My Perfume Long Weekend

After I saw my favourite J-Pop group (well to be honest, the only one I like), Perfume, for the very first time in Hong Kong back in early June 2024, I loved the experience so much I really wanted to see them again. Though maybe not in Hong Kong again as honestly, I didn’t think much about the city. It was certainly not one of the most welcoming places I had travelled to. I knew the group were going to release a new album sometime before the end of 2024, and there is always a tour to support their album releases. However, I didn’t give it much thought. I did want to see one of their big Japanese arena tours, but I thought I’d never get around to doing it.

Then in August they finally announced the new album, “Nebula Romance Part 1”, and their Japanese tour which would begin in late December and finish in late April. I honestly wasn’t planning doing another big overseas trip after going to Hong Kong. However, I had always planned to visit Japan again, specifically to see the Sapporo Snow Festival which occurs in early February. So, I looked at the concert schedule. I knew anything near Tokyo would sell out pretty quick and it would be hard to get a ticket. Some of the other concerts were really too far north or south of Tokyo, so I chose the Shizuoka concert as it was close enough to Tokyo to make a day trip (my original plan was to go back to Tokyo straight after the concert), but small enough to have a good chance to get tickets. Plus, it was in the same month as the Sapporo Snow Festival. It ticked all the boxes. They were playing two dates in Shizuoka that weekend, so I chose the latter date, the Sunday, 23 February 2025.

In early September, the fan club tickets went on sale as part of a lottery. So, as I did with the Hong Kong show, I entered the lottery. I checked my online banking on the day the results were announced and noticed I had been charged the ¥13,050 for the ticket from Pia, the ticketing company. Holy hell I thought, I’m going to see them again. In addition, there was a second VIP ticket lottery in late November. This included closer seating plus a bunch of extras such as a tour t-shirt, a VIP pass, a seat cover and priority entry for the merchandise stand. Of course I entered, paid the additional ¥13,050 and discovered in early December I had won that lottery as well.

Perfume was also touring their Perfume Costume Museum exhibition of their stage and music video costumes with the exhibition making a stop from 22 February to 1 June at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. So, I thought why not see the exhibition the following day after the concert? The museum was selling a specialty ticket; a circular one meant to mimic an okonomiyaki, a Hiroshima speciality. So, I ordered an online ticket for that as well which cost me ¥1,600. They also included a version with a plastic spatula for ¥2,500 which I thought was a bit silly. At this point I realised that the concert was on the long weekend of the Emperor's Birthday, with Monday being the public holiday. This worked out well as on Mondays the museum was usually closed, but they always opened for public holidays.

The Saturday of the long weekend rolled around. It was the last week of my holiday in Japan, day 24 of my 29 day holiday. I had walked around Mount Nokogiri the day prior and was quite fatigued. I had left my Tokyo accommodation in Kamata, Ota Ward around 5:30am, and wasn’t too surprised to find the train stations to be a lot busier than usual. I got to Shinagawa and took the shinkansen to Shizuoka which took a bit over an hour. I arrived way too early, a bit after 7:30am and had a long breakfast at the local Gusto. My plan for the day was to look around the city until I could check into the hotel. It's a typical mid-sized Japanese city with a population of nearly 700,000. The Shizuoka area is home to the factories of several plastic model kit manufacturers such as Tamiya, Hasegawa and Bandai’s Gundam model kit factory. As a result, the city was dubbed “A Model City” by its local council. In conjunction with several businesses around the city centre, several “Plastic Monuments” have been erected in the CBD. There are mostly metal sculptures which look like giant plastic model sprues (or runners) holding parts of an object or a whole object like a public telephone, a vending machine and even the armour of a samurai warrior near the local castle.

For most of the morning, I searched these out. The numbers allocated to each of them indicate there would be 13 in total, however only 10 seem to exist. During my search for them, I wandered into the night-life district which has bunny girl clubs and full-on showgirl clubs. There I found a Don Quijote store which catered very much to the employees of that district with beauty products, condoms, lube, alcohol and conbni food on first floor and an 18+ section on the top floor with vibrators and other sex toys. The entire second floor had nothing but make up products. I had never seen another Don Quijote store like that anywhere else, especially one with a roped off 18+ section.

