Waking up in the morning was a bit surreal. Did what happened the day before really occur? That was US doing that? It was a trip. But what was even more trippy was that we began to get responses from the heavy metal press in other countries. That same morning, Mai got a call from Germany. She couldn't talk because she didn't know enough English, so she took the guy's number and had me call him back after we had gotten everyone together to be part of it with me acting as interpreter. The interview lasted about 90 minutes. It wasn't just about us, but about the state of the Japanese metal scene and how women fare in it.

The calls kept coming after that, too. People were apparently making copies of our CD-ROM and sending them around, which was great for us. I taught Mai how to say, "Give me your number and I'll have our American guitarist call you back." On the remaining 700 or so CD ROMs we still had, we put a sticker with an email address on them rather than making people call Mai's number. Her number was for people in Japan to book us or contact us for more information. Back in 1995, the consumer internet was just getting off the ground popularitywise, so it was still questionable how many people had web access let alone email capability.

I had to return to the U.S. since I had just about used up all the time I was allowed to stay there without a visa (180 days a year, but no more than 90 at a stretch). I wouldn't be able to return until March. Cindy went back with me, which effectively put the group out of commission for five months. However, during that downtime, I went to a senior level computer science class at a local university before their lecture started and told them I was looking for a fulltime web designer to create and maintain a homepage for the group. I wrote my emal address on the chalkboard and left.

The next morning, when I checked my email, I found three applicants for the position. I got back to them and, after interviewing them at a Starbuck's about a mile from my house, chose one as my permanent web guy. Given the tools that were available at the time, he did a real good job and kept updating and improving it as we not just acquired video, audio, etc to put up, but to make it look better. I was insistent on simplicity so that it was easy to use and navigate. The rest of the members were glad to be on the web and a couple of those who had been holdouts from getting online finally bought computers so that they could see it on a daily basis and communicate with fans.

Mai and I started to talk about doing an American tour during times when I couldn't be in Japan. We weren't quite ready for it yet, but it was something we had to prepare for. We also needed to organize gigs in Japan so that we have as little actual downtime as possible and we are in front of as many people as we could manage.

The interview requests dribbled in over the winter, as did letters with money in them seeking copies of our CD-ROM. During the Christmas/New Years holiday, Tsutomu came to my house and we had a good old time fucking, sucking, and generally being affectionate with each other. It was so nice to feel his cock inside me again. He was going to graduate college in April. I was wondering if he would ask me to marry him once he was able to get a job.

Using the information I had available to me, I sent copies of our CD-ROM to clubs all over America. Since we were a new band with just two gigs under our belt, it was going to be extremely difficult to book shows. I was hoping that some of them would play off the fact that we were an all girl neo-classical metal band. And I was also praying that we would draw invitations in areas with large Japanese communities. I put a one page ad in Music Connection to advertise us and let not just bookers know we were there, but other musicians, too.

Of course, my biggest problem was that heavy metal was pretty much dead as a commercial force in the U.S. at the time. Many of the clubs where bands had been allowed to cut their teeth were closing, floundering or were bought out by entertainment conglomerates and thus would only book signed acts.

Cindy missed Seri something fierce and she would write emails to her that I had to translate into Japanese for her and vice versa. That made me squeamish because I felt like a voyeur.

Meanwhile, Mai got some letters of recommendation from the organizers of the college student festival at the school we played at and parlayed it into about half a dozen shows total for April and May.  Of course, the quid pro quo for the letter was having to play their festival again the following October. I decided to book some summer parks and legion hall shows that we would promote ourselves and hopefully sneak in some high school and college shows, too, even if we had to do it for free. It could be that they would think it would be cool and multi-cultural for a band from Japan to play at their campus, especially one that is all female.

That latter idea bore fruit, as I ended up able to indeed schedule about a dozen shows at those venues for September and late October in Southern California. We would have to fly back to Japan in between that to perform our obligation for the Japanese college. So I took out ads in the area free papers to publicize the California university appearances and, just to sex it up, also had them include the ones in Japan, too.

Finally, the last week of March came and I could legally fly into Japan again without a visa. Of course, Cindy was with me and we immediately started rehearsals. It was like getting back on a bicycle and, within a couple of weeks, we were ready. Our first show was April 14th in a section of Tokyo called Koenji on a three band bill with us at the bottom, so we only got 30 minutes. We did just some of our fast songs for the set and we destroyed. Some of the guys at the front were trying to look up our leather skirts. I smiled because it was so funny due to the cliche nature of it. We sold 30 copies of our CD-ROM there.

