This touches on a thought I had during a recent smoke session. I’m also going to loop in this post, as it got me started on this path.
I agree with you on the first point. No doubt, there definitely have been less bands forming, and even less bands sticking together long enough to get somewhere. But why? One of the simplest answers is that there are simply less people. Band members are aging out and there aren’t as many people in the next generation to replace them. Japan’s had a falling birth rate for quite some time now, and we’re just starting to see the impact in the scene now. Otherwise, I can’t come up with a good reason for why the most exciting thing to happen in the scene in recent years is for old bands to come back.
My unpopular opinion? It’s gonna get worse. A lot worse. We were also discussing the cyclic nature of the scene on our discord, but most of us in the discussion are of the mind that Japanese music is music and throwing up arbitrary labels to define your taste is always limiting in some fashion, but this time we also brought up the reality that visual kei has spawned scenes of its own. Idol rock and metal is booming; BAND-MAID is like the biggest rock band in Japan at the moment. K-Pop took notes from the aesthetics of visual kei and mixed it with pop, soul, and R&B and became its own juggernaut. And visuals aren’t exclusive to visual kei either, so there are plenty of bands with snazzy looks that sit just outside the scene, taking inspiration but not associating themselves with it. And it goes without saying that we can all agree that visual kei exists, but we are unable to pin down a solid definition of it.
So in short, we’re having our “punk rock moment”, and that more than ever we as international fans need to embrace the rest of Japanese music or risk spiraling into irrelevance, because our discussion ended on the fact that the “trunk” of visual kei has been established, and that it will always be there, but that it’s time for these new scenes to shine. These new scenes are solidly established - maybe even more established than visual kei at the moment - and have crossover/mainstream appeal that visual kei will never have, and for a scene that’s a niche within a niche we need the luxury of people to keep it going. We…don’t have that.
And this is just one aspect. Others can probably conjure up some good ones too.