DREAMS COME TRUE’s Nakamura Masato talks about the loss of fans in Japan after the group focused on the US

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In the ’90s, one pop group that had dominated the charts and was right there on top was DREAMS COME TRUE.

The group featured bass player Nakamura Masato, vocalist Yoshida Miwa (and another member, keyboardist, Nishikawa Takahiro who left the group due to changes in musical direction in 2002) and quite literally, everything the group released was gold. Many songs reaching #1 on the Oricon Charts and packing up venues.

But the group decided to take a risk to try to expand their music overseas which unfortunately hurt the group’s position in Japan.

Nakamura recently appeared on TBS’s “Sunday’s Hatsutomigaku” broadcast on the 18th. He appeared in the “Interviewer Osamu Hayashi” project and talked about how he was 35 years old when he met Yoshida Miwa who was 22 years old.

While they released a million records one after another, they signed a contract with a major American record company in 1997, saying it was the “biggest crisis”, and the following year, in 1998, they made their worldwide debut.

But suddenly in 2002, he recalled, “I got fired, one day, all of a sudden. It was over for me. I was so shocked”.

In the program, it was explained that DREAMS COME TRUE, returned home at rock bottom, they were labeled as an “artist who abandoned Japan”.

Looking back, Nakamura said, “The rules and systems of the industry are important. The way I did this was a little bit against that system. It wasn’t that we wanted to debut in the United States; we started playing music by listening to American folk music, which was Western music. We wanted to give that back to America”.

However, Nakamura recalled that he had a hard time with the media and various teams, and said, “Then I got fired, and I went completely blank”.

After returning to Japan, he said, “The number of fans decreased dramatically. Up until then, there were almost no sold-out performances and the arenas were completely empty”. Nakamura added, “I was able to work in Japan, and then I went to America. If I didn’t come back for two or three years, the fans would feel the same way. Of course, I would really feel abandoned”.

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