Fujii Kaze will play two solo piano recitals at Tokyo Dome in November, announced on a poster styled as a Japanese neighbourhood circular. The Fujii Kaze Piano Recital reuses wording and a nickname from a flyer for a free concert he gave in his hometown in 2018, two years before his official debut. It runs separately from the Prema World Tour, which reaches the same venue a month later.
Announced on September 9th, the recital steps away from the world tour format in favour of a solo piano-and-vocal performance. Songs from his 2020 debut album ‘HELP EVER HURT NEVER’ through to ‘Prema’ will feature, with ‘Shinunoga E-Wa’, ‘Kirari’, ‘Michi Teyu Ku’, and ‘Prema’ among those planned. Covers old and new are also promised, along with a possible “request corner”, where audience members can put in song requests.
The artwork soon drew comparisons to a kairanban, the circular traditionally passed between households in a Japanese neighbourhood, far from what you’d expect for a Tokyo Dome show promotion.
Fujii Kaze’s Tokyo Dome poster, left, and the 2018 Satosho concert flyer.
The wording can be traced to a 2018 flyer preserved by Satosho Town. A then-20-year-old Fujii played Satosho General Cultural Hall ‘Froide’ in Okayama Prefecture on May 30th for a free afternoon concert titled Early Summer Wind Concert: The World of Fujii Kaze. Organised by volunteer group Sumire no Kai as part of its training programme, the notice was circulated locally.
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Set the two announcements side by side and the borrowing is hard to miss. Both introduce Fujii with a short biography noting that he began piano at three, and both use near-identical wording about his concert and composition activity. Both advertise piano-and-vocal performances and solo playing, a mix of older and newer music, and a request corner.
Even the running time matches. The 2018 concert ran from 1.30pm to 3pm, while each Tokyo Dome recital is scheduled for around 90 minutes. The obvious difference is scale, with Satosho Social Welfare Council recording 210 attendees at the 2018 concert against a Tokyo Dome capacity of 55,000.
The nickname revived on the new announcement is piano no kikōshi (ピアノの奇行師). It is a pun on piano no kikōshi (ピアノの貴公子), or ‘prince of the piano’, replacing 貴公子 with the coined 奇行師, built from kikō (奇行), meaning eccentric or unusual behaviour. Loosely, it turns the ‘prince of the piano’ into the ‘piano eccentric’.
Fujii was already using it before the 2018 concert. Sumire no Kai chairman Koji Aoki told Josei Jishin that when he first met Fujii in April that year, he handed Aoki a business card bearing the title ‘piano no kikōshi’ Fujii Kaze.
From Satosho to stadiums
Solo piano has remained part of Fujii’s live career as the venues have grown. In 2021, Fujii Kaze ‘Free’ Live 2021 put him alone with a grand piano on the turf at Nissan Stadium in Yokohama. Covid restrictions ultimately left the stadium empty, but the YouTube broadcast reached more than 179,000 concurrent viewers. He later took the format overseas with Fujii Kaze and the piano Asia Tour in 2023 and a US tour in 2024.
The recitals fall in the middle of the Prema World Tour. Fujii plays Fukuoka on November 14th and 15th before returning to Tokyo alone at the piano five days later. The full tour then reaches Tokyo Dome on December 19th and 20th, giving him four shows at the venue in roughly a month, split between two very different productions.
About Fujii Kaze →
Fujii Kaze is a singer, songwriter, and pianist from Satosho, Okayama, born on June 14th 1997. He began classical piano as a child under the influence of his father and, from age 12, uploaded piano covers recorded at his family’s coffee shop to YouTube. The videos eventually attracted music-industry attention, and he moved to Tokyo in 2019. Kaze officially debuted in 2020 with the music video for ‘Nan-Nan’ and released his first album, ‘HELP EVER HURT NEVER’, that May. Both it and the 2022 follow-up ‘LOVE ALL SERVE ALL’ reached number one on Billboard Japan’s Hot Albums chart. In 2022, album track ‘Shinunoga E-Wa’ became an international viral hit, reaching number one on Spotify’s local viral charts in 23 countries. At the inaugural MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN in 2025, ‘LOVE ALL SERVE ALL’ won Album of the Year, Kaze won Best Japanese Singer-Songwriter, and ‘Feelin’ Go(o)d’ won Best Cross-Border Collaboration Song. He also completed his first European tour and a second North American tour before releasing his all-English third album, ‘Prema’, through Republic Records in September 2025. In 2026, Kaze returned to Japanese arenas with Pre: Prema and announced the Prema World Tour, beginning in Asia before planned European and North American dates in 2027.
AloJapan.com