After wandering around the city for the best part of the day, I checked into my accommodation, a very average hotel a block north of Shizuoka station, and went out for dinner, to a Nepalese run Indian restaurant. Inside was a small group of slightly loud middle-aged men continually asking the staff for highballs and extra naan. The waiter spoke English and told me that he had worked in Brisbane and Melbourne before moving to Japan. when I went to bed I could hear sirens and motorbikes throughout the city late into the night. It had really felt like everyone had been let off their chain as it was the long weekend. I walked way too much on Saturday and felt really fatigued at this point in my trip. I decided on the Sunday morning to have a late breakfast and then take the train out to the stadium where the concert was. I went to Gusto again where a bunch of somewhat rowdy young people (slightly criminal looking types) were having breakfast too.

Deciding to leave at about 10am for the train, I took the JR Tokaido line to Aino station, the closest to Ecopa Arena where the concert was being held. The weather had been really good that weekend with blue skies and very little cloud. It was a little on the chilly side though. The train with its buttons to open and close the carriage doors and the scenery, made me feel like I was out in the country. On the way a man in his 30’s loudly told off a couple women in their 70’s talking on the train. The two ladies weren't having any of it and another man soon intervened. The complainer walked off into another carriage and the train guard was called. Well, that was my excitement for the day. It was the long weekend, why can't people relax?

The train journey took a bit over 70 minutes. I took the south exit and felt like I was in the middle of nowhere. There was a small sign on a pillar near the exit saying "Welcome to Fukuroi", which was the nearest city to the arena. However, the sign had the city’s mascot, Fuppy, dressed as the three members of Perfume, so I knew I was in the right place. Taking the 15-minute walk up to the arena, I passed a very swank looking guest house/café who were playing Perfume songs, likely as way to entice fans in to get some coffee and food on the way. Though it felt a bit of a desolate area with only some apartment buildings and lot of parks (and almost no one around...), I was pleased to find a Family Mart on the way and got enough food for the rest of the day.

When I got to the arena, I realised that it was much smaller than I thought. I read it had a capacity of 40,000 people, then realised that was the sports stadium next door. Ecopa Arena’s capacity is 10,000 which is still big. Being the long weekend, there was a kind of sports event going on in and around the stadium. It seemed like some sort of casual jogging event. I had arrived at about 11:45. The doors did not open until 3pm for a 4pm start, but I needed to exchange my printed-out emails for my tickets and get my VIP merchandise. The ticket exchange opened at 12:30. However that turned into a bit of an issue when the guy at the door of the arena refused to let me in. After a good 10 minutes of politely arguing my case with another member of staff and trying to translate the emails from English to Japanese via Google Lens, I was finally let in (a case of “misidentification” they told me in English, which doesn’t make any sense, but anyway…). I got my paper tickets and then exchanged one of them for my VIP pack.

I never used my third ticket for the merchandise VIP line as there wasn’t a huge amount of people lined up. The only thing I got was a flight tag which showed the dates of Shizuoka shows. It has been attached to my backpack since the evening of the concert. Afterwards I had a quick look around and took a few photos, then sat on a bench until close to 3pm. I was feeling a bit ill and fatigued. I was worried that I would faint in the middle of the concert or on the way home. But I ate the rest of my food just before the concert hoping that it’d give me bit of energy.

I could see a line up was beginning to form, so I went and joined everyone. Your seat number isn’t allocated until you enter the arena. When the doors opened at 3pm, people filed in an orderly manner as you’d expect. You scan your ticket which spits out a paper ticket seat allocation, then you get your Team Nebula Member ID Card (the seat allocation ticket has either Cyan, Yellow or Magenta written on it) and then it’s off to find you seat. After consulting a seat section map, I discovered I was right at the front but at the side of the stage. I went to the toilet quickly then found my seat. I was amazed as it was labelled as row five, but I was actually in the second row from the front, only six metres away from the stage. I also noted only five minutes has passed since the doors had opened. Seriously, so well organised.

