As we were in Japan, we started the day with... French pâtisserie. Of course. (I was relieved - this is much more my style of breakfast than the savoury offerings available elsewhere.)
Then I had two choices, as my personal tour guides explained. Option 1: Queue at the Endless Summer venue to buy JKS merchandise; Option 2: Queue at the AP shop in Shibuya... to buy JKS merchandise. I chose option 2. Now don't get me wrong, I am British and we LOVE to queue. I have even been known to join a queue without any knowledge of what it was for, just in case it was for something good. However, I can honestly say that I have never queued to get into a shop before. We arrived at the shop and walked along the side of the queue... and kept walking... and turned a corner and kept walking... until we eventually reached the end a good few hundred metres from the shop itself. It was staggering.
About half way along the queue I realised that just because a lot of other people share your insanity doesn't make it sane, so I should be documenting this occasion for the sake of completeness of my future psychiatric medical records, hence the photo. It didn't move quickly but it didn't matter. Like the rest of the trip, it was just fun to be surrounded by people who were at least as crazy as I am. Furthermore, while we were waiting and shuffling along the queue, Tree J tweeted a link to a teaser of the MV for Darling Darling, so I watched that a few hundred times and before I knew it we were next in line. |
The shop is somewhat reminiscent of a shop at a theme park or museum, in that it is completely devoted to one thing and everything you can buy there has pictures of that thing on it. Obviously though, the thing it is devoted to is JKS, so for eels I suppose the experience is more similar to being a greedy child in a sweet shop. Even the outside of the building is covered in pictures of his face. |
There's a floor of JKS, a floor of Team H, and then a third floor that was devoted to his birthday wine. (I'm often envious of how much he has accomplished in his nearly thirty years but this might be the thing I envy most... his own birthday wine). We were able to sample the birthday wine but not to buy any - at this point there may have been an audible sigh of relief from my credit card.
The relief was short-lived because just up the road was the Zikzin shop. This necessitated yet another queue but once you were escorted over the threshold there were four whole floors of obscenely priced beautiful items to peruse, including clothes, jewellery, household items, and toiletries.
By the time we had completely bankrupted ourselves (and I had learned a valuable lesson about calculating currency conversion rates before paying rather than on the way out of the shop), it was time to think about getting ourselves over to the venue for Endless Summer.
My first impression when we arrived at the venue was of immense numbers of people, virtually all women. The crowds… wow. There were so, so many people all milling about on the concourse waiting for the doors to open. I took some photos myself but this one from weibo gives you a far better idea... no prizes for spotting yours truly, sticking out like a sore thumb as usual.
Inside the venue, again, the impression was of the scale of it. Coming from the Seoul show, which was about 3000 people maybe, to a venue for 15000 was quite a shock. At the far end of the arena the promo picture for Endless Summer was displayed on a central screen above the stage and on screens to each side of it. Beams of light were sweeping about and the atmosphere was already buzzing.
My seat was on the second floor towards the back. I’d been incredibly lucky so far on the trip in that my total inability to hold on to anything hadn’t been an issue. My time of being a normal person had run out though and in quick succession I dropped my new phone (which bounced down the concrete steps right to the front of the balcony), my light stick, and several items out of my bag. Fortunately no permanent damage was done to any of them, and it did give the people around me something to watch while we waited for the show to start.
The lights went down and the music came on and he appeared from underneath the stage, right at the end of the long section sticking out towards the audience. His hair was combed forwards again, like in the first part of the Seoul show, but in my opinion he was wearing much better clothes. To be honest, it was an absolutely ridiculous outfit but he looked completely fabulous in it.
As it was a full concert rather than a fan meeting this time, there were lots more songs and less talking, although he’s very garrulous and still talked a lot, in Japanese this time. He introduced his new song, Darling Darling, which is really cute and is definitely in the running to be one of my absolute favourite songs of his (and not just because my heart scrunches up a bit every time he pronounces darling ‘darwing’).
He sang two other new songs, both of which were also great. He then sang three Team H songs (woop woop) and during Gotta Getcha he rode on a segway around the ground floor of the arena, somehow managing to dance and brush hands with people, all while speeding along! Impressive coordination.
Then there was the encore. He sang one of the songs from It’s Beautiful and during the song he walked to a part of the stage, bars rose up from the stage, and the whole section lifted up on a massive crane and circled the venue a couple of times. He was shouting the ‘saranghae’ part of the song and all of us were shouting ‘saranghae’ back, it was beautiful and moving and distracted me from my totally irrational fear that the crane might not be safe (I am scared of heights and was scared for him, like an anxious mother)!
I enjoyed the show even more than I’d enjoyed the Seoul one, I think mostly because of the different format and atmosphere. His performance was on another level, there were so many more songs, and there were so many more people, all of whom were singing and dancing and shouting. It was one of the happiest evenings I've ever had.