Bringing back Cats and Dogs as a place to write

The URL of this blog, catsanddogs.tokyo, comes from the name of a band I had in my twenties.

It started in 2006 or 2007, played its last show in 2011, and disappeared without ever formally breaking up.

Fifteen years on, I'm bringing the name back — this time as the name of a place to write. As the first post here, I want to leave a record of how that came about.

A spring of failed exams, and a music school

The clock rewinds to 2003. I failed the entrance exam for the university I'd hoped to attend, and ended up enrolling in a music vocational school and a correspondence junior college instead.

I had always been interested in the music business, and a producer I admired happened to be teaching at that school. The chance to study under him was what made me choose that path. The course itself was business — not a school for training performers.

But I picked guitar as an elective, and from there my interests fanned outward. The school had a full set of DTM gear — "desktop music," as computer-based music production is called in Japan — and I quickly got hooked on the feeling of building sounds in front of a computer.

One day, the DTM teacher complimented a track I'd made on my own. It meant a lot to me at that age, and I can still remember exactly how it felt. To have someone affirm something you made — looking back, it pushed me forward more than I'd expected.

I wanted to take the songs I'd built on the computer and play them with my own hands, in front of people. So I started a band.

Four people in a band

The drummer and guitarist were friends from the music school. The bassist was a coworker from my part-time job at the time. I sang and played guitar. A four-piece rock band.

The musical influences were, plainly, what was in the air back then. Blur, Oasis, Radiohead, Travis, Coldplay. UK Britpop and alternative rock — my friends and I were all into that lineup together. If you came up through that era, you can probably feel the texture of the sound.

Cats and Dogs, from a song about rain

The band name came from a single song.

I was writing a song called Rain. While looking up English phrases for the lyrics, I came across the idiom "raining cats and dogs." Taken literally: rain made of cats and dogs. What it means: a downpour.

I thought: silhouettes of a cat and a dog could work as a band logo, just as they were. The name was short and easy to say, too. From one song about rain, it spread into the name of the whole band.

The finished logo was a sitting cat and a standing dog. We sometimes called ourselves C.A.D., taking the initials.

Five years on the floors of Shibuya, Harajuku, and Yoyogi

Our main venues were three live houses (as Japan calls its small club venues): Shibuya LA MAMA, Harajuku ASTRO HALL, and Yoyogi Zher the ZOO.

Floors that carried Tokyo's indie rock scene for years. Back then, around Shibuya, Harajuku, and Yoyogi, there were plenty of live houses to drift into on a weeknight on the way home, and plenty of bands playing them. We were one of those bands.

2011, the last show

The last show was in 2011.

We never officially announced a breakup. My own enthusiasm cooled gradually, my time started shifting toward recording-support work for other bands, and Cats and Dogs as an active band naturally faded.

The truth is, even back in my school days I had a sense that "maybe I'd rather be the one supporting the people around me, not the one out front." The reason I started the band was "I want to perform my own songs," but as I kept at it, that axis shifted, little by little.

To be honest, parts of me were chipped away over time.

To keep playing live houses in Tokyo, there's something called a ticket quota: each booking, you have to sell a certain number of tickets yourself. So every time a show was confirmed, I'd reach out to everyone I knew, asking them to come. Only a handful actually showed, and after enough cycles of that I gradually stopped reaching out at all. What if I ask again and they say no? Even asking is probably a burden by now. Getting hurt started to scare me, and the stretches where I couldn't tell why I was doing this at all grew longer and longer.

Around that same time, friends my age who'd gone the university route were graduating, finding jobs, starting lives that looked, from where I stood, like smooth sailing. Whenever I heard those updates, I'd ask myself: what am I doing?

Somewhere along the way, something in me had broken. I can see that now.

And I never put any of that into words for the band — never explained that my own enthusiasm had cooled. I just let it blur to an end.

That I couldn't say thank you — to the three friends who poured their private hours into Cats and Dogs, or to the small handful of people who came to support us, before the band quietly went away — that's still a small unfinished thing inside me.

A time when I didn't want to talk about it

For a while after I stopped, I didn't really want to tell people I'd been in a band. I think I was embarrassed to be the one to bring up the story of someone who'd quit partway through.

Around the same time, I sometimes watched, from a distance, the friends who hadn't given up — who were still doing music or performing. I know firsthand how hard it is to keep going, because I stepped away partway through myself. I have a deep respect for the friends who kept at it.

And then, fifteen years

Fifteen years passed.

A little before the band started — I was twenty, still at the music school — I'd begun working part-time at the IT company where I still work today. I went full-time at twenty-four, and before I knew it I'd been there about twenty years.

The bassist for Cats and Dogs is also a friend I met at that part-time job. He's still at the same company, still my coworker.

After the band ended, I drifted away from DTM and music production, and started using my time to write code instead.

I have a family now, and live a happy life day to day. I've been given a lot, I think.

And then one day, a thought came to me: Instead of only receiving, maybe I could give something back to someone — even a little.

When I asked myself what to put out into the world, this name — the one at the root of it all — came to mind.

A place to repay, in a different shape, what I never got to say

The name of a band that ended before I could say thank you — I'm bringing it back, this time, as the sign over a place to write.

I couldn't make it ring out as Cats and Dogs. But in a different form — in writing — maybe I can leave behind, for someone, the things I've experienced and come to see. This is an attempt to take the unfinished business of those years and reshape it into something else entirely.

There's a second meaning to starting this blog. The version of me I'd labeled "too embarrassing to talk about" — the one who quit halfway — I'm finally going to face him properly.

On this blog, I plan to write what I notice and what I think, day to day, without pressing it into a mold. If anything I write happens to help someone of my generation, or gives them a moment to pause, that's enough.

In a shape the me who drew that logo could never have imagined — Cats and Dogs starts again.

Thanks for being here.