Fishmans specal event

On December 28th 1998 the legendary Japanese band Fishmans played their last concert with their iconic vocalist and lead songwriter Shinji Sato. The concert was intended as the farewell of the bassist Yuzuru Kashiwabara who was leaving the band, but it ended up also being the farewell of Shinji Sato with his unexpected death the following year. This concert is known as 男達の別れ (otokotachi no wakare), meaning something like “a farewell of men”. It goes through songs from throughout most of their career, developing them in interesting ways with improvisation and new ideas and ends with a 40+ minutes long performance of their fittingly titled “Long Season”.

With the band gaining significant attention in recent years thanks to online music forums like RateYourMusic, the Fishmans fandom is bigger than ever, and the English-speaking community has started a tradition known as “Fishmas” to match up with this concert and the Christmas times. Inspired by this, I thought this was a great oppourtunity to show the concert film of this performance, since the 28th of December this year marks the 20th anniversary of the release of the concert DVD for the performance. This event will be on the 27th which might be seen as “cheating”, but at least by the time we start it’s already early on the 28th in Japan, so good enough.

Together with this, I thought I might as well also show the 2021 Fishmans documentary to give some information for those who choose to stick around after the concert film.