Day 9: Mount Naeba - Show Day
Nau mai
Yesterday we played at Fuji Rock Festival.
This beautiful voucher is what you can exchange for a breakfast at the Prince Hotel, Naeba.
I handed over my pink slip at the entrance to the buffet and looked out across this enormous dining room, imagining it crowded with skiers fuelling up for a day on the slopes. The slopes were green and the chairlifts were idle on this day, however, and the dining room was hardly busy. Despite this there was a large spread of food and I tried to choose carefully lest I run out of room on my plate. I plated up some Tochio fried tofu with mushrooms, teriyaki lotus root meatballs, and steam heated vegetables with bagna sauce on my main plate. In my main bowl I had steamed jasmine rice with the Prince Hotel Original Curry, and in my supplementary bowl I had miso soup.
The members of the tour party met in the lobby at 10:30am, a time that I would have to say is easily in the top three lobby call times. Of course there was another small bus to transport us but I don’t remember any special features about it. It probably had curtains and a small fridge. The small bus drove us around the back of the festival and into a small carpark behind the Red Marquee stage. There were air-conditioned portacoms neatly lined up to serve as green rooms. The backstage area was spacious and meticulously organised. We had space to store and set up our equipment and it was precisely marked out on the ground with tape. A couple of the stage hands showed the calibre of their work, turning up with hammers and nailing pieces of wood into the riser to stop Tristan’s bass drum from drifting forwards.
“Just put it straight through the drum!” I said.
We were all pretty shocked by the size of the crowd that came to see us. The marquee was full and overflowing out the back. They seemed excited to see us perform and we were just as excited to have finally made it to this festival. There was a group of fans, perhaps a club even, that had made Expert in a Dying Field flags and were fluttering them about above their heads.
After playing what felt like one of the better sets we have played in recent months we came off stage feeling stoked. It seemed that Japan was going well for us. We packed down and then were whisked off for a few interviews before the work day ended.
Making our way through the festival to the radio tent for an interview.
One of the camping locations.
We stopped by the catering tent to eat dinner and the sun was setting by the time we began loading our equipment into another small bus. This model had a large roof rack that we didn’t utilise. We drove back to Tokyo in the dark, arriving late in the evening to find a city very much awake.
Here are the points scored today.
Liz arrive at the bar, buzzing, just before 1am with her new sunscreen purchases (we thought she had gone to bed).
Liz won a Dragonball Z figurine at the Super Yami Gacha and gifted it to Tomohiro, our chaperone.
Thanks to Tomohiro for looking after us and taking some nice photos of our set.