Rikon Densetsu’s ‘Daikuko’: The Ballad That Lets the One Left Behind Just Stand There

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Rikon Densetsu’s Daikuko (“The Big Airport”) is spreading the quiet way. Not through a big first-week spike, not through a viral clip — through car windows cracked open on summer evenings. It’s the theme song for TV Asahi’s Thursday drama Daikuko ~GATE24~, and it behaves like one: it doesn’t try to hit you over the head. It walks you home from the episode.

Here’s the read I keep coming back to. Daikuko is a breakup song that refuses to file the breakup away — it sets the whole scene at an airport and stays with the person doing the seeing-off. Not the one boarding. The one still standing at the gate.

Key facts

• Rikon Densetsu’s digital single Daikuko was released on July 24, 2026. Words, music, and arrangement are all by the band themselves.
• It was written specifically as the theme song for TV Asahi’s Thursday drama Daikuko ~GATE24~, starring Shuri.
• The recording features Yasuo Sano on drums, Ren Yamamoto on bass, and Daichi Kakinuma on keys.
• The single artwork was shot by photographer Hideki Sakamaki.
• Rikon Densetsu is a two-piece: Ayumu Matsuda (vocals) and Jun Beppu (guitar). Formed 2022, major-label debut in 2024.

What kind of song is Daikuko?

The short version: this is a song about how you remember a goodbye. Written for the Shuri-led TV Asahi drama Daikuko ~GATE24~, it’s a song about not filing away the flashbacks of meeting and parting as past memories, but carrying them forward as a light that shows you the way — a piece that traces the shifts of feeling and time with a careful, delicate hand. That’s the pitch. And I think it’s the whole thing.

Most breakup songs pick a side. Either “I’ll never forget you,” or “I’m past it now.” Daikuko refuses both. You don’t forget, you don’t get over it, you just leave the thing where it is and let it light the room you’re standing in. Honestly, in my twenties I would’ve bounced off this idea. It took getting older to hear a farewell song and think, oh right — this isn’t something you’re supposed to process.

The title choice does a lot of work too. An airport is not a train station. The distance is longer. Once someone clears security, they’re gone from view, physically. Love songs set in that specific place — the place where you literally cannot see them anymore — aren’t that common.

The sound: light through clouds after a summer squall

Onto the production. The track is described as having a nostalgic, emotional afterglow — like a shaft of light breaking through the clouds at summer dusk, with the smell of rain still hanging in the air. The recording features Yasuo Sano on drums, Ren Yamamoto on bass, and Daichi Kakinuma on keys. That personnel list is basically the blueprint.

Yasuo Sano doesn’t over-play. He sits back. On a ballad — and especially one that has to conjure the enormous, echoey space of an airport — that restraint is the whole difference. Yamamoto’s bass draws the outline. Kakinuma’s keys carry the humidity of the track, which is the closest word I have for what he’s doing. All three are pulling in the same direction: subtract. That’s what lets Matsuda’s voice stay in the middle of the frame.

If you’ve come in through the band’s other stuff — the city-pop-meets-funk bounce of Ai ga Isso Mellow, or the take-off-running groove of First Kiss — the deceleration on Daikuko is a little startling. They slowed down and turned the humidity up. Same band, but a much wider swing than I expected. What holds it together is the underlying kayōkyoku-adjacent sentiment they’ve always had. It still sounds like Rikon Densetsu. That’s the neat trick.

As a drama theme it does the unglamorous job well. It runs under the end credits at a temperature that keeps you inside the episode a little longer instead of yanking you out. Not a song fighting for your attention — a song extending the afterglow. Quiet call. Smart call.

When this song actually works

I think this one comes alive at night, in a car. Doesn’t matter if it’s an urban expressway or a two-lane coastal road somewhere quieter. That stretch of straight road with no traffic lights, oncoming headlights drifting past in slow motion — that’s when it lands. Feelings you couldn’t quite deal with during the day come up an inch or two.

The other slot: Sunday evenings. There’s a specific loneliness to the weekend winding down, and the humidity of this track is right in that pocket. Not sad exactly. Just wistful. Summer Sundays especially. It’s a good cushion between the end credits on Thursday and the Monday morning you’re heading toward.

Where it doesn’t work, to be honest: the morning commute. This is not a caffeine song. Force it on at 7am and it just sits heavy. Late afternoon onward, or a slow weekend morning while you’re doing the dishes — that’s when it goes deepest.

Rikon Densetsu, and where this song sits in their arc

Rikon Densetsu is a Japanese two-piece male band that started activity in 2022 and made their major-label debut in 2024. The name is taken from the Japanese title of Marvin Gaye’s 1978 album Here, My Dear. Matsuda and Beppu met in 2018 while working part-time at a “band karaoke” bar where the staff play the instruments live and the customers sing. That origin story matters more than it looks.

Two people who spent their nights listening to strangers sing every song imaginable, then found themselves at home during the pandemic swapping acoustic demos — that’s an unusually song-first way to start a band. They’ve got a lived-in sense of how songs reach people baked in from day one. Naming yourself after a Marvin Gaye record isn’t a stunt either. It’s them showing you where they’re looking: soul, R&B, the emotional register of the seventies.

Their signature tracks up to now — Ai ga Isso Mellow, Ajisai, First Kiss — have all been lighter, slicker, sunnier. Daikuko is clearly a different color. It feels like they’re opening a drawer they hadn’t opened yet, and doing it on a big stage. From debut onward, Rikon Densetsu have consistently said they want to remain, above all, a pop band. This song still fits inside that. It’s a ballad, but it isn’t a closed one.

