Masayoshi Oishi bets ‘Kimi wa Koibito’ can carry the anime without the anime

Masayoshi Oishi’s ‘Kimi wa Koibito’ was written as the opening theme for The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten Season 2, but the official music video ignores the source material entirely. No anime characters appear. Instead, two live performers — actor Tatsumi Hamada and VTuber Yuki Sakuna — move through a Tokyo romance that the song could belong to whether or not the anime existed. The music video has crossed 1.2 million views on YouTube.

That calculated independence is the premise the single is testing. The track’s core architecture — Oishi’s high, clear register building toward a chorus that releases outward rather than driving forward — works here as a standalone romantic statement, unencumbered by character lore or fan expectations. What passes as a premise in anime tie-in culture is a claim about the song itself: that it carries weight on its own.

Oishi has spent decades building the authority to make that claim. As a solo artist and as the vocal half of OxT alongside Tom-H@ck, he has contributed to approximately 54 anime and game music projects — among them the Overlord series openings, the Gold-certified ‘UNION’ from SSSS.GRIDMAN, and the Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun opening ‘Kimi Ja Nakya Dame Mitai’, which became a touchstone for a particular style of earnest, self-aware J-pop melody.

The limits are real, though. ‘Kimi wa Koibito’ is not available on Spotify, and its listener numbers on Last.fm reflect an audience concentrated in existing anime fandom. A music video that accumulates over a million plays without streaming platform distribution is building reach one YouTube play at a time. It works — but only in the formats where Oishi’s audience already lives.

‘Kimi wa Koibito’ is released on Pony Canyon in standard and Blu-ray editions. The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten Season 2 is currently airing, meaning the single continues to gain broadcast exposure with each new episode.

Tags: J-pop