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Paper short abstract

Serving as a conduit for cultural engagement, Japanese noise music acts as a parasitic force within otaku and dōjin cultures. Sharing “maniac” roots with niche hobbies, noise mutates in a resilient, rhizomatic practice, infiltrating popular media contexts to achieve new forms of cultural relevance.

Paper long abstract

Since its post-war experiments, Japanese noise music has served as a unique conduit for cultural engagement, connecting avant-garde experimentation with deep-rooted traditions and contemporary subcultures. This engagement manifests through diverse stylistic approaches, challenging aesthetic conventions while fostering new cultural dialogues by transcending musical and cultural boundaries, with some artists integrating noise into contemporary pop culture, such as Hijokaidan’s collaborations with idol groups like BiS and Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, bridging underground experimentalism with the mainstream and expanding the audience for noise. Given these premises, this paper examines the parasitic integration of noise music within Japanese otaku and dōjin (coterie) cultures, arguing that noise functions as a subversive “maniac” root shared between underground experimentalism and popular niche hobbies.

The analysis begins by identifying the shared “maniac” roots between punk, noise, and otaku culture, noting that all three are fundamentally underground practices centred on intense personal hobbies. A central case study is provided by Hatsune Kaidan's performance at the Music Media-Mix Market (M3), a long-running event for independent music circles. This performance demonstrated the porous boundaries between these worlds, as fans of polished idol culture and digital Vocaloid music readily embraced the chaotic energy of Hijokaidan’s harsh noise. Then it proceeds to further define dōjin culture as a space of “secondary creation” (niji sōsaku), where amateur creators draw inspiration from mainstream works to produce fan-made music, manga, and software, whose noise releases often feature bishōjo illustrations, signaling an aesthetic link to anime and manga. The study also examines the role of online databases for Vocaloid and the Touhou Project media franchise, which facilitates the large-scale appropriation and reuse of motifs through noise rock, ambient, and experimental styles. Finally, the integration of extreme aesthetics, such as guro and denpa, leads to subversive subgenres supported by independent netlabels. By proving that Japanese noise is a resilient, rhizomatic practice that survives by constantly mutating through contact with pop culture, this paper investigates how noise, often perceived as an inaccessible or marginal art form, functions as a “parasitic” force that infiltrates popular media contexts to achieve new forms of cultural relevance and social legitimacy.