As people began to enter the arena, I noticed people were surprised at how close they were to the stage. It was also clear that quite a number of people sitting around me knew each other and were absolutely delighted when another person they knew showed up to sit in their allocated seat. They greeted each other really warmly. During the pre-show music, it would occasionally stop and a trailer for the movie “Showtime 7” would screen. Perfume makes an appearance in the film where they perform their song “Human Factory - Denzo Ningen –“, which was released a couple of weeks prior. I noticed a couple of other westerners in the audience. I spotted a young couple outside and there was a bloke with a beard in the front row to the right of me. I don’t know if the show sold out, but I couldn't see any empty seats an it seemed really close to full capacity.

The performance itself was quite different from their usual shows. The album “Nebula Romance Part 1” is a concept album. It’s meant to be a soundtrack to a fictional sci-fi film starring Perfume. This idea was expanded for the special edition of the album which included a movie program. The first half of the show leans heavily into the science fiction movie concept with the album preformed in full without breaks and video segments in between songs explaining the film's storyline. The story is told via an android named Kikimo, who seems to be a thinly veiled stand in for Mikiko, their long-time chorographer and creative director. A robot army occupies the moon, which had been fortified by the remnants of humanity during a 20 year war. During an attack, three women, Ayaka, Yuka and Ayano (i.e. Perfume) who have been hibernating in cold sleep capsules, are thrown out into space and fall onto Earth, somewhere in a desert. The Earth itself has been taken over by androids. With no memory of their past, Perfume are taken in by Kikimo who plans to have them join the android Nebula’s Army of the Light. However, the trio ask to attend dance school. Kikimo believes that it might be a good idea to let them blend into android society. Known as the “three miracles that descended from space”, they become regulars on the Mr Mic Show.

Most of the video segments seem to be different takes, outtakes or directly culled from the “Cosmic Treat” music video which promoted the album. The stage itself has a massive lighting rig above it with a metallic sphere in the centre which is also seen on the album cover. The actual stage itself is also quite unusual. It’s a large revolving circular stage divided into three separate stages. The first one has an oddly shaped video screen which they could project anything behind them and a screen in front, onto which elements can be projected onto it. It’s sort of like a metallic wall with an oval cut out in the centre. The issue with this is if you didn’t have a front on view and were at the side of the stage, you couldn’t always see all of them performing. However, it has the ability to move to the back of the stage sperate from the video screen stage, which for most songs in the performance was the case.

The second stage is the Mr Mic Show from the “Cosmic Treat” music video. The third is a bathroom stage, mostly used for “Morning Cruising”. I quite liked this first half of the show as there was no breaks talking to the audience, and it was non-stop and very theatrical. Highlights in this section were the performance of “Morning Cruising” and also the highly unusual performance of “Jikuka”, where they left the stage and went out on the runway extending out at the front and metallic flowers descended from the lighting rig, with metallic confetti coming down from above. At least I think it was. I’m not 100% sure how that effect was achieved.

This section of the show was all over too quickly. We got to the final song on the album, “Mobius”, and the group exited the stage towards the end of the song, while on screen Perfume fired laser guns at an unseen enemy, with one shot hitting a cyborg soldier's helmet, revealing a human underneath . A dark, ominous figure appeared on screen with the words “to be continued”. After that, it was time for the usual transitional song, always a new instrumental by their producer, Yasutaka Nakata. As always, it’s very danceable, but I wish these songs would get a commercial release. The second half of the concert is a brand new setlist every show. Straight out of the gate we were treated to “Cling Cling”, then “Laser Beam” and finally “Baby Cruising Love”, a great set of songs from their back catalogue.

