Arashi Exhibition Journey - more like a journey into racism and exclusion.

[kerrol]

Okay, I was staying in Japan,planning to return to Australia in late August. I really, really wanted to go to the Arashi exhibition because... der... I've been an Arashi fan for over 12 years

Comments

[kurikuribebi]

I found your entry randomly, hope you don't mind me commenting. Sorry to hear you had that experience, but I can't say I'm surprised -- it's not like racism is dead in Japan. It's still very much alive, though most people aren't so blatantly obvious about it, and handle it in a passive aggressive way. A friend of mine some years back wanted to get in to a VK concert, and despite showing her residence card, the security wanted more proof of her actually living where she did. Eventually my friend ended up calling her boss to vouch for her.
Another friend of mine mentioned that it was some kind of "fraud issue." For example, you have your friend sponsoring you and you are using their address, but then security has no way to verify that is true and that you didn't just use someone's address without acknowledging or whatever. I always thought that was a bull excuse until an acquaintance back west tried to register for tickets to something using my address. So if this were the logic security is running on, I'd understand it, but they need to be clear and explain themselves instead of just being like "Nope, good-bye!"

Johnnys isn't doing as hot as it used to locally and are banking on that foreign market, so hopefully in the future things will improve? But I'm not hopeful just yet because when it comes to the foreign market, Japan doesn't really have a clue as to what it's doing.

Don't let that treatment discourage you from enjoying what you love. Very much like you did this time, you hold your ground and you do you!

[kerrol]

Thanks for commenting.

Everyone knows that there's been a huge resale ticket problem for years. I feel like Johnnys have wanted to be seen to be doing something about the problem without actually doing anything that costs them money. Like sending out an email saying please don't resell tickets is going to stop anyone.

Now with Arashi going on hiatus, it's become a bigger problem because obviously fans are going to get a lot more fired up about not hitting for tickets. So yeah, they try to do this "foreigners are coming here and rorting the system" thing instead of trying to fix the real problem because they don't want to mess with that "Japanese people obey the rules" mindset. But if you look at how many tickets are sold through sites like Ticket Japan where you can't have a seller's account without a Japanese bank account.

I'm glad they're actually doing ID checks to stop ticket resales but I think they need to be a lot smarter about the whole process.