Buying concert tickets in Japan is a little arcane.
You might think it’s as easy as entering your credit card info into a ticketing service, but no. There are several ticketing services all competing against each other: Ticket Pia, Lawson Ticket, e-Plus, Livepocket, the list goes on and on. Okay, so you check which services have the tickets to the show you want to go to and sometimes it’s only one, or sometimes it’s all of them at once, or sometimes it’s staggered to favour one service, and sometimes it’s only if you sign up for a phone plan with a specific service. Let’s say the stars align and the first available ticket service is open to you. You make an account, and it goes without saying you can only do this if you’re a resident in Japan--this means buying tickets from overseas in tandem with booking a flight/lodging/etc. all for your favourite band’s concert is next to impossible if you don’t already know a resident who is willing to go through the steps of buying the ticket on your behalf. So you enter in your residence info, then your phone number. When I was an exchange student, I didn’t have a phone number--I used a data-only SIM card since I figured who needs a phone number these days? Apparently every service in Japan requires one, so I learned my lesson and made sure to sign up for a regular cell service plan when I moved back here.
Rinse and repeat this account creation process as many times as necessary. Now you’re ready to buy the ticket! You wait for the day the tickets go on sale, and if the band you want to see isn’t too popular it’s usually no hassle. The issue? These services release tickets at set times every week for every single band. Japanese web infrastructure is held up by conbini-tier glue, and the site crashes every time. You get hit with an error message that says there’s too many people accessing, and you have no choice but to refresh the page over and over until it finally lets you in, and there’s still the chance that somewhere in the process of clicking through the pages until your ticket is bought that the error message will pop back up and you’ll have to start the process all over again, sometimes screwing you over entirely.
Lo and behold: you’ve made it to the payment page. Just one final form to fill out and that ticket is yours! So you think. You plug in your puny Canadian credit card info, and it gives you an error that reads something like: Foreign credit cards cannot be used. That’s right! You think you were sneaky with your proxy address and your VPN, but the true and final guardsmen is the Stone Soldier of Overseas Credit Cards. Maybe you’re a long-hauler who has a legitimate enough job and income to trick a Japanese bank into giving you a credit card, but for the rest of us illegitimate ilk there’s only one remaining option: to pay at a convenience store.
You trek to your local 7-11, cash jingling in your pocket. You show the barcode, and the clerk immediately knows what to do. Sometimes, if you’re ordering on e-Plus, you get the option to pay by credit card even if it wasn’t allowed on their goddamn website. I guess it’s some kind of fraud protection thing, fuck, I don’t know, I just want my ticket. Whether you pay by card or cash, the staff prints out the ticket right there and hands it over to you. Do not lose it under any circumstances: there are literally no back-ups, and digital tickets are only now slightly coming into use (of the 25+ shows I attended last year only one band did digital tickets). Okay, finally, there you go, there’s your ticket, now you can go to the concert.
But the first time I went to a concert in Japan I didn’t do any of this because I didn’t know how. I didn’t know ticket resales were a little illegal either, so I just naturally used one of the extralegal sites and paid 3x the regular cost (5000 x 3 = 15000 fucking yen) because I thought it would be the one and only time in my life I would be able to see my favourite band, The Pillows.
The year 2018; I am an exchange student. I’ve paid 15000 yen for this fucking ticket. The venue: Shibuya Club Quattro, which is inexplicably on top of a multi-level clothing store called GU. I go up the stairs and nervously hand over my ticket that probably says something like Tanaka Daisuke on it but the ticket inspector, probably barely older than me, says nothing at the discrepancy between my pale hand and the irrefutably Japanese name.
“It’s 500 yen for the drink ticket.”
“Oh, that’s okay, I don’t need a drink.”
“You need to buy the drink ticket.”
“No, really, it’s fine, I won’t buy a drink, but maybe I’ll change my mind.”
“You have to buy it.”
This exact scene has played out ad infinitum at every livehouse in Tokyo between clueless foreigners like myself and venue staff. You NEED to buy the drink ticket. It’s in the ad, it’s a custom, it’s expected, it’s how the livehouse makes money. So I scrounge out a 500 yen coin from my pocket and pay. I look around the lobby and bar. The faux brick interior makes you feel like you’re in some basement, but you’re on the 5th floor of a huge building in Shibuya. The drink ticket is this laminated piece of paper and I hand it over to the bar in exchange for a beer. I came as soon as the doors opened but it’s already packed. It would be many months later that I would find out there is a Pillows fan club where you can get the earliest pick of tickets, but I still don’t even know how to use the regular sites.
