Fudanjuku (10/27/2019)
By: Philip Brown
Tags: Japanese Music, Japanese Culture, Music, Japanese

Well this one is hard to write about. It starts with a premise that would only work in Asia, aka Japan or Korea, and tries to go from there. But I guess I should start from the beginning…

This concert should have been last month but one, or many, of the band members were sick or injured so they postponed it to today. They even put it into a different live house, which was a new one for me, Live Vanquish. This one is in the seedier bar and redlight district feeling quarter of the city which is ironic because the place itself is one of the newest looking place I have seen in Hiroshima. It is very professional looking and everything is really clean. They handed me a sheet of paper with some writing space and a message, written in Japanese, that seemed to be write a phrase that makes you think interconnections… The rest of the instructions I couldn’t quite make out. After writing my phrase I walked into the concert room which was filled to the brim with highschool aged women (which is normal for Japanese concerts). I was cornered by one of them and they asked me to wave a light to celebrate one of the band member’s birthday… which told me a lot about what type of an audience this would be. So I got back to the wall and watched what happened next…

The band is called Fu (wind) dan (male) juku (school) which even when translated into English doesn’t really make much sense. When they got on stage some things felt a little off. They all had deeper voices but it sounded off… They all used male phrases (in Japan there are male and female phrases and verb forms… I guess the closest comparison would be valley girl vs normal speech?) The biggest thing was that during the intermissions they interacted like what I assume that female high school students interact… and when I googled the band it all made sense. They were all cross dressing women. While I find the concept interesting; I am not sure what the point was… did they like wearing non frilly clothes (even though they wore chains which kept on getting caught on their arms)? Is this a commentary on how women can do stereotypical male band styles? Was it just because they were bored?

Anyway…. it seems that one of the members was still sick because there were only 5 members participating. But that didn’t seem to hinder the show at all.

The fact that I am a little sleep deprived because of my late night travel to see a concert last night doesn’t help my impartiality but I guess I’ll try to start with the good things. They all are very good at singing and dancing. While the dancing is more arm movements than the band from last night they were very coordinated and even flowed off of each other. The music was boiler plate Japanese pop but even that can be good. They used the papers we wrote in the beginning to set up a song; which was good. They also used a ribbon to show the interconnectedness of people; which was unique from all of the other bands I had seen in Japan. And lastly: the audience participated a lot in the show… but there in-lies the problem.

The show felt like it was strictly made for Japanese teenage girls… which I am not (probably). This show is like my kryptonite. The first hour only had 4 songs… the rest was the singers talking like best friends in highschool. While it isn’t bad if you are a teenage girl but, I couldn’t keep up with all of the slang, internal references, and topic changes. After 20 minutes of this I really started watching my watch. On the fifth song (nearly 70minutes in ) they had 10 songs in one… which just felt like a punch to the face. They can make good music but putting all of your best songs into 30 seconds just feels cruel to me. It just went downhill from there. This was the first concert that I just walked out of… not because of the music… just that I couldn’t follow what was happening nor could I participate with the songs because I had never heard them before. The fact that I was the only person to raise their hand at the beginning when they asked if this was the first time that you had seen their concert…

All in all… probably decent band… horrible inclusiveness… and horrible time for anyone who is not Japanese… ironic given the moral behind the concert…

1.5/5