Make Believe Mailer 66: Scream Your Heart Out
CHAI Live At Ebisu Yebisu Garden Place, And The Return Of Live Energy
Photo By Author
Finally, after several years that have felt twice as long, we were allowed to scream.
Put better, we were allowed to scream without catching stray glances from event staff, security or fellow concertgoers. And the capacity crowd at Yebisu Garden Place, turning out on a rainy Thursday night to catch CHAI, was ready to shout. They were chatty in the run up to showtime, and when vocalist Mana came on over the PA to address the crowd — “photos OK! Videos OK! Shouting, OK!” — they let loose.
Personally, this marked the first show1 I saw since the Japanese government removed its mask guidance on March 13. The venue still required masks — largely observed, though the folks opting out faced no enforcement I could see — but unlike previous major shows across the country over the last two years, there were no efforts to stop people from singing, or shouting, or screaming along with the music.
CHAI served as the perfect act to christen this new period. Always energetic and up for letting their oddball side stand out, their set front-loaded on their most upbeat tracks (“N.E.O”) and opportunities for playfulness (the sudden turn to DJing on “Ping Pong!” and the choreographed chaos of “Action,” complete with Mana doing about three laps around the stage). What could have tipped into exhaustion just a few years ago — who has all that pep? — felt totally welcome — give me all that pep!
To its credit, Japan figured out early on COVID-19 traveled in the air, and while large swathes of the world wiped down their delivery groceries, this country opted for silence. “Please scream inside your heart” became a micro topic of interest to global media after Fuji Q Highland coined the Shimamura-shirt-ready slogan in summer 2020, but that bit of branding turned out to be a preview of all pandemic-era measures in the nation…especially when it came to live music.
When concerts started becoming more of a possibility again in 2021, the big pushes to bring live industry back were required masking, social distancing and vocal silence. The last one felt contradictory to the thrill of performance, but it was either politely clap or face another 12 months of “virtual events.” Fuji Rock 2021 emphasized keeping one’s lips sealed, while Supersonic a month later featured security dashing around and breaking up particularly hype groups of punters, resulting in a headline set from Steve Aoki featuring the DJ remarking “this is the most energetic, quietest show I’ve ever played.” It could feel like overkill…but then again, the alternative would be the rowdy and seemingly rule-less Namimonogatari2021, which received a week of media coverage and briefly appeared to usher in the doom of live events in Japan.
It didn’t, thankfully, but staying quiet remained central as more shows returned to the event calendar. By the time of summer music festival 2022, most of the major festivals could go on, complete with international acts joining the bill, but an emphasis on clapping…at most…stayed in place. Every single set I saw at Fuji Rock in July featured an MC running down a list of rules the crowd had to follow, while Summer Sonic a month later featured video announcements — including a particularly bizarre one where Sonic The Hedgehog (the patron saint of the “Sonic Stage”) taught festival goers how to clap. Many didn’t listen — with many foreign acts encouraging them to “scream along,” unaware of the political dimension at play — but staff stared daggers at them, making everything feel…off.
The truth is, smaller events across the country have been ignoring these shouting guidelines for a long time now — though masking has always seemed great! — and I’ve been to plenty of shows in the past year where these recommendations never arrived. But still…going to an actually big concert and not having that weird pressure coming down on you if you want to, say, whoop after hearing a song about loving gyoza felt good.
The second half of the night felt a little less hectic — after getting all their nerves out in the front end, CHAI mostly locked into rock band mode for the final stretch, going as far as to perform the first song of their encore acoustically (uh, a nice novelty, but stick with what you do best). Maybe everybody was a little too excited, and exhausting themselves too quickly. It takes time to adjust, even to things once common.
The most charming moment of this stretch came when CHAI asked the audience where they were from. Most of us hailed from Tokyo, but a handful of others shouted out — Osaka! Shizuoka (twice)! Australia!, a response which brought the house down. No concert can really be important in the way that, like, legislation is, but this show felt like it was important to a lot of people, ready to get back to a live community they could fully take part in.
One of the big predictions various Twitter types made last year was that tourism to Japan would suffer from the government’s border measures, which were in effect much longer than similar countries. This has proven to be one of the dumbest projections ever, even by social media standards. Tourism to Japan is recovering based off of official data, and going off personal strolls around Tokyo neighborhoods and the (very welcome) number of emails I’ve been getting from friends planning trips.
I can also feel it in Tokyo’s live and club community, where more people — domestic and international — are funneling back in. It has been invigorating, especially when I think back on the dread I felt after Namimonogatari2021, when the media decided “music festivals…that will be the downfall of society” for a little bit. Thankfully, that fell off fast, and now a new ecosystem of small spaces and familiar livehouses seem to be thriving. Now, the bigger spaces can join them in offering something that, if not “normal,” feels familiar.
As is often the case with these types of shows, CHAI used their Yebisu gig to promote a much larger event happening in a month. The quartet’s first festival — Neo Kawaii Festival — is more of a showcase, featuring beatmaker STUTS and Thai indie-pop act Phum Viphurit as of now, but the symbolism of it is hard to miss. It’s a merging of disparate scenes both sonic and geographical, and most intriguing, it happens at Zepp Shinjuku, a new venue set to open in April, making CHAI’s gathering one of the first at a venue clearly courting punters both domestic and foreign. Perfect timing — as the group’s own show this month highlighted, now is a great time to kickstart something new.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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Full disclosure — was invited by CHAI’s team, probably since I’ve written about them twice for The Japan Times now.