Hitsujibungaku’s ‘Itooshii Hibi’: Why a 2:33 Song Landed Right Before Their First Budokan

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Hitsujibungaku’s “Itooshii Hibi” is a track from their fifth album Don’t Laugh It Off, released on October 8, 2025. It runs 2:33 — short, even by their standards. It was picked up as the CM song for Bourbon’s Original Biscuit Series, and it landed in the world right before the band’s first-ever Nippon Budokan shows on October 9 and 10. That timing changes how the song reads.

It’s a song that lets a small lightness sit openly inside the noise — and putting these two minutes and thirty-three seconds out right before Budokan says a lot about where Hitsujibungaku is standing right now. This isn’t the flashy lead single. It’s an album cut. It’s the fifteen seconds a TV commercial can carry. But looking back, this is probably the marker. That’s the kind of songwriter Moeka Shiozuka is.

Key facts

Key facts

• “Itooshii Hibi” is on Hitsujibungaku’s fifth album Don’t Laugh It Off, released October 8, 2025. Words and music by Moeka Shiozuka; arrangement by Hitsujibungaku.
• It’s the tie-up song for Bourbon’s Original Biscuit Series TV commercial featuring Tomoya Nakamura and Ryubi Miyase, which began airing nationwide on October 14, 2025.
• The band played their first Nippon Budokan shows the day after the album dropped — October 9 and 10 — as the Japan leg of the Hitsujibungaku Asia Tour 2025 “Ima, koko (Right now, right here.)”. Live footage was later shared on YouTube.
• Runtime is 2:33. The band wraps everyday frustration and a kind of hollowness in a light, quick melody.

Why look back at a song that just came out

This song is still new. So why write about it in the retrospective mode? Simple: the line Hitsujibungaku has been drawing over the last two or three years — the anime OP hit, an Asia tour, a first Budokan, a full-length album — crosses itself, quietly, right here in “Itooshii Hibi.” They have bigger songs. They have louder songs. What matters is where this 2:33 gets placed among them.

Personal detour. I came in around “Hikaru Toki” and, honestly, filed them under “that band that broke through with an anime tie-in.” That reading fell apart when I went back to the EP era. The alternative texture around Kirameki and Zawameki, the contrast between quiet and roar — that hand is still there, sitting inside the current noise. Listen to “Itooshii Hibi” through that lens and something stays behind that the CM version doesn’t quite deliver on its own. Inside the lightness, the same hand.

So: retrospective, but as a stance, not a timeline. Standing on the far side of Budokan and picking up what wasn’t obvious on release day. That’s the angle.

Two minutes, thirty-three seconds — length as a statement

Start here. 2:33. Play Don’t Laugh It Off front to back and this song’s brevity stands out. Around heavier Hitsujibungaku pieces like “Sono Toki,” “Haru no Arashi,” and “Koe,” “Itooshii Hibi” slips in and out. That’s a decision, not an accident.

When a rock band writes a song in the low two-minute range, choices get made. No sprawling bridge. No amplified final chorus. No solo. No drawn-out fade. “Itooshii Hibi” runs on those choices cleanly. The reason it survives being cut down to a 15-second commercial is that the whole thing was already built compact. It sits at the same scale as a Bourbon biscuit ad — desk, afternoon light, that granularity of daily life — without having to shrink to get there.

Now think back to early Hitsujibungaku. They’ve always been a dynamics band: shoegaze-leaning reverb on one side, solid, hard-edged guitar on the other. That two-layer structure hasn’t broken at Budokan scale. It’s still both. A band that can fill an arena and a band that can fit inside a 15-second spot, coexisting in the same two months. The shortness of “Itooshii Hibi” almost feels like evidence of that coexistence.

Shiozuka’s “anchor” theme, in its lightest form yet

One word Moeka Shiozuka keeps returning to in interviews is yoridokoro — something like an anchor, or a thing to lean on. In a 2020 interview with CINRA, she talked about attending Christian schools from kindergarten through high school, and how the Bible and hymns were just around, part of daily life. She frames it less as a matter of faith and more as: having something to lean on inside your day-to-day is a good thing. That framing is baked into how she writes songs.

