When did you get into Jrock?

Ok, so lets expand our conversations to the broader topic of Jrock in general.
When did you get into Jrock music? How? Who was your first band you heard/got into?


For me, I was about 13/14 years old, and into, like really heavy rock music/metal. My best friend was listening to Jpop from video games, like FF X2 & Kingdom Hearts -Ayumi Hamasaki and Koda Kumi and I was going freaking nuts with her playing that all the time. So I yelled at her and asked her if she had any non-pop music, and she played me Cage by Dir en grey. My reaction "Wtf is this shit? >.<" Cage was too soft for me and I was certainly not used to the Visual Kei look and sound since I listened to north American death metal at the time. So then she sent me Miyavi - Jibun Kakumei. I was in love. Something about his imperfect voice, raw sound, and spazztic-ness and blue hair, I was hooked. I got into other bands after that, and eventually got into Visual Kei (and after I heard other songs by DEG I became a HUGE fan and still love them today, Cage still isn't my fav song but I don't hate it by any means XD)


What about you guys?! ^-^

When I was like... 8? I think? XD A friend of mine moved to Japan, and our school allowed us to be pen pals [since we had mandatory pen pals in grades 1-5]. She always sent me a tape of what her brother was listening to, cause at that age I wanted to be just as cool as him XP Lol. One of the first tapes she sent me had X Japan on it, and I fell in love with it. She kept sending me their music and a bunch of other bands, including LUNA SEA, and she got me addicted. Eventually we lost touch, but she kept sending me tapes every time we wrote. A lot were indies bands that only played small venues, or never released any official albums/singles,

Everyone has better stories than me haha.
2 years ago I was bored with all the music I was listening to (I really likes Finnish/Swedish rock) and my friend showed me Miyavi because he thought he would interest me. I thought it was weird at first but later that night I started going on a youtube spree and found a lot of bands I liked. So yeah, that's sort of it. Grew from there. Now I'm not so, "I can only listen to Jrock!" (I KNOW YOU ALL HAVE GONE THROUGH THIS DO NOT DENY IT lol) but I keep to my favorites. ^-^