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January 31, 2026
【Hiroshi Fujiwara Interview】"AI won't eliminate music" - A speaker from fragment × BE@RBRICK appears | MEDICOM TOY
MEDICOM TOY | MEDICOM TOY
BE@RBRICK AUDIO Portable Bluetooth® Speaker FRAGMENT 400%
A collaboration model has arrived: a BE@RBRICK speaker developed by Rinaro, in partnership with fragment, led by Hiroshi Fujiwara. Available in two simple designs: BLACK and WHITE. It embodies the aesthetic of HF, who has created numerous BE@RBRICKs.
This time, as it's a speaker, we asked about AI and music, topics frequently discussed in recent years, as well as the currently popular podcast program "BAD PHARMACY" and the SLIDE CULTURE MAGAZINE (a magazine you watch on YouTube) "QUIET."
Additionally, an interview with Pavlo Shimanovych, founder and CEO of Rinaro, about the development of the "BE@RBRICK AUDIO Portable Bluetooth® Speaker" can be foundhere
Text by SHINNO Kunihiko | Photographs by TAKAYANAGI Ken | Edit by TOMIYAMA Eizaburo
I have 100 percent trust in what MEDICOM TOY wants to do
—A collaboration model of the "BE@RBRICK AUDIO Portable Bluetooth® Speaker" with fragment is being released. Do you use Bluetooth® speakers regularly at home, Hiroshi-san?
Hiroshi Fujiwara(Hereafter, HF) I'm not home much, so almost never. However, I've been involved with BE@RBRICK since its inception, so I take the stance of "go ahead with whatever MEDICOM TOY wants to do." I trust them 100 percent because I know they won't bring anything strange, and there aren't many companies like that.
—BE@RBRICK is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and you've been collaborating since its predecessor, KUBRICK. That's quite a history.
HFIt's amazing. MEDICOM TOY has become quite a large company.
—The colors are BLACK and WHITE, which are symbolic of fragment. Was that an easy decision?
HFYes. If there's a concept, I'm not the type to spend a lot of time on design.
—If you were to gift this speaker to someone, who would you choose?
HFRather than someone who likes BE@RBRICK, it might be better for someone who likes music to get it and discover BE@RBRICK through this. However, I feel that the opportunities for people to listen to music at home have generally decreased compared to the past. In the first place, I think music in the 1970s was something only truly passionate people listened to.
So, perhaps it would be better if listening to music at home became something considered eccentric again. Back then, when you bought a record, you'd listen to it until it wore out, but now people don't listen that much. But this is true for all genres; it's an inevitable consequence as archives accumulate.
I think music is the most suited for AI
—Your song "KOTOBA" with the music unit "Order of Things," featuring Koki Okamoto, was digitally released recently. Has your motivation for creating music changed from the past?
HF"KOTOBA" was a song I made when COVID began. It was originally planned for release the summer three years ago, but due to the record company's circumstances, the release kept getting delayed. Nowadays, AI's advancements are so incredible that I wonder if there's any point in me doing it myself.
While it's being used in various fields like video and text, I believe music is the most suited for AI. This is because music itself is fundamentally akin to imitation.
When you start a band, isn't it like, "Let's do something like The Beatles" or "Let's do something like the Sex Pistols"? Since it's fundamentally built on "likeness," copyright is more ambiguous compared to other genres. There are only 12 notes, so even with a random prompt, it can form something coherent.
—Do you plan to utilize it yourself in the future?
HFI don't intend to release anything I create with it, but when I asked a friend what they were listening to recently, they said, "I make my own music every morning and listen to it."
—That's incredible. An era where supply and demand can be met by one person.
HFAnd it's amazing that something we used to take a month to create can be done in about 20 seconds by entering a prompt and pressing a button. In fact, thinking up the prompt takes longer.
—However, since it's made by recombining existing elements, it will have a sense of déjà vu. Also, if it leads to mass production of low-quality content, I worry that we might lose the value of music in the future.
