One of the first stumbling blocks you'll probably come across starting up a band in Japan is trying to book gigs. You'll explain to the booking manager about your music, give them a demo CD or a link to a place they can hear you online, they'll say, "Sure, I love your sound" — and then they'll tell you the noruma.

Predominantly a feature of the Tokyo music scene rather than its smaller-city equivalents, noruma is one of the most hated things among local musicians. It's basically a minimum quota of tickets for your performance that must be sold, any shortfall from which must be paid in cash by the band at the end of the night. It will normally amount to anything from 15 to 30 tickets, totalling between ¥20,000 and ¥60,000.

It's one of the features of the music scene here that comes as the biggest shock to foreign visitors to Japan, and is for obvious reasons a perennial gripe for local bands. Recently, the Tokyo indie Twittersphere has been abuzz with discussion of the subject, mostly along the lines of "Noruma is evil." But it seems to me that this misses the warped reality of the relationship between bands, venues and audiences in Tokyo.