It was at this stage they finally took a break to address the audience. To be honest I’m not much of a fan of this stuff. Not because my Japanese isn’t all that great, but it’s just that I don’t find it all that interesting. However, a couple of intriguing bits cropped up here. They asked the audience if it was anyone’s first time at Perfume concert and a few people put up their hands. Then they asked if anyone had been to more than two concerts on this tour and just about half the audience’s hands shot up. I was flabbergasted. During this segment I noticed one guy with a notebook furiously taking notes as all three spoke. Later when they had the P.T.A. no Corner segment (which I am happy to say I participated in and understood 90% of), when they asked people are in their 40’s to cheer out, that got the loudest cheer. I suppose I should not be surprised that their a fair amount of their Japanese fans would be in this age bracket. While there was much hype about the Team Nebula Member ID Card, I felt these were really underutilised in the performance (each team colour was only called out once). It was more of cute keepsake than anything else.

In addition, they forced the crowd to do choreography of what I assume was from one the themes from the anime series “Chibi Maruko-chan”. It was only after the concert that I released the mangaka for the series, Sakura Momoko, was born in Shizuoka. The rest of the set list was quite interesting with two songs that were staples in Perfume shows, “One Room Disco” and “Chocolate Disco”, but also three rarely performed songs, “Kasuka Na Kaori”, “Flow” and the fan favourite (and mine, which I don’t think had been performed in a while), “Party Maker”. The crowd went bonkers for this song. The second half of the show used the entire stage with the side and front runways far more than the first half. It also used the mainstage a lot more with Perfume walking through each of the three “sets” during various songs. The other thing I noticed in this concert was the reliance on lasers for effects. Putting aside “Laser Beam”, which of course included them, I was surprised at how often they were employed. In addition, you had the usual Perfume stage trademarks such as front projections and the group suddenly popping out of the stage floor.

After two and a quarter hours, it was all over. As they have done in recent concerts over the years, they walked all over the stage, waving goodbye to the audience. Personally, I prefer a big theatrical finish and for them to disappear or to come back and do an encore, as they had done in concerts a decade or more ago. Immediately after the show finished, I wanted to go and see them again. It was such a fun experience, a little bit different to the Hong Kong crowd for sure, but very enjoyable. In addition, I could see all three clearly from my seat for most of the concert. I noticed that once the concert began, I really felt energised by everything and enjoyed it immensely. I felt so better afterward. I think what happened was I was so bloody nervous going to show I made myself sick.

I had allowed myself about two or three hours to get back to the hotel. However, I was really surprised at how quick I got back to Shizuoka. While the train was packed like it was rush hour, the vast majority of people got off at Kakegawa station, one stop from Aino station. I didn’t realise that there was a shinkansen station there and most fans from out of town travelled to that station or were staying the night in nearby hotels. So, the concert finished at 6:15pm and I got back to my hotel room at 7:45. Again, I was flabbergasted. Another what the heck moment. So bloody organised. Hats off to JR Central and the staff at Aino station. Really impressed.

After a good sleep, I still felt a bit fatigued, but I had to leave early to get to Hiroshima. When I booked my tickets for the shinkansen, it didn’t really dawn on me how long the trip was going to take. Over three hours. On the way it began snowing. A lot. I was slightly concerned as I had not prepared in terms of clothing for this. The snow dissipated but returned again as we got closer to Hiroshima. Being a public holiday Monday and the city being tourist hotspot, the station was utter bedlam. I decided to take a streetcar to the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art where the Perfume Costume Museum exhibition was being held, but soon realised the it only got me half way there. When I got off the streetcar, it snowed on and off a bit, but wasn’t too bad and soon cleared to partly blue skies.

To get to the museum I walked past a rather interesting Shinto shrine, down a laneway and through a park up a hillside. In addition to the museum, next door to it was a manga library which I decided I wasn’t going to bother with. Outside the museum was a massive banner promoting the Perfume exhibit. I exchanged my printed-out paper receipt for my “okonomiyaki” ticket. It came with a "paper bag" slip which mimicked a takeaway bag when you buy a real okonomiyaki. I went to the exhibition room where it was and was a little horrified that the lady at the counter was going to cut part of the ticket out. It was explained to me that it was a “Hiroshima cut”, a style of cutting the first piece of an okonomiyaki. I reluctantly let her do it and went in.

