Perfume GAME interview for bridge magazine

reporter: Komatsu Kaori
publisher: bridge vol. 56 
published: March 31, 2008

The unknown truth of Perfume

Appearing at Summer Sonic and boasting a number of musicians among their fans, Perfume is a rare breed, crossing over the norm of idols and gaining attention from the public. They made their breakthrough with the single “Polyrhythm” released last September, and in the time since, they’ve appeared at Countdown Japan, reached a record #3 on the singles chart and more, now making their growing momentum something of note. Nakata Yasutaka of capsule produces their high-quality technopop sound and heartrending lovestruck lyrics, and their emotionally restrained, robotic vocals, the polar opposite of anything sweltering or forward, put the finishing touches on the ephemeral, plastic-like worldview they express.

Formed in 2000 and hailing from Actors School Hiroshima, the group, with their long career and disciplined background, seems to have finally aligned that potential in lockstep with the modern era. Perhaps because they spent such a long time at the bottom of the totem pole, their real-life characters sometimes come across self-deprecating, but they’re down-to-earth, too, and there’s an entertaining gap between this and their perfectly polished staging.

As if smoothly evading the fever heating up around them, their album GAME, set to be released on April 14th, is a hard and heavy-hitting techno record. The sad, sweet and beautiful world of Perfume unfurls in perfect order, revealing a magnificent result. In commemoration of this album’s completion, we asked the three members of Perfume to look back on the eight years since their group was formed.

Formation in Actors School Hiroshima

―― Perfume was originally formed between A~chan, Kashiyuka and one other girl in 2000, when you were elementary school students. What image did the three of you have at the start?
A~chan: There was no real concept or anything — we just did things energetically. Well, it’d come down to how Nocchi viewed Perfume back then.
Nocchi: I was already enrolled when Perfume was formed, but within Actors School, they were like real idols. It felt like, “There’s a cute group of three girls here!” We had something called unit auditions, and if you passed, you could take part in the school recitals with your group. I saw Perfume dancing during one of those unit auditions, and they were so cute. Like in the kind of way that other girls admire. But I didn’t know anything about the members individually. They were really cheerful and energetic.

―― Then you lost one member and reached out to Nocchi.
A~chan: That’s right. We wanted someone who’d fit into our dynamic as three members, so we started talking like, “Then it’d have to be Ayano-chan, right?” We decided to invite her because of that.

―― I’ve heard that you all liked SPEED [a four-member girl group], so why were you so fixated on having three members?
A~chan: We originally talked about auditioning with just the two of us, but we thought we wouldn’t be a strong unit as only two, so we decided to add one more member to the group and became a trio. Then we lost that girl who joined at the beginning, so I chose Ayano-chan to replace her.
Kashiyuka: I wonder why? Maybe because there weren’t many trios around us?
A~chan: That’s true, there were basically either quartets or duos.
Kashiyuka: It was like duos, quartets or quintets. So we thought a trio would be nice. That’s probably all it was.
A~chan: Yeah, probably.

―― Then you must’ve had the sense that doing things differently from the rest was more interesting from rather early on.
A~chan: Oh, was that it? But maybe we felt like there was no point in doing the same thing as everyone else anyway.
Nocchi: Yeah, we didn’t imitate anyone either.
A~chan: A lot of the others were going the “cool” route, and even tiny little kids would be singing grown-up kinds of songs and auditioning with those. Yeah, maybe there weren’t very many groups who had a cute style. So it was like another thing that’d make us stand out.
Kashiyuka: The people around us were incredible, too — they were all at such a high level. It was almost all older girls, so we probably felt desperate to keep up with them. Going towards the auditions, I think we were naturally conscious not to lose to those girls.

Making their debut at a favorable pace

―― Next, you made your indie debut in March 2002, and your direction was a little different at that time compared to now.
A~chan: That’s true. It was like they took the feel of Perfume at the time and made that into a song. We came across very idol-like, with a kind of energy and power and vigor; I think we had that sort of “they’re young, but they’re working hard” feeling (laughs).
Nocchi: We came in like a storm all at once (laughs).
A~chan: Right, we blew in and then we blew out (laughs).
Nocchi: I think our hit-and-run approach has been with us since then (laughs).

―― (laughs) Do you remember when you had the most fun back then?
Kashiyuka: I was really happy to be able to sing our own song. We received a song of our own for the first time, and that was made into a CD and distributed out into the world, but we still hadn’t gotten to the point where we were conscious of our audience yet. Until then, it’d only ever been our parents coming to see our recitals, so they’d never required anything of us but to put together a fully complete production on stage. Creating those performances and dancing were really fun for me.
A~chan: At events, there was something like a sectioned-off block for Perfume. We were happy to have that. They’d release the setlists of who was scheduled to perform one or two weeks in advance, and if you weren’t listed there, you couldn’t go on stage. For Perfume, though, our songs wouldn’t be decided in advance, but they’d basically set aside a block for us. That made us happy. It felt like we were a little special somehow. There were between one and two hundred students at the school, so there were definitely people among us who got buried, like people you never even knew were there. Some people came just to have fun and others were doing it for real. So there was kind of a serious competition between us, and we were happy to have that little bit of special treatment.