I shuffle into the main floor. Everyone’s got different shades of the same towel draped over their shoulders, and I saw them selling a red and blue one in the merch booth right outside. It’s their logo and the words “CAN YOU FEEL THAT HYBRID RAINBOW.” They’re also all wearing their oldest shirts, all in a competition to see who’s been a fan longer. The Pillows 15th Anniversary Special Live. Do You Remember the 1st Movement? Thank you, my twilight Tour 2003. Arabaki Rock Festival 08. Lostman Go To City 2006. I am wearing a button up and a cardigan.
This show is their first Tokyo stop for the release of their new album, Rebroadcast. I prefaced this by saying they’re my favourite band, but in 2018 they were more like “my favourite Japanese band,” and it was more so trying to grant my high school self’s dream of seeing them live. I’m sure you know about FLCL, right? Six episodes. Gainax. Tsurumaki Kazuya. The entire soundtrack? The Pillows.
The year 2013. I’m 15 years old. A girl told me to make a Tumblr account, so I did. After I stopped talking to that girl I kept using Tumblr. There was this culture of making GIFs out of anime, and this was a careful thing. The framerate had to be correct. The resolution had to be perfect. The shot you chose had to be just right. The communities around this, the so-called “Anime Tumblr,” was a serious community made up of teenagers and 20-somethings who, in hindsight, should not have been spending that much time with Tumblr teenagers. This is also the first time I’m figuring out my own tastes; in a matter of months I’ve seen Evangelion, Serial Experiments Lain, Twin Peaks, and so on. Naturally I found the path that led to Anime Tumblr, and it was here that I was introduced here to FLCL.
Legs spread, same width as the shoulders, body tight, then hit the ball like you’re defeating the enemy. Here, the pinky finger is key. And then you just hit, hit, hit! Ka-king! Bingo!
Back on the floor in Club Quattro I’m sipping my beer. It’s not a large space, the website says it can hold a maximum of 750 people but it really doesn’t feel like there’s more than a couple hundred. There is inexplicably a huge pillar in the middle of the floor that blocks the stage no one wants to end up behind. I’m tall enough that anywhere you stand is a good spot, so it doesn’t matter that I’m towards the back. It’s almost time, and I’m starting to get excited; will they play my favourite songs from FLCL? Last Dinosaur? One Life? Hybrid Rainbow? I can’t wait.
The lights go down, and the crowd goes nuts. Everyone starts rushing the stage. Their theme song starts to play and everyone claps along. The lights are dim, and, oh boy, here they come. Sawao Yamanaka, still sporting the messy tousled hair that he wore until very recently, Manabe tosses up a quick peace sign, Shin-chan, the oldest-looking gray-haired grandpa, slumps onto his stool. Their “guest” bassist, Arie, comes on. I didn’t know this at the time, but The Pillows have never had a steady bassist even if Arie has been playing with them for years. They quickly do some last-minute tuning, check to see if the sound’s on, Sawao gets up close to the mike and asks, “OK?” and then they start playing the title track of their new album, Rebroadcast.
Oh my god, they’re really right there on the stage. So much time in high school was spent watching these guys on a tiny screen in music videos and concert recordings and so on, and now here’s the real deal right before my very eyes. It’s the fucking Pillows. What the fuck? I can barely even process what I’m seeing with my eyes. You’re telling me when I was 15 and watching live recordings of One Life with tears in my eyes, thinking it was impossible to see them live ever in my life, now here those same guys are right there on that stage just a few metres away from me.
There’s no time to react; the next song is I Think I Can. If you’ve seen FLCL you know this song--it plays in the climax, the last episode, that fucking guitar coming out of his forehead, flying through the air, Amarao begging him to stop, and then that last exchange with Haruko, fuck!! They’re playing that song!!
The summer of 2013, it’s hot in Izmir. I’m in my grandparents’ apartment which barely holds them and my family here. The only peace I have is the wee hours of night when everyone’s gone to bed and it’s just me and my laptop. Anime Tumblr is just kicking into high gear in the North American timezones. It’s maybe six months since I saw FLCL for the first time, and I keep listening to that killer soundtrack.
The only light in the dark living room is my laptop screen. I’m watching a recording of them play Last Dinosaur, back when they were a little younger and still closer to the emotions these songs were written with. There they are, just beyond the screen, which was the only way to describe my experience with Japanese bands that followed The Pillows: Kinoko Teikoku, Number Girl, Tokyo Shoegazer, Coaltar of the Deepers, Mass of the Fermenting Dregs, the list goes on. My experience of them was completely and totally virtual, the same way I’m sure plenty of their overseas fans experience them.
