My First Live Concert In Japan: SCANDAL!

A few months ago, I was scanning through concerts coming up in Japan because I really wanted to attend a J-POP or J-ROCK concert since these bands rarely tour in America. I was pretty much going through this website and listening to bands that played the genres I was interested in, because I have listened to a lot of this music previously, either hearing it in anime or in Youtube mixes, but the problem was I didn't know any of the artists by name, only if I recognized the song! Finally, I found this girl band called SCANDAL, and when I listened to their most popular song, I recognized that it was one of the ending songs for the anime Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood (which is top 10 by the way, definitely watch it) and decided that I for sure had to attend this concert.

I was already in Osaka for the day since I had met with my band club in order to form groups for the live show in June. I joined five different "bands", covering the following artists: Tatsuro Yamashita, SHISHAMO, Silent Siren, Green Day, and One OK Rock. Each group will play two songs, so in total I will be playing 10 songs at the live show. I have a lot of practicing to do on my own and rehearing with the groups coming up! But I am excited to be playing music finally with some people in Japan.

After the band event, I grabbed MOS Burger for dinner (which is crazy cheap because you can get a double burger, large french fry, and large drink combo for only $8 USD). I had to navigate my way through the horrendously busy Osaka station, and then ended up missing my transfer train four times on my way to the venue. Luckily I left early, so I still made it on time before the concert started. Unfortunately I goto stuck in the back next to a bunch of much older Japanese men, who seemed a bit grumpy that a white foreigner happened to share an interest in their Japanese girl "idol" band. I only saw two other foreigners at the event.

Video and photography was not allowed during the performance, but at the end the audience is given a five minute window for a photoshoot! It was pretty crazy during the concert though, because all of the Japanese people seemed to know exactly what type of synchronized move to be doing, which alternated between fist pumping, head banging, or one of the two combined with shouting "はい！はい！はい！はい！" in time with the beat. It seemed to depend highly on the pacing of the song and the pulse from the drummer, but I figured that these were all die-hard fans who had attended concerts previously and knew all of the patterns already. After the concert, I shelled out about $90 on some merch; two CD albums, a shirt, and a music video collection. Totally worth it though.