―― What did it feel like when your indie debut was decided? Like a “We did it!” type of feeling?
Kashiyuka: It was just that: “We did it!”
A~chan: But we absolutely wouldn’t say it in front of everyone. Even when we were looking at the paper, it was like we were sneaking a glance at it (laughs).
Kashiyuka: On the inside, we were screaming, like, “I’m so happy!”
A~chan: We were in a pretty good position in the school, so we almost had to act a little like we didn’t care about things like that. Really little kids and girls who’d recently enrolled would all know about Perfume and be like “Wow, it’s really them!”, so we were a bit like celebrities within the school (laughs).

―― You must’ve felt swept up in all kinds of dreams about what might be waiting for you once you debuted, didn’t you?
A~chan: Ah, I think we probably didn’t have any idea what debuting itself would be like. We don’t really understand it much even now, though. We didn’t really get what the difference between an indie debut and a major debut was either. Since we’d gone all that way with it as our goal, hearing the word “debut” made us really happy. Once we got there, we didn’t think about how we’d change or what our situation would be like at all — it just made us happy that we’d get to have our own songs and appear at lots of events. We were just happy and that was all, so we didn’t think anything of what was ahead.
Nocchi: We knew that it was a huge chance, though, and all of us understood that if we let this go, we’d be finished. So instead of looking back, we only looked ahead. But it was like we couldn’t really voice any big dreams or anything. It wasn’t that I was seeing it in some idealized way, but I just thought it’d be nice if we could go to Tokyo and do well, although I couldn’t say it to anyone out loud. But I knew we’d have no future if this fell through once we got there, so I did have those worries. Well, if I say that, I was always worried.
A~chan: That’s right.
Nocchi: But we were always hanging by the edge.

―― (laughs) But to realize that failing there would’ve been the end of the road for you, the three of you must’ve already felt incredibly strongly that you wanted to keep going as Perfume forever.
Perfume: That’s true.
Nocchi: Anything else was unimaginable.
Kashiyuka: We didn’t think about any of it. We thought we had no choice but to stay as this trio.
A~chan: I think it was probably because all of us believed it’d be impossible to make it individually. It wouldn’t have worked even with two of us, so we must’ve been under the — false? (laughs) — impression that the three of us together made it all possible, I think. I’ve never given it any serious thought like that, but we came together as this trio before we even realized it.
Kashiyuka: It felt like we weren’t in a position to choose whether or not we stayed as these three members. That part just went without saying, and we weren’t allowed a say in anything else about our direction like adding new members or things like that. But we didn’t want anyone else to join. We did feel like that.
A~chan: We definitely had some pride. Even compared to other schools, in ours it was like if you could dance, then you were someone who could really dance, and our school tended to have a reputation like that. Then, since we’d gotten so much praise for our dancing, we thought this kind of idol stuff would be easy. So to some extent, it felt like you had to really excel in some way or else you wouldn’t be good enough. Don’t I sound really self-important right now? (laughs)
Nocchi: (laughs)
Kashiyuka: No, but it wasn’t as if we were so good out of everyone else in the school either.
A~chan: But we were good for being young. So probably, if we were chosen based on that criteria, only Nocchi would’ve gotten through.
Nocchi: Oh, that’s sort of nice.
A~chan: It wasn’t really so much that we could dance but just that we kind of shined, so if someone really egotistical had pushed her way into the group, I don’t think we could’ve maintained the atmosphere that Perfume had then or now. Yeah, I wonder why? When I think about it like that, it feels really strange. It just happened naturally.
Nocchi: Timing was part of it, too.
A~chan: But maybe us being friends was a big factor.

―― For girls, say, it’s normal to marry or pursue something like this as only a temporary hobby. I imagine there might’ve been girls like that in your school as well.
A~chan: You’re right, there were a lot like that.

―― But the three of you weren’t like that and even knew you’d have no chances left if you failed here. Why did you have so much drive to push yourselves that way?
A~chan: Just a misunderstanding.
Nocchi: Right, a misunderstanding, that’s all.
A~chan: We thought we could do it, or I don’t really know, but even our moms thought we could make it.
Kashiyuka: We had a weird self-confidence.
A~chan: Those people are strange. After moving to the capital, there were times when we had no work and then our minds would go in a different direction, like, “Ah, maybe there’s just no point. I’ll work hard in school instead.” We had moments when we’d lose hope, but our moms would be under this bizarre mistaken impression like, “You kids can get to the top!” (laughs) I guess it’s in a parent’s nature to be like that, though. But I think we were probably able to make it this far because our moms were there for us in that way. So it all started from a misunderstanding. “We can be stars! We can do it!”
Nocchi: It was really nothing but misunderstandings left and right.
A~chan: Yes, we came this far on a misunderstanding.