The second gig was two days later on a Friday in Shibuya, Tokyo. This time we were opening on a two band bill and were allowed a full hour. The crowd was behind us all the way and we got called back for an encore. The club owner wouldn't let us back on for a second one, but instead asked us to headline in November, which meant I would have to keep careful track of how long I was in country so that I could make the show. We were pretty thrilled with that. We sold  50 copies of our CD-ROM. Nice!

Six days later, we played at some dive in Yokohama I had never heard of. It probably held 75 people max. We went down well, but the stage was very cramped and we really couldn't move much. We unloaded maybe five CD-ROMs afterward.

Then we played a Tuesday night in Kawasaki, which was in the same prefecture as Yokohama. This was a very well known venue and, again, we were third on a three band bill. The crowd loved our 30 minute set, demanded that we come back and we did two more songs before the club manager said that was all. We again sold 30 more copies of our CD-ROM.

A week later, Tsutomu graduated from college (the Japanese school calendar ends in April). I wasn't allowed to go to the ceremony, which was fine since I find graduations excruciatingly tedious. When I saw him the next day, I took him to a love hotel and fucked his brains out for a few hours. We didn't do it in my hotel room because in a love hotel we could be as loud as we wanted.

Seri reconnected with Cindy and both of them were quite chuffed about it, naturally. I was really happy for them. Even so, they were obviously still hiding their lesbianism from the other band members. It sucked that they felt it necessary to do that.

Our next show was on May 1st and, as always, we were an opening act. We were allowed 40 minutes and while I thought we played well enough the crowd just didn't really care for us. There was very little reaction. It really shocked us after the successful gigs we did. The headliner was a visual kei band that ultimately never went anywhere and who I didn't think was any good.. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Two nights after that, we were back in Koenji at the same club we did our first gig of the year in. We were originally scheduled to go on third, but the club manager, noting the reaction of the crowd to us at that past show, dropped the second band to third and slotted us in their place, giving us 45 minutes. We demolished the joint and were brought back for three encores. We sold 61 copies of our CD-ROM this time.

A writer from Rockin' F, a major Japanese music magazine, happened to be at the show to check out the headliner and came backstage after our set to interview us. We had to break our equipment down first, though. We gave him a CD-ROM and since he didn't want to talk to us after the show was over, we agreed to meet him in a coffee shop the next day.

We got fully kitted out for the interview. He brought a photographer with him, as we anticipated he might, and we went into an alley behind the coffee shop for an impromptu photo session once the interview was concluded. They gave us a nice two page spread and it was a fun interview. Of course, he asked us about our marriage prospects. Cindy and I laughed knowingly. I lied and said none of us had boyfriends or husbands because we were concentrating solely on our incipient musical careers so as to not blunt our appeal to hopeful lads, as it were.

That was the last of the shows we had scheduled and Cindy and I had to leave the country so that we would still have some time left to use on the visa free deal in October and November. Thus, it was decided that everybody would fly to SoCal and live with me so that we could keep rehearsing and writing together. When we got situated at my place in mid-May, I called the local high school (actually, my alma mater), where I had already booked a gig for September, to ask if they would mind if we played there in the next few days. They were good with it and so our first American show was at my onetime high school, although as an Asian female rather than a white male. The white boys loved us, the white girls couldn't have cared less and the hispanic guys ignored us. I rented professional video cameras and hired some college film students to shoot the show and we used their facilities to edit it all down.

Using that opportunity as a reference, we played at a high school in a different district before the schools shut down for the summer. Between those two shows, we sold another 33 CD-ROMs. We flyered a lot of the other high schools for a show I booked at an American Legion Hall in Orange County. for July 11th. 

Miki likely only had one more year left on her Master's thesis, but she decided to shelve it to see where the band was going to go. We got more encouragement when, at the aforementioned Legion Hall show, we drew 103 people, about twice what I had believed we would. We were allowed to use pyro, too, and we played two blistering hours that went down a storm. We sold 47 CD-ROMs, which is a pretty amazing amount for that crowd size, and we collected as many email addresses as we could in order to create an email newsletter about our band.

The hits to our website began to increase greatly over the course of the summer. The other band members went back to Japan a week after the above concert to conserve their visa free time. Tsutomu called and told me he got a job with a prominent insurance company and would be working in its sales division. He was disappointed I wouldn't be returning to his country until late October and I was missing him tons, too.