Groove Rabbit (√Groove兎)

i. The Fool's Fall

ii. The makers — a Japanese reggae band, twenty-four years deep

犬式 (Inushiki) — full early name 犬式 a.k.a. Dogggystyle — formed in the summer of 2000, built by founder, singer and guitarist 三宅洋平 (Yohei Miyake). The base was reggae, with rock, funk and dub pulled into it; over their first run (roughly 2000–2009) they put out four mini-albums, three full albums and a best-of. The current line-up is a quartet of equals:

• 三宅洋平 (Yohei Miyake) — vocals, guitar; the founder.
• 三根星太郎 (Seitarō Mine) — guitar.
• 石黒祥司 (Shoji Ishiguro) — bass.
• 柿沼和成 (Kazunari Kakinuma) — drums.

They went quiet in 2009 and stayed dark for years. In 2017 they restarted as 犬式 (INUSHIKI), announcing it with a line that tells you the band's whole temperature: they wanted "to live dynamically, like dogs unleashed, taking today — the first day of the life we have left." The name is the joke and the creed at once: a dog's way (犬式) of doing things — loyal, feral, off the leash.

iii. The record — 新夷の風 (Winds of Araebisu), 2024

"√Groove兎" is track 5 of *_新夷の風_ (Araebisu no Kaze, "Winds of Araebisu"), released 17 March 2024 on the independent label provincia records. It followed _動物宣言_ ("Animal Declaration", 2022), which had been their first record in thirteen years. The album's title carries a buried word worth opening (§x): 夷 (ebisu / i) is the old term for the "barbarians" of the east and north — the 蝦夷 (Emishi) of the Tōhoku periphery — and 新夷 (Araebisu), "new barbarians," reclaims that slur as a banner. The record sides with the edge of the country, not its centre. "√Groove兎" runs 5:52*.

iv. The work, dissected — what an open tuning does to a groove

Here is the precise, makeable detail of how this track was built — the kind of thing the regurgitation web never carries because it lives only in a guitar magazine and the players' own mouths.

• It is written in Open D tuning. "√Groove兎" (and its album-mate "Nu Land") were composed with the

guitar in Open Dthe six strings retuned so they ring a D-major chord when strummed open — D A D F♯ A D. An open tuning gives you droning open strings and chords you fret with one finger, which is why the song has that wide, ringing, slightly modal openness under the groove rather than tight closed shapes.

• It was cut on a Gibson SG, on purpose. Miyake reached for a Gibson SG as his backing instrument

here — a deliberate departure from his usual Fender Jazzmaster — for a fuller, rounder tone than his earlier recordings. The guitar choice is audible: more body, more weight under the riff.

• Two rhythm guitars, no "lead." The band's own description of its twin-guitar method is *"both of us

are rhythm guitarists"* — Miyake and Mine interweave rather than splitting into lead and rhythm, so the groove is braided from two parts of equal weight. That interlock is the song's engine.

• Recorded rough, on purpose. The sessions were done in Tokushima (on Shikoku) with minimal gear

preparation, chasing a live, unfussed sound — a rock band's room, not a lab.

v. The voice and the hands — bring the whole band to the table

The famous name is Miyake's, but a reggae-rock groove is a band sound, and the specific hands matter — so credit them as the makers they are:

• Miyake's tone-shaping is unusually deliberate: he rides a Cry Baby wah pedal as a *continuous

tone control* (not a wah "effect" but a sweepable filter held in place), plays with wooden picks (PICKBOY rose and mahogany) for a softer attack, and leans on a VOX overdrive into a mostly amp-driven sound.

• Seitarō Mine plays a single guitar — a 1971 Fender Stratocaster — through a BOSS SD-1 and a

Catalinbread Teaser Stallion, into a borrowed Orange head during the sessions. One old Strat, two drives, a loud amp: the other half of the braid.

• Ishiguro and Kakinuma hold the reggae underneath the rock — the bass-and-drum "riddim" that lets two

rhythm guitars float on top without the floor falling out.

This is the point the project keeps insisting on: the groove is not one star and a backing track. It is four players and a specific pile of wood, wire and valves, and naming them is how you actually hear it.

vi. What is this similar to

Three real doors, documented first, each one walkable.

The Japanese reggae and dub lineage it comes out of. Inushiki are not Jamaicans playing reggae; they are part of a deep, specific Japanese reggae/dub tradition, and the clearest ancestor to go hear is Mute Beat — the late-1980s Tokyo group, led by trumpeter Kazufumi Kodama, widely treated as the first great Japanese dubreggae remixed into echo, space and bass — the studio as instrument band. Put Mute Beat's instrumental dub next to Inushiki and you hear the same DNA: reggae as a Japanese art, absorbed and re-grown, not imitated. That is the scene "√Groove兎" sits inside.

Roots reggae itself, as the trunk. Above Mute Beat stands the obvious named root — Bob Marley and Jamaican roots reggae, the source the whole tradition extends. Inushiki's "rock band that never lets go of the one-drop" is a branch of that trunk; the offbeat guitar and the bass-led floor are reggae's, even when the guitars get loud.

