Fujii Kaze: ‘India Makes Me Feel Like This Is My Home’

Against the backdrop of a simmering sunset on the grounds of Lollapalooza India 2026 in Mumbai, Japanese singer-songwriter and musician Fujii Kaze glides across the H&M stage with an unrestrained flair. His honey-dipped locks flutter in the wind, lending him an almost otherworldly aura, as Kaze assumes the role of a contortionist, twisting and turning his form as he runs through crowd favorites like “Hachikō,” “Shinunoga E Wa,” and “Prema.” And every time he thrusts a hip or flails an arm into the air with reckless abandon, the audience erupts in cheers. 

Speaking to Rolling Stone India backstage right after his performance, Kaze is giddy with excitement, yet has a childlike curiosity, eager to absorb every detail of where he is. India, he says, feels like his “spiritual home,” and standing before a sea of faces in Mumbai only deepened that feeling. “It was kind of a difficult show to do, to be honest,” he admits. “But I don’t feel like I’m in a foreign country. India makes me feel like this is my home. This is where I belong.”

Though Kaze was born and raised in Satoshō, Okayama, he grew up surrounded by the spiritual undercurrent of India, regularly singing bhajans and mantras with his family. And while this marked the J-pop sensation’s fourth visit to the country, having last visited in 2022 while shooting for his music video “Grace” in the hilly terrains of Uttarakhand, it was his long-awaited debut on the Indian stage. Yet, it didn’t quite feel that way to him. “I felt like I’ve performed here many times already, and today was just one of them,” he admits. He insists he’ll return again and again, drawn back by something he can’t quite explain.

Kaze’s evolution as an artist hasn’t always been linear. Growing up under the watchful gaze of thousands online, the Japanese artist got his start in music by releasing covers on YouTube at the age of 12. Slowly, his thousands-strong community blossomed into millions of adoring fans who clung to his every lyric like gospel. Yet for a young musician making music alone in his bedroom, the visibility often came with a strange, isolating feeling of being removed from the very audience that was growing around him.

That paradox resurfaced a few years later when his breakout hit “Shinunoga E Wa” exploded on TikTok during the height of the pandemic, years after it was first released. Once again, Kaze found himself basking in Internet fame from the confines of his bedroom. Since then, it’s been a slow-burn journey to translate that immensely personal, online relationship into a shared physical experience, even though he’s been able to easily pack global venues like Dubai’s Coca-Cola Arena and Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi Racecourse. “I’m still trying to find how to perform in my own way,” he says candidly. Performing, for him, is like a ritual. “I have to be mentally and physically prepared every time. It’s not always easy. But it makes me want to be a better version of myself. It helps me grow as a human being.” 

While offstage, Kaze is soft-spoken and contemplative, onstage, he transforms into a free-spirited presence that radiates confident playfulness and warmth. That energy seems to extend into every aspect of how he presents himself, perhaps most visibly in his outfit. Pairing 1970s-inspired butterfly-print flared trousers with a patterned pink silk shirt, brown velvet jacket, tribal motif necklace, and, perhaps most significantly, a black tika on his forehead, his ensemble is a kaleidoscopic clash of chaos and color that perfectly fits his onstage persona. “It’s a Seventies rockstar kind of outfit paired with this very Indian-inspired tika, which [may feel] a little random, but it works, you know? It all connects.” That same sense of connected chaos is also emblematic of the Japanese hitmaker’s genre-defying sound, which flits between pop, jazz, R&B, and soul. “To me, it feels like my music as well, because there’s no one genre [that I make].”

India holds a special place in Fujii Kaze’s soul, with the artist even saying that he hopes to learn Sanskrit and eventually move here to become a devotional singer. He is most intrigued to learn about the rising wave of bhajan clubbing, where devotional tunes are finding a new life on the dancefloor.

“I think it’s so amazing, because I [would] want to tell people [about] the spirituality that I learned from Indian philosophy in a very casual, pop, and cool way. So I think it’s amazing to share that kind of spiritual feeling with such fun vibes,” he says with a smile.