I remember seeing the above video of ex-Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman's apperance on a Japanese cooking show a while back and thinking "Huh. Look at him all speaking Japanese and junk. Weird." I figured he had just been touring there for so long that he had picked up the language and blended into the culture. Well, it turns out that things have gone much further than that. Friedman is an all out Japanophile. He did learn a lot about Japanese music through his tours, but unlike most metal maniacs he instantly fell in love with the J-pop scene. Otaku USA's Patrick Macias has written up an interview with Friedman for The Japan Times. As Friedman explains it:

"Toward the middle of my time in Megadeth, like around the mid- to late-'90s, I started really getting into Japanese music. At first it was B'z, Zard, Hitomi, Glay and Ayumi Hamasaki. Every time we'd come to Japan for a tour, I'd go back home with a suitcase full of CDs and listen to them constantly. I found that you can listen to a J-pop artist in Japan and they might have one really heartfelt ballad and then a death-metal track and then a disco track or a ska sound, but it's all the same artist on the same album, and with good songwriting all the way through. This made me think, 'I wish I had that kind of freedom in the States,' because if you're a metal musician in the U.S., you can't really step outside of that image very much. I love metal, but there are a lot of other things that I like, too, and I found that Japanese artists have way more freedom in that sense."