“Itooshii Hibi” is probably the lightest version of that theme she’s put out. No heavy talk of salvation. It admits the everyday friction and emptiness at about the weight of a single biscuit, and then puts that admission on a quick, buoyant melody. USEN’s encore write-up describes it as a song that draws everyday frustration and emptiness while a light melody gradually hands you a little courage. That temperature is interesting as a landing point for where the band is now.

Older Hitsujibungaku, when they acknowledged the weight of daily life, tended to go quieter. Grainy guitars, held-back vocals, arrangements with a lot of space. “Itooshii Hibi” takes the same theme and puts speed and lightness on it. Same subject, different handling. Could they have written this five years ago? Probably not. And even if they could have, it wouldn’t have been this light.

Is that evolution or just a bigger toolbox? I don’t think it matters much. What matters is that they can now handle “something to lean on” in a serious song and in a light song with the same hand. That’s the fact worth writing down.

The Bourbon commercial as a filter

You can’t really talk about “Itooshii Hibi” without the CM. Bourbon’s Original Biscuit Series — think the small bags, the Petit line, Chocoliere, all of that — with actors Tomoya Nakamura and Ryubi Miyase in the spot, nationwide from October 14, 2025.

On paper, the pairing looked surprising. Hitsujibungaku’s sound has always felt a bit more nighttime, a bit more city, than a national confectionery ad. In practice, that surprise is doing work. The everyday-with-a-tiny-lift feel of a biscuit spot and the lightness of “Itooshii Hibi” overlap without either side having to bend.

The interesting question is what survives the filter. Fifteen seconds of TV — what still sounds unmistakably like Hitsujibungaku? For this track, I think it’s Shiozuka’s voice. That slightly rasped core. Not shouted, not whispered, neutral on paper and yet weirdly specific. As long as that lands, the CM works as a doorway.

You can be cynical about tie-ups. In this case, the closeness between the CM’s runtime and the song’s 2:33 makes it feel like coexistence was baked in from the start. I don’t know if the song got short because of the ad, or if the ad picked it because it was short. Either way, a song that lands instantly in a commercial went out into the world under Hitsujibungaku’s name. That’s the piece that stays.

Why drop this song right before Budokan

Album on October 8. First Budokan on October 9 and 10. Looking at that calendar now, it says something. When a band hits a milestone like Budokan, the release right before it tends to be a statement piece — big, loud, chest-out. Hitsujibungaku didn’t do that. They tucked this 2:33 into the album and walked into the arena.

And then, after the shows, the first Budokan clip they put on YouTube was “Itooshii Hibi.” That’s the part that stuck with me the most. The highlight they chose to lead with wasn’t a big song. It was this light one. That choice tells you where their center of gravity is right now.

Plenty of bands play big songs in big rooms. Not many can actually make a small song sound right in a big room. Playing “Itooshii Hibi” at Budokan reads as a claim to the second category. A Natalie live report from October 11, 2025 described the sound that night with phrases like “beautiful, warm noise” and full of a homey feeling. A loud band using loudness as shelter instead of as a weapon — that mode got confirmed on the biggest stage they’ve ever played.

Its role inside Don’t Laugh It Off

Don’t Laugh It Off is the band’s first full-length in about two years, following 12hugs (like butterflies). It includes tie-up tracks: “Feel” (the OP for the anime Silent Witch), “Koe” (theme for the Monday-9 drama 119 Emergency Call), “Burning” (the ED for Oshi no Ko Season 2), and “Haru no Arashi.” The title itself sits somewhere near “don’t laugh it off” as in: don’t brush this away.

Lined up like that, the album isn’t a stack of serious songs. It’s more like a unified move — serious subjects (loss, anxiety, things that don’t reach) wrapped in lightness, noise, or warmth. “Itooshii Hibi” is the record’s lightness department. It takes everyday friction and, instead of sinking with it, walks with it at a normal pace.

Worth remembering: in 2024, drummer Hiroa Fukuda stepped away for a rest, and the band’s setup shifted for a while. With that in mind, a title like Don’t Laugh It Off reads on more than one layer — aimed at the self, at the band, at the listener. A quiet, firm call. Placing “Itooshii Hibi” inside that isn’t a contradiction. It’s the logical shape of it.

How it actually gets played — the slot it fills

Think about where this song actually lives. CM listeners get it in front of a TV, at home. Album listeners get it on the commute, headphones in. The Budokan clip is more of a re-experience. All of those are real. But my read is that this song hits hardest somewhere else — the vague, aimless stretch of a weekday, roughly 4 to 6 p.m.

