Touching Scandal

31 Jul, 2026

For reasons that I myself don't fully understand, I have been a fan of the Japanese band Scandal for well over a decade now. I won't claim that they're the greatest band ever, or that I like all of their songs, or even most of them. I just like them.

Every nerdy white guy has to decide how to interact with Japanese popular culture at some point. I took a slightly oblique approach: manga and anime never really did anything for me, but the Japanese music scene has been an inexhaustible source of new delights.

I like languages, and Japanese has always fascinated and intimidated me in equal measure. I used to subscribe to the usual beliefs that people have about learning languages: that it's impossible after a certain age, that you can never lose your accent, that attaining fluency is impossible without living abroad, etc.

Eventually I realised that I have managed to learn English without ever once studying it, only ever having spent a few days in England, and I have been mistaken for a native speaker more than once. Americans without fail assume I'm British, but I tend to confuse actual British people because they cannot place my accent. One of them once told me that I sound like I was born at the BBC.

Logically, if I managed it once, I could do it again, and so I resolved to learn Scandinavian, which turned out to be about as difficult as falling out of a tree. (Pardon the vagueness, I'm trying to retain some anonymity here.)

This gave me all the hubris I needed to try my hand at Japanese next.

From David Moser's classic Why Chinese is so damn hard¹:

Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will *still* be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.

It's been a while, and I am now intimately familiar with the kind of humility that Moser talks about. It is unlikely that I will ever attain fluency, or even basic conversational competence. Despite the efforts of kind and patient tutors, it turns out communicating in a language that I barely speak is a major mental obstacle for me. I'm sure the key is out there somewhere, but I haven't found it yet.

No matter; even if I do not reach the destination, the journey has been more than worth it. If nothing else, it was over pictures of my trip to Tokyo that I got together with my first ever girlfriend.

And then there is the music.

Japanese bands don't tour in Europe much, for obvious reasons. I once found myself in a tiny Scandinavian venue comprising about two percent of the audience -- more if by weight -- an experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Some years ago Scandal were performing in a country near me, so I drove for a few hours to go see them. I had been following their journey on Instagram, and I had seen some pictures of their tour bus. When I finally arrived at the venue, that same bus was suddenly there, as if it had jumped out the two-dimensional confines of my phone screen and extruded a material presence into reality.

I had of course booked VIP tickets -- just like everyone else there had -- which entitled me to a "hi-touch" event with the band, "hi-touch" being what Japanese thinks is the English term for a high five. High-fiving Haruna, Tomomi, and Rina was certainly intense, but when I got to Mami at the end of the line everything faded into darkness and her smile filled the entire universe.

As I walked off in a daze I was ready to go home again until I realised that there was still a whole concert to go.