HFIsn't all music like that? It's all things you've heard somewhere before. Every time new technology emerges, there are always people who complain. When DAT (Digital Audio Tape) came out, people opposed it, saying it would hurt record sales if it could be copied, and there was a debate about whether musicians would become obsolete if sampling could replicate orchestral sounds.
Now, there's a concern that AI might eliminate music creators. But if you think about it, everyone is doing something "like" something else, so it won't disappear. You could say the value of music might diminish, but as the general public starts using it all at once, 2026 will likely be the true beginning of the AI era.
—The electricity consumption must be terrifying (laughs).
HFGoogle's search has become AI-driven on its own, hasn't it? I personally like new and interesting values, and the hip-hop techniques I found interesting in the past involved sampling and using good music from the past, so I've always been drawn to that kind of thing.
The background behind the creation of "BAD PHARMACY" and "QUIET"
—Please tell us about the podcast program "BAD PHARMACY" currently streaming with TaiTan and Ryohei Kamide. Last November, the release of "Hokaron," a collaboration between the program and Lotte's portable hand warmers, also became a topic of discussion.
HFInitially, the word "podcast" itself seemed to be gaining popularity independently. "BAD PHARMACY" began two years ago when one of the students from FRAGMENT UNIVERSITY ( *Note 1) where I gave lectures, expressed a desire to do a podcast with me upon graduation.
*Note 1: A lecture series held from October 2023 to March 2024 as part of an open campus event. It will be published as a book, "FRAGMENT UNIVERSITY | Non-Verbal Marketing HF's Special Lectures," in February 2025.
The initial proposal was to hear my old stories, but I suggested it would be better as a platform to discuss things I find interesting now and what will be interesting in the future. That's how it evolved into doing it with TaiTan and Kamide. Both are incredibly intelligent individuals, so I mostly listen.
Basically, I don't know much about what they do elsewhere, and they don't ask me about my work at all. I also don't mention things like, "I have a new BE@RBRICK coming out." That's part of what makes it interesting. Both of them come from families who owned pharmacies, so it would be great if we could do something witty and unusual, like creating and selling ginger shots.
—It sounds like it would be enjoyable to listen to "BAD PHARMACY" on the new BE@RBRICK AUDIO. Also, please tell us about SLIDE CULTURE MAGAZINE (a magazine you watch on YouTube) "QUIET", which started in December 2024.
HFIt's been about a year now, but the number of views is incredibly low, which I find interesting in itself. "QUIET" started purely from my contrarian idea: what would happen if there were no videos or sound on YouTube?
This also has zero monetization. Well, it doesn't cost much either. I think early magazines were probably created by people who were driven solely by their passion. In that sense, "QUIET" is exactly like that. Since there's no income from anywhere, no one involved receives any payment.
Conversely, we recently released a print magazine for the first time ("QUIET Presented by PRODISM"), and it attracted sponsors. We were finally able to achieve some monetization through analog means. Normally, you can't monetize a magazine, so the common practice is to go online, but we're doing the opposite.
—That's remarkable. That reverse thinking.
Producing a book on the history of Shibuya from the perspective of a record shop
HFI've always enjoyed editing things, and that extends to how I create music. Perhaps it's a habit formed from experiencing the golden age of magazines in my youth. We're planning to release the second issue of the print "QUIET" in about six months. Publishing the first issue made us realize we could use the YouTube "QUIET" as an archive, and conversely, we could conduct interviews and discussions more effectively by, for example, having someone do a brief interview and create a 10-line headline, with the main content in the magazine. As part of that, a book about the history of Shibuya will be released soon.
Shinichi Takei, who runs a used record store called "Face Records" in Udagawacho, started investigating "Where was the first import record store in Shibuya?" This led him to delve deeper and deeper, spending every week at the National Diet Library. His research findings were so fascinating that I encouraged him to "let's make a book" and took on the role of producer. The manuscript is complete, and it should be out in late February.
—I'm eager to read about the history of Shibuya, which was once the city with the most record shops in the world from the 1990s to the early 2000s.
