SilverShr0ud is the creator of The Fish Tank, the biggest fan community around the Japanese band Fishmans. When I wanted to make the the Fishmans Bootleg.fm page, she was eager to help, and through this I got to learn her journey of creating her community.

I think her story is fascinating, and anyone who wants to create a community around a band or an artist that doesn't have one yet can learn from her story.

When and how did you first find out about Fishmans?

So I remember around 2016/2017 I had been getting more into music as a person, and I remember finding, over and over, this 98.12.28 album. I really didn't even hear Long Season first, I saw that it was this 98.12.28 album everyone was talking about. For whatever reason, I generalised it the first four or five times I saw it. I thought I was looking at an indie folk album or something, and at the time I thought those were dime-a-dozen so I was like "throw that back in the pile".

Eventually I investigated it and learned that the name was 98.12.28, and that's my birthday! So I was like, I might as well give it a look. Then I remember looking at the tracklist and thinking "wow, there's a 41 minute monster at the end of this". So that was the first thing I listened to, the live version of Long Season. It blew my mind, I didn't even hear the entire album until like a month later because it's over 2 hours.

But that's basically how it started, I got into the studio stuff a month or two later and it was a thing that would come back to me every month or so. I'd go "oh okay, I'll listen to Fishmans again" and I'd have another Fishmans phase. Nowadays they're longer, around 3 months on 3 months off.

When did you decide that you'd be the person to compile information on this band and build a community around them? Did you kind of fall into that position or has it been a mission from the start?

Yeah so my Discord server, The Fish Tank, that literally started as "Silver's Fishmans Collection". That was because the primary and only reason you'd be in the server was to follow my Fishmans collection. And the reason I started that is because I had a lot of trouble finding the second live album. I literally had to ask a friend to pull it off of ruTracker, a Russian private tracker.

I remember getting this album and thinking that it was selfish to keep it to myself, and that I needed to share it with other people. At the time I didn't know anything about sharing music with other people, all I knew was "upload it to Mega and share it with someone". So that's how I started it, I had a Mega folder with everything I had that was Fishmans related. Doing that, I opened into the scene seeing all of those people that had come before me. I found a user on RYM called IshmaelBlack who had gone through and reviewed most of their stuff. There was also somebody named Selib who had reviewed all of their stuff and made a list about it.

Selib in particular reached out to me a few months in, and said "I see you're doing this project, and I wanna give you what I have". That led to me having different things like certain DVDs, and I didn't know how to parse a lot of it. I had two episodes of what's called "Radio Fishmans Night", and there's all these different radio programs that Fishmans did. He gives me all these files and I'm thinking "Wow this is amazing, I've never seen these before".

There were these forum posts I saw of people saying "Man I just wanna see The Long Season Revue and I can't find it anywhere", so I remember going on Buyee and literally buying a copy from Japan, having it shipped to me so I can upload it. After it arrived I remember sitting on this thing that many people wanted to see, and that gave me a kind of a rush. Ever since then it's felt like I've been able to bring Fishmans to other people in that way, and now I have a really dedicated community of people doing stuff with that. So it's been really rewarding to see that kind of thing grow.

When you started the Wiki, how much information was available as a collected resource and how much of it was scattered?

I actually started the Wiki for the same reason I started the library (the Mega folder). It's because I didn't want to keep it all for myself. I learned at a certain point that I was learning more about Fishmans than your average American, so I thought "I wanna make sure other people can hear about this". Keeping it in this closed garden of this Discord server felt kind of perverse almost. Keeping everything hoarded like I'm some kind of goblin with its treasures (laughing).

At the time I started the Wiki, which was around 2019, I remember posting it on the Fishmans Discord. Many people wanted to contribute, and they would contribute to all kinds of pages. I remember I was really mad at this one person, who uploaded the front cover to "Chappie, Don't Cry", their debut album, and to this day it's labeled as "front.jpg" so every time I upload a file it complains that "there's already a file called front.jpg" (laughs).

I remember there were so many assumptions at that point, because so much of the information was in Japanese. All you could really do was assume based on context what was going on. There was an article from natalie.mu, which is a fantastic Japanese music journalism publication, they published a massive piece on Uchū Nippon Setagaya, where they wrote about the band's troubles recording it. How Shinji Sato took too much of a creative lead. I remember reading this a year after starting the wiki and thinking "I had no idea there was so much trouble behind this album". It's always really exciting when new stuff comes out.

I know someone who's currently going through every single performance on the Live Concert Guide page of the wiki. They're going through every date and looking through different platforms online, trying to find new things. Everyday now I see different things, new images of Fishmans etc.

When I started the Wiki, it was sort of impossible to learn anything about Fishmans without getting your hands dirty and forcing the knowledge to come to you. It's a little like mining for gold, I think. Now that the Wiki exists, I think it's a lot easier to learn. I've even been recognized in different music communities for my contributions to the Wiki, some folks would even ping me and say "hey, you're the girl that made the Fishmans wiki." That's always so awkward, but I take that with more pride than I would if I kept hoarding all of these Fishmans goodies.

What was the piece of information that was the hardest to find so far?

I remember when we found all of the concert dates, there were like a million dates that we discovered. One of them was December 27th 1998, at Akasaka Blitz. That was one of the 4 concerts they played at Akasaka Blitz. I remember learning that and thinking "Oh, there's another 98.12.28 somewhere".