Proceeding to Tokyo on that momentum 

―― Following your indie debut, you moved to Tokyo in the spring of 2003, when you were in your third year of middle school. What led up to that point?
Kashiyuka: Someone who scouted new talent would periodically come to see our recitals, and in their rookie development program, there was something called Farm, an exclusive recital just for certain local groups they selected. After watching us there a few times, they were kind of like, “What do you think about heading over this way soon?” Then we didn’t hesitate either, and as soon as we could go, it was like, “We’ll go right now!” And we didn’t even feel any worry at that stage. That was probably just our own misunderstanding, though. We just felt so much hope. First it had been our dream to debut and we made our indie debut in Hiroshima, then putting out a CD had been our next goal, and then going to Tokyo had been our next goal after that. Then around the fall of our second year in middle school, they informed us that we’d be moving to Tokyo and I just thought, “Another one of our dreams is coming true!” My head was so full of that, I couldn’t think about school or anything else. It was just like, “We can go to Tokyo!” Nothing else mattered.
A~chan: For us, the four years we spent going to that school were really long and really intense. They always had us doing something every day. But when I think about it now, it’s been five years already since we came to Tokyo, and if I compare four of the years we’ve spent here to those four years, they’re completely different. The four years we’ve spent here are precious, too, but I think if not for those, we wouldn’t be where we are right now. But those four years in that school were an extremely dense four years. So part of us did feel like, “I wanna go to Tokyo already! I want to get out of here as fast as I can!”
Kashiyuka, Nocchi: Yeah.
A~chan: But we might’ve been looking at something way above our heads.
Kashiyuka: Right? We had so much hope towards our goals — our mentality was really incredible. We felt so strongly that we were going to make this happen no matter what.
A~chan: But I think we couldn’t have labored under that false impression if not for our parents’ help. There are a lot of girls who lose steam or who have to give up on their dreams because of money. The admission fees and tuition costs are a huge burden. So we have to show a lot of gratitude to all of our parents for allowing us that misunderstanding.

―― But it was fun for you, too, and not like you were being forced.
Nocchi: Yeah, it was hard, but it was fun, too, of course, and it felt like something we needed to be doing.
A~chan: That’s true, it might’ve become like something we had to do for us.
Nocchi: Yeah, without being told by anyone.
Kashiyuka: Before we knew it, we’d started thinking of it that way.
Nocchi: So maybe it really was a misunderstanding (laughs).

―― It must’ve been fun to feel like you were rising higher and higher.
A~chan: It was fun. Like, “At our next recital, we’re gonna show them this!”
Kashiyuka: At recitals, Perfume wouldn’t only do one song — we had a whole corner to ourselves. We were really happy to have something like that. We’d do a handful of songs just as Perfume.
A~chan: Right, each recital had 18 or 19 songs. Out of those, we’d do about four. So I think that was probably remarkable.

Change of direction to technopop

―― The writing of your name changed from “Pafyu~mu” in hiragana to Perfume, and in August 2003, you released “Sweet Donuts” produced by Nakata-san. It’s a completely different track from your songs before it, but what were your thoughts when you heard it for the first time?
Nocchi: I’d expected something with a more cool and stylish feel that we could belt out. Oh, but we’d been singing stuff like “Omajinai Perori,” so I guess that’s why we wouldn’t be given something like that when I think about it now, but Tokyo definitely had a pretty cool image once we got there, so I wondered if we could get them to let us sing something like that… Well, it did give me the impression of a cute, Perfume-like song, but it was definitely hard to sing, and there was a strange feeling to it like, “What is this!? This is a song!?”
A~chan: I was like, “Why are our voices so hard to hear like this?” But that was because he’d processed our vocals to make them fit with that techno style. None of us understood that at first, so we went ahead and belted it out. In the song, our voices are pushed down and held back. When I think about it now, that was probably because they wouldn’t match, so our voices were processed to be harder to hear. When I listen to it now, though, our voices sound like they’re rebelling and it really doesn’t match at all, so it’s funny. But at the time, I didn’t really know anything about techno and I couldn’t understand it, so I think it really comes across in the song that we were just being told what to sing.

―― Compared to your songs now, it’s abundant with emotion. The difference between each of your voices comes through rather clearly as well, and it feels a little like they’re colliding with each other and the track.
A~chan: It does feel like that.

―― But that was what you’d done all along, so you couldn’t sing any other way.
Kashiyuka: That’s right. Nakata-san would tell us to sing coldly or flatly, but we didn’t really know what it meant to sing in a flat way. Like, “Huh? What kind of singing style is that?” Should we relax? Speak the lines more fluidly? To start, we’d never been told anything but “put more feeling into it” in Actors School. It was nothing but “use more strength here,” “sing this part more clearly” and stuff like that, so we didn’t fully understand what we were being told to do at first. That’s why our way of singing wasn’t settled yet. It was stuck in that state of us not really understanding what to do.

―― How did you grow accustomed to techno after that?
Nocchi: Later on, as I listened to capsule’s songs, I had a cute impression of them at first, but then capsule also started to go in a cooler direction before long. Then Perfume followed their lead and went from being cute to bringing in a little more cool elements since our major debut, so as that went on, I kind of started to understand the appeal of techno and realize that our songs were good. I don’t know what the exact timing of it was, but we got used to it little by little.

―― You received this techno song unlike anything you’d ever sung before, but since Perfume had been around for some time at that point, did you feel any resistance towards this new direction?
Kashiyuka: Not musically. When we moved to Tokyo, though, we were really opposed to Perfume being written in English characters. “Pafyu~mu” in hiragana was thirteen strokes. We wrote it that way because we’d heard this urban legend that groups whose names were written with thirteen strokes in Japanese always became really famous and popular, so when we got to Tokyo and they told us they were going to change it to the alphabet spelling, we were really, really against that. But we couldn’t disobey them in the end, so it was put into English letters regardless.
A~chan: I don’t think we were very picky about music or anything. We didn’t feel much of anything towards the songs, and even when we were in school, it was more like we fixated on singers. So we were more likely to be particular about the people themselves, like MISIA, Koyanagi Yuki, aiko, Matsuura Aya, etc. It wasn’t about “This song has a kind of rock style! It’s really good!” but more like if one of those people sang it, the song was good.
Kashiyuka: Yeah, it’d be like “SPEED’s song” or “Amuro [Namie]-san’s song.”
A~chan: Right, right, right. Because we weren’t that finicky about the songs, we didn’t know about techno either, and we basically just thought it was hard to sing. We’d only ever thought about it like regular people, or like how a little kid would think.