HFApparently, the area where CISCO (a long-established import record shop that closed in 2007) used to be in Udagawacho was originally a military prison. The stairs in front of CISCO were the prison's back entrance.
—I had no idea.
HFAfter the war, the US occupied the large land owned by the military, and Washington Heights ( *Note 2) was built there. It's said that only officers could live in the Washington Heights residences, and furniture, clothes, and records discarded as trash from affluent households spread throughout Shibuya and Harajuku, potentially forming a unique culture. That's our speculation.
*Note 2: Constructed in 1946 as a US military facility in Japan. It was returned to Japan for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and now houses Yoyogi Park, the National Yoyogi Stadium, and the NHK Broadcasting Center.
When I was young, foreigners mostly meant Americans. When I went to London at 18, friends I made there would mock the Japanese-accented English of Japanese people who visited. Of course, all the English taught in Japan is American English, and we lived a life of "Hooray for Coca-Cola!" So, I learned for the first time that the British found it strange. To that extent, the period of high economic growth, the 70s and 80s, when we grew up, was truly dominated by America. Takei-san's book contains many such stories.
I also interviewed people in the fashion industry over 80 years old about Shibuya back then, and received many interesting responses. There was a pioneering select shop called "CAPSULE" ( *Note 3), with Shiro Kuramata handling the interior design and Tadanori Yokoo writing the initial introduction.
*Note 3: Introduced emerging domestic creators of the time, such as Comme des Garçons, Kansai Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake, to the world.
Takei-san has already decided on the concept for his next research project, and there's talk of making that into a book as well. Since I'm interested in interviewing people, and "QUIET" also makes interviews easier, we've been discussing doing more interviews and dialogues. As part of that, a book about the history of Shibuya will be released soon.
The next 100 years might actually be the most interesting
—We look forward to the release of the book and the future developments of "QUIET." Lastly, this year (2026) marks the 50th anniversary of Punk and the 40th anniversary of the release of "Kensetsu Butsu" by Ito Seiko & TINNIE PUNX (Hiroshi Fujiwara, Kan Takagi), a monumental album from the early days of Japanese hip-hop. What are your thoughts?
HFI don't particularly think about my own anniversaries. TINNIE PUNX itself started from Kan-chan and me saying, "Has it really been 10 years since punk?" However, this might connect to the AI discussion earlier, but I thought pop culture had ended in the 90s.
Rockabilly in 1960 and hip-hop in 1990 are completely different genres, and while there were various developments like glam and punk in between, after the 90s, everything felt like it was just based on rock, reggae, hip-hop, and house that had already emerged. I didn't feel anything was particularly new, and I lived my life accepting that things didn't have to be new to be good.
—I think many people over 50 feel the same way.
HFHowever, recently, while watching "The Beatles Anthology" which started streaming on Disney Plus, I realized that perhaps the 100 years starting from the 90s, when all of pop culture came together, might actually be the most interesting.
This is because Einstein proposed the theory of relativity 100 years ago, and quantum mechanics only recently took shape and became feasible for computers. While we may not be aware of it, physicists have likely been thinking about many things over the past 100 years to reach this point. I believe similar developments could occur in the world of pop culture.
I was fortunate enough to be part of the generation at the starting point of this, so I hope to witness how new and interesting things emerge by arranging what already exists and changing how it's used.
BE@RBRICK AUDIO Portable Bluetooth® Speaker FRAGMENT 400%
Size | Approximately 280mm in total height
Colors | Available in 2 types: BLACK / WHITE
Weight | 870g
Specifications
● Equipped with Bluetooth® 5
● Frequency Range: 90Hz-20,000Hz (-6dB)
● Rinaro proprietary "QUAD’360™" omnidirectional audio technology
● Includes USB-C charging cable: 5V/2A
● Replaceable rechargeable battery
● 6 hours of playback on a 1.5-hour charge
● Volume and soundtrack control via wrist rotation
Release Date | Releasing on Saturday, February 7, 2026, at MEDICOM TOY NEXT
Price | ¥107,800 (tax included)
※ Limited quantity. Please forgive us if it sells out.
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