Another person I used to know had a Discord server about finding lost media music. One of the main things they talked about was finding this December 27th concert. Eventually, somebody on that Discord found someone who had recently posted pictures of mini-disc recordings of that concert on Twitter. They were just casually putting up clips of Oh Slime! and you could tell it was an unreleased concert. I DM'd that guy and he ripped the mini-discs for me and sent me over the files. I'll be honest, that was kind of an elation (laughing). I actually asked my server to keep it private between us until December 27th of that year, so that we could have it as a reward for this thing that was so difficult to get. That was really exciting, still today I see how some people that prefer it to 98.12.28.

After that bootleg, I've watched several other users make similar strides forward, collaborating with Japanese bootleggers to help get their tapes online and public for everyone to hear and to keep these pieces of Sato's legacy alive. You know, something I think separates the Fishmans bootlegging community from other communities is that the community surrounding Fishmans prioritizes a sort of internet archaeology, scouring every source for the potential of hearing more of Fishmans' music, rather than recording the shows ourselves. It's all a matter of knowing where to watch, what to look for, who to contact and how best to get these recordings to the community. I think I've done a lot to help foster that sort of environment, and I'm really proud of that. That's likely the hardest thing I've had to do so far: creating the community and environment necessary to do any of this at all.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about the band?

That's a really good question. I think the thing that was most surprising to me was learning who Shinji Sato is. I feel like there was a general attitude in the community around 2018/2019 that Shinji Sato was this innocent, who could do no wrong. I like to refer to that as the legend of Shinji Sato. Someone who was amazing, unparalleled, etc. The reality is that Shinji Sato was an incredibly exacting artist. I almost felt bad for him sometimes reading certain things because you could tell he was troubled. You could tell throughout his career, he met a lot of different struggles as far as creative processes go.

Near the end of his career, 1997-1998, you could tell he was sort of unraveling as a creator. He was trying to create that "thing" that he'd be remembered by. There are hints of that in the Fishmans documentary. There's a letter that he wrote to his mother that they show which he wrote in the December of 1998, that he just wants to have a good show. Again, it's hard not to engage in the legend when talking about him. There's this person who was the old keyboardist in the Fishmans documentary, Hakase (the doctor). He mentions that Shinji Sato was sometimes difficult to work with, sometimes rude. Seeing that is very dispelling, I feel. It created someone who's much more human. It's someone we can relate to more.

Even though the myth of Shinji Sato is a beautiful one, I still think that it's more important to remember that these people are human. That realisation to me was really shocking in the beginning, that we've been fictionalising these people.

Fishmans is obviously really popular now in many internet circles, but I was wondering how popular they were back when they had the original lineup?

They were less popular than they are now. In the context of things over there, you usually see Fishmans get talked about alongside groups like Spitz and Yura Yura Teikoku which were also big in that same time period. I would say they were as big as The Pillows before they made the FLCL soundtrack. I actually have a really cool poster in the corner of my room; it's a gig poster that features both Fishmans and The Pillows.

I have seen lots of people today comparing Fishmans to famous Western rock bands like Radiohead because of their ambient pop days, but I don't think that's accurate at all, especially in terms of popularity. Fishmans' popularity in Japan is probably comparable to the popularity of bands such as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in the West. That band is virtually unknown in mainstream circles, but almost everyone "in the know" has heard King Gizzard. That's how popular Fishmans is in Japan. Those who know where to look will find them and their music.

So yeah, back in the day they were less popular but they were still a mainstay. They're usually remembered as one of the better Japanese groups.

Are there any pieces of information that people are still looking for?

With Fishmans, there's still an elephant in the room, "What happened to Shinji?". I think there's this thing in the back of everyone's heads. We really don't know why he passed away. And it's the family's right, it's not something we have the right to know. You can read in his obituary that he passed away from "heart failure". This phrase is sometimes used in Japan when the person commits suicide. This is the sort of thing that they write in newspapers when they want to protect the family's honour.

That's something that I don't entirely subscribe to. You could tell looking at Shinji Sato's later years that he had oxygen problems. There are accounts of him before 98.12.28 taking oxygen. Maybe one March day he woke up and had a cold, around that time he was upset since he was under the impression that every member of the band was leaving, so maybe his lungs just gave out. Realistically we probably won't know what happened to Shinji Sato, and that's okay. So much of the music has some mystery in the air. I think if we knew, it wouldn't feel right. Not to say that it's "entertaining" to think about this sort of thing, but rather to say that it's a part of who they are. That sort of beautiful "not knowing".

You've built a community around Fishmans, what would your advice be to someone looking to create a community around another niche band that doesn't have an already existing online community?

I would first identify where the community is most likely to come from. In my case it was Rate Your Music and Reddit. I started marketing on those websites, but since then I've branched out to other social media where more Japanese people are. I've also been marketing on Youtube. That's the first thing you should think about.

The second thing to say to yourself is "why would someone join my community?". If there's already a community, ask yourself "what are they not doing that I should?". In my case, I like to offer things. For example, here's some Fishmans music that you can't hear anywhere else. I like to enable my community as well, I like to have my community run certain aspects of the server like the polls that we do. We will literally give that role to anyone that asks, because we want the server to have a direct part in the creation of the community. For the longest time we had emoji slots that anyone could edit.

Remember that you're not anything more than a hall monitor really, you're just sort of here to make sure that the thing doesn't crash and burn. You're another member of the community so act like it, and people won't think that you're pretentious and stupid. That's all really.

Check out The Fish Tank Discord server and the Fishmans Wiki. SilverShr0ud's all other social links can be found here here.

SilverShr0ud's profile picture created by Voats in The Fish Tank, and you can visit their store here.