It used to be only once a year during Anime Festival Asia (AFA) that Japanese pop culture lovers like myself have the luxury of having our favorite Japanese artistes coming down to Singapore to perform their popular Anisongs (theme songs featured in anime series and video games). However, last weekend I had the opportunity to listen to two popular Anisong bands, FLOW and angela perform their hits live at two separate mini-concerts at JPlex!
JPlex! is a new event created by the organisers of AFA, and is a mini-event that incorporates Anime blockbuster movie screening, concerts, and also sale of related merchandise. It was pretty good to be able to watch the latest anime movies from Japan with proper subtitles. But for me, the main highlight of attending JPlex was the two awesome heart-pumping concerts by FLOW and angela.
The first thing that pleasantly surprised me was the venue of the concert. Because it was held inside a lecture hall at Republic Polytechnic, it meant that we were seated really near to the artistes. I'm quite sure that if we were to attend any concert in Japan, we would never be able to enjoy such proximity to the artistes without having to pay a premium price for it. Being close to the stage meant that artistes could come right up and interact with many of their fans. I could still vividly remember how one of the lead vocals of FLOW, Keigo gave everyone in the first row a farewell high-five at the end of their concert.
Even though there wasn't a crowd that could have filled the Indoor Stadium, the artistes gave their best to rock the house down, and the crowd reciprocated with their screams as well . While atsuko was singing, KATSU would at times stand up on the boom box and perform one of his awesome guitar rifts to electrify the crowd. Similarly, the gang of five in FLOW was just jumping up and down all over the place, until even the official photographers had a hard time following them around.
The HS System of my Canon IXUS 220 HS came in really handy during the concert. At first, I was using the camera under program mode but after I turned on the low light function, I was satisfied that I could capture a good shot of FLOW performing without it being too grainy as a result of the high ISO.
Another segment that I was particularly delighted about was the meet-and-greet session after the concert. Everyone who attended the concert had the chance to meet their favourite artistes. We also managed to get an autographed poster that was signed right in front of us. Such opportunities are usually hard to come by, and it was extremely exciting to be speaking to the artistes. While waiting in the queue, I was busy trying to remember all the vocabulary that I had learnt in Japanese class to come up with an interesting line to say to them.
During the meet-and-greet session with angela, both of the members noticed my t-shirt and I was quite amused that they were able to identify the character on my t-shirt as Zetsubo sensei from the Anime series Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei!. The guys from FLOW were equally cool during the sesssion and we were able to find out that Koushi Asakawa's favourite anime is actually Kimagure Orange Road (きまぐれオレンジ☆ロード).
At the end of the day, even though my voice was hoarse from screaming and my body was tired from the jumping, I returned home a happy man, clutching the two autographed posters in my hands to remind me of an entire day of awesome Japanese pop culture entertainment.
I would like to thank Canon for these electrifying memories, which will be forever vivid thanks to IXUS!