Why PIZZA LOVE Retired — Yuta Kato on Persona, Pressure and Returning to Rap [Exclusive Interview]
A rap persona can make autobiography and performance almost impossible to separate. For Yuta Kato, the character called PIZZA LOVE brought recognition, memorable clothes and a place in Tajyusaim Boyz. It also became a set of expectations he no longer knew how to carry.
In September 2023, Kato announced that he was retiring as PIZZA LOVE. He stepped away from music, moved through several jobs and tried to build an ordinary working life. Then old friends from his hometown asked him to record again—not necessarily as the comic, brightly dressed figure audiences remembered, but as himself.
This is therefore not a simple comeback story. It is an account of how an artist can keep the craft, history and audience attached to a stage name while refusing to let that name control the rest of his life.
Translation note: This English edition was translated and edited from the original Japanese HIPHOPCs interview. The Japanese conversation involved Yuta Kato, Sei and Sam. Filler and conversational banter have been condensed, while Kato’s meaning, the order of events and the distinction between his recollections and independently verifiable facts have been preserved. The method-acting comparison in the Japanese introduction was an editorial analogy; this article does not claim that Kato practised method acting or make a clinical diagnosis.
1. From PIZZA LOVE to Yuta Kato
HIPHOPCs: How should people introduce you now?
Yuta Kato: I want people to call me by my real name, Yuta Kato. For a time, I styled my name in Japanese as 加藤卍優太, but now it is simply 加藤 優太.
The deliberate full-width space has a visual effect in Japanese that does not transfer naturally into Roman letters, so this English edition uses Yuta Kato.
Born on September 7, 1994, Kato grew up in Ebina, Kanagawa. He was 31 when this interview was published and was approaching his 32nd birthday. Today, alongside music, he works in interior finishing and hangs wallpaper. At the time of the interview, he had been with his current employer for a little over a year.
The change of name does not mean that PIZZA LOVE was an entirely false person. Kato describes the character as an enlarged version of real impulses: humour, a taste for attention, loud fashion and the willingness to turn a private joke into a public identity. The problem began when that enlargement hardened into a demand. What had once been playful started to tell him how he was expected to dress, speak and make music.
Even the origin of the old name was casual. Before Tajyusaim Boyz formed, a friend who worked at either Pizza-La or Pizza Hut brought pizza home. Kato ate it, and friends began calling him PIZZA LOVE. He no longer remembers which chain it was, and the uncertainty is part of the story: the name was not developed as a branding exercise. It began as a joke among friends and grew far beyond its original setting.
2. KOHH, Lil Pump and Learning Rap Alone
HIPHOPCs: What first made you want to rap?
Kato points to Yuki Chiba’s earlier KOHH-era work. The rawness and directness made Japanese rap feel close enough to attempt rather than admire from a distance. One important song in that orbit is correctly titled Dirt Boys featuring Dutch Montana and Loota. KOHH’s early mixtape is officially styled YELLOW T△PE.
From there, Kato became absorbed in US trap. Lil Pump’s “Boss” and “Gucci Gang” were especially important: compact records built around repetition, energy and an immediately legible character. Kato does not present himself as a formally trained musician. He started at 21 or 22, set up a computer and audio interface, and learned by trying to make records on his own.
That self-taught beginning shaped his later method. He still records at home and sometimes builds a song through an improvised, punch-in-like process instead of arriving with every line finished. Beats may come from producers he knows or from outside sources. The objective is not to prove technical orthodoxy. It is to find a process he can return to without turning music into another burden.
In that sense, his return is not a rejection of everything he learned as PIZZA LOVE. The old records taught him timing, economy and how a strong visual or verbal idea can travel. The new question is whether those skills can serve a person rather than require the person to keep serving the character.
3. Building a Persona That Could Become a Trap
HIPHOPCs: How much of PIZZA LOVE was performance?
Kato describes a feedback loop. Bright clothes and exaggerated styling made people laugh, so he pushed them further. Wearing GALFY began as a joke and became a trademark. Away from the stage, he often preferred darker, quieter clothes, but audiences increasingly recognised only the louder version.
He can still laugh at the construction of the character. In the Japanese conversation, he uses deliberately self-mocking language about being a “fake rapper” or making the concept work as a gag. Those remarks should not be read as a confession that the music, relationships or experiences were fraudulent. His point is narrower and more revealing: the public version of PIZZA LOVE was consciously heightened, while the life underneath it remained real.
