Viewed from the hothouse of the Tokyo music scene, the northeast of Japan can sometimes seem like a mysterious land. A gray, frozen, sparsely populated expanse: a cultural wasteland.

"You're traveling east?" say my friends, with a raised eyebrow of suppressed incredulity. "Hmm ... I guess there's a lot of hardcore bands."

The idea that the northeast is a musical backwater is a crude stereotype with a grain of truth to it. Sendai and Sapporo are the only really large cities northeast of the Kanto area, and most of Japan's major music hubs spread out along the major expressways and shinkansen routes, bookended by Tokyo at the eastern end and Fukuoka in the west.