East Of Eden Trivia — 22 Entries
22 sourced facts about East Of Eden.
Trivia
On the EP Rising In Bloom, "Checkmate" is the first lyric Ayasa has written. The music is credited jointly to East Of Eden and Mao. By Ayasa's account, the moment she first heard Mao's demo an image of a chessboard came to her unbidden, and she wrote from there — casting the singer, Akane Minato, as the protagonist making her way through the game of a life. The writing credits for the EP were revealed on an Instagram live the members held on 21 May 2026.
Ayasa, the band's leader, set out what she wanted the name to mean in the comment issued when the group was announced: that East Of Eden should become, for anyone who comes to know and like it and for the members themselves, exactly what the name says — a paradise. In the same comment she called the four who joined her the goddesses of music she had met over the course of her career, and said the approach had come from her.
East Of Eden was assembled by Ayasa, until then working as a solo violinist, who set out to reach an international audience and gathered the players she most wanted to work with. The four came from entirely different backgrounds: vocalist Akane Minato had been the lead singer of the idol group predia, which disbanded in 2022; guitarist Yuki plays in D_Drive, the instrumental band that made its international debut on Britain's Marshall Records; bassist Wakazaemon also played in Coronanamoremomo, Maximum The Hormone's official franchise band; and drummer MIZUKI had been working as a support drummer.
On 10 December 2024 the band announced that bassist Wakazaemon was leaving; a fortnight later, on 24 December, they announced MINA, who had been working as a solo artist, as her replacement. In her comment MINA wrote that before going solo she had spent about six years in a band, having moved to Tokyo dreaming of making it that way, and that when that band broke up four years earlier she had closed the lid on the idea of ever doing it again. The invitation left her unsure at first, but chance meetings with the members and work that put them in the same room kept happening, and after seeing them play she decided to join.
On The First Eden - Seeds Of Hope, "Darkside Lotus" arrived as a demo that leaned Vocaloid. Akane Minato felt that would not give it any flavour, hit on the idea of working in something of enka, tried it half as a joke — and it fitted. Nobody had directed her to do it; the idea was her own.
The demo for "Telepathic," on Rising In Bloom, arrived with almost no violin solo in it. Every other part had been worked out; the violin was more or less blank, and Ayasa struggled with it. The solo had to sit over a breakdown at an awkward tempo — sixteenths dragged, thirty-seconds ran away. What she ended up playing was showy enough that the guitar solo following it no longer held its own, and Yuki re-recorded hers.
"The weight of choice" was written for AKIBA LOST, a late-night drama on Nippon TV, and used as one of its two theme songs alongside Garari's "Answer Me." Bassist MINA also appears in the drama, as the cosplayer Wakana Yusa — her first acting role. In her comment she wrote that recording came after the shoot was finished, which she felt gave the playing more of the scene about it. Ayasa, citing the saying that life is a succession of choices, described the song as carrying the wish to regret none of them and keep walking forward on one's own feet.
The band's first anime tie-up was sprung on the audience at their Zepp DiverCity show on 3 July 2026: a new song, "Ghost Sequence," had been chosen as the opening theme for the TV anime Toaru Anbu no Shoujo Kyousei. Singer Akane Minato had long been saying she wanted to sing an anime theme one day, and this was the moment it came about. Announced in the same breath was that a second new song, "ONE WAY," had been picked up for a pachinko machine in the same Toaru franchise.
The record titles run as a single line from fruit to seed to flowering: two mini-albums called Forbidden Fruit -1st piece- and -2nd piece-, then the first full album The First Eden - Seeds Of Hope, then the EP Rising In Bloom. Ayasa has said she wanted the titles to carry that progression — starting from the fruit and going back to the seed. She adds that they are still on the way up toward the flowering rather than satisfied with it: the sky, as she puts it, is only starting to come into view.
The first lyric Ayasa ever wrote, "Checkmate," came out of the chess match in the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The moment she played Mao's demo, that scene appeared over the intro, and she built from there a story with the singer, Akane Minato, as its protagonist, pushing on without being thrown by the noise around her. Behind taking the job on was the sense that having spent so long in instrumental music, writing words was the one thing she could never do on her own; people around her had been suggesting it too. In East Of Eden the composer usually writes the words as well — but Mao's songs had always been sent out to someone else for lyrics, so, she has said, she thought she might as well try it herself.