The distinction matters because the persona eventually limited the songs available to him. A joke can become a rule. Once listeners expect one colour, one tone and one kind of punch line, sincerity can feel like a violation of the brand. Kato says he reached a point at which he could no longer tell whether he was making the music he wanted or fulfilling an assignment created by previous success.
His present name is therefore less a dramatic reinvention than a reduction of pressure. Yuta Kato can make a funny record, a serious record or a record that does not fit a fixed visual identity. He is not trying to erase the audience that came through PIZZA LOVE. He is trying to make enough room to remain a person when the performance ends.
4. Tajyusaim Boyz: Success Without a Script
Tajyusaim Boyz brought together figures including LB-RUG, M.A.G, Young SEX—now known as Yan Seku—and PIZZA LOVE. Kato remembers it as a loose, free group rather than an organisation built around strict management. That looseness produced both its chemistry and its instability.
The group’s official catalogue includes “Ribo de Kau” (リボで買う。), “Ore-tachi no Bakuto” featuring Hannya and two albums. Its MS Record profile documents appearances connected to SUMMER BOMB, Summer Sonic 2019 and NHK’s Shibuya Note. Kato also recalls staging THRILLDRIVE at HARLEM and inviting Creepy Nuts.
HIPHOPCs: Did your retirement end Tajyusaim Boyz?
Kato does not make that claim. He says he left and allowed the remaining members to decide what came next. In the interview, he is careful that he did not know the group’s formal status after his departure. Later coverage has described Tajyusaim Boyz as effectively inactive or de facto disbanded, but that description should not be converted into a statement that Kato personally dissolved it.
What he retains most clearly is the freedom: people with very different instincts appearing together, learning in public and sometimes reaching stages they had not imagined when the name PIZZA LOVE began as a joke. That history remains part of Yuta Kato’s story even though he no longer wants it to dictate every future record.
5. “Oyaji no Uta” and the Violence He Refused to Repeat
Content note: This section discusses Kato’s first-person account of childhood domestic violence. It does not identify the non-public person involved and does not infer a diagnosis or motive.
One of the clearest examples of the life beneath the persona is “親父の歌” (“Oyaji no Uta,” or “Song About My Father”). According to Kato, when he was about three years old, his father assaulted both his mother and him. He says his mother eventually took him away and that he has not seen his father since. He connects that experience to his refusal to use violence himself.
Kato says he wrote the song against domestic violence and with the hope that violence against women and children could be reduced. That purpose is also supported by his earlier first-person interview with GQ Japan. The record is not evidence for a psychological diagnosis, and this article does not use the story to explain every later decision. It is evidence that PIZZA LOVE’s catalogue was never only comedy.
The song also clarifies what Kato means when he distinguishes character from self. A stage name can be heightened without making the pain inside a record imaginary. The contradiction—comic presentation beside a serious account of family violence—was not a flaw to solve. It was one of the truths his public image eventually made difficult to hold at the same time.
6. Why He Retired in 2023
On September 1, 2023, Kato posted an official retirement announcement. A contemporary TuneCore Japan report recorded the announcement, his physical and mental struggles, and his intention to finish remaining music.
HIPHOPCs: What was happening before you stopped?
Kato says the pressure had been building for roughly a year. Looking back, he believes he was struggling mentally, but he does not present a formal diagnosis. He recalls developing fevers of around 40°C roughly every two weeks for more than six months, sometimes remaining in bed for about a week, and repeatedly visiting hospitals because of fevers and a sore throat. He says he was told the problem was probably stress. These details are his recollection; HIPHOPCs is not independently diagnosing the illness or asserting that stress was its proven cause.
The physical episodes arrived alongside a simpler but equally serious fact: music had stopped being enjoyable. The PIZZA LOVE character created expectations he felt obliged to satisfy, while the gap between that figure and his private self grew wider. Continuing would have meant protecting the public image at the expense of the person maintaining it.
Retirement did not instantly freeze the catalogue. The official PIZZA LOVE page later listed the 23-track GOOD Good bye with a March 7, 2024 release date. That post-retirement release is consistent with the previously stated intention to finish and issue remaining material. It should not be misreported as proof that the September 2023 announcement never happened.
