Juna Serita Was Told to “just play bass.” Why She Went Back to Singing

This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version

When she sang, “so many people complained,” and what they told her was “just play bass.” In a November 2025 article, bassist Juna Serita said that after hearing it she “lost confidence and quit singing.”

Still, she chose to sing again. Feeling that “life is too short,” she made the theme of an album, in her words, “to show off myself without fear.”

For this profile, we went through the newspaper and music-media interviews she gave, her official biography, the captions of a podcast, and the titles of the videos we could list on YouTube. The numbers are as of November 1, 2026, measured by this site with the YouTube API. We have not watched the videos themselves; we checked what they contain only through their titles and descriptions.

Juna Serita's Name and Age: What the Sources Say

Her official biography introduces Juna Serita as “a bassist, vocalist, composer, and bandleader from Ishikawa, Japan.” She comes from the town of Uchinada in Ishikawa Prefecture: a July 2021 article in the Hokuriku Chunichi Shimbun (in Japanese) calls her an Uchinada native and gives her age at the time as 27. We could not confirm her date of birth in any reliable source.

In Japanese, her name is written 芹田珠奈 (read “Juna”), and some sources write it 芹田ジュナ. Whether that is the name on her official family register, though, we don't know. It may be a bit of a letdown, but we found nothing in which she addresses it herself.

As for where she is based, the culture magazine Itchy Silk introduced her in November 2025 as living in Tokyo. The piece misspells her name as “June” in its text, but it is a Q&A in which she answers for herself.

As of November 1, 2026, her YouTube channel had 279,000 subscribers and about 56.03 million total views, and it showed 582 videos.

From The Blue Hearts to Guitar, Then to Bass

Her way into music wasn't the bass, as it turns out. According to the Hokuriku Chunichi Shimbun, she began writing lyrics and music on guitar at 11, influenced by The Blue Hearts.

In the Itchy Silk interview, too, she looks back: “I always loved singing when I was a kid. I started writing songs, then I wanted to play some instruments to sing with it.” In her words, she was “a vocalist first.” The instrument, she says, “didn’t need to be bass guitar at all,” which is a bit of a surprise.

The turning point came in high school. Thinking “there are countless good guitarists” (translated from the Japanese), she hit a wall and picked up the bass, the paper writes. Her official biography puts her start on bass at 17 (“After picking up bass guitar at 17 years old”). Asked by Itchy Silk whether it was 17, she answered, “I would say 18 years old. That’s the time when I decided to become professional musician.”

Three Part-Time Jobs in High School, and a Family Against It

Her family did not welcome a path into music. Asked by Itchy Silk whether they had encouraged it, she answered: “Not at all! They didn’t like it.” Her family, she said, “wanted me to have a stable job and get married and have kids.” In the same November 2025 article, she added, “I think they are proud of my achievements now!”

As a high school student, she held three part-time jobs at once, to buy gear and to cover the cost of “pay to play” gigs. At a pay-to-play show, the performers are the ones who pay to appear. She worked before school and after it, practiced quietly for one to two hours in the middle of the night, slept three hours, and headed off to an early-morning job again. Every day.

Eventually, in her words, she “kinda got depressed,” and began to wonder, “what am I doing this for?” What kept her going was a thought: “if I become professional, this hard life will be all paid off in future!” That, she says, was “the time I got extra serious.” For a high schooler, it sounds like a very heavy routine.

Studying Under Tetsuo Sakurai at Showa University of Music

After high school she went on to Showa University of Music. Her official biography says she got in on “a full ride scholarship” and studied under Tetsuo Sakurai, a bassist formerly of CASIOPEA.

She told Itchy Silk that until she began taking his lessons, “I was listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Maximum the Hormone.” Sakurai pointed her elsewhere: “He recommended me to listen to Jaco, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire, Tower Of Power.” Jaco, here, is Jaco Pastorius.

That last name turns up on YouTube, too. The oldest video we could confirm in the API listing is a Tower of Power bass cover from November 23, 2014.

Her official biography also lists performing at a music festival in South Korea at 18, playing the NAMM Show in 2017 and 2018, and appearing in a Sony TV commercial. It also says she was interviewed by the US magazine Bass Player. That claim goes no further than her own side, though: we have not seen the article itself.

One Video Carries the Channel: “Funk No.1”

She probably became widely known through the all-female band TOKYO GROOVE JYOSHI. Her official biography calls her a founding member. An event listing from Triple R, a Melbourne radio station, also describes a band of three, including her, formed in Tokyo in 2018.

The producer's 2019 blog post (in Japanese) tells of finding her on YouTube, going to see her play live, and asking her to join. Whether that was before or after the band formed, the post does not say. It also says that she wrote the words and music for every song on her solo album.

According to Triple R's listing, the band also played clubs in New York. She left the band in 2020, and a new bassist joined.

On YouTube, one of the band's videos stands far above the rest. “Funk No.1,” published on her channel in October 2021, had about 29.03 million views as of November 1, 2026.

The credits in its description read “bass Juna Serita.” We could not confirm when the footage was recorded. Nor did we find any supported explanation for why its views climbed so high.

The skew shows in the numbers. As of November 1, 2026, this one video accounted for just over half of the channel's total views; the next most-viewed among the videos we could list, “What is hip ?” (cover), had about 2.12 million.

As of November 1, 2026, the channel showed 582 videos, and the API listing let us confirm view counts for 574 of them. Of the gap of 8, 2 were slots with a length of 0 seconds and 0 views. Why the other 6 were missing, we could not confirm.

Lined up, those 574 videos had a median of about 10,000 views as of November 1, 2026, and 7 of them had passed 1 million. The channel's numbers alone, in other words, make it hard to say how popular she is overall.

