One Ok Rock is pretty lucky for an arena rock band

In its native Japan, One Ok Rock plays arenas. Stadiums, even. In America, where the band released its first English-language album, “35xxxv,” last fall, One Ok Rock considers itself fortunate to be third-billed on the Monster Energy Outbreak club tour.

“It doesn’t matter how big or small the crowds are, for me,” says lead singer Takahiro Moriuchi (he goes by Taka; all members of One Ok Rock go by their first names). “When I started this band in Japan, it was the same thing, no big crowds there. Now we’re doing it again in the United States.”

One Ok Rock want to be the most famous rock band to ever come out of Japan, which is harder and easier than it sounds: No famous rock band has ever come out of Japan, at least none that has ever made it big stateside.

One Ok Rock could easily be mistaken for an American band, which might actually be the point: The group’s members love American pop-rock, and the sort of Hot Topic/Good Charlotte/Warped Tour punk that was popular circa 2005. Ask Taka what music he likes, and he’ll cite acts such as Linkin Park, Maroon 5 and “a lot of emo stuff.” The album “35xxxv” (pronounced “thirty-five”) is a crisp, endearing, slightly dated homage to those bands; it sounds like an album of Bush-era Fall Out Boy outtakes.

One Ok Rock (which actually did play the Warped Tour in 2014) released the disc in Japanese and English versions. “It’s almost the same album,” Taka says, though some of the melodies were Americanized. “Sometimes English to Japanese is difficult, because words and sounds are totally different. Sometimes we change the melody, sometimes we change the licks. . When I sing it here, I have to sing in English. It’s so confusing, but I’m now getting used to it.”

Moriuchi, now 28, was born to famous enka (e.g. old school) singers Masako and Shinichi Mori. In the early 2000s, he briefly belonged to the boy band NEWS, which would go on to become famous after he left. It wasn’t a good fit: He didn’t like the band’s sound and chafed against its rules (boy bands have lots of rules). “When I started singing, I was 13 years old and I was in some boy band group,” he says. “It was not my style. That’s why they moved me to more comfortable music for me, more rock and roll.”

In One Ok Rock’s early days, Moriuchi was uncomfortable with the idea of becoming famous, partly because the group’s formation coincided with his parents’ very public divorce, and because pop stardom in Japan is often a thorny proposition. “In Japan, music culture is, this is a really bad word, but super cheesy,” he says. “That’s why I (didn’t) want to do cheesy Japanese music stuff. But here (in America) it’s more, like, international, I think it’s cool.”

The group’s 2012 song “The Beginning” appeared in a manga adaptation and became a smash; the band tentatively began outreach to the rest of the world the following year, and eventually went to southern California to make “35xxxv.”

It was the culmination of everything Moriuchi ever wanted. The group had a house on the beach, a studio in its house, a celebrated American producer (Goldfinger lead singer John Feldmann) and, eventually, a distribution deal with Warner Bros. “We want to tour and do recording in the United States,” Taka says. “This is a dream come true right now. I wanted to reach more American fans, reach another country of people.”

To a small but vocal contingent of its Japanese fans, the band’s preoccupation with stateside success was perceived as an abandonment of its roots (“Maybe they understand already?” Moriuchi says hopefully when asked how these fans feel now). Backlash or not, Moriuchi, having lived in southern California, isn’t in a hurry to go back home. “The United States is so comfortable for me. I don’t know how it is for the others, but for me it’s so much better than Japan.”