Further change in style with their major debut

―― Making your major debut with “Linear Motor Girl,” your costumes went from having a colorful and cute feel to becoming more dark and cool. I imagine there were various strategies involved in making that decision, but for the three of you, what sort of impression did you have of it?
A~chan: We didn’t know much about those strategies; we were just really happy when they told us we were going to make our major debut. We knew they were holding a lot of meetings about it, and they showed us a sketch of what they came up with there first. Someone on the production team had drawn a concept illustration with kind of a cyborg look, and when they told us we were going to be doing something like that, we didn’t understand a single thing. We just went along with it like “Oh, I see” as if we got it, and then the costumes were really something else. The sleeve on this side was like leather or something.
Kashiyuka: Like one leather sleeve and then sleeveless on the other side.
A~chan: They were weird costumes. Plus, until then, we’d always worn cute ones in white or yellow, so it was obviously a shock to suddenly be told there was going to be a slit and everything. Like, “How high up is the slit going to be!?”
Kashiyuka: “Everyone will see our underwear!” And it was all pitch black. For the first track of our major debut, the three of us had talked like, “We should definitely go with white dresses. Pure white is the cutest.” Then we got these all-over black ones and we were really bewildered at first. And in the end, even the song “Linear Motor Girl” was a really different track, so without even comprehending the song itself, we shot the music video, took the jacket photos and recorded the song, and that made it one we really didn’t like early on.

―― Were you worried about Perfume’s future?
A~chan: Ah, we did have some moments like that. Well, but we were already down on our luck even around “Vitamin Drop” in our indie days, so we were glad for that new change. We were really happy that our staff had given that much thought to Perfume and tried to pull something together with us. So we felt like we should meet those expectations, and when we went on TV or wherever, we desperately tried to find good things about the song and constantly thought about how we would view it if we were the audience. We made a really big effort. We were glad to be given this chance, so we wanted to live up to it and make people love us more, and those feelings became really strong for us.

―― Did that period you mentioned before when you almost lost hope come before that point?
A~chan: That’s right. We were really doing our best on the surface, and we wanted to work hard, but as much as we thought “we want to, we want to,” we weren’t able to, we couldn’t, our audience wasn’t increasing. The people who came to see us would definitely keep coming, but there was a long period of time when our audience was stuck between 200 and 250 people. Since before “Vitamin Drop.”
Kashiyuka: Like around “Monochrome Effect.”
A~chan: Then we started performing in Akihabara after that and we did the song “Akihabalove” with Momoi Haruko-chan, and we actually like doing new things like that. So if we were told that we’d be doing something new, we’d get excited and jump on it, but if we didn’t see any increase in our audience from that, it’d feel like we came crashing down. None of us would speak those worries aloud, but behind the scenes, I think all three of us had started to feel like maybe we’d gone as far as we could go.
Kashiyuka: Yeah, everything was at a standstill.

―― Before you came to Tokyo, you only looked ahead and kept yourselves going on that momentum. After moving to Tokyo and failing to grow your fanbase like you expected, it must’ve felt like your first setback.
A~chan: You’re right, but it didn’t feel like a setback.
Kashiyuka: It felt like we saw reality. Until then, we’d always just been content with everything as long as we felt like we’d done well, and to that extent, we never paid any attention to the audience. As long as the performance had been perfect by our own standards, that was good enough for us, and we’d be like, “Our show today was so great!” But once we came out to Tokyo, we had events and concerts, not recitals, and we didn’t really have any experience catering to a crowd. Even when we did events in Hiroshima, it was just about us being on stage and less about doing that for an audience. Then when we got to Tokyo, we started to be more conscious of them and worked to get our crowd up to 250 people, but after that, we didn’t know how to increase it. We didn’t know how we should change ourselves going forward or anything like that either, so having that awareness of our audience might’ve been hard for us. 
A~chan: With our dreams and stuff, it’s sort of like when we were in school, we didn’t understand anything, so we could just say whatever we felt like. “I wanna be like this! I wanna be like that!” But I think the people who speak up about those things win in the end, because once they’ve said it, they’ll put in the effort to reach that goal, and that really makes them shine. But then I started to forget that, and while of course I still had tons of things I wanted to do and dreams I wanted to come true, it was like I couldn’t say that out loud. Like I couldn’t talk about them because they’d never happen anyway. Once you start feeling like that, you’ve already hit rock bottom, right? (laughs) Since you’ve lost that light. But I think we probably did our best.
Kashiyuka: Yeah. I mean, we couldn’t be like “I hate this, I give up” at that point. We just tried to make the best of it. 
A~chan: So I think our managers were really great in that respect.
Nocchi: They were all the kind of people who wanted to do cool stuff.
A~chan: Yeah, they weren’t idol people.
Nocchi: Right, exactly, so even when they suggested something that took us by surprise, we could put our all into that because we thought it was cool, and we started consciously wanting to do more cool stuff. We had our worries about it, but we also had a lot of hope.
A~chan: I think our staff probably had a lot of difficulties involving money, though. But they never spoke a word of that to us, and instead, they’d say things like “Let’s keep at it!” and gave us so many incredibly encouraging words.
Kashiyuka: They tried to instill more confidence in us. They’d tell us, “It’s OK! As long as you do your best, it’ll all turn out fine!”
A~chan: So I think we were in an environment that made things really easy for us — a privileged environment. We’re still in one now, I think.

