On cats and bowling balls - some things are different in Japan

March 11, 2014

A conversation the other day reminded me about when my old band was big in Japan. Well, medium-sized in Japan, anyway.

We’d released our album in the UK on our own label, and it had been critically acclaimed. We signed a deal with Sony to release it in Japan, and we were all very excited about the prospect.

We were a little surprised when the label showed us the artwork for the Japanese release, which consisted of pictures of cats, really bad drawings of us, and a photoshopped picture of our heads on bowling balls.

I’d previously lived in Japan for two years, and I’m still not sure if this is a WTF Japan thing, or a WTF major label marketing thing.