Arashi: Japonism, 11/27/15 at Kyocera Dome
We had dinner before the con, and two fans sat down at the table next to us...a Jun fan sitting next to me, and a Nino fan next to C. We looked at each other, recognized what was going on, and nodded to each other. I love Arashi fans...
During opening aisatsu, Jun knew how many people in the Dome he was going to make happy this time, looool...
The audience was AMAZING tonight until it got to encore...no one bothered calling for double. Arashi were away for a really long time during the first encore and I thought the audience was so stupid for not calling, since they must have been talking with the band about adding in more songs for a double, because they kept commenting on how amazing the crowd was... =w= No one has been calling before the concert at Osaka either...
MC:
+ They started commenting on how great the crowd was. Sho asked Jun what he thought of the audience, and Jun (looking exhausted) mumbled about it being cold outside and how terrible it must have been for everyone to be lining for goods in this weather. Everyone else was like "that's not what we're asking you about though, we're not asking about the cold outside, we're asking you what you think about this heat/passion INSIDE!"
Jun said he thought the audience was full of nicer fans than usual, sparking a pleased reaction from the audience. Asked to elaborate, he said he had been waving to the crowd and a girl with a handmade Aiba uchiwa had waved excitedly at him, and then flipped her Aiba uchiwa around to the other side with a generic message. Everyone else chimed in saying she surely meant, "It's not just Aiba, I support you too!" Jun said, "I think I just don't have very many fans... It's okay, you don't have to flip your uchiwa over to try and make me feel better! You don't need to placate me! But I thought that was so nice." (Apparently at last night's concert he was talking during the MC about his awareness of antis being present at the concert who hated him, and how he hoped they could still become happy at the concert with the other 4 leading them to happiness... WTF is up with him this week...?? This is genuinely upsetting as a fan, he never talks like this at concerts, they're his pride...)
Sho said they were going to do four shows at Osaka this year and said he thought it was the first time. Jun said no, they'd done four shows last year as well. The group went back and forth arguing about it and the audience started screaming back to them.
Sho: "Don't you notice that our fans generally know everything about us better than we do ourselves? We do things or say things and immediately forget them, but they remember absolutely everything about us! And then whenever you contradict yourself, they'll be like... [Sho adopts an annoyed, sassy fan attitude] 'DON'T YOU REMEMBER THAT ONE THING YOU SAID THAT ONE TIME?'"
Sho said the night before he had noticed lots of women in the mother-and-child seats were dressed in suits, and he thought they must have been coming right from work. Then he did a hilarious bit where he pretended to be a female fan begging off work early claiming to have a cold, then running to the concert and singing/dancing Hadashi no Mirai, only to freeze in realization that her boss had sneaked out to the concert at the same time and had seen her.
Sho said he thought there were a lot of children there that night and then Aiba asked the kids in the audience to yell. The noise was overwhelming and Sho got stern and was like, "Some of you thought, 'I'm TECHNICALLY still a child, right?' and went for it, didn't you?!" They cut it off at elementary school and had the kids yell again, and it was still pretty sizable. They said maybe all the elementary schoolers were the ones making the atmosphere of the audience so lively that night.
They asked Ohno how it felt 24 hours into his 35th year. Ohno said it hadn't sunk in yet. Everyone else teased him saying that if it hadn't sunk in that it was his birthday even after the cake and a domeful of fans singing happy birthday to him, then what could make him accept it? Ohno said he appreciated all of that but there wasn't really a big life change involved from 34 to 35 and it's not like you get to do something new and exciting by reaching that age. So he hadn't fully accepted it yet. He whined a bit about how 35 did feel really old and how 35 felt like serious "old man" age.
Jun ducked out as usual and the others jankened, only to end up with the exact same result as the previous night. Aiba was pointing at Nino and laughing at how he kept doing the same janken result and that's why it ended up the same. Left alone on the stage, they covered their mics for a moment and talked quickly between themselves, and then hurriedly rushed through Nino's promo bits where he just stated the titles, release dates, and relevant TV stations of each project.
Aiba said the quiz portion of the tour was now over since he'd run out of material (the previous night he said he thought up material for the quizzes at bedtime until he fell asleep, lol). "No more quizzes. So...let's do RIDDLES!" Nino was groaning over it but was like, "Oh right, your family is really into riddles, aren't they?"
"The first riddle: what kind of bread can you not eat?"
Nino paused for dramatic effect for a moment and then yelled, "BREAD THAT'S ROTTEN AND GONE BAD!"
"CORRECT ANSWER!"
Nino: "...well...I thought of saying, how about a frying pan (bread=pan) instead but..."
Aiba had another one but I'm blanking on how to get it across in English... "Kakesoba ni nani ga kakatteru?"
Sho and Ohno came back out and said they'd been listening backstage. Sho condemned Nino's rotten bread answer. Everyone sat down to try to think of the answer for the current riddle. After a bit, Aiba excitedly asked if he could just tell the answer, and Sho told him he was doing it wrong and the way this worked is he was supposed to offer a hint instead. Aiba said it was hard to give a hint, and Sho was like "omg you don't even WANT us to guess this, you legit are dying to tell us the answer...this isn't how riddles are supposed to work..."