Worth flagging: a group that had been self-producing everything, audio and visuals, brought in a top-tier session rhythm section for this one. That shift in the setup is a useful lens. Hand off what’s worth handing off, keep the middle. The line between the two is clearly drawn.

How it fits Daikuko ~GATE24~

Onto the tie-in. Daikuko ~GATE24~ is set at the airport as the country’s borderline, with Shuri playing a customs officer with sharp powers of observation. She’s part of a newly formed team pulled together from various government agencies, and the show follows them as they grow into “the ultimate gatekeepers” fighting to protect Japan’s peace and safety — a punchy piece of entertainment. Genre-wise it leans procedural / workplace-with-heart.

Pairing that with a theme song about “holding a goodbye as light” is a genuinely interesting call. An airport is a workplace for the show’s characters, but for the people passing through it, it’s one of the biggest emotional turnstiles in a life. The theme song is quietly handling that second view. While the drama pushes the job forward, the song picks up the countless lives moving through the same building. That division of labor is doing a lot of work.

The band left a comment about it too. Rikon Densetsu said: “Someone waiting happily for a person to come home, someone stepping out somewhere with fresh resolve. Excitement you can barely contain, anxiety too big to hold alone — we think everyone at an airport is carrying feelings there aren’t quite words for. We’re really looking forward to a drama set in a place where those meetings and partings cross paths. If our song can add even a little color to that story, we’d be grateful.” That word — color, adding a little color — is exactly this song’s posture. They’re openly saying: we’re not the main character here.

Three things to listen for

• Sano’s subtraction on drums. He’s not trying to convince you with fills. He’s stacking choices about not playing so the humidity stays around the vocal. Hear that and you can see the whole build.
• Matsuda’s mid-to-upper range. The soaring high he flashes on Ai ga Isso Mellow is reined in here, and the nuance he finds when he holds back is the kind of thing only ballads make visible.
• Kakinuma’s keys as “the texture of time.” The air just after a summer squall — that specific after-quality — lives in his sustain. Pay attention to how wide the intro and interlude feel.

Chart-wise, and beyond the chart

Since release, the streaming numbers have been picking up along two lines: existing fans coming in through First Kiss and Ai ga Isso Mellow, plus new listeners arriving through the drama. A Thursday 9pm national primetime slot is still a real vehicle for a theme song. The MV also premiered on the official YouTube channel the same night as release, so the streaming-to-video loop was built in from day one.

That said, I don’t think this song is best judged by peak-week speed. It’s built for slow accrual — a little more on a Friday morning, a little more on a Sunday night, meaning quietly rewriting itself in the listener’s head as each episode goes by. The truer measurement isn’t the snapshot ranking. It’s whether it slips into your week over the course of the show’s run.

Which is where the interpretations will probably split. Do you rate a theme song by its opening burst, or by how it settles in over the season? I’m firmly in the second camp on this one, but I get that fans who love the punchy, lead-single side of this band might find it a touch understated. Curious where people land on that after another few episodes.

Where to go next

If Daikuko is your first Rikon Densetsu song, the natural next click is First Kiss. A bass line like a revving engine, guitars like the sound of tires on asphalt, urban polish and a groove that feels like wind cutting past you — the kind of song that makes you want to run outside the second you hear it. Opposite tempo, opposite temperature. Same band. It’s the clearest way to feel the range.

After that, go earlier — Ai ga Isso Mellow. That’s where you can hear the soul / city-pop / funk lineage they’re pulling from. In the order Daikuko → First Kiss → Ai ga Isso Mellow, you can trace backwards from where they are now to where they came from, and the size of the swing becomes obvious.

And once, just once, put on Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear (1978) — the album their name comes from. You don’t have to love it. But hearing the seventies soul they’ve explicitly anchored to shows you the weight they’ve chosen to carry. Rikon Densetsu is standing somewhere between that record’s humidity and 2020s Japanese pop.

In the lineage of Japanese “farewell songs”

Zoom out a little. The Japanese pop tradition of airport-as-farewell-song is deeper than people outside the country tend to realize. From the seventies onward you have kayōkyoku classics like Teresa Teng’s Kūkō, and Yumi Matsutoya’s catalog is full of songs about movement, distance, leaving. The sound of a jet engine tangled up with the image of a goodbye is a layer of memory Japanese listeners have carried a long time.

Daikuko lands on top of that lineage with a 2020s pop texture. It’s breathing the air after the global rediscovery of 80s city pop — not chasing nostalgia on purpose, but arriving at it naturally, with the humidity of someone living now. That’s the craft, I think. Not manufactured retro. Present-tense feeling that just happens to touch older feelings.

The fact that the words, the music and the arrangement are all by the band themselves is a quiet reason the song holds together so cleanly. The lyric world and the sonic humidity don’t drift apart. Same people writing, singing, arranging — so the grain matches all the way through. It’s a commissioned theme song, but nothing about the internal cohesion feels outsourced. Small thing. Big effect.

Wrap: keeping the goodbye around, to light tomorrow

Daikuko isn’t a flashy song. It does the job a theme song is supposed to do — quietly, at high resolution. It doesn’t push the farewell into the past, doesn’t try to forget it, just leaves it where it is and lets it glow. The airport setting is what gives that gentleness its weight.

I first put it on the day after the drama’s premiere, a Friday night, coming home from work. Half-listening on a streaming app. It stayed with me longer than I thought it would. Couldn’t quite move on to the next track — that’s the honest version. Having known the bouncier Rikon Densetsu first, I wasn’t expecting to be stopped in place by this one.

I think this is the song that opens their next phase. The band that grabbed ears with bright, kinetic tracks just made their case through restraint. Once a group crosses that line, the way people hear their future work shifts a little. What will Daikuko sound like when summer ends? That question is part of the song too. This one’s worth the long relationship.