7. Work, Rejection and the Road Back
After leaving music, Kato worked as a truck driver, in a factory and in industrial-waste-related work before arriving at interior finishing. Employment changed the terms of his identity. He was no longer introduced first as an artist, and he sometimes encountered rejection while trying to find work. The interview does not establish that tattoos caused any particular rejection; that was raised as a possibility in the conversation, not confirmed by Kato.
Around 2024, old friends from Ebina began asking him to make music again. Crucially, they were not asking for a perfect recreation of PIZZA LOVE. They wanted to hear him record, including songs without a gag at the centre. After losing the social identity of “rapper,” Kato says the fact that even one or two people still wanted new music changed what seemed possible.
He did not return because the underlying conflicts had magically disappeared. He returned with a smaller promise: make music that remains enjoyable, let the name match the person, and stop before the process becomes destructive. The scale of the audience mattered less than knowing that somebody was waiting.
There is also a practical loyalty in his present plan. Kato is grateful to the employer who accepted him and says he would want to continue interior work alongside music even if a song became successful. “Two pairs of shoes” is not merely a metaphor in his current catalogue; it describes a structure that allows neither occupation to carry his entire identity.
8. Making Music Without Losing Himself
HIPHOPCs: What does recording look like now?
Kato records at home, works with beats from producers and acquaintances, and sometimes discovers lines in the booth rather than completing every lyric beforehand. He estimates that he has made hundreds of demos, with only a small fraction suitable for release. That is his own approximation, not an independently audited count, but it describes a private practice far larger than the public discography suggests.
The official Yuta Kato catalogue shows the transition in public. Singles include “Mid Night Flow,” “Minna de Gohan o Kuu” and “Zako Otoko.” On July 30, 2026, he released the four-track project Saiko Jinsei (最高人生): “Zako Otoko” produced by NOVA, “Lucky Free Style” produced by YGF BEATS, “Shikabane” produced by bonnierogerr, and “Nisoku no Waraji” produced by prodbyDSI.
The title of that last track literally evokes wearing two pairs of footwear—holding two roles at once. It fits the life Kato describes better than a conventional comeback narrative. He is not abandoning work to recover a lost celebrity identity. He is testing whether rap can exist beside work, ordinary relationships and health without swallowing them.
His quality control is deliberately severe. Making hundreds of demos does not obligate him to release hundreds of songs. The abundance gives him permission to discard work and keep the process playful. That freedom is the opposite of the period when each new record had to reassure the audience that PIZZA LOVE was still behaving like PIZZA LOVE.
9. Where Yuta Kato Goes Next
Kato’s advice to listeners is modest because it comes from the cost of overextension. Do not keep forcing yourself to inhabit a role simply because other people understand it. Be honest about what you want to do. If a job, image or creative routine has become impossible to sustain, changing direction is not necessarily betrayal.
He says he is happy now. That statement matters more than whether the new name immediately reproduces the old reach. PIZZA LOVE proved that Kato could build an unforgettable character. Yuta Kato is an attempt to build a life in which a character is no longer required to remain unforgettable every day.
For readers approaching his work through place and lineage, see the Kanagawa Rap Atlas and HIPHOPCs’ English Yuki Chiba profile. More artist conversations are collected in the HIPHOPCs English interview archive.
Source and translation note
This article separates three kinds of material. Kato’s statements about his childhood, health, work, creative process and reasons for retiring are first-person recollections from the HIPHOPCs interview. Release dates, track listings and public announcements were checked against official Yuta Kato, PIZZA LOVE and Tajyusaim Boyz catalogues, the September 1, 2023 retirement video, MS Record and TuneCore Japan. The purpose of “Oyaji no Uta” was also compared with Kato’s earlier GQ Japan interview. Where Kato was uncertain—including whether the pizza behind his old name came from Pizza-La or Pizza Hut—the uncertainty has been retained.
The English edition omits off-topic banter, private details about third parties and unverified hearsay that are not necessary to understand Kato’s account. It does not reproduce any private contact information. Descriptions of mental strain, recurring fever and medical advice are attributed to Kato and are not presented as clinical findings. Descriptions of Tajyusaim Boyz after his departure distinguish his own account from later media shorthand about the group’s status.
Credits: Interview by Sei and Sam. Japanese article by Sei. English translation and editing by HIPHOPCs.