―― When you hit that wall of how to increase your fanbase and spread the word about Perfume, what was the first course of action that occurred to you?
A~chan: Since we’d been doing street performances, we had the idea to make flyers and hand them out there. We drew each of our faces and wrote about our personalities and doodled all kinds of things like our hairstyles.
Kashiyuka: We put down our favorite things and stuff.
A~chan: Like information that nobody really needed (laughs). But when we started handing those out, there were people who’d come to get them and people who kept them and filed them away. We also sold our own CDs in person and would aim to sell a certain amount each day. Like one copy each, or as many as possible. Then we already had the attention of the people watching at the front of the crowd, so we tried to keep an eye out for people in the back doing their shopping and things like that. Nobody really told us to do it, but we just took it upon ourselves.
Kashiyuka, Nocchi: Yeah.

―― Coming face-to-face with reality for the first time and seeing those misunderstandings you’d had until that point begin to crumble away, did you ever have the sense that maybe you were wrong about all of this?
A~chan: Ah, but we were also part of a group called Bee-Hive together with some other female artists under Amuse, and they placed us in that unit right out of the gate. So our days were really busy as soon as we got to Tokyo. Besides us, the other groups in it had been popular or well-known for a while already and had an established audience to some extent. That was where they first presented us, so it was another really privileged environment. Even doing street performances, we did have people who came to see us, although it was just like a trickle here and there. Well, looking back on it now, there’d be some fifteen people or less than ten or something like that. But we never considered that a small amount and always thought about how to satisfy that audience and make them want to come back, so we were never like “What do we do with this?” or “Whoa, this is rough” or anything like that.
Nocchi: Even as we didn’t have much confidence, we probably never stopped having those wrong ideas (laughs).
Kashiyuka: That part always stuck with us (laughs). I think even when we were worried, we tried not to think or talk about that. If there were a hundred people in front of us, we’d perform for those hundred people, but if there was only one, we were taught to sing just for that one person. I don’t remember who taught us that — to sing just for those fifteen people if we had fifteen people in front of us — but ever since then, we became less shocked by the size of the audience and much more focused on singing for the people who were there.

―― It must’ve felt like you were coming into direct contact with those people, being able to see the faces of your audience.
Perfume: Yeah.
A~chan: That’s true. When we were in school, it was just parents and relatives, so we’d never paid them any mind. So you’re right, we started to look at each and every person individually.

Their sense of distance from techno

―― Was there a period when you started to get the hang of how to sing techno?
A~chan: Starting from around “Vitamin Drop,” we learned how to sing it properly.
Nocchi: Yeah, I think the difference between “Monochrome Effect” and “Vitamin Drop” is huge. We were able to sing it right without fighting against the music, I think.
A~chan: Like we were following along. Or like we’d given up (laughs).
Nocchi: I guess it was around that time? We started sitting down to sing.
Kashiyuka: Nakata-san had us sit. We really hated it, though, to be honest (laughs). But we couldn’t tell Nakata-san that. It just stayed between us. We’d be like, “Next time for sure, we should ask him to take away the chair!”
A~chan: “Let’s get him to let us stand!”
Kashiyuka: We’d be talking like that, but once we got there, we’d go “yes, sir” and then the next thing we knew, oh, we’re sitting down. In the end, we couldn’t say anything. But I’ve started to realize lately that it was better that way. I understood that the meaning of having us sit was to restrain our voices. Now I think that’s fine. When we made our major debut with “Linear Motor Girl,” we were still holding onto the image we had of ourselves from our indie era, and even though we knew we had to adapt to our new concept, deep down, we still liked our older cute style better, so we weren’t totally used to the cooler stuff yet.
A~chan: That made us reject “Linear Motor Girl” a little. Then when we got our next track “Computer City,” it was actually a great song when we really thought about it, and we were kind of excited to move into this cool concept. So we were really eager when we shot the cover photos for that one, too.
Kashiyuka: You can really sense our hope looking at it, honestly (laughs). I think we also probably liked the costumes.
A~chan: And I really liked our makeup.
Kashiyuka: Somehow the timing worked out for us to like all of it. From there, we came to like our own songs, and that was when we started to buy our own CDs.

―― So you hadn’t been confident in yourselves until that point.
Nocchi: Yeah, it really was just like that. And we were in that box of being idols, so the people at school would sort of make fun of us. “You guys are just idols anyway, right?” I felt like it had that kind of connotation.
A~chan: Our class was full of cute girls, too. 
Nocchi: Right, the girls in our class never invited us anywhere. They’d say things like “You want to come with us? Sure, sure, then tag along next time” and then never really ask us to go.
Kashiyuka: We didn’t have confidence, so we couldn’t speak up in those situations.