Nino started throwing out suggestions: "Money? Feelings?"
Aiba said, "Oh, you're SO close! Yes, you're on the right track, it's not a material thing!"
After a bit more stalling, Aiba begged again to tell the answer, acting like it was incredibly clever and going to be a huge reveal, and they finally said it was fine for him to disclose it.
Aiba, triumphantly: "The answer is...the soba store's livelihood!"
You could have heard a pin drop in the audience.
Nino was like, "Whelp. On that note...I'm out," and walked offstage to go get changed. Aiba wailed, "Wait, don't leave me out here alone with this terrible atmosphere!" and chased after him, yelling over his shoulder to Sho, "I'll apologize to the audience when I get back!"
Jun came out as well, dryly complaining about the soba store reveal as being tragic. They started discussing the juniors and said that the previous night had been the first live performance ever for a bunch of the newest Kansai juniors. Jun said the newest recruits were in sixth grade, and it was incredible that when Arashi had debuted, those kids hadn't even been born yet...hadn't even been close to being born... Everyone got hushed in amazement and then went, "Well, it makes sense, our leader is already THIRTY-FIVE, after all..." Ohno: "Quit it!!!!"
Once Aiba got back they kept mocking him: "THE SOBA STORE'S LIVELIHOOD!" He was like "STOP BRINGING IT UP!!!!"
-
Our seats were still on the second floor but right in front of the center stage, so we had a great view. At the end when they shot out the Japonism streamers, they actually made it to the top floor! Only a few and they only reached the first three rows or so, but still close enough that we were futilely reaching out our hands ^^;
The staging and such is really amazing... From a production standpoint this whole con is so splendid... The rotating doors behind them for Masquerade, the screens being created to look like folding screens, the sakura trees raining down real petals... Everything was so beautiful. I thought the shamisen/taiko players kind of riffed on longer at the end thank-you section too and the audience was clapping along to the rhythm a bit as they were playing A.RA.SHI instrumental.
There were more technical difficulties than usual - early on around the opening when they dropped the rolling fabric from the side of the stage before the juniors popped out, on the left right the roll of fabric didn't detach from the stage on one side, and some juniors had to hop over the curtain rod holding it up. Then during "Oh Yeah!" all the sound (music, microphones, everything) completely cut out for about 3 seconds in the middle of the chorus. It was really cute in how the audience didn't skip a beat and just kept screaming the lyrics until the sound blipped back in. No one even batted an eyelash, we all just kept going.
During end aisatsu, the sound team seemed to be having trouble with the mic level for people. The aisatsu seemed to be getting progressively lower volume until it got to Jun, who also seemed to be a bit hoarse and whispery on top of the mic trouble, and I really couldn't hear him properly at all. I was turning to the screen and trying to lip-read to follow along with the low volume, but after a while it was obvious no one else could hear him properly either and everyone started murmuring around us, obviously asking the people around them if they could hear him.
Sho pretty much said the same thing as the previous night about how they used to spend all their time trying to do the opposite of what other Johnny's groups were doing and now it was refreshing to try to be as typical Johnny's as possible with this concert in their quest to go back to their origins, Aiba was pretty short and was just gushing happily about how much fun he'd had with the audience (also praised the audience for being amazing at FUNKY and saying all the practice had paid off), Ohno thanked everyone who still had uchiwa wishing him happy birthday and joked again about the concert theme of going back to the beginning and how he wanted to go back to his childhood photo self.
Nino's aisatsu was really sweet and he talked about how they were all getting older, but they still wanted to keep meeting us like this. Soon as the years keep getting on, they won't be able to move the same way, but they'll have the juniors and the audience dance in their place. And eventually they'll get old and fat, but he believes the audience will be able to overlook them losing their looks...
Jun said their concerts are a special time they like to share with the fans, but that he hopes the positivity from the concert experience is something that bleeds over into our everyday lives when we go back. He doesn't just want the concerts to be something that end there, but a creation that has a ripple effect that is passed on to everyone around us. He stated firmly again that he wanted to continue on with these five members, and bowed low again to the audience.
Will return with a final report for Sunday later~ Jun's really concerning me tho, legit every report you read has people there for the first time speculating that he's sick every single night. There's no way he's had a cold for every single stop on the tour, so he's obviously bitten off way more than he can chew with that solo... Reading about his aisatsu from last night is making me so sad. This concert is so splendid from a production standpoint and he's truly outdone himself (from a production standpoint this might be the most solid concert tour they've ever done, it's really exceptional in how beautiful it is while still remaining simple in all the right ways with just the right amount of spectacle...from an emotional standpoint, my heart is with Time and 5x10, so I can't really say this is my favorite tour I've ever attended, but for production this is just so beautiful). I hope he's going to be okay tonight, four days in a row of something this physically taxing on him must be rough, and hearing him say that he doesn't have many fans and that he knows people hate him is just too upsetting... The concerts are his pride so I understand why he's pushing himself past his limits for something that looks cool, but hearing him talk like this makes it seem not worth it if he's working this hard and putting himself down... Japanese twitter's posts about this subject are so cute and cheering me up tho, the #松本潤に愛を叫べ tag is so presh, Arashi fans really are the best <3