As we’d be going through Tokyo to get to Chiba for the the brilliant green concert, Beth and I figured we might as well make a slight detour to go to the hamburger shop in Akihabara that I raved about. For the record, it’s a place called Seattle Burger that’s in a big building near the Akihabara station. They easily have the best hamburgers I’ve had in Japan and are actually pretty damn good even compared to most American hamburger restaurants. If you’re just visiting Japan it’s not that big of a deal, but when you live here and crave a damn good hamburger, it’s worth the detour.

After lunch and some wandering around we took a train to the Chiba station and from there caught a bus to Tokyo somethingsomething University. They had an English name listed as Tokyo University of Information Science. We were expecting a decently large campus and had made sure to arrive a good hour and a half before doors opened to allow us to find the venue. I mean, we figured that the brilliant green was a decently big act, and a university would have to be pretty big to attract them. We were wrong.

We got off the bus to find ourselves in a campus that consisted of maybe ten buildings. And that school festival I spoke of? It was just a few tents set up selling food. I had better school festivals when I was in middle school. Unfortunately this meant that we now had to kill the hour and a half we had planned to find the venue and enjoy the festivities. Luckily, we both keep our DSes handy at all times.

Also, this university was the first time I have gotten constant ‘gaijin wtf’ looks from people. Even when I’m the only foreigner in a crowd of people, it’s usually not very pronounced, but at this festival it seemed that almost everyone was staring at us. It wasn’t very good, especially when groups of people suddenly stop what they’re doing when you walk by and just stare. Considering we were in Chiba, I figured that having a foreigner around wouldn’t be that big of a deal (as compared to the inaka/country), but we were quite wrong.

And remember that concert that we were going to? It was being held in the school gym. When I say school gym, that’s exactly what I mean, your standard school basketball-court-sized gym. It was like a slightly-higher-budget talent show. Oh well, doors opened and we took our seats in our folding chairs on the gym floor.

Once the concert started and I got over the terrible acoustics of the place, I quiet enjoyed myself. I’ve been waiting to see the brilliant green live for quite some time, and I finally was. Unfortunately I can’t say the same for the rest of the audience.

Yes, the students at this school gave me one more reason for disliking both them and the school by the majority of them being complete zombies at the concert. Yeah, most of them stood up, but that’s all they did. Even when the concert ended, the band left the stage, and the audience called them back for the obligatory encore, Tomoko asked why the audience wanted them back despite being dead the whole concert. I don’t know. I’m glad they came back for the encore, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have blamed them if they didn’t.

When they first left I knew they had to come back because they hadn’t played Stand by Me, their new song, yet. When they did the encore they, of course, played the new song. Now from listening to the single I don’t really like this new song, but I really enjoyed it live. As Beth said, this is one of those bands that actually sounds better when they play live. They closed with one of my favorites, Angel Song, and that was it.

Overall, the concert was worth the 1,500 yen admission. I mean, that’s pretty cheap for a big-ticket name. Unfortunately all aspects of the venue blew– both the physical space and the audience that populated it. I want to see them again at a better venue.

So there, I can cross one band off of my ‘Bands to See in Japan’ list.

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