―― What was the biggest factor that led to you starting to like techno and growing more confident around “Computer City”?
Kashiyuka: I don’t know why that was. There wasn’t any one definitive reason for it. For some reason, rather than there being one particular thing that made us change, we just really started to accept techno from then on. Maybe it was partly because we were high school sophomores? We started to like cool things a bit more than cute things, and we got a little more interested in music, too. That was when I really started to like Nakata-san’s music and techno itself. So although I really love the song, it wasn’t so much that the song was good — I just suddenly started to like all of it beginning from that point.
Nocchi: I can’t remember if it was out in the country or in Tokyo, but I think that was probably around the time we got invited to perform at a club event, and we actually saw the adults there getting into Perfume’s songs in a club setting. As we had more experiences like that, it was like we started to realize that the music we were doing was cool.
Kashiyuka: From that period forward, we started to appear with people like Utamaru-san [of the hip-hop group Rhymester] and at [DJ crew] Moushiwake Nighters’ events, and I think it’s because we had more opportunities for techno and club music lovers to get to know us. And Perfume originally danced in clubs in Hiroshima, so we really loved that atmosphere. We kind of gained more confidence because of all that. 
Nocchi: It sort of felt like, “We might get made fun of in school a little bit, but people go wild when they play our songs in the club!”
A~chan: Like, “I bet you didn’t know that!” (laughs)
Nocchi: We were a little timid, but that was like our small rebellion (laughs). That was when we started to find the confidence to say that much for ourselves.

―― Did you feel like you’d started to see a light at the end of the tunnel because of that development?
Kashiyuka: It wasn’t so much a light, but I felt glad that we could go in a direction like that. I don’t know if all three of us thought that or not, but it made me really happy to be recognized by the club scene and people who were into that kind of cool music.
Nocchi: Yeah, I was happy.
Kashiyuka: I was really jealous of artists who went on TV and were super popular and successful in the mainstream, too, of course, and I always thought that would be really nice, but — and I don’t know if I was just trying to act tough about it or not either — I kind of thought it was cooler to do nothing but live performances and have all these live shows under our belts. We probably had that mentality because our former manager was this real rocker type who was kind of like “Let’s give them a show!”, so we ended up performing in all these live houses where a lot of rock bands played. So I was much happier being recognized by people like that. Like they were acknowledging the quality of our music. Sort of like, “Ordinary idols could never even set foot in here.” It felt like we had a little something extra special.

―― I think the path from your days at Actors School Hiroshima to your move to Tokyo must’ve felt to some extent like it was all laid out for you, but once you got there, you started to break that new ground, and I imagine for that reason you were able to try out a variety of different things. Did you feel like you had to take on a lot of new challenges?
A~chan: Ah, it was less like we had to and more like we wanted to.
Kashiyuka: Yeah, we liked things that were different.
A~chan: We wanted to take any audition we could and do whatever was available to us.
Kashiyuka: We had a hunger for that.
A~chan: When I look back on it now, though, I think we really pushed through a lot. But we didn’t think of it like that at the time. Our manager and everyone left us on our own, too, so maybe it was for the best that we constantly had to come up with things ourselves. Then if we started to lose hope or lose our way again, the adults would come back and help us, so we were in a really good environment. But it was because it was the three of us, so while I can say now that our circumstances were good, maybe things would’ve been worse if we’d had different members, and we could’ve even ended up going down some weird path. I think it’s so wonderful how everything worked out for us.

―― Even when you felt conflicted about your direction, you were never conflicted about continuing Perfume.
Perfume: Yeah.
Kashiyuka: We weren’t. Because we always thought about Perfume first and foremost.
A~chan: Was it a misunderstanding?
Kashiyuka: A weird misunderstanding?
Nocchi: I trusted the members and our staff and I loved all of them, so I think that was probably why I never gave up.
Kashiyuka: We really cherished this concept of Perfume. I think probably even our staff didn’t want to compromise and just do whatever we were offered. After all, when a group doesn’t sell, sometimes they’ll say you should’ve given up and just done gravure instead, right? But all three of us would say “Gravure is the only thing we don’t want to do!” when it came to that.
Nocchi: Like, “We refuse to take off our clothes!” (laughs)
Kashiyuka: “We don’t want to do stuff like that as Perfume!” (laughs)
A~chan: We did it right after we moved to Tokyo, though (laughs).
Kashiyuka: We didn’t know anything about it. We were just like, “Why are we wearing swimsuits?” (laughs)
A~chan: They made us sit on something like a box without knowing the reason why and then they said something like, “How about you try putting on swimsuits now?” We were like, “What!?”
Kashiyuka: “Huh, we’re going to wear swimsuits?” But despite that, we really didn’t understand a thing, and we wore them because it was our job.
A~chan: We couldn’t say anything (laughs).
Kashiyuka: But after making our major debut and all of that, once we got to be more conscious of Perfume as an entity, I think that was when we started saying things like we didn’t want to wear swimsuits or thinking that’d be weird and clash with our image of Perfume. I think we must’ve given that thought to what Perfume is.

―― It was like you three developed this image of Perfume in your minds subconsciously rather than it being something you actually discussed.
Perfume: Yeah.
Kashiyuka: We’ve never talked about how we should be or anything.
A~chan: But our first manager was like that for sure. He’d be like, “You’re gonna be in swimsuits!? That’s completely out of the question!” Maybe it was because he had that attitude towards it?
Kashiyuka: That was probably part of it, because he was such a rock kind of guy.
A~chan: That brainwashed us and then we ended up being like, “We absolutely refuse to pose in swimsuits!” (laughs)
Kashiyuka: He’d be like, “I told you, racking up gigs is better than going on TV.” He always said “Your concert today was great” and things like that — that’s the kind of person he was.
A~chan: We’d be sooo happy if he told us that.
Kashiyuka: Right? Like, “Wow, awesome!” A little misunderstanding (laughs). But I think our staff creating that really well thought-out vision was part of it. I think if our staff had been all over the place doing this, that and the other thing, we wouldn’t have made it down the kind of path we’re on now.

