Tokyo is having one of those days. Yesterday, the city was sweltering; today, rain has settled in, steady and grey – the kind that makes everything feel stiller than it is. Inside a studio tucked away in Tokyo, though, the atmosphere is anything but. Lights are being adjusted, racks of clothing line the walls, test shots snap away while the humidity from yesterdayʼs heatwave can still be felt faintly. Somewhere in the middle of it all is MAKI: &TEAMʼs youngest member, and the subject of our cover.

Todayʼs timing feels significant. &TEAM – a nine-member global group under HYBE, whose rise since their 2022 debut has been anything but gradual – had just kicked off their 2026 concert tour ‘BLAZE THE WAYʼ. Theyʼve scored another million-seller in ‘We on Fireʼ, their third EP – 1.2 million copies in its first week alone, breaking the record previously set by ‘Back to Lifeʼ, their Korean debut album released just months prior. A dome encore concert was announced for September days before Iʼm due to meet him. And now this – a cover shoot unlike anything MAKI has done before. Heʼll tell me that himself, later. For now, heʼs calm, unhurried, and taking everything in.

“I think I started singing properly in 2nd or 3rd grade,” MAKI says. “But even before that, I loved listening to music and singing songs.” He grew up partly in Singapore, spending around six years there before moving back to Tokyo, where he found his way into a small musical academy near his home. Musicals, plays, bigger auditions – itʼs the kind of trajectory that theatre kids follow, one stage at a time. He did it for maybe three or four years, on and off. It was fun. It was formative. And watching it back now, as fans occasionally surface old footage, itʼs also – in his words – kind of cringy.

The shift came when he discovered I-LAND – a project that in 2020 produced ENHYPEN – not as a participant, but as a viewer. Something about it landed differently to him. Not the competition format or the production, but the motivation underneath all of it: people who shared the same dream, working hard together to reach it. “That was something I really wanted to experience,” he says. From that moment, the path changed. Musicals gave way to something bigger – performing on stage, making music, being part of a group. “I want to be in a group of people who share the same dream, the same passion for singing and music.” He found that in &TEAM. And within &TEAM, he found something else he wanted: the maknae title – an affectionate term used towards the youngest person in the group.

“I was actually really happy, to be honest. It was like an achievement Iʼd wanted.” He pauses, then adds: “At the time, I thought it would be quirky or something – I donʼt think much of it now.” Heʼs a middle child at home – an older brother, a younger sister – so being the youngest was new territory. But with his fellow members TAKI and HARUA being in the same school year, it didnʼt feel strange. He landed somewhere between youngest and peer, which suited him just fine.

Thereʼs a version of MAKI that a lot of people encounter before any other. It lives online; a quick search brings up plenty of fan-made montages of such moments. One officially posted clip from August 2025 – the ‘just friendsʼ clip, as itʼs known – sees him with a mirror, a lean, and an almost-kiss that never quite lands. It has racked up views that rival the groupʼs “Deer Hunter” music video. For a lot of fans, those moments are the gateway.

MAKI is very aware of this. And when I bring it up, he smiles knowingly. “I tend to go viral for meme-type things, funny clips,” he says. “Itʼs a weird feeling – indescribable, in a way. I feel happy about it. But at the same time, Iʼm worried about people remembering me as just that one thing, when Iʼm so much more.”

Itʼs a more honest answer than most would give. He then sits with the tension for a moment. “When I go viral for those things, and not so much when Iʼm doing something Iʼm actually passionate about, I start to think... why? Or like, how would I use that?” He pauses. Then, with a slight laugh: “I guess itʼs not that deep.”

It is that deep, actually. MAKI takes his craft – specifically his voice and singing, the thing heʼs loved the longest – seriously enough that the meme question isnʼt idle vanity. Being known for a moment rather than a craft – however warmly that moment is received – is a real tension for someone who has spent most of his life thinking seriously about his voice. Thereʼs another way to look at it.

“If thatʼs the entrance for new fans to get to know &TEAM,” he says, “then I think itʼs all good.” A beat. “They watch my funny meme video, they get to know &TEAM – and then theyʼre like, wow, &TEAM is this super cool group, I should stan them. I think itʼs a win-win.” He means it.

But strip away the memes, the mirror clips, the viral moments – and what you find underneath is someone who has been thinking seriously about his voice since he was old enough to hold a tune.

Singing came first. Before the stage, before I-LAND, before any of it. “Iʼve loved singing from such a young age,” he says. “It stuck with me for most of my life.” Itʼs a claim that carries weight when you listen to what MAKI actually does with a song. On “We on Fire,” their latest title track, his delivery is smooth and controlled. “Bewitched” – one of the b-sides – is where he finds something rawer: an angsty verse delivered with a harsh rasp that feels even more thrilling in a live setting. Two very different registers, both entirely his.

But when he became a trainee, he was still singing like a theatre kid – emotional, performed in the specific way musicals require. Contemporary pop demanded something different, and he had to learn it from scratch. “That process was really fun for me,” he says, and you believe him – thereʼs something in the way he talks about craft that suggests he genuinely enjoys the work, not just the outcome.

Then his voice changed. It happened fast, the way these things do – one month he could hit a note, the next month he couldnʼt. “I felt a lot of pressure,” he says. “Iʼd had confidence in my singing my whole life, and then that confidence just dropped.” For someone whose entire sense of self was built around that ability, it was destabilising. “It made me stop and think: how do I overcome this?”

