Japan now has the youngest club DJ on the female side of the Guinness World Records books. Illumi Maeda, who performs as DJ ILLU, was 6 years and 99 days old when she played a full club set in Yokohama on March 28, 2026. Guinness World Records has now made the title official, and the certificate reads exactly that way: the youngest club DJ (female) is Illumi Maeda, born December 19, 2019.
She played for more than an hour in front of an enthusiastic crowd, and she did it through equipment problems that would rattle a lot of grown DJs. “I was nervous, but I’m really glad I managed to do it,” she told Guinness World Records.
How DJ ILLU became the youngest club DJ
The record attempt took place at a club in Yokohama, in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo. Guinness rules for this category are simple on paper and hard in practice: the DJ has to play a real set in a real club, in front of a real audience, and the attempt has to be documented and verified. Age is measured to the day, which is why the title is written as 6 years and 99 days.
The previous holder was another Japanese DJ. In 2023, DJ RINOKA took the female title at 6 years and 155 days old after playing a club in Meguro, Tokyo. DJ ILLU beat that mark by 56 days. It says something about the Japanese club scene that the last two holders of this title both came up there.
A house full of music
She started DJing at three. According to Guinness World Records, her mother loves music and regularly hosted friends from other countries, so parties were simply part of everyday life at home. Several of her mother’s DJ friends began showing her the equipment, and the lessons grew from there.
Her ear was trained early, too. Her mother played all kinds of genres at home and in the car, and ILLU also remembers dancing to classical music with her great grandparents. The one artist she names as a real influence is Avicii, whose records she says lifted her spirits and showed her how much a song can change someone’s mood.
Music to get people through hard times
That idea is at the center of how she talks about DJing. Guinness built its headline around it: she wants to make music that helps people through tough times, the same way Avicii’s music worked for her. For someone her age, it is a surprisingly clear sense of why the job matters.
Her plans are a mix of the serious and the very six years old. She wants to play festivals around the world (“I’d love to DJ at different festivals around the world,” she said), she wants to go after another Guinness World Records title in a different DJ category, and one day she wants to open an ice cream shop where she can also DJ. If she ever gets to one of the festivals that take over an entire resort, the ice cream part might be the easiest to arrange.
Where she sits among the youngest DJs on record
Guinness keeps separate male and female categories for this record. On the male side, the listed holder is Archie Norbury from the UK, who was 4 years and 130 days old when he played Bungalow in Hong Kong on March 30, 2019. Before him, another Japanese child, Itsuki Morita, was recognized as the youngest club DJ in 2017 at age six.
Records like these are a reminder of how DJ culture has changed. Controllers, laptops and tutorials have put the tools in kids’ hands far earlier than vinyl ever did, but reading a room and holding it for an hour is still the hard part. That has not changed since the days of the old record battles, from the DJ who mixed on reel to reel tape at DMC 1991 to today’s booths.
What comes next for DJ ILLU
For now, DJ ILLU keeps playing and sharing her sets on Instagram as @djillu.yokohama. The record is official, the certificate is framed, and the festival dream is on the table. At six, she already has something plenty of working DJs are still chasing: a clear reason to play.