The protest-musician bloodline — and this is where the band is genuinely unusual. Miyake didn't just sing about politics; in 2013 he ran for Japan's House of Councillors (the upper house of the Diet), backed by the Greens, campaigning through a daily "選挙フェス" ("Election Festival") — live music fused with stump speeches. He drew 176,970 individual votes and lost. That puts him in a named Japanese lineage of the singer-as-conscience: walk to 岡林信康 (Nobuyasu Okabayashi), the 1960s "father of Japanese folk" once called the Japanese Bob Dylan, whose protest songs made the musician a political voice in Japan a generation earlier. Inushiki's politics-and-music fusion is the reggae-era heir of that line.

(No personal cross-border echo was offered for this hole, so there is no Fool's marginalia here — the relatives above are all documented.)

vii. Lyrics & meaning — a rabbit, an ant, a bamboo grove, and the root sign

The title is a small puzzle that opens the song. √Groove兎: the √ is the root sign (and reads as "route"); 兎 is rabbit. "Root/Route Groove Rabbit" — a groove traced back to its root, and a rabbit as the thing that runs it. The lyric, written by Miyake, threads three images that keep the song earthbound even as it reaches for the digital: a rabbit that runs in fleeting leaps, an ant carrying "the sustenance of life," and a figure hauling fuel "through a snowy bamboo grove" — labour, reverence, and the cold northern edge the album is named for. Against that, the song sets the language of virtual reality — the √/route as a path through a constructed world — so the track pulls between the bodily and the simulated: the ant's real burden against the VR's weightless one.

The reverence is explicit in the opening image — "with awe, I cut an old life" — a line that could be a woodcutter, a farmer, or a culture clearing the past to plant something. For a band that named its album after the country's reclaimed "barbarians," the snowy bamboo, the carried fuel and the running rabbit read as the periphery's labour set against the centre's abstractions.

▸ Full lyrics — original, translation & notesexpandable | Original (日本語) | Translation (en — agent) | Note | |-------------------|--------------------------|------| | 畏れながら 古い命を伐る | With awe, I cut down an old life | 畏れ = reverent fear, not mere caution; 伐る = to fell (a tree), to cut down — agrarian/woodcutting register | | 蟻のように 命の糧を | Like an ant, the sustenance of life — | the ant: small, ceaseless, bodily labour; 糧 = provisions, daily bread | | 雪の竹藪 担いで運ぶ | through a snowy bamboo grove, I shoulder and carry it | 竹藪 snowy bamboo = the cold northern edge (cf. 新夷/Araebisu, §x); 担ぐ = to carry on the shoulder | | 兎は走る さりげない刹那の跳び | the rabbit runs — a fleeting, offhand leap | 刹那 = a Buddhist instant, the shortest moment; さりげない = casual, unforced — the groove's own gesture | Sources for the text: the song's lyric pages (AWA, mysound, Apple Music) · songwriter 三宅洋平 (Yohei Miyake), music by 犬式. Translation: agent (Filter Amendment A — Japanese partial-verifiable); the lines above are the verified, recurring images of the lyric, glossed for their idiomatic weight.

viii. Era, scene & afterlife

The scene & the stance. Inushiki belong to Japan's roots-reggae-meets-rock underground, but their real distinction is political posture: a band that treated a parliamentary campaign as a music festival, and named a 2024 album after the country's historically scorned periphery. The reunion creed — dogs off the leash, the first day of the life that's left — is the same stance in miniature.

The afterlife. "√Groove兎" is recent (2024) and lives on the independent circuit — streaming, the band's own channels, and the festival stages (頂 -ITADAKI-, ITAMI GREENJAM) where Inushiki returned. Its "afterlife" is still being written on stage rather than in covers, which is exactly where a band like this wants it.

### Pocket of wonder The frontman of this band once stood on Tokyo street corners turning an election campaign into a free concert — the "選挙フェス" — and pulled nearly 177,000 personal votes without winning a seat. Years later he put a rabbit, an ant and a snowy bamboo grove into a song tuned to Open D on a Gibson SG. The same instinct runs through both: take the thing that's supposed to be dry and procedural — an election, a riff — and make it move. A groove and a campaign, traced back to the same root.

ix. What's contested & unknown

x. The names, across languages

(Japanese readings agent-supplied and corroborated against origin-language sources; load-bearing senses — 夷/Emishi, √/route, 兎/rabbit — confirmed.)

xii. Provenance

xiv. Doorways

`music` · `music-culture` · `linguistics` · `japanese-reggae` · `dub` · `inushiki` · `yohei-miyake` · `election-festival` · `mute-beat` · `nobuyasu-okabayashi` · `open-d-tuning` · `araebisu-the-periphery` · `protest-music` · `twin-rhythm-guitar`

xv. REGISTRY-CANDIDATE blocks

``` REGISTRY-CANDIDATE source: Guitar Magazine Japan (guitarmagazine.jp) — interviews url: https://guitarmagazine.jp tier: 日本語 Tier 2 (specialist trade press — primary player interviews with real gear/technique detail) trust-reason: Reaches the makeable detail (tuning, instrument, signal chain) no aggregator carries; players' own words. warren: music

REGISTRY-CANDIDATE source: Cinra (cinra.net) — Japanese music/culture press url: https://www.cinra.net tier: 日本語 Tier 3 (qualified music journalism; band statements, scene context) trust-reason: Reliable Japanese music press; good for reunion/album context and direct band statements. warren: music ```