AG! Steve

I’m just one of the newest Atarashii Gakko! super fan, playing catching up with the Seishun elders!

I’m a total goober, and I’m only in this to have fun and pursue my addiction for the greatest singing and dancing band in the world!

How it all started

After a long day at work, on a rainy Seattle night in November 2023, I sat in front of my TV to watch some random YouTube and relax before diner.

Weirdly, YouTube kept showing me an unusual thumbnail in my Recommended list. Four Japanese girls in retro-sci-fi costumes, one of them yelling into a sci-fi watch on her wrist.

I’ve always been a rock & metal guy. I’ve never cared for pop music, be it American, European, K-Pop or J-Pop. I certainly never cared for choreography bands. And to be perfectly honest I’ve always looked down on “boys bands” and “girls bands”.

I also never read mangas or watch anime (well, aside from a few rare exceptions).

And so I thought this was a bug in their algorithm! Surely, I’m the LAST person who would care for such a band. I simply ignored it and watched something else. But day after day, that “Tokyo Calling” thumbnail kept showing up in my YouTube recommendations, and I kept skipping it.

Eventually I relented, half sarcastically. OK FINE, I’ll watch it, can you just take it out of my Recommended list please?

And then… that very moment I clicked “Play” on my remote. I don’t want to sound too dramatic… but it kind of changed my life. 😅

And so began what every new AG obsessed fans have to go through: an absolute rabbit hole of nearly 10 years of content, Tik Tok, albums, merch. And the Lore. Oh my god the Lore, so much of it, and thankfully I quickly found out about Gakkord/Discord (the most active English-speaking AG community online).

Becoming a Super Fan

I was an obsessed, but “normal”, fan until the Vancouver show in 2024. I thought that concert and the next day in Seattle would be plenty enough for me.

But then I showed up early, and met with the travelling band of goobers, from Paul & JD to Chesca, Armindo, Matt, Ayumi-san, and much more! They were all so welcoming, symbolically chanting the “one of us! one of us!” and sure enough, I immediately realized I was one of them.

And it’s been a LOT of my life since!

The Pilgrim & the Sacred Grounds

Most of my life, prior to discovering AG, I’ve been someone who enjoyed traveling the world to visit movie locations,

My craziest adventure was probably when I spend two weeks crossing the Australian Outback, in solo, from North to South, just so I could visit (what I like to call pilgrimage) all the locations of the original Mad Max trilogy.

By becoming an AG Super fan, this passion to make pilgrimages to “sacred grounds” has naturally transfered to Atarashii Gakko.

My hope is to turn this new website into one where I can catalogue every AG sacred grounds I visited, with pictures and maps and information, so hopefully other AG fans can use it and make their own trips to the holy lands!

Please stay tuned, as I figure out how to dump ALL of my pilgrimages I’ve done so far on this website.