Beat Crusaders
Japanese band
Beat Crusaders (ビート・クルセイダース, Bīto Kuruseidāsu; typeset as BEAT CRUSADERS) were a Japanese rock band active from 1997 to 2010. During all promotional appearances, their faces are masked by drawings resembling themselves as printed by a dot-matrix printer.
History
Beat Crusaders, commonly abbreviated BECR, was founded at the end of 1997 by Tōru Hidaka, as an experimental U.S. Lo-Fi Indie Rock unit. The rest of the band later joined as a result of continual experimental gigs performed around the Shimokitazawa area of Tokyo. Their creative use of analog synthesizers and an old Casiotone, incorporated with influences of such bands as Weezer and The Rentals, and at times the dynamism of Snuffesque rock, had transformed them into a powerfully melodic guitar band. By the end of 1998, Beat Crusaders had become known for a crazy and fun live act that was not to be missed. The momentum continued with a single, "E.C.D.T." released in June of the following year which entered independent charts of CD retail shops all across Japan. A month later their first mini-album, Howling Symphony of... was released; this entered the charts again with various music magazines giving a big thumbs up. Reflecting their chart action and praise from magazines, numerous gigs followed with notable bands in the Japanese alternative/independent scene, from guitar pop and new wave, to pop punk and ska bands.
“Beat Crusaders” enters the record as japanese band. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Beat, Crusaders and Japanese can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Beat Crusaders” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Beat, Crusaders and Japanese provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q813064. VIAF identifies the subject as 128235562. The Library of Congress control number is no2009030532. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2010 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beat Crusaders” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.