There are plenty of morning pick-me-ups. Plenty of late-night sinkers. “Itooshii Hibi” isn’t either. It feels built for the in-between — just before evening, work still on your desk but your mind already halfway out the door. The 2:33 length fits that slot. Longer songs demand you focus. This one doesn’t. You can hear it while walking, while transferring trains, while wiping down a table.

It’s too early to say that as a fact, so I’ll leave it as a hunch. But when you line it up with the rest of the catalog — the morning-ness of “Hikaru Toki,” the nighttime of “Mayoiga,” the interior mood of “more than words” — the time slot “Itooshii Hibi” occupies was actually kind of empty. You could read it as a song written to fill a gap in their own catalog.

Three things to listen for

• The pace from the intro into the first verse. No hanging back. A lot of Hitsujibungaku songs open by pulling you into quiet first; this one steps in at everyday walking speed. That’s the starting point of the whole 2:33 design.
• How Shiozuka holds back on the vocal. Even in the chorus, she doesn’t push all the way. There’s a narrow line between “light” and “flimsy,” and she keeps this song on the right side of it by controlling vocal pressure. Play it a few times and you can hear it.
• How the band treats noise as a friend, not an enemy. The grit is still on the guitars, but it doesn’t hurt to listen to. That “beautiful, warm noise” quality that the Budokan live report caught — this song has a compressed, smaller version of the same texture.

Any one of those on its own is fairly quiet as a design choice. Together, they hold the same core steady across a 15-second commercial, a 2:33 album cut, and a Budokan clip. That’s what it means to have strong bones.

A small pin in Hitsujibungaku’s 2025

The Hitsujibungaku of Zawameki-era 2020 and the Hitsujibungaku of October 2025 share a name, but the scale of activity is on a different level. Recording in the U.S., an Asia tour, dates in Europe and North America, and now their first Budokan. A BAILA album review from October 2025 groups them among Japanese bands whose stage is widening internationally. Inside that arc, “Itooshii Hibi” doesn’t stand out. It’s quiet. But it’s probably the little pin that later shows you where the band was standing at this moment.

What kind of pin? A doorway for people who first meet the band through a commercial. Proof they can play a small song at arena scale. A record of the moment their “something to lean on” theme learned to be handled at a lighter temperature. Three things, sitting inside one 2:33 track.

Big songs do big work. Small songs do small work, and the small work is what gives a band its thickness. Hitsujibungaku has been adding to that thickness for the last five years. “Itooshii Hibi” is on the thickness side.

Where to go next

If “Itooshii Hibi” is your way in, the next song to try is “Sono Toki,” from the same album. It handles the same subject — the friction of everyday life — from the quiet side, essentially the flip of what “Itooshii Hibi” does with lightness. Play them back-to-back and you can hear the band writing one theme in two different modes. The obvious next step is Don’t Laugh It Off in full. Sitting inside “Feel,” “Koe,” and “Burning,” the position of “Itooshii Hibi” gets much clearer.

Going further back, the EPs Kirameki and Zawameki from around 2020 are worth digging up. The blueprint of the current sound is already there. And the lightness of “Itooshii Hibi” turns out to be connected to that older noise once you listen with both in your ear.

One question, left open

Here’s the question I’m leaving unresolved. Is the lightness of “Itooshii Hibi” a texture Hitsujibungaku is going to keep expanding from here, or is it a one-off shape that only made sense inside a commercial tie-up? I can’t tell yet. I’ll need the next single, the next album. But whether this song turns out to be a one-time experiment or a bridge to what comes next will change how the band reads.

Longtime fans will have a better feel for this than I do. What time of day does “Itooshii Hibi” live in for you? Did you meet it through the Budokan clip, through the CM, or through the album flow? It’s probably a slightly different song depending on the entry point. When a song has more than one way of being handed to you, interpretations split. I think that split is fine.

2:33. Slotted between the day before Budokan and the days after, sitting quietly on the album. Not flashy. But it’s the marker you’ll look back at. Small, but hard to ignore if you’re watching where this band goes next. This article is an unofficial piece of music writing and isn’t affiliated with any program, artist, or company involved. Please check official sources for details.