Moving forward to “Polyrhythm”

―― With that, your public recognition skyrocketed at once thanks to “Polyrhythm” in September of last year. How did you feel at that time?
Kashiyuka: It actually made me really scared to gain so much popularity out of nowhere and even end up on the charts as a result. I was really happy that a much greater number of people in the world had finally gotten to know Perfume, but on the other hand, I had a lot of anxiety that we’d get carried on the wave of those people who came to know us through that “Polyrhythm” commercial and become like a one-hit wonder or end up thrown away as a fad.
Nocchi: Yeah, it was like that. But even then, we talked with our staff about a lot of things, kind of to calm ourselves down. Maybe because we trust them, that put our minds at ease. We talked about keeping at it and doing our best.
A~chan: For the average veteran artist, maybe eight years isn’t very much time at all, but for Perfume, those eight years started from when we were just eleven years old and really young, so that’s a really important and long time in the context of our lifetimes. We’re still only 19, so you could easily call that half our lives. So when they said it was about time that we made it and reassured us like, “You kids have already done this much, right? Don’t worry, we’re never going to run away,” it made me really happy that they’d say that. For some reason, when people were telling us “It’s finally happening for you guys!” I didn’t understand it at all and just thought, “What are they flattering us for?” So I just didn’t take it seriously. When they told us our position on the charts and stuff, I really couldn’t believe it. It didn’t feel real to me, so I felt like I was just floating on air and unable to take it all in.
Kashiyuka: Yeah, it felt like they were talking about someone else.

―― You made a lot of effort to spread the word about Perfume and increase your audience even by a few people. Did you have something like this in mind as the goal or target of that work?
A~chan: We didn’t have anything in particular we wanted to be like somehow. Just content with the three of us staying together, in sort of a strange way. Even though we could’ve aimed higher.
Kashiyuka: It’s true. We had our hands full with what was in front of us, and it took all our energy just to manage that, so we never thought about whatever was way farther ahead.
A~chan: What must we have been aiming for?
Kashiyuka: Right?
A~chan: But we had the broad kind of goal or dream that we wanted people to know who we were just by our name and that we wanted other people to admire us. We talked about those sorts of things. But what did we mean by that? That’s a big undertaking.
Kashiyuka: We probably said some incredible things, right? We didn’t realize it ourselves, but we’d end up being known by many more people.
A~chan: Yeah, so when I think about it now, what really is a dream? But this year, our goal is something closer like a one-man concert at Budokan — I mean, that isn’t close at all, because the Budokan is so big. But we do have that kind of specific idea in mind.
Kashiyuka: We’ve only recently gotten to where we can speak that out loud. We couldn’t say it before now.
Nocchi: ’Cause it was impossible (laughs).
Kashiyuka: It was like if we voiced it, we’d just bring shame upon ourselves.
A~chan: Right, like even if we really wanted to perform at Summer Sonic or Countdown Japan, we knew we never would, so we couldn’t say it.
Nocchi: Yeah, we couldn’t say that.
Kashiyuka: After all, if we mentioned it in an interview, we thought they’d kind of laugh at us like “Oh, you want to go to Summer Sonic?”, so we never said it. Then we got to go last year and it was a shock for us.
Nocchi: I mean, it’s Countdown Japan?
Kashiyuka: We were like, “You’re lying!? Who’s going?”
Nocchi: It’s a super big rock festival.
A~chan: Exactly, it’s Japan. It’s the whole scope of Japan. It’s amazing when you think of it that way. When I think about “Baby cruising Love” and “Polyrhythm” being #3 and #7 in the country, even though that’s only for a certain fixed point in time, I still don’t understand those figures. We didn’t believe we’d ever go any higher, so we never paid attention to rankings or set a ranking as a goal for ourselves. When we rank like that on the chart, we’re so elated, but it isn’t a goal for us. Well, I guess those rankings and sales numbers aren’t a repayment to the staff who’ve stood by us, but it’s easy to see and understand when it’s expressed through those figures, so I think it becomes something like that. I feel like the people on top of the charts probably don’t pay attention to those positions all that much. So I want people to care more about what our music will be like.
Kashiyuka, Nocchi: Yeah.
A~chan: Not only being obsessed with the rankings and thinking this or that about them.
Nocchi: So the reason why they don’t care about rankings is because they can always go higher. Once you become someone who can always go higher like that, you don’t have to bother caring about those things anymore.
Kashiyuka: Instead of being concerned about other people’s opinions of our music, we should have our own policy or individuality as a group. I want to maintain what makes us Perfume rather than only making music in response to whatever is popular right now, so that we can create what we think is fresh or what really excites us. Well, it’s not like we’re even really making any of it ourselves — truthfully, all we do is sing, and our songs and lyrics are written for us and our staff takes care of everything — but I hope we can be like that in the future.
A~chan: But even thinking we’d like to be like that down the line shows how little leeway we have. Like right now, we don’t have that margin for error, so rankings and stuff really weigh on us. But that’s only one standard, after all, so it isn’t like that’s everything. So I just hope that the number of people who like us and what we do will increase more than right now. For now, we’re still performing like we always have, and our cover art does feel more polished, but we aren’t forcing ourselves, and I think it represents or shows us as we are right now without trying to be something we’re not, so I’m really happy that the number of people who like us as this current Perfume is growing. Because this is who we are. I want to stay true to ourselves without feeling the need to keep up appearances.
Kashiyuka: That’s part of why it doesn’t feel real to us.
A~chan: Exactly. So for example, if we really glossed ourselves up and went out there looking super stylish and people told us that was cool, it’d be like “Right?” (laughs) — because, you know, “We meant to look that way” — but we aren’t like that. We’re like, “What? What part of us do they like? What about us are they calling cool?” Like, we’re still performing the same way and everything, so we just think, “Huh? What’s so great about that?” Because we don’t have any confidence, or we don’t believe in ourselves. So when people praise our cover art, we’re like, “Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it?” (laughs) Since everyone working with us put their utmost effort into it and did so much to make us look pretty, we feel like, “Oh, thank you very much, but it was all thanks to our team’s hard work.” I think it’s probably something like that.
Kashiyuka, Nocchi: Yeah.
Kashiyuka: We’re probably not that inclined to show ourselves off as something we’re not, and of course, we don’t think of our cover art or videos as “our” work that we’ve had a hand in creating either. So we ourselves are really objective about that and have no problem saying things like, “Look at this amazing album cover! Isn’t it just the coolest!?” So because performing is something we do naturally on our own, we don’t experience that the same way — we’re just naturally and obviously doing what we want to do and improving what we want to improve. Our album art and songs and everything are made for us by other people, so we’re always really unbiased about those things. But we can’t look at our own performances objectively, so it surprises us a little when people compliment us on that.