The answer was to start again. Learn the notes in a different register, find a new way to reach what heʼd always been able to reach before. “It was basically learning how to sing all over again,” he says. “But I guess it happens to everybody. Itʼs something I couldnʼt avoid – so I just stuck to it and learned.”

Itʼs a small story, told without drama. But it says something about how MAKI is put together – that when something he cared about was taken from him, even temporarily, his instinct wasnʼt to grieve it but to solve it. The same instinct that turned a theatre kid into an artist. The same one that would lead him to arrive at a photoshoot with a folder of anime reference poses and a clear idea of what he wanted to show.

He pulled up his phone and showed me the poses – specific ones from JoJoʼs Bizarre Adventure, the anime heʼs been returning to for around six years. The series has always existed at the intersection of manga and high fashion: creator Hirohiko Arakiʼs characters are famous worldwide for their poses, which are directly inspired by the stances of fashion models. That relationship with the industry runs deep enough that Araki has collaborated with Gucci, Balenciaga, and Bulgari – his art practically breathing high fashion across runway channels. For MAKI, a series about outsized characters who dress like no one else and move like nobodyʼs watching was always going to resonate.

“The anime itself is super unique,” he says. “There are so many things about it that are completely out of the ordinary, but they work because of the style itʼs in.” He saw something of himself in that.

Among them was Jotaro Kujoʼs pointing pose – one of the seriesʼ most iconic images, instantly recognisable far beyond the animeʼs own fanbase. In the shoot, MAKIʼs version of it is unmistakable. “I was happy I could bring my favourite anime – like my hobby – into my work self, and mix the two together to make something Iʼd never shown before.”

What followed was genuinely collaborative. MAKI wasn’t a passive subject – he came over to check the camera between setups, scrolling through the frames with the focus of someone who cared about the outcome. The resulting images are unlike anything in his existing catalogue. The mirror series in particular – where he appears to be looking away, but makes eye contact through the reflection – captures something that’s difficult to stage and harder to explain. It’s the type of shot that just happens, or it doesn’t.

I ask whether the person in these photos is the same as the person he is offstage. He considers it. “When I commit to something, I want to give 100% – everything I’ve got. Otherwise I end up looking back thinking, I could have done that better.” The on-stage version and the shoot version, he says, are connected by that same drive. “I want to be the best version of myself. That’s what ties the two together.”

It’s a shoot that could only have happened this way – with this particular brief, this particular photographer, and an artist who arrived with a vision of his own and the confidence to see it through.

There’s a philosophy running through everything MAKI says today, and it surfaces most clearly when I ask about his personal style.

MAKI describes himself as “free.” Not strapped to anyone’s opinions, not interested in following rules. “I like to go my own way and be different,” he says. “I like to think it’s better to be called weird than normal. That’s a thought I live by.” It came from his dad – more specifically, a remark that lodged itself somewhere in MAKI’s consciousness and never left. “I’d rather be called weird than normal, because a weird person is someone you’d want to know more about.”

As an artist, he translates that into something slightly different. Not weird – unique. “Having something other artists don’t have, your own way to perform and create. I think that’s a really beautiful thing you can do as an artist.” It’s the same quality he admires in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: the confidence to be completely itself, to be extraordinary on its own terms. He came to the shoot with that energy. The anime poses, the nail art he wanted to wear, the way he moved through the setups – all of it pointing in the same direction.

What would it mean, I ask, if fans told him he’d inspired them to be more themselves? “I would be more than happy,” he says without hesitation. “Inspiring and influencing other people is one of the main goals I had before becoming an artist. Because before I got here, I was inspired by people who were chasing their dreams, working hard. I wanted to give that same thing to people who might be watching us – watching me.”

It’s a sentence that only lands properly when you know the full picture: the theatre kid who found something bigger in I-LAND, the trainee who had to learn to sing all over again, the youngest member who wanted the maknae title because he thought it would be a good mindset to have. He’s been building toward this version of himself for a long time. The person in these photos – self-possessed, completely committed – is the result.

Near the end of our conversation, MAKI is asked what the version of himself he’s working towards might look like. He pauses – the way people do when a question lands somewhere real. “That’s a deep question,” he says, and then takes his time.

When he’s ready to speak, he tells me this: “Someone who isn’t ashamed of what they do, or how they do it, just because it’s different from other people.” Another pause. “And I think it’s a really hard goal to achieve, because everyone has regrets. But I think being too perfect isn’t interesting either. I think people are interesting because of their mistakes, their regrets, and what they’ve become because of those things. So right now I’m just trying to experience all sorts of things – make mistakes, learn from them, and get closer to being a better version of who I am.”

It’s the most considered thing he says all day. And it reframes everything that came before it – the viral memes he can’t fully celebrate, the voice that disappeared and had to be rebuilt, the maknae title he wanted for reasons he doesn’t entirely remember now. None of it is failure. All of it is material.

Before he leaves, MAKI goes back to the monitor to look through the images one more time. He finds his favourites, photographs them on his phone, quietly pleased. The shoot, the conversation, these photographs – they are, as I told him at the start, his. But now they belong to you too.

This feature is taken from our fourth printed issue, available for purchase here.