Trivia / Fishmans

• Breakout Hit: Long Season became this for the band years after they had stopped being around for western fans.
  • "Nightcrusing" for their home country and much earlier, "いかれた Baby".
• Creative Differences: Why Kensuke Ojima and Hakase-sun left Fishmans, although they still remained on good terms with Sato and company and even fans consider them good musicians for their contributions during their early years.
  • Averted with Kashiwabara, who simply wanted to leave the band because he felt he had accomplished everything as a musician. Ironically enough, following Sato's passing, he started playing music again.
  • This was the case with ZAK. While ZAK was happy and willing to help out the band with production, he eventually began to butt heads with Shinji over the band's direction, especially with Shinji taking a much more dominating force in the band, leading to the creator-driven Uchu. This lead to ZAK leaving the band after Uchu's release as well.
• Creator's Favorite: With their constant show of it, especially from a super lengthy one from the bootleg 1997.12.12 Live in Liquid Room performance, Fishmans seemed to consider "Walking in the Rhythm" their favorite song.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Japan seemed to take note of Fishmans's dedicated fanbase and pushes them all out like big icons, even appearing on Space Shower TV, which could be considered the equivalent to a TRL-esque series.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The infamous Fishmans Rock Festival, consisting of vinyls of their Setagaya Trilogy, 8月の現状, 98.12.28 男達の別れ and the singles "Season", "Walking in the Rhythm", and "ゆらめき In The Air". It's incredibly rare to come buy and even if one is lucky to find a copy, expect to pay over $2000 for it.
• No Export for You: Probably one of the biggest reasons why Fishmans have remained in underground success in the US. The band never reached stardom outside of Japan, so their music was never released outside of Japan. Which leads to...
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: The CDs for their music tend to be pricey because of the aforementioned No Export for You. 98.12.28 is worse for the CD copy since it's been out of print for years despite being given a reissue in 2009. As a result, fans tend to go for the DVD live performance of 98.12.28 than buy the CD. Especially now that albums are free to stream, although 98.12.28 is abridged with removing the show banter.
• The Pete Best: Founding bassist Hisamatsu, who was replaced by Yuzuru in 1988, around a year after formation.
• Reclusive Artist: Shinji was surprisingly enough if one digs hard enough on Japanese websites: All that's known is he was from the Setagaya prefecture in Tokyo and graduated from Meiji Gakuin University. Rumors go around about him from "dating" Honzi, dating a musician known as MariMari (as stated on the 4chan board about him), to even a long debated rumor that he originally was a model.
  • Honzi as well, not much is known about her aside from her one solo album and Fishmans career. ZAK too is relatively private about his life.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: A non-game example: Fans have always thought that 98.12.28 was the band's goodbye show, which was not the case: It was a goodbye for Yuzuru, their bassist. More to the legend is that Shinji at the show said "Goodbye", foreshadowing his death. Again, this was proven wrong with the DVD release of the performance that actually shows Yuzuru happily saying "Sayanora!" to the audience as they finished the show. Shinji doesn't even talk after the performance ended and simply sat his guitar down and waved goodbye to the audience.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Fishmans planned to continue after Yuzuru's departure. It's debated on what would have happened afterwards, although some argue the band would have gone in the direction similar to Uchu. Shinji himself stated during the 98.12.28 performance that he wished to return to the band's dub roots.
  • Judging from the release of the song "A Piece of Future, Fishmans would have gone in a Post-Rock direction.