It’s this bizarre feeling when these bands are still actively playing shows and releasing music, and the only thing stopping you is an ocean between. They live on your computer screen, in your iPod, in your Bandcamp account. Japanese band culture is so poorly archived and historicized domestically, let alone abroad. There’s a kind of oral tradition that surrounds these bands: who played what at which livehouse, which band dissolved and where their members went, the trendsetters and the copycats, the pipeline from Quruli to Asian Kung-fu Generation to all the other messy-haired nerds belting rock anthems that are only the subject of lived experience instead of historical record. For the overseas fans this is basically like the dead sea scrolls, the huge hurdle of language differences and lack of information spread across forum posts and Youtubers who can barely pronounce the names of the bands they like so much. There are no Japanese bands that have real cultural presence overseas, except for the occasional self-proclaimed music nerd who speaks with a kind of reverence for Yellow Magic Orchestra the same way you might hear a film student discuss the masterworks of some guy called Akeera Kurosahwa. The point is: these bands might as well not exist outside of Japan.
That’s what made the feeling of seeing Sawao Yamanaka himself walk out on stage so surreal. Crossing the ocean, wading through the domestic ticketing services, figuring out all the bizarre livehouse customs, it’s like you’ve finally complete Hercules’ twelve labors just to be able to gaze upon some old guys who can barely sell enough CDs to make ends meet play guitar.
This is exactly what makes seeing live music in Japan so rewarding--all these customs and steps and so on almost feel like they’re there to vet out the non-comittal and non-serious. This is true of any kind of live performance in Japan, but almost all livehouses ban cell phone recording of any kind (though this may vary for smaller bands who want the exposure). It was kind of unusual for me where stadium shows in Toronto are lined with thousands of iPhones trying to get their very own zoomed-in grainy footage of Gorillaz stumbling their way through Clint Eastwood. In Club Quattro all eyes are on The Pillows, it’s just you and that band, and this moment feels exactly that: live.
Why The Pillows? Why this very orthodox rock band and not, like, becoming a Boris superfan? I really don’t know--they’re like an origin point for the kind of sounds I look for in every other genre, or maybe they’re some kind of bridge between me and my dad who once said they sounded like “the Beatles if they were Japanese,” which is his favourite band. For a while I thought it was because I couldn’t understand the lyrics and I wouldn’t have to sit through the self-absorbed asides of Oasis and other contemporaneous rock bands, but even after I found myself able to hear them clearly nothing really changed. It’s always been The Pillows--if you were to unlock my iPod you’d see the menu is already on their list of albums, if you were to sort my MP3s by most listened it would be that golden run from 1996 through 2001, if you were to cross reference the names of characters and places in things I make you would find they almost always go back to the titles of Pillows songs. There’s no real way to put it into words, but the simplest way would be that it feels right--the kind of music that sews everything about me together.
Later on I would go back to Canada and the pandemic would start and my bedroom would become the four corners of my world again. There was nothing left but my memory, and every time I would play back those three old men walking out on stage I would find myself smiling before I even realized it myself. That’s something no concert DVD can recreate, no amount of gazing at a video playing on my laptop’s screen, nothing but my irreplaceable memory: that’s mine and mine alone.
I take my bike out of the garage and pump its wheels full of air. This red dinosaur used to be my dad’s, and when I grew to the proper size it became mine. It still has that kind air of “an adult’s bicycle,” even if it’s been mine longer than it was his. I get on my dad’s bicycle and roll it down the slope of my street for the millionth time in the year 2020, because there’s nowhere to go but as far as it’ll take me. Right past my elementary school, down to my middle school, down to my university, I go so far that it starts to become a chore to have to make it back. I am 22 years old and ready to face the world but it feels like the world isn't ready to face me. Patricia comes on my iPhone speaker, which I play at full blast for the empty city of Toronto. The clouds part the same way they did my very first time getting off the train in Nakano, and then I remember The Pillows: a rock and roll band I fell in love with at 20 years old in Tokyo, Japan, completely overwriting however I felt about The Pillows: the band that did the soundtrack to an anime called FLCL I watched on my 13-inch laptop screen in my grandparents’ apartment in Izmir. I ride the bike toward the clouds where I can only hope things will be even better.
August 6th, 2024