Creator Profile · wowaka: Pushing VOCALOID Into the "Mid-Generation Big Three" with Rock's Sense of Speed
VOCALOIDCreator Profilewowaka「生きて、また会おう」—Live, and we'll meet again.
In April 2019, a single obituary left the whole VOCALOID scene speechless: wowaka had died of acute heart failure at the age of 31. His name—along with "Genjitsu Touhi P," the alias from his early days—had long since been carved into the bones of this subculture.
The Basics
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Born / Died | November 4, 1987 – April 5, 2019 (from Kagoshima; aged 31)[^1] |
| Education | Kagoshima Prefectural Tsurumaru High School → University of Tokyo |
| Debut | 2009, with the upload "Gray Zone ni te"; the name "Genjitsu Touhi P" dates from here[^2] |
| Main voicebanks | Hatsune Miku, Megurine Luka, Megpoid |
| The turn | Formed the rock band Hitorie; lead vocals and guitar |
The name "Genjitsu Touhi P" came about almost offhandedly: the description of his debut song included the line "escaping reality sure feels good," and fans just started calling him that. But he clearly never actually escaped anything—he kept up a steady output all through his time at the University of Tokyo, and after graduating he simply upgraded "escaping" into a career as a rock musician.
Three Songs, One Era
"Rolling Girl" (2011)
The song almost everyone covered on their way in. Racing drumbeats under drifting harmonies; the chorus feels like glancing back mid-sprint.
"Unhappy Refrain" (2012)
It gives "unhappiness" the velocity of a dance track—a textbook case of wowaka's aesthetic of contradiction: the bleaker it gets, the harder it burns.
"Ura-Omote Lovers" (2011)
Both sides of a lovesick heart, playing at once. The density of melodic hooks still holds up today.
Around 2011, he was named alongside ryo (supercell) and hachi (Kenshi Yonezu) as VOCALOID's "mid-generation big three"—three people who respectively shoved the grammar of electronic, pop, and rap into the throat of a virtual voice.
Six Years of Silence, and One Song: "Unknown Mother-Goose"
After he shifted to band work, wowaka went six years without uploading a VOCALOID track. Then in 2017, on Hatsune Miku's tenth anniversary, he bought a V4X voicebank, spent a week getting back up to speed with tuning, and uploaded "Unknown Mother-Goose"—which reached Hall of Fame status just 5 hours and 27 minutes after posting.[^3]
The song is often read as wowaka's farewell letter to VOCALOID: the melody returns to his signature racing beat, while the lyrics are a plain, unguarded thank-you. The line 「生きて、また会おう」("Live, and we'll meet again") from the music video later became the words fans quoted most often when they mourned him.
The Legacy: Speed, Sincerity, and That Goodbye
What wowaka left behind wasn't a set of techniques but an attitude: sing the things you can't outrun, at the fastest speed you've got.
Every April, Hatsune Miku and her cover singers pull out "Rolling Girl" and sing it one more time, right on schedule—not as a nostalgia ritual, but as the "see you again" he promised in the song.
So if you had to sum up wowaka in one phrase: he turned escaping into running.
- 1: Dates and cause of death (acute heart failure) come from the Japanese Wikipedia entry on wowaka and obituaries in several Japanese outlets.Return1
- 2: The origin of the "Genjitsu Touhi P" alias is covered in the Moegirlpedia and Hatsune Miku Wiki entries.Return2
- 3: The 5-hour-27-minute Hall of Fame time comes from the upload page records and a Moegirlpedia compilation.Return3