The exhibition had Perfume’s costumes from way back in 2005 for the “Linear Motor Girl” music video to their 2024 Asia Tour. The obvious highlights were the LED light enhanced costumes for the “Spring of Life" music video, which of course still functioned and the dresses made for their 2013 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity performance, where patterns and imagery were projected on them. These dresses were displayed in their own darkened room in order to mimic that performance with images being projected on to them. My own personal favourite costumes were the ones used the music videos for “Linear Motor Girl”, “Magic of Love”, “Tokyo Girl”, "Mirai no Museum" and “Spinning Girl”, as well as the “Night Flight” ones used in the Pino commercials, the “Cosmic Explorer” album cover, and the 2012 MTV Music Video Awards dress.

While most of costumes included all three as a set, some only had one on display such as the 2012 MTV Music Video Awards dress. The exhibition also included some of the dress patterns and original design drawings. Confusingly, the exhibition was on two levels, the ground floor and basement floor. There wasn’t any really clear signage this was the case and I almost walked out of the exhibit half way through. I later realised the building was designed, built and opened right at the end of the bubble economy, a time of greenlighting avant-garde and extravagant building designs, which mostly likely explained it’s strange layout. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a museum where an exhibition was spread out over two floors. I later found out that the other exhibition rooms are the same, one which had a darkened stairwell which made look like the basement space was off limits.

At the end of the other half of the exhibition in the basement floor with the gift shop of course. I bought an exhibition image t-shirt as well as a booklet/exhibition catalogue. I had my “okonomiyaki” ticket, a bunch of Perfume flyers and my tickets from the concert in a clear plastic folder to protect them. The woman at the counter saw the concert ticket and asked me how the concert was. I smiled and said it was very, very good. It was day three of the exhibition and a public holiday, yet there wasn’t as many people there as I expected. I really liked the exhibit and thought it was well worth the trip. I had a look at the rest of the artworks in the regular galleries and decided to head off. Possibly the only issue I had with it was you could only take photos in certain sections. Oddly this applied to all exhibitions in the museum.

I decided to walk back to the station as it wasn’t all that far away. However, the weather soon turned sour and kind of rained/hailed/sleeted all at the same time. As I was still rather fatigued, I decided it might be better to head back to Tokyo rather than hanging around the city as I had planned to do. Hiroshima station was still utter bedlam and I managed to wade through the crowds to get to the Midori no Madoguchi in order to catch an earlier shinkansen back to Shinagawa. It was really packed with travellers, but there was a dedicated foreign tourist service desk, so I lined up and waited for rather easily confused European tourists to finish harassing the poor staff members.

The only thing that was available within an hour at that time (a bit after midday), was a seat in a Green Car, so I coughed up the extra ¥7,000 and went up to the platform, only to be blocked temporarily by an American tourist trying to get through the ticket gates. I hadn’t travelled in the Green Car of a shinkansen before, but I must admit I wasn’t entirely all that impressed. You just get a larger seat with a really annoying foot rest, a hot towel provided by one of the staff and you can order meals to be brought to your seat if you so desire. Not really worth the extra money I paid for it. However, I got back to my Tokyo accommodation a lot faster, so I was happy about that. Shinagawa station seemed really peaceful compared to the chaos I’d just left.

In spite of the chaos and general disorder that was the Emperor’s Birthday long weekend, I really loved going to see Perfume live in concert yet again. I always wanted to see one of their arena shows in Japan and now I can cross that off my list. I also loved the costume museum exhibition. It was great to see all of the costumes used in their promotional work as well as their concerts and other live performances. It was another one of those things I never thought I’d ever see in person as I never normally seem to be Japan when these kinds of exhibitions are on. Everything on this trip seemed line up really well and I got to do a lot of stuff I had missed previously. While this tour ended last Sunday, a new album is due to be released sometime around September and another tour is sure to follow. I think I might have to go to Japan for an eighth time to see Perfume live again.