Eat, sleep, rave ... make peace! DJ Yousuke Yukimatsu’s mission to change the world with topless raves

Ten years ago this month, Japanese DJ Yousuke Yukimatsu had an epileptic seizure. When he didn’t show up for a festival booking, organisers got in touch with his friends in Osaka, who found him collapsed at home. He was taken to hospital where doctors diagnosed a brain tumour. “If no one had contacted me, I might have died,” he posted on a crowdfunding platform several months later.

In the black-and-white photograph accompanying the crowdfunder to support his work, Yukimatsu leans his head towards the camera, his buzz cut growing out around a thick ragged scar that curves from his left ear to the top of his hairline: he’d been through two craniotomies, plus extensive chemo and radiation therapy. The illness also left him with a realisation that he needed to make DJing his full-time job; to dedicate himself to his craft and make the world a better place. “If we can keep living [for] tomorrow, if I can encourage people … that’s what I’m always trying to do,” he says now. “The world is getting much worse than the time when techno was born [in the mid 1980s]. Weapons are being developed; it’s getting easier to commit a massacre. In Japan, if a musician speaks about politics, they can be hugely criticised. But I think it’s really important to speak up.”