September 2020: Alone to America

After leaving the band, she moved to the US alone in September 2020. According to the paper, she wanted to learn the roots of the music she loves, such as funk and blues. At first, she told the paper, “I didn't know which way was up; I was feeling my way.” Even so, she formed bands of three to five with Americans in Florida and Georgia, and took on backing-band work as well.

The July 2021 article also describes what was hard at the time. A car she had picked up cheaply broke down. She moved people and gear herself, so without a car her work simply stopped. The paper added that she planned to start crowdfunding soon to raise money. Her old blog, where she was asking for support, could not be read as of November 2026, so we do not know how that turned out.

She was back in Japan temporarily at the time, to take part in a music recording for an international conference in Munich, Germany. While there, she also visited the newspaper's office in Kanazawa to promote her album Battle Field.

The paper calls it her first instrumental album, with 10 tracks. “With instrumental music, you can compete on the music alone, whatever your nationality or language,” she said. It sounds like something from a time when she was playing in a country whose language was not her own. Then again, she also said of the title track, “I'd love it to be used as, say, entrance music for combat sports.” It was not all heavy going, it seems.

Writing “Hunter” With Tape on the Keys

In October 2021, she gave a roughly 19-minute interview to a guitar podcast. What follows is what can be read from its auto-captions.

The captions contain mis-recognitions and do not tell the speakers apart. So we do not quote anything she says there; we only summarize it. We have not watched the video itself.

According to the captions, she usually starts a song with the bass, it seems. The melody comes next, and then she programs the drum patterns and keyboards.

The interesting part is how she wrote “Hunter.” She didn't know much scale theory at the time, so she looked up an exotic scale online and put tape on the keys of the notes she could use. From there, it seems, she searched among those notes and settled on the melody. She says it is her favorite song on the album. The music video came out in August 2022.

Her second favorite, “Childhood,” was written first and given its title afterward. She also talks about loving dogs as a child, going outside to look for them and pet them.

She mentions, too, that she had started practicing the saxophone, that she aims to release one album a year, and that she is thinking of a vocal record next.

Two Songs That Didn't Make It Into THE JAZZ AVENGERS

One of the bands she has played in is the jazz band THE JAZZ AVENGERS. Around its 2023 album, it had eight members. According to a Billboard JAPAN interview (in Japanese), the band grew out of a group put together for One Young World in 2021. That summit was held in Munich. It is probably the same international conference she came home to record music for, but the newspaper article does not name the conference.

In the same Billboard JAPAN interview, the band's leader, Senri Kawaguchi, reveals that “Juna-tan,” an affectionate form of Serita's name, was one of the organizers' recommendations. It is fun to see the band's own nickname printed as is.

The song she wrote for the 2023 album is “Pain or Pleasure.” Before it, she had submitted two other songs, but they were rejected because the bass did not stand out, she said. The reason may make you smile. She plays sax as a hobby, she explained, and even though she is a bassist, she tended to build her songs around the sax.

Asked about the band's future, she pictured it five years on: on vacation on a southern island, the phone rings, and everyone gathers for an overseas tour. “My goal is to earn a year's income from that tour,” she said (translated from the Japanese). Quite a dream.

Elsewhere, in an e-mail interview with vois (formerly MusicVoice) (in Japanese) in April 2023, she was asked what she was pursuing in music. Her short answer: she was practicing playing just a little faster. Her reason: “subtracting is easy, but adding doesn't work unless you have something to add” (translated from the Japanese). We read it as wanting to have a wider range to choose from.

Another band she has played in is Muses. In the interview list on the contents page of the November 2022 issue of Bass Magazine (in Japanese), her name appears as 「芹田ジュナ（Muses）」 (Juna Serita, Muses). We have not read the interview itself. Bonedo (in German), a German music-gear site, wrote that as of April 2026 she was a member of both bands. We could not confirm her membership after that.

After “just play bass”: Back to Singing

We found no clear statement from her on when she came back to Japan. What we have is an announcement for a concert at Kanagawa Kenminhall (in Japanese), which says she returned to Japan in 2023. This organizer's announcement is the only source.

Her uploads changed sharply around this time. Counting the 574 videos whose views we could confirm as of November 1, 2026, by year of publication in Japan time, 2022 had 34 and 2023 had 109. The jump is plain to see.

Which brings us to the story this article opened with, from the 2025 interview. Asked about her album SHOW ME RIGHT NOW!, she said, “I always wanted to show my singer-song-writer ability more than bass skills.” But when she sang, people complained and told her “just play bass.” The article does not say when she lost confidence and quit singing.

What changed her mind was a feeling that “life is too short.” If she didn't try, she would never be good, and she would never be “perfect” anyway. With that in mind, she says, she chose the album's theme.

On April 10, 2026, a new album, FLOW, came out. Bandcamp describes it as her “7th album,” with 10 tracks, and as “layered with vibrant vocals.”

One of its tracks, “Still Here,” got a live video in April 2026, and in May a video with Jack Gardiner's name in the title. His is a name her official biography lists among her collaborators.

In the same April 2026 article, Bonedo reported that guitarist Ulrich Ellison's next album was to be recorded in Tokyo in October 2026, and that a German tour with her was planned for spring 2027. We have not been able to confirm that the recording actually took place. Nor did we find any interview in which she talks about FLOW.

The latest video we could confirm is “Juna in Pakistan,” from October 30, 2026. We checked only its title, so we do not know what it shows.

Asked by Itchy Silk about her plans, she answered, “I want to tour all over the world with my own name Juna Serita!” Read as the words of someone who once quit singing, it is a strong line.