―― It feels like you’re a combination of two extremes where you lack confidence, yet you have this conviction in your odd misunderstandings.
Perfume: (laughs)
Kashiyuka: We aren’t too good at finding the middle ground (laughs).
A~chan: This is the first time I’ve ever thought this much about it (laughs). So all my words are too insufficient, and halfway through, I don’t even know what I’m saying (laughs).

―― (laughs) I suppose Perfume will always keep going forward with this same atmosphere.
Perfume: That’s true.
Nocchi: Well, even if we get married, I think we’ll keep going.
Kashiyuka: Perfume will be Perfume even when we’re 30.
A~chan: We’re going to have our weddings all together!
Kashiyuka: We’ve really been saying we should hold our weddings over three consecutive days (laughs).
A~chan: I’m going on the first day.
Kashiyuka: That’s why we’re telling her not to lose energy after that.
A~chan: Right, everything will be super orderly only for the first day, and then from the second day on it’ll be like, “Oh, congrats, congrats.” (laughs)

―― Then what is your final goal?
A~chan: What should it be?
Nocchi: I want a bunch of people to come to my funeral.
A~chan: She’s dying! She’s dying! (laughs)
Kashiyuka: That’s too final! (laughs)
A~chan: I don’t know. What do you think?
Kashiyuka: I guess we don’t really have an ultimate goal.
A~chan: I just want the three of us to stay together.
Kashiyuka: Yeah, if the three of us can stay doing techno forever, that’s enough.
Nocchi: And if we can do cool stuff.
Kashiyuka: For us, all we want is to do things we sincerely enjoy, so we don’t have any specific goals or anything like that. We don’t have anything set out in front of us like, “Okay, we’ve made it this far! We finally reached our goal!”, so even if we say we want to be doing this or that ten years from now, once those ten years go by, we’ll probably already have some other far-off goal in mind. But I do want to keep feeling that close sense of danger. We’re the kind of people who go to waste if we’re kept in a warm place for too long. I want to stay on a cliff where we could fall straight down if we were pushed.
A~chan, Nocchi: Ahahahahahaha.
Kashiyuka: Because we spoil if we’re in a warm spot. I think it’s probably been that way ever since we were in Actors.
A~chan: They’d be like, “There’s already no hope for you!”
Kashiyuka: “If you kids don’t make an effort now, you won’t have a future!” (laughs)
A~chan: Maybe it’s because those words were said to us so many times. “There is no next time!” and things like that (laughs).

―― (laughs) Understood. Then, to wrap this up, I think your album GAME coming out in April is very good.
A~chan: Ah, really? I think it turned out pretty heavy. We’d been saying we wanted to do something like that forever, but if we say we want to do something, Nakata-san is the type to want to do the opposite. He’s a little contrary like that. One of the tracks is called “GAME” and it has this really heavy bass part that goes like ♪dededededededede, and after I told him “I really like that part!” during recording, half of it disappeared (laughs). That’s how contrary he is. When you praise someone and even that makes them want to do something different, anything you say becomes useless, I realized.
Kashiyuka: So all we can do is leave it up to him.
Nocchi: It’s a fittingly contrary album.
A~chan: But I think people who hear that first will consider it really good.
Kashiyuka: It feels like we’ve finally gotten to make strides into techno for real.

―― Like you haven’t gone for widely accessible pop music just because you’re in this situation right now — it’s all hard, edgy techno.
A~chan: That’s right.
Kashiyuka: When you say it’s not like Perfume, I guess it’s not.
Nocchi: I’d really like for people to listen to it as an introduction to Perfume.
A~chan: That’s hardly an introduction.
Kashiyuka: I think Complete Best would be better for that.
Nocchi: No, let’s introduce them from here.
Kashiyuka: If they start with this as an introduction, they’ll be let down when they see our past.
Nocchi: But that’s what makes it cool!
A~chan: Yeah, it’s cool. But it’ll probably feel really challenging. If they don’t like techno, I don’t think they’ll consider it any good, and if they’re not someone who listens to a variety of music, I don’t believe they’ll think it’s good either, so I hope those people will listen to it, too.