Woven into the lyric of "Checkmate," without ever being spelled out, are colours Ayasa associates with each member: blue for Yuki, who plays a white instrument painted with blue roses; yellow for MIZUKI, which everyone including MIZUKI accepts; green for MINA, whose bass is green; and white for Akane Minato, both from her earlier career and from the sense that she can take on any colour at all. Those four become things from the natural world in the D section — water running, the sun rising, grass and trees stirring, a flower opening. Ayasa is fond of purple, but decided purple would make the whole thing suddenly ghostly, and gave herself the flower instead, as what opens after the water and the sun and the greenery. She remains a little embarrassed about it.
Looking back on the Shanghai show of 29 March 2025, the band's first outside Japan, Akane Minato said what struck her was that the audience sang along in Chinese. Ayasa has said that the language barrier had worried them — how were they going to lift the room? — but that the singing and the shouts came from the first song, and it was the crowd who lifted them. The band went on to play in South Korea as well.
Warner Music Japan's page presents East Of Eden as a five-piece: Ayasa on violin, MINA on bass, Akane Minato on vocals, MIZUKI on drums and Yuki on guitar. The label describes it as four musicians, each established in her own field, gathering around Ayasa, a violinist working across a wide range of scenes — five players from different roots setting out to win the world over with rock built on a metal foundation.
For fans in Japan, the Shanghai show came with an unusual application process. It was staged at the Bandai Namco Shanghai Base Dream Hall on 29 March 2025, all standing, and applications from Japan were taken by email only. The details the band asked for included the applicant's name exactly as printed in their passport and the passport number, both stated to be for identity checks on the day. Anyone without a passport yet was told to send the number once they had one, and everyone was asked to check that theirs had at least six months left from the date of departure. On the day a desk for overseas bookings was set up at the venue, where tickets were collected on presentation of the passport.
On 20 March 2025, the day of the Zepp DiverCity show, the band announced that bassist MINA would not be appearing owing to illness, adding that tickets would not be refunded. Dated the same day, a second announcement said an extra date had been arranged at short notice for 8 April at KT Zepp Yokohama — billed, in the same breath, as the last headline show before Yuki's break.
Guitarist Yuki wrote in her comment at the launch that she and Ayasa had connected on social media and had been saying they should work together some day, and that this was what came of it; the other three were people she was meeting for the first time. The band's first release, the digital single "Evolve [Extended Version]," came out on 8 August 2023 and runs six minutes and forty seconds, long enough to put every player's technique on show.
Ayasa explained afterwards why she had approached MINA. She had been following her on social media and was struck that she had built her name not as the bassist of some particular band but simply as MINA the bassist; the years of band experience behind that mattered too. Ayasa made the approach expecting nothing, and then MIZUKI happened to run into MINA at an event and Ayasa found herself working alongside her, which only strengthened the wish to have her in. In January 2024 MINA had also appeared in a session video for the solo project of LINKIN PARK's Mike Shinoda.
Every track on the first album, The First Eden - Seeds Of Hope, was written after MINA joined. They could have used unrecorded songs from the live set, or re-cut older material, but the move to Warner Music Japan and the arrival of a new member landed at the same moment, and — as Ayasa put it — it felt as though they had moved house. What they wanted to show was what this new place and this new line-up had made.
On the same album, "IKIZAMA" sits so low that Akane Minato's first thought was that it must be in a man's key. Raising it was discussed and several versions were tried, but a higher key changed the atmosphere of the song entirely — and left the guitar with shapes that are simply not playable in drop D. Yuki asked them to keep it where it was, and it stayed.
The instrumental "YELLOW CARD," included only on the standard edition of The First Eden - Seeds Of Hope, was put together by drummer MIZUKI with Mao, and every melody in it is hers. She packed in what she had wanted to play — the flat-out double-kick passage at the end among it — and then, because she wanted the guitar solo and the violin solo to fight, alternated short solos between them.
On the same EP, the violin that appears to run in sixteenths through the intro and chorus of "Dawn of Astrantia" is in fact played in eighths with a heavy dotted-eighth delay over it; the delay is cut only on the sustained note at the end of each phrase. The idea came out of a conversation with Ryutaro Fujinaga, who wrote the song, when the two were working elsewhere. On the bass, MINA thought the demo had too much slap in it and said at the session that she wanted to take some out — Fujinaga told her he wanted the slap sounding all the way through, and it stayed.
After playing JAPAN JAM 2025, guitarist Yuki went on maternity leave, and for a stretch the band performed without a guitar at all. Ayasa has said that MINA, still relatively new, stepped forward to fill the space, and that doing so is probably what settled her into the band. Yuki returned soon after giving birth.