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No I am not discussing about the latest in machine gun technology.
AKB48 is one of Japan's popular girl band, having – hold your breath,
48 members ! Yes and therefore the name.
Although they all don't perform together but in groups of just 12-15.
So when we heard that they were performing in Osaka we decided to go
for our very first Japanese pop concert.
The concert was on a Saturday at 11 am.
Why have a concert at 11am ? God knows.
So we figured out if we want to get in, we need to get up at 6 am
to stand in the line for the tickets ! 6 am ?? me ?
The earliest I woke up to stand in line was at 5:30 am
to heard Steve Jobs at the Macworld conference this year.
Hmm...might as well get up. So I got up at 6 am, we got ready
and reached at the place at 8:30am and were greeted by a long line. Nice.
I was surprised by the audience. I had assumed it was more tweens
and teens but I saw a lot of older guys.
Its a girl band and its Japan, of course.
One guy ahead of me, who must be standing long in the line actually
was carrying this bike(cycle), dismantled/folded up in a huge bag
on his shoulders. I could see he had Hello Kitty themed stuff on his cycle.
And he must be at least 25-27 years. Only in Japan.
So after standing 1 1/2 hours in the line, we discovered people
who had bought the special sticker from AKB48's latest CD would
get preference, and d'oh, apparently everyone in the line owned the
latest cd. Ah, well at least we would get in .
Photography was prohibited so I'll describe it.The show started 10 mins
late which by Japanese standards is horrific late taking in consideration
the fact that they measure train efficiency in seconds.
The crowd was overall very well behaved and I am tempted to say dull,
comparing the audiences in concerts in US and India.
There was just one group of crazy fans who had their posters and were
dancing in their own little group. This group of AKB48 had 10 members.
They came up on stage,looked very pretty and cute, sang very cute, danced
around cute in their mini skirt uniform sort of theme dresses.
Conclusion : Overall it was nice concert, every 15 year old boys dream concert.
And all the 25-30 year old Japanese audience enjoyed it a lot.