TOMONARI SORA: “This is the landscape that exists deep within us”

The Japanese singer-songwriter talks to CZMOS about a creative universe where music and images cannot be separated, and reflects on local identity in the age of global culture. From the album “Bunmei Kaika – East West” and his first overseas solo show to an unexpected connection with Italy. For TOMONARI SORA, a song does not necessarily begin with a sound. It can emerge from a landscape, the atmosphere of a book, or the futuristic shape of a toy Lamborghini. Melody, arrangement, words and images then call one another into being until they form a complete world. The Japanese singer-songwriter has followed this process since the fourth grade, when he taught himself to compose by translating what he saw — or imagined seeing — into music.

Born in 2002, TOMONARI SORA has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices of a new J-pop generation. Released in 2024, “Oni no Utage” has surpassed 160 million streams, while related social content has exceeded 1.5 billion views. Yet reducing his work to virality would miss what makes it compelling: songwriting that remains immediate without separating itself from folklore, humour, unease and cultural memory.

That tension also runs through his debut album, “Bunmei Kaika – East West”, released in November 2025. Its title draws on the expression associated with Japan’s opening and modernisation during the Meiji era, but for Sora it does not describe a simple fusion of East and West. Instead, it suggests a relationship in motion: different worlds changing one another without erasing their differences.

In this interview with CZMOS, TOMONARI SORA discusses his need to follow an idea from music all the way to its artwork, the value of local imperfections within an increasingly uniform culture, and what he discovered by hearing his audience in Taipei. The conversation eventually reaches Italy, from Arcimboldo to the Venice Carnival, where the artist recognised in a city transformed into theatre something he had already imagined in “ACTOR”.

TOMONARI SORA: music, images and Japanese identity

You started writing songs in the fourth grade, teaching yourself everything from scratch. Most children that age are consuming music, not building it. What were you actually trying to make back then, and how different is it from what you make now?

The music I made in the fourth grade was my way of turning the landscapes around me and the fantasy-like worlds I encountered in films and books into sound. I once wrote a song inspired by an Oriental turtle dove, for example. Whether something was real or unreal, I felt that I was translating the scenery and atmosphere that appeared inside me into music. Fundamentally, I don’t think what I make now is all that different. I still have a strong sense that “this sound carries this kind of image.” Back then, however, I wrote almost as a way of recording my imagination and inner world. Now I also think about how what I create will reach people and how they will listen to it.

You handle lyrics, composition, arrangement, illustration and artwork entirely on your own. That is more than a skill set: it suggests a refusal to separate the music from its visual and conceptual world. Is that control a creative need, or something closer to a philosophical position?

Doing everything myself is both a creative necessity and the way of working that feels most natural to me. To express the image in my head in its purest form, I feel it is best to carry the process through myself from beginning to end. Once a melody takes shape, it brings an idea for the arrangement; then the lyrics appear, followed by the visuals and artwork that fit the song. To me, these are not separate tasks. They are connected like a game of association. Rather than choosing not to separate the music, visuals and concept, it feels as though they simply cannot be separated by nature. It is less about wanting to control everything than following those associations all the way to the end. That is the form of creation that feels most right to me.

“Bunmei Kaika – East West” takes its name from the Meiji era, when Japan chose to open itself to the West and absorb its influence without dissolving into it. That already carries a critical position, not merely a title. How did you arrive at this framework for your debut album? And what does it mean today to build a distinctly Japanese artistic identity within a global culture that tends to flatten difference?

One of the things that led me to the theme of “Bunmei Kaika” was that more people had begun to see me as a “Japanese-style” artist. I think that image developed after many people heard “Oni no Utage” and “Niramekko”. Japanese elements are an important aspect of who I am, but they are not everything. With this album, I wanted to build on my Japanese identity while showing that I carry many other worlds within me. At first, I imagined a blend of Japanese and Western styles. As I thought about it further, however, I realised that I did not want East and West simply to mix. I wanted to understand them through a more positive, reciprocal relationship in which they influence and transform one another. That feeling is what “Bunmei Kaika” means to me.

To possess a Japanese artistic identity amid globalisation also means looking again at my own identity. Rather than department stores that look similar in every country, I believe the character of a place, and individual difference emerges in its markets and in everyday things that are slightly irregular, things so obvious to those on the inside that they are easily overlooked. Bringing attention back to what we usually miss or tend to discard also helps me establish my own expression and identity.

J-pop in the 1990s and 2000s was often preoccupied with sounding Western. Your aesthetic appears to move in the opposite direction: folklore, yōkai, matsuri and a deeply local imaginary. Yet your work travels globally. Do you think there is something in a specifically Japanese aesthetic that succeeds precisely because it does not try to be universal?

My approach differs from song to song, so I am not trying to create a Japanese style in every track. Sometimes I consciously draw on Western sounds as well; the musical language I need changes with the theme of the work. What matters most is not how I want to be seen as an artist, but what I want to communicate through that particular song.

When I deliberately use Japanese elements, however, I want people who share roots similar to mine to feel a sense of empathy or nostalgia. Empathy lies at the foundation of my music. At times, I want to express through sound and language those original landscapes that feel familiar to us and are rooted somewhere deep within. What is familiar to us can, in turn, be new and creatively stimulating to people with different roots. Perhaps, instead of diluting it in pursuit of universality, presenting it as “this is the landscape that exists deep within us” is precisely what allows it to travel farther.

When I see people overseas cover my songs, learn Japanese through my music, or create illustrations and cosplay inspired by it, I feel that world has truly reached them. At my first solo show outside Japan, held in Taipei last June, hearing fans directly in another country made me strongly feel, in a way that was different from the internet, that music can cross borders.

CZMOS Magazine is published from Italy, and our editorial perspective exists at the intersection of Italian culture and contemporary Asia. Is there an Italian artist, a musician, filmmaker, designer or anyone else, who has surprised or influenced you in an unexpected way?

I think Italian culture has influenced me in quite a few different and unexpected ways. As a child, for example, I loved Lamborghinis. I have never driven a real one, of course, but I owned a model car. The futuristic, almost spaceship-like image of those sports cars feels as though it became an original landscape for my own idea of “driving.”

Among painters, Arcimboldo has stayed with me. I love his idea of making human faces out of vegetables and fruit, and I once went to see an exhibition of his work in Japan. That sense of seeing one thing as something else sometimes appears in my artwork. I also enjoy applying it to music, hearing the sound of a shaker as if it were the sound of a broom, for example.

Then I visited Italy for the first time this year, and seeing the Venice Carnival was significant. The masks and the way the entire city takes on an extraordinary, theatrical atmosphere overlapped perfectly with the world of my song “ACTOR”. I had written it before the trip, but when I experienced that atmosphere in Venice, I thought, “Perhaps this is close to what I had wanted to express.” Performance, masks, celebration, unreality: these are elements through which Italian culture has influenced me in unexpected ways.

A landscape that can cross borders

In TOMONARI SORA’s words, identity is not something that must be made rigid or defended from outside influence. Instead, it is a landscape worth observing again: one shaped by everyday details, imperfections and images so familiar that they risk passing unnoticed.

His work shows that a deeply local artistic language does not necessarily need to be simplified to reach an international audience. It can travel precisely because it preserves its specificity, allowing listeners either to recognise something of themselves or encounter something entirely new.

From Japanese cultural memory to the masks of the Venice Carnival, TOMONARI SORA’s world continues to expand through unexpected associations. As in his music, each image leads to another, creating a space where reality and imagination, East and West, sound and vision do not need to be separated.

Source / Fonte: https://avex.jp/tomonarisora/profile/