How do you start a death metal band in Japan?
Well, it’s simple, really.
First, you’re going to want to be from Saskatchewan in the early 2000’s.
Sure all of you are, so we can just take that as a given.
Second, you’re going to want to fly all the way across the world to an island
that you have virtually no understanding of either the language or the culture.
It’s important that you arrive with no friends, no plan, and no money.
Third, you’re going to want to work for a man who makes incredibly uncomfortable sexual jokes,
sometimes about children.
You’ll be locked in, kind of like an abused spouse.
And in the end, you are just going to have to stick with it because honestly, you have nowhere else to go.
But eventually, it's going to become so unbearable that you are willing to risk everything
just to do anything else.
And then, you're going to want to die and be reborn.
Not once, but again and again and again.
Because until you are willing to redefine yourself, there is nowhere that you can go
that you won't follow.
Today's story is dedicated to a man I can virtually guarantee you’ve never heard of.
He’s not rich, he’s not famous, he didn’t overcome some massive life trauma.
He certainly isn't perfect.
But I think he’s worth the time.
Because like most of us, he went out into this world with no idea what he wanted from it,
and he found it.
His name is Remy.
And he’s a death metal singer in Japan.
In 2003, a nineteen year old boy named Rameen Molavi flew from the cold prairie heart
of Saskatchewan to the tropical island of Okinawa, a quaint Japanese colonial oddity
a few hundred miles off the coast of Taiwan.
He’d been hired to teach at a small, out of the way kindergarten alongside another,
younger Canadian boy.
Me.
I always respected Rameen.
In our kindergarten, there was no better employee than him.
He arrived early and left late.
He rarely complained about the low pay or long days and awful boss.
Not because he was supportive of it, or dumb, or didn’t understand the world.
There were just some things he couldn’t change, so what was the point in complaining about them?
He was smart enough to know that he was locked in, and the only way out for him was forward.
When Rameen first stepped foot on this soil, he spoke virtually no Japanese.
He didn’t have a teaching degree.
He wasn’t university educated.
He didn’t come from a rich family.
Hell, he barely had a few hundred dollars to his name.
But he was young, and willing to take the risk.
No matter what came at him, at least he wasn’t sticking around in some hometown
he didn’t want to be from.
At least here nobody knew him as the dorky little kid he no longer wanted to be.
It wasn’t about Japan, it was about finding somewhere new.
A place that he got to define himself.
But anyone who has lived life on the road can tell you that
unless you deal with your baggage, you just carry it with you.
You can't run from yourself.
Living life in a foreign country may imitate the feeling of growth, but true growth always
comes from within.
And Remy had grown up feeling weak.
He was a bit of a nerd.
He was tall but lanky.
He wasn't comfortable in his physicality.
When someone tried to pick a fight with him at the bar, he wasn't the type to strike back.
It just wasn't his nature.
But he’d always been interested in martial arts, and this was Okinawa, where karate began.
So he joined a local class, even though all it really did was make him feel worse.
It didn’t make him feel stronger, it just highlighted the weakness.
It was no longer theoretical now, but he had to face it every single day.
He was the weakest person in his entire dojo.
And that was embarrassing.
So he started working out.
He bulked up.
He promised himself that by the time he went home to visit his family, he’d be a different man.
And he was right.
In the airport, his mother walked right past him.
She couldn’t even recognize her own son.
All of a sudden, nobody was calling him Rameen anymore.
Now, he was Remy.
It wasn’t just an aesthetic change, it was symbolic.
Gaining muscle didn’t give him a better understanding of who he was, or who he wanted to be,
it simply made it clear who he didn’t.
Growth isn’t about standing on the shoulders of giants, it’s about standing on our past selves.
On the pile of dead corpses you thought you once were.
And before long, that same introspection led him to a choice that made his pile grow further.
Remy quit his job, a job he was genuinely great at, and went back to school.
He got a degree in business and did the natural thing that one does when they have a degree in business.
He started working in an office.
