How O-VILS. started (English ver.) 2021/10/23

 

YUNON JAPAN NEWS (1)　(Free translation)

 

Hello! I’m Yuina Mita, the representative director of YUNON JAPAN Co., Ltd.  I don’t want to make this text too formal, so please read this with a loose mind📖.

 

I do internet live streaming in my activities as a singer-songwriter, ‘MitaYuina’.  Therefore, I often share my thoughts in live performances. However, since I have launched my website, I have decided to record important things in writing here. I don’t know how long I will be able to keep this up, or even if I will be able to do this on a regular basis. So as soon as I update it, I’ll report it on Twitter, etc.

 

First, let me tell you why I started an alumni band.

 

When I graduated from high school and participated in the 2012 Rose Parade, I thought to myself, “I would like to have an alumni band that exists as a continuous team, rather than getting together only once every few years and instantly disbanding.”

 

However, I was 20 years old at the time and did not have the financial ability to build or the power to organize a large team. Nor could I prepare a production that would make the alumni want to participate. More than anything, I was afraid of the many eyes of the seniors and the school. When I look back now, I realize that these fears were just my own assumptions, but they were true at the time.

 

The history of the club activities at school has been created by the seniors, and the ‘head family’ of the club is the seniors, and the current members carry on the tradition. At that time, I thought that it was only after I had reached a certain level of seniority that I could inherit those traditions and send them out in the form of an alumni team.

 

It was for this reason that I denied all dreams of an alumni band when I was around 20 years old. I’ll say it again, the reasons I’ve given here are my assumptions.

 

I thought about how I could realistically make this dream of an alumni band come true.

 

* To get my fans. If I had a certain number of fans, I might get some recognition from various fields.

 

* To save up money. If I can become more famous and earn more money from my music career, I can save money to form an alumni band. To that end, I made the following decisions. I will try my hand at music as a drum vocalist, which was rare at the time. In addition, by singing while playing the drums, I might be able to understand a little bit the pain of dancing while playing an instrument.

 

* To organize a group called ‘GrooMe!’. We all don’t want to use the glory of our alma mater as a signboard for our activities. Rather, if I could organize a form of the support member and conduct the group’s activities as a job requested by ‘MitaYuina’, all these problems may be solved.

 

With this in mind, the drum vocalist ‘MitaYuina’ was born on August 25, 2016. And the more I did my own music activities, the more people started to support me. So I said to myself, “Since they support me so much, I want to give something back through music”  and “I want to do something that will bring me one step closer to my dream of organizing an alumni band.” This feeling had been growing. So, in February 2019, I grabbed the hundreds of thousands of yen I had earned from my musical activities and held the concert of ‘GrooMe!’ in Shibuya WWW.

 

When it came time to start up ‘GrooMe!’, I was confronted with the difficulty of making music with only wind instruments. It was too difficult in terms of both cost management and music playing, and dancing was out of the question. I couldn’t even prepare costumes for everyone, just T-shirts. I couldn’t even afford the transportation cost for everyone to come to Tokyo to perform, so I had to ask a senior member to provide a microbus. There was no time to rehearse with everyone.

 

In terms of music, we had an uneven composition and not enough people to play the brass band’s music. Therefore, I put a brass band arrangement in my song, shared the score with them, and asked them to join in by playing as a backing band.

 

I would like to give a big thank you to the members of the group at the time who agreed to this crazy project. After several performances of ‘GrooMe!’, I realized that it would be reckless to gather dancers and complete a single performance in Tokyo with this budget and in this period of time.

 

So in order to accumulate funds, I started saving the money earned from my musical activities. However, I could not find an opportunity to use the money. In the meantime, the world was hit by the Corona disaster from 2020. Furthermore, in June of the following year, 2021, I got plans to start another job that is pretty heavy.

I thought, “Maybe I should act now,” so I tried to contact Yokoyama-sensei, but I struggled to write emails for about three months. I wrote “I want to create a team like this…” and then deleted it many times . I kept repeating this. Finally, I got desperate and pushed the send button. A few minutes later, I received a reply from him, “Well, I don’t know if there’s anything I can do, but I’ll cooperate.”  I still vividly remember how my body and mind relaxed at once. 😂

 

On August 15, 2020, I met Yokoyama-sensei for the first time since the Rose Parade. My junior colleague, Chippi, was with me. He said, “You’ve come up with a very grand plan.” At that time, I didn’t have a clear vision yet, and there wasn’t much I could talk about concretely, but he was worried about my financial situation. That impression has remained in my memory.

 

I had decided that I would use the 10 million yen I had saved from my music career for this team, along with my body, until I started another full-fledged job, which I plan to start in June 2021. In addition, I had a plan to find sponsors and secure funds by the time of the first performance, scheduled for April 3, 2021, and let some entertainment office manage the show. Thus, I started working on forming an alumni group.

 

At the time, I thought that I could not manage such a group like this by myself, and for some reason, there was no reward for Yokoyama-sensei. 😂 There was no way I could continue such a project. But I couldn’t talk about it clearly because I had no confidence, and I was in a very unstable state at the time.

 

In the midst of all this, Yokoyama-sensei agreed to this reckless proposal. Also Chippi got on the same ship, and after that the number of sailors increased steadily. And now, the story that seemed to be grasping at clouds at that time is taking shape. I feel like I can’t believe it.

 

That’s how we came to have a group line with a vague name like “Alumni Band”. Looking back, it has been a year that has flown by. I can’t believe how far we’ve come in just one year. Thanks to all the fans, staff, and members. That’s all I have to say about that today🍁.

Thank you for reading to the end ☺️.

by YUNON JAPAN Co., Ltd. Director & O-VILS. General Director YUINA MITA