SPITZ

One of Japan's most prominent pop-rock outfits, Spitz moved more than twenty million albums and singles combined across their long-running career while securing no fewer than fourteen Oricon chart-toppers, and they continue to maintain that momentum. Early on, however, commercial considerations played no role in the group's formation and yielded no results. The story began in 1986 when Tokyo art students Masamune Kusano and Akihiro Tamura formed a punk band called Cheetahs. That initial lineup mirrored the Blue Hearts—Japan's counterpart to the Clash and the Ramones—so closely that the members soon concluded another clone was unnecessary and chose to split. Their musical drive resurfaced, leading them to revive the project around 1987 with the addition of Tetsuya Miwa and Tatsuo Sakiyama while Kusano shifted focus toward acoustic guitar.

Local club performances followed, and the band issued its first single, “Hibari no Kokoro,” in 1990, with a self-titled debut album arriving the next year. Persistent uncertainty in the music scene and the quartet's own modest goals kept them out of wider view throughout the early nineties. They completed the albums Namae o Tsuke Te Yaru and Hoshi no Kakera plus the orchestrated mini-album Aurora ni Narenakatta Hito no Tame Ni, yet none cracked the Top 100 until a track from the fourth album, Crispy!, finally registered in 1994. The achievement restored Kusano's confidence, and the fifth album, Sora no Tobikata, reached number fourteen on the Oricon ranking. True breakthrough arrived with the single “Robinson,” which moved 1.6 million copies. Sixth album Hachimitsu, released in 1995, also reached the million-sales mark, joined by the singles “Cherry” and “Sora mo Toberu Hazu.” The latter appeared in the television drama Hakusen Nagashi and has since become a standard song at high-school graduation ceremonies. During the same period Spitz launched extensive tours—forty dates in 1995 and seventy in 1996—choosing to forgo Budokan so they could stay close to their audience.

The band sustained a steady trajectory through the late nineties and the 2000s, even when they experimented with Hayabusa and Mikazuki Rock. Recorded with a Los Angeles engineer, those albums were presented as a return to harder-rock origins, though their edge remained no sharper than Bon Jovi's. After a hiatus in 2003 and 2004 during which their songs kept surfacing in commercials and dramas, Spitz prepared for their twentieth anniversary by releasing a compilation and two further platinum-certified, chart-topping sets—Souvenir in 2005 and SazanamiCD in 2007—while contributing several tracks to the Honey & Clover anime and film series. Into the 2010s they issued three more full-length albums—Togemaru, Chiisana Ikimono, and Mikke—remaining fixtures on the charts.