But it didn’t take long before he realized that wasn’t much different than
what he’d been doing before.
Sure, the customer had changed, but the core was still the same.
It wasn’t long before that was just another body in the pile below him.
Now in Okinawa for over half a decade, he wasn’t that bright-eyed kid anymore.
He had people now.
He had friends.
And what's more, he had a little bit of money.
So when he heard through the grapevine that there was a bar for sale on the cheap,
he thought to himself, shit why not, and he bought it.
It failed.
Not because he didn’t give it his all, but the timing just didn’t work out.
The local American military, around which the entire nightlife of this island revolves,
shut off the tap.
Punishing the many for the bad acts of the few.
The in-the-know refer to that time as prohibition.
And with no military out drinking, few bars could survive.
That included his.
But he wasn’t deterred.
As ever, he just treated it as another bit of the pile to stand on.
A failed bar was the first step towards a successful one,
and soon he’d try again.
Only this time, he was gonna do it his way.
It wouldn’t be about the military, it would be about him.
His interests, his beliefs, his desires.
He wanted a bar for Okinawans and foreigners alike.
A place where people who actually cared about the island might find themselves having a drink.
A place for people like him.
He named the bar Remy’s, branded after himself.
His girlfriend and bandmates helped with the design, and his friend Tone helped turn it
into a hub for live music.
Soon, he’d be hosting bands who would otherwise never get to see a stage.
Bands that could maybe, at best, pull in a dozen of their friends to come and watch.
Once if ever.
Yet, famous or not, they were the sound that defines modern Okinawa.
Not some folksy attempt to entertain the elderly with a culture that no longer existed,
but a conduit to a future that nobody could stop.
And they all thoroughly thanked him for the opportunity.
Night after night, week after week, he watched this island’s future perform.
And eventually, it just made sense that he’d want to do it, too.
After all, he’d built the stage, so why not stand on it?
The only thing holding him back was fear.
So one more Remy died, and that pile grew that much bigger.
So together with his girlfriend, Tone, and a few local musicians who shared their interests,
they started a band.
High Tech Low Life, as you can see by the shirt, I am a fan.
But in the beginning, they could only draw in ten, maybe fifteen people.
That's the way it goes.
So he put in the work.
He spent dozens if not hundreds of hours stapling posters, writing messages,
cajoling his friends to come out to the show.
And eventually that number grew.
It became fifty, and then a hundred.
And that may not seem like a whole lot from main land standards, but here on Okinawa
that's a pretty big deal.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that they’re likely the largest death metal band
in all Okinawan history.
Although they call themselves cyberpunk.
I'm not actually sure about the difference.
I don't think it really matters.
In filming this, I went to a few of his shows.
I knew going in that it wasn’t my style of music.
I personally don’t really like anything above two decibels.
But I had a great time.
And I mean that, too.
This isn’t just me pumping up an old friend.
It was fun.
It was… authentic.
These aren’t people trying to be some rock stars, they’re not trying to be some viral sensation,
they’re just trying to be a local band.
A part of the community.
And it shows.
I know I’m not a particularly hip guy, I’m sure there’s a million Remys out there
all over the world.
But that’s my entire point.
What makes us great is not the number of people in the room, it’s the emotion we put into our music.
When you look at his band, its clear that nobody just walked out on that stage to make some money.
Nobody didn’t care.
Every single one of them is standing on a pile of themselves, and in the moment they perform,
I swear you can see it.
Like I said, I don’t really care for his type of music.
But if I lived here I’d be there every weekend.
Because I loved the experience.
There’s soul here.
And maybe that’s the key to a good life.
The music you make isn’t the important part.
It’s the journey it took to make it.
It’s standing on a stage you were once terrified to stand on and screaming out to an audience of ten.
I’m sad to have buried my friend Rameen.
Because it means I’m old.
Because it means that I have my own corpse pile to ignore.
But honestly, I’m thrilled to have met Remy.
Because he’s standing on that stage, exactly where he’s supposed to be.
This is Rare Earth.
Thanks, bud!