Well, at least it wasn’t raining! Otherwise, we’d have been standing for that whole time. Grow, army of minions!Įventually, you get almost to the end of that line, and as you climb the stairs to enter the inside of the building where the band merch is, you get to look down on the new line forming–people waiting out in the hot sun for the concert hall to open up. I’d walked up and down the Shinkansen aisles to get characters on my way here like a friend had suggested, but waiting in that crazy line worked a lot better. I only had five other people’s characters in my DS when I started waiting in this line, but by the time I turned the DS off to go into the concert hall, I think there were like thirty. I recently got a Japanese 3DS, and I turned it on so I could use Street Pass to add lots of people’s characters my “friend plaza” automatically as we passed each other. There is a fun advantage to walking back and forth past people in a long line all afternoon. It took us two or three hours to get to the front of the line, inching along. My friend and I agreed that we have never been in a line this long before–not even at Disneyland. And, as a result:ġ. The line to wait for band merchandise was so. Bump of Chicken doesn’t have a fan club, which for popular groups is usually the first step to being able to even enter a lottery to get tickets (like to see Arashi). My friend entered and managed to get us tickets, but you see how it can be.
Since they’re so popular, getting tickets is a pretty cool thing by itself. Like I said, I haven’t been keeping up on these things, but it looks like their newest album was #1 for the week on Oricon, which is like Billboard. She didn’t appear at the concert, but I think I’m okay with that .īump of Chicken is a really popular band here. They don’t really match, but you can’t look away. She has her own concerts.) My friend and I agree that the Hatsune Miku version is a little weird, but also kind of fascinating, since Bump of Chicken and Hatsune Miku feel like they’re from two different entertainment worlds. ( Hatsune Miku is a digital singing girl character. Their most recent single is “Ray,” from their album of the same name, which also has a Hatsune Miku version. I liked how the song sounded already, and when I looked up the lyrics, I realized they were really good, and started liking the band a lot. What got me into them during college was songs like “ Makkana Sora wo Mita Darou Ka” ( lyrics) and “ Sainoujin Ouenka” ( lyrics).
I asked my friend, a teacher I work with, who told me that the “chicken” part is supposed to refer to cowards, and bump…we couldn’t figure out “bump.” Apparently, the attempt to translate it didn’t really work, but they kept it anyway. I checked Japanese Yahoo answers, which gives basically the same phrase in Japanese, with a rumor about where it may have come from. I haven’t been keeping up very well with popular music in Japan lately, but I still keep up with certain bands, and Bump of Chicken is one of them.įirst off, the name “Bump of Chicken” is supposed to mean, quote, “cowards strike back,” and ALL the websites I checked to try to figure out this translation said the same thing, so I figured they were all just copying and pasting something wrong without bothering to think about it or check. We couldn’t get tickets to their Hiroshima concert, so we took the Shinkansen all the way to Fukuoka ( Marine Messe Convention Center). Second concert in Japan during JET! Most of our total concert experience took place outside the building, actually.