Beppu’s Music Scene is Here and It’s Raw: Tsuwara

Beppu is its own little world, a “not-Japan” nestled within Japan. Quiet and unassuming at first, but surprisingly full of life, as college towns often are. Students come and go every semester, friendships form fast, and just as quickly disappear after graduation. Most things here feel temporary. Yet as I spent more time here, I noticed that even in a transient swamp like Beppu, things can take root.

Tsuwara was one of them.

A de facto indie record label that does not call itself one, Tsuwara is a project-based music collective run by students at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU). Artists submit demos, and the chosen ones get their songs produced by the collective itself, which handles everything even beyond the studio—distribution, branding, promotion, music videos, and graphics. A collaborative platform built around curated projects and the people willing to work on them.

The collective released its debut project, “Sophie”, on March 23rd, 2025. I had the chance to hear it live before any music video or official release came out. Fast, punchy, bright, with—in true indie-rock fashion—a melancholic twinge of longing. It’s the sort of song that gets stuck in your head after one listen. But what struck me more was how intentional everything surrounding it felt. The music video, inspired by a true story about the songwriter’s cat, follows “Sophie”, a character who temporarily runs away from home and slowly grows comfortable elsewhere, delaying the inevitable return. The symbolism in the video is impossible to miss: the changing seasons, the carefully framed split-screen shots, the warm-cold lighting, the amount of detail packed into scenes most people would scroll past in seconds.

Production is often a thankless job. Seconds in a music video can take hours of work. Most people will never notice the editing decisions, the pre-production meetings, the storyboarding, or the countless re-shoots behind a single scene. But that invisible labour is precisely what makes Tsuwara interesting—an entirely student-run project with no sponsors, funded completely out of pocket.

Tsuwara cheekily merges the Indonesian word suara (meaning “voice”) with the Japanese phonetic alphabet “tsu-wa-ra”. For its founder, Yusuf Mujahid, better known as Aco, the project was born out of both passion and pressure. A fourth-year marketing student at APU, Tsuwara, to Aco, is the lovechild of his “career-driven necessity to create” and his long-harboured dream of starting a record label, born of his avidness for music since high school.

In Beppu, that urgency makes sense. For fourth-years at APU, 就活—job-hunting—hangs over everything. It’s the proverbial time-ticking bomb for seniors. Graduation approaches fast, and suddenly every hobby starts to feel like they need to become legible as “experience”. In the LinkedIn-oriented world we live in, everything has to become part of the portfolio somehow. Even creativity.

That contradiction sits at the centre of Tsuwara. On one hand, the collective clearly understands branding and promotion. The rollout for “Sophie” was calculated and deliberate, complete with teaser posts, visual assets, coordinated promotion, and a full press kit. Aco frames marketing not as “selling out” but more as respect for the art itself. If people spend months creating something, why half-ass the distribution?

At the same time, Tsuwara avoids the kind of algorithmic short-form content that dominates online music promotion now. The “TikTok method” feels rehashed. So much online music marketing today revolves around chasing relatability and virality before the art itself even has time to breathe. You will notice this in the current music landscape: indie artists “selling themselves” online, flattening their work into derivative echoes of more popular sounds, or packaging songs as the “song of the summer” or “tracks to listen to if you hate your ex.”

Tsuwara feels slower than that—more deliberate, more considerate. Not anti-internet, but unwilling to completely surrender to it either, it still maintains a presence across platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify while refusing to let algorithmic trends define its output. In that sense, it feels akin to a pre–short-form social media music industry, when discovery was shaped more by editors, scenes, and scheduled media cycles than by viral acceleration.

But Tsuwara is not just defined by how it distributes its work, but by how it is built. Looking over the credits, the sheer number of people involved is striking. Officially, Tsuwara credits storyboarders, scriptwriters, choreographers, videographers, editors, marketing staff, photographers, and artwork artists. Unofficially, the circle feels even wider: friends reposting trailers, people chipping in ideas in passing, others singing along word-for-word during live performances. Ultimately, the entire thing runs on trust.

And that trust matters, because nobody here is being paid. People work on Tsuwara because they believe in the vision, but also because the project gives creatives in Beppu a rare chance to actually make something together. Bedroom musicians get the opportunity to release music with real production behind it. Amateur actors step into music videos. Friends find outlets for their skills in directing, editing, graphic design, or PR.

Aco himself admits that the Indonesian community at APU played a major role in making Tsuwara possible. The plethora of Indonesian students in Beppu means there is naturally a concentration of musicians, artists, and creative people around him. That became both Tsuwara’s greatest strength and one of its biggest questions going forward: how do you expand beyond the circle that made you, without losing the trust that holds everything together?

There is no clear answer yet. 

Aco hopes that Tsuwara will eventually outlast its founding members, passing into the hands of future students and perhaps even expanding beyond Beppu itself. Exactly what that looks like remains unclear.

Tsuwara still feels raw and new, full of possibility in a way that feels unpolished rather than uncertain. Aco once imagined it as a broader creative medium spanning film, design, and other media before ultimately choosing to focus on music because that is what he knows best. Student life in Beppu is temporary by nature. People graduate. They move away. Ideas float. Entire friend groups disappear within months.

But maybe that is exactly why projects like Tsuwara matter.

Not just because they create music, but because they archive something: a moment, a group of people, a particular version of Beppu that will not exist in the same way again.

Somewhere between late-night editing sessions, storyboard drafts, and unfinished conversations about the future, Tsuwara began to feel like something more than just a student project. Tsuwara does not fully resist transience—it is made from it, yet it also does not collapse into it. It exists within the inevitability of time in a place like Beppu while still sitting slightly against how art outside of it is pushed toward speed, visibility, and immediate consumption. Instead, it builds slowly, surely, through trust, collaboration, and labour that is often invisible at first glance.

That is what I kept returning to in Beppu: not the idea of permanence, but that something here was being built carefully enough to matter. Tsuwara may have been born from the restlessness and creativity of student life, but its ambition is bigger than that: to become something others can inherit, and carry forward. If not the collective itself, then the idea. 

Find Tsuwara

Instagram: @tsuwara.beppu

Spotify: Tsuwara

YouTube: Tsuwara

Written By: Oorvi Abhaya Sitanggang

Edited by: Thuth Htet San