Snapshots of Japan: Fuji Rock 2010

So folks, here’s the deal. I’m all well and done with the immersion business but I’m still taking a few days to sort out the “well, that was fun. What do I do now?”  So hopefully I’ll have the post for the immersion, and the JLPT up this weekend. In the mean time, here’s another entry in the Snapshots series.  This one is about the day and night I spent at Fuji Rock, an all together awesome and terrifying experience, as you will soon read.  Enjoy, and I’ll be back to regular updates by next week at the latest.

Kisses,

Adam

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It’s eight in the morning and you’ve somehow managed to haul yourself out of bed, and get yourself to a tiny little hot spring town called Echigo Yuuzawa in the middle of the middle of nowhere. Despite this, it manages to be just about an hour and a half away away from the heart of Tokyo.  Bullet trains.  Japan is strange like that.

The station is surprisingly busy, all kinds of young people looking all sorts of out off place.  Everyone is wearing big plastic rain boots in the full range of rainbow colors. Hell, there’s probably more than one pair of straight up rainbow ones.  Big floppy hats, rain ponchos ranging from elite camping gear to plastic bags, and a truly alarming amount of leggings.

We, the shuffling mass of youth, are eventually herded into something resembling a line, and loaded up onto buses.  No one is here to take in a hot spring or two.  We’re all headed to Naeba, another town about a half hour away which is home to some world class skiing.  Too bad it’s the middle of summer.

Naeba is probably a pretty sleepy, charming little place in the off season.  But for 3-days out of the year Naeba is host to something so horrible and wonderful the locals would be calling the exorcist if they didn’t know it’d be long gone before he’d arrive.

You step off the bus.  Let’s get a few things straight:

Fuji Crowd

  1. See those dots in the distance? Yeah, those are all tents.  Hundreds and thousands of them. On a ski slope.
  2. The thousands of people walking around near by, caked in mud, sunburned, and buzzing like they just downed a 2-liter of red bull?  They just got here about 10 minutes ago.  They’re waiting to get in.  On the other side of the 30 minute entrance line it’s pretty much the same.  Only a hundred times more people, a thousand times more mud, and a million times more energy.

Welcome to Fuji Rock.

Japan’s premier music and mud fest.

If you’ve been to any music festival in America you have some idea of what to expect.  It probably pales in comparison to most of the real major ones America has to offer.

But there’s something special about Fuji Rock. It’s in Japan.

A Special Kind of Unhinged

This is a music festival happening in Japan.  Most of the concert goers are Japanese.  Perhaps you think, given the general impression of Japanese people as quiet, reserved, and polite, that a concert attended primarily by Japanese people would be boring.  If so, this is because you’ve never spent 5 minutes in a karaoke box with an otherwise sane Japanese person.  But I don’t think you can grasp the degree to which Japanese people can and do loosen up when put in an atmosphere designed solely for that purpose.

It is absolutely, terrifyingly, awesome to watch hundreds of Japanese kids screaming their heads off, throwing their fists up, and starting mosh pits at the drop of a hat.  You can strike up a conversation with anyone, even if you speak absolutely no Japanese.  Dan started dozens of conversations just by walking up and playing rock-paper-scissors with people.  People are dancing really really badly all over the place. No one here is even remotely worried about how stupid they look anymore.  They’re too busy having fun.

Oh, and did I mention it goes all night?  Music starts up some time in the late morning, and keeps going until well past when the sun rises the next morning.  It shuts down briefly so that people can try to clean it up, and keep the entire venue from being swallowed up by mud.  Then it’s right back on its feet a few hours later, ready for day 2 and 3.

Let It Rain, Let It Rain

Every single thing which would normally deter one from having a music festival seems purpose build into Fuji Rock’s basic framework.

It always rains.  Always.  It has literally never not rained. [citation needed]  Since the festival’s stages are sprawled over a few kilometers of muddy forest, this means that after about 20 minutes there are knee deep puddles of mud.  Not only does no one care,  everyone is strangely happy.

Because it’s so spread out, hiking from the first stage to the last stage takes well over a half hour. I can’t give you the exact timing because I got worried that by the time I made it all the way to the other end of the festival, I wouldn’t be able to make it back to the main stages in time for one of the bands I really wanted to see.  They were going on stage in about an hour. Furthermore, there are stages tucked into some really weird places.  There is one small stage literally in the middle of a forest.  There is almost no way to watch this stage, except by standing next to a tree.

The arguably unwieldy size, and the fact that nature itself seems hellbent to stop Fuji Rock from happening on literally a yearly basis paradoxically adds a strange sort of magic to the place.  The whole time I was there, I couldn’t believe it was happening.  Not in the “oh my god, I’m finally here!” sense of the world. I mean it was literally so odd my brain was having trouble squaring it with reality.

What About the Music?

There were some truly spectacular performances by some really amazing bands, ranging from complete unknowns to super rockstars, both Japanese and foreign.  But since this isn’t a blog about music, it would take forever and be kind of boring to detail every single performance.  And it almost doesn’t matter.  The music and the festival are almost two separate entities.  For sure, one couldn’t exist without the other.  But even if you didn’t know a single band there, I would still say it’s worth going at least once, just to experience the atmosphere. And the mud.

I probably only knew about a quarter of the bands I ended up seeing, and got introduced to some really cool Japanese bands as a result.  I also found that not having a main stage concert to get to every 30 minutes freed me up to do some really worthwhile wandering.

The best performance I saw that day was not one of the main stage superstars (although they were awesome), but a band playing homemade percussion instruments and pipes from the Solomon Islands.  They were playing at the forest stage, and the crowd watching them grew so large that they actually choked off the pathway, causing a huge traffic jam.  This actually lead to more people being near the stage for longer, and deciding it was worth hopping off into the forest to stick around and watch.  They spoke pretty much no Japanese, although they did a cover of a really famous Japanese folk song at one point which everyone got really into.

