don't upload songs.

"If I don't keep creating, they'll get bored"
"My family has gone crazy"
"I'm anxious about everything in my future"
"Nothing in love or anything else is going well"

I wished from the bottom of my heart that time would just stop.
I thought about dying many times.
Or I thought it would be better if COVID raged even more and everyone just died.

In such a situation, my only means of resisting in my own way was, of course, music.

Kodoku Arisugawa "Saredo Akuma no Tenohira no Ue" (Yet, on the Devil's Palm)

This kind of song was born.
A state of resignation.

I wish everything would just be wiped clean.
If conversation doesn't make sense, I have no choice but to convey it through music.
I thought I would leave my way of life and the voice of my heart here and die.
The reason the title 'Devil' was used for songs made around this time,
and why there is such an apocalyptic, desperate feeling, is because I was at my limit.
The constant repetition of 'see you later' is all because of that.

The second song in the Devil series
perhaps because I was feeling a little better, or perhaps because I was exhausted,
became a song that stopped trying to be close and instead pushed people away.

My heart was about to break,
and this song is a voice of anger, like one that encourages myself when even the flame of anger no longer lights up.
But after that, various things happened, and I reached my limit.


The unpleasantness of adults I learned through romance, and an intense sense of discomfort.

A rejection of becoming an adult.
I became afraid of thinking about my own future.
There was a route where things would probably go well.
But that was a way of becoming an adult that I hated just as much as being dead.

I have no allies anywhere.
No one will help me.
Thinking that, I decided to write a suicide note.

You might think, 'this again?',
but I was serious at the time.

However, I thought it was too tasteless to spit it out as words,
so I made a song as a final act of rebellion.

Before I hanged myself,
this was the last song I made.

A few days after completing this song,
I hanged myself for the first time in my life.

The result was a failure.

It wasn't that anyone stopped me.
I put a belt on the doorknob and hung myself by sitting down and putting my weight on it.
I felt the sensation of my consciousness fading away,
and my head and back felt cold.
Then I suddenly got scared,

and I understood the lightness of life.

Everything I was worrying about became irrelevant.
If it can be thrown away so easily,
I thought I would really do whatever I wanted, and use it as a trump card for when I had no other choice, and since then, the feeling of wanting to die has never surfaced.

Conversely, only the feeling that I had already thrown away my life remained.

It doesn't matter how I live or how I die anymore.
I became invincible, thinking that nothing I do is scary.

My spending became wildly reckless in an obvious way,
and the word 'life plan' was blown away.
(I'm still walking on that extension, so it's pretty dangerous)

In the midst of that,
a new lover changed my life.
They gave me peace of mind from the bottom of my heart.
Everything about just being alive was fun,
and for a while after that, I made love songs.

I think this is the culmination of my view on love.

I put everything into this song.
I don't think I can make a song about love better than this.

The songs after this
seem like songs made entirely out of habit,
with no real substance or argument.

I lost my initial impulse, and the will to make songs also faded.

Life is wonderful even without making songs.
From the moment I could think that, creation became a mere hobby.
Creation, which was my life itself, was no longer indispensable.

For a while.

Yes,
after a while, the basis of my self-confidence became shaky.

My only strength, that I could make songs, disappeared,
and I had no special skill to be proud of.

In terms of timing, job hunting began,
and I was gradually returning to a normal path from a life of doing music casually and planning to die if things didn't work out.
A song I made in the midst of that.

By making this song, I realized once again that I want to create.

I realized that I like having my creations recognized and receiving feedback on them.

It was good that I realized it, but
before I knew it, I had become a working adult.

I dare to express it as 'had become' a working adult because
I had no sense of responsibility or reality, and I just became a working adult as time passed.

I participated in information sessions prepared by the school, followed the procedures honestly,
and passed the interviews just with my talent for smooth talking, becoming a working adult.

In other words, I'm a liar.
Just like a reflex game, I just give the words the other person wants.
I really became a working adult just by going with the flow.

I could get 300,000 yen just by sitting and touching a computer all day.
I had no sense of accomplishment.
But I was also getting used to living casually.
Like, 'I get paid, so...'

I think I was completely underestimating society because things were going more easily than I thought.
I thought that if I just played pretend, my anxiety about the future would disappear.
At that time,

Kuu, the Gt.Vo of my favorite band, NEE, passed away at the young age of 25.
The simplicity of 'people die,' which I thought I had accepted,

came crashing down on me intensely now.

The fact that such a great genius died in the middle of their dreams
revived the creator in me that had been sleeping until now.

More than anything, I thought that 'dying without achieving anything' was scary.

I thought I was reasonably satisfied with my activities, but
deep down, I was hiding the feeling that I wanted to sell more and be known more.

I can do more.
Well, but I have some songs that are doing okay...

I had become like that.

That said, I had a feeling that I had already done everything I could in terms of music-related activities.

I had fulfilled my dream of performing live with a band, and I was already satisfied.

In addition to that, while I was at a music magazine company,
I had a rejection reaction to music itself.

Why is this?
Strangely, my passion for music and equipment was cooling down more and more.

Then, a dream suddenly emerged.

"Manga artist"

There are too many characters, so I'll write the rest tomorrow.

Today's playlist is
the cheering songs that supported me.