Heavy Metal in Japan

When you think of Heavy Metal, you think Black Sabbath, Ozzy Ozbourne, Led Zepplin, Metallica and others.  Heavy Metal is usually found in North America and Europe.  Japan on the other hand, Heavy Metal is a very rare breed.  Sure, there is rock bands here in Japan like Sophia or Last Alliance.

Sophia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei7ibeGn9Xw

Last Alliance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ing7DuOu1UQ&feature=related

 But the Heavy Metal scene is still very, very underground in Japan.  There is one Heavy Metal band that I know of that stems from Japan and that is Metal Safari.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg1M3QSqeCQ&feature=related

A friend of mine introduced me to them.  But when I bring them up with Japanese friends, they've never heard of the band.  And when I bring up Heavy Metal bands from America or Europe, most of the time my Japanese friends have never heard of them or even like the music.  Some friends though have heard of some of the bands and do like some Heavy Metal music.  But these friends are very few and far between.  This past weekend at the Kansai Gaidai school festival, I got to see some rock bands perform in Building 2.  One of my friends, Ryuhei, was a guitarist in one of the bands and I was able to see him peform a few times.  The picture immediatley below is my friend Ryuhei getting ready for the performance.

The picture below is the other members of the band during the performance.

The crowd was made up of other Japanese Kansai students and they really got into the songs.  But if I had asked any of them after the concert to name any of the bands and or artists that they had performed, they have named one maybe two at the most.  From what I could tell the Heavy Metal culture has only recently come to Japan in, maybe within the last 20 years or so.  Maybe if I dig around some more, I could find a lot more about the small community of Heavy Metal enthusiasts here in Japan.