It was incredibly fun, all the more so since I had no idea that there was even a stage back there.  In this, as in all winging it type adventures, it’s the unexpected bits which always seem the most interesting.

Fuji Rock After Dark

As awesome as the entire day of concerts was, the oddball phenomena of Fuji Rock: Day Version, were nothing compared to what it becomes after the last main stage concert finishes their 3rd and final encore.  The buses away from Fuji Rock stop running at around 11-12, meaning if you stick around past then you’re there for the long haul.  Dan and I parted ways here.  Dan made his way back to the train station, to duel hundreds of Japanese kids in rock-scissors-paper for a slightly more comfortable patch of concrete to sleep on until the first train started.  I decided to stay up all night dancing to techno music in my giant orange hiking boots, and find a way back to civilization in the morning.  I was not the only one.

At first everything is pretty normal.  There are two or three stages which have some pretty world famous DJs hosting spastic techno rave parties right near the entrance.  All the food stalls keep running all the way till sunrise for some reason, so if you desperately want some paella at 5 in the morning, they got that covered.  I danced for a little while, then went and hung out with some of the Japanese kids who were working at Fuji Rock I met earlier via the “Oh holy wow, you speak Japanese! Wanna hang out after we get off work!?” trick.  At some point they did the sane thing and went off to bed, and I decided to go exploring and find the fabled 4th stage, in the back of Fuji Rock.

The minute you leave the comfort of the main area, with its mostly cheerful and upbeat ravers, Fuji Rock: Night Version shows its true face, breaking the boundaries of your fragile reality which had already been seriously tested by a day of weirdness.  There are people sleeping everywhere.  Curled up in chairs, on tarps, or sometimes just in puddles of mud, having apparently lost the wherewithal to do anything more than collapse where they stood.

All the tiny little paths winding through the forests have been decorated by giant multi-colored light up snowflakes.  Eventually the snowflakes give way to an entire forest of disco balls.  An entire forest of disco balls.

The backstage is a mud puddle, more so than any other part of Fuji Rock thus far seen.  People are just going crazy dancing in it, and this seems totally normal.  The later it gets the less people look like they’re dancing.  They’re just kind of swaying, half-asleep, to the music.  It’s an entire mud filled field of zombies.  Dancing to techno.

This was too much for my brain to handle.

I went in search of somewhere to pass out until morning.

For a while I am seriously considering jumping several feet off the raised wooden walkway and cutting through a couple hundred meters of dense underbrush to try and get to the now shutdown Fuji Rock kiddie park.  I assumed there would be less techno music there.  But the Fuji Rock security personnel were quick as bunnies, and just as numerous.  Also I’m pretty sure they were cheating, by being well rested.

Then I tried sleeping under a bridge, but the ground was made of bundles of rocks held together with metal netting.  Also the organizers of Fuji Rock, in an effort to stop people from doing exactly what we were doing and sleeping rough, made sure that every square inch of Fuji Rock was filled with either loud techno music, or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory playing at full volume, interspersed with clips of random Japanese festival dancing.  The hallucination worthy after-party continues!

I eventually gave up and managed to wander all the way back up to the front, which was starting to devolve into the same zombie-filled mud pit I had just left.

A quick search of the area turned up a plastic chair which no one seemed to be using, so I dragged it under some pine trees, turtled up inside of my rain jacket, and tried to get a little sleep before morning about 30 meters away from the loudest techno dance party in Fuji Rock.  Perhaps even the loudest techno dance party on the planet, for all times past, present, and future, in this and any other as of yet undiscovered dimensions.

Moral of the story: Fuji Rock is totally awesome, but the human body was not designed to process music, dance, and sweat for a solid 18-24 hour period.  Do yourself a favor, and shell out the ¥3000 for a campsite ticket. I’d honestly consider it even if you don’t have a tent.  They have a free hot spring, and a place to sleep which is not immediately adjacent to a whole lot of strobe lights, bass and Gene Wilder.

But I’d Totally Do It Again

Despite the night being a total horror-show, it was one of those vaguely traumatic experiences which I can look back on fondly now, 4 months in the future.

Regardless of whether you stick around for the night, Fuji Rock has a lot of really amazing music, and is just a damn good time.  If you’re not a total idiot you can even base yourself out of a lovely little campsite on a ski slope with a few thousand other concert goers.  I bet the tent town is a ridiculous experience unto itself.  If you’re really on top of things you might even be able to find a hotel in the area, but I can’t guarantee it will be nearly as fun.

After my JET contract finishes up, I’m planning to take a run at the full 3-day festival experience.  Tent shanty-town and all.

3 thoughts on “Snapshots of Japan: Fuji Rock 2010”

  1. Was hoping to see a night picture featuring a large mass of lighted snowflakes or mirror balls. Any of the music you saw at the concert that you really liked available on YouTube?

    What was the temperature during the concert? Hot or not because it seemed you were up in elevation.

    One gets an overwhelming vision of wet mud as part of the package- do they have showers or laundry places to clean up before heading back on trains to go home?

    Thanks for sharing the experience with us in vivid details.

  2. Didn’t bring my camera in. Aforementioned mud was a concern.

    You can find all sorts of music from the concert on youtube. Just search for “Fuji Rock 2010″.

    It was cold…ish. But I didn’t really notice it much. There was a lot going on.

    No showers or laundry. Maybe up in the campsite. We were just muddy on the trains. I changed shoes and pants before hopping on the nice, shiny express train though.

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