It's the final day of this year's Rock in Japan festival, which took place Aug. 5-7. Holding court in the HMV DJ booth is entertainer Yoshiaki Umegaki. He's a late fortysomething transvestite sporting a tall blue wig and playing with his plastic breasts under a fetching blue sequined number while pouring beer down the front of his trousers. And all the while he's singing comedy chansons and sticking giant green peas up his nose and blowing them out on members of the audience who are only too happy to be on the receiving end of Umegaki's "green stuff."
Back on the Grass Stage, the pedestrian emo of Asian Kung-Fu Generation was more in keeping with the mainstream script that Rock in Japan is renowned for (read: no Cuban-Jamaican ska or Senegalese drummers here, a la Fuji Rock, no Californian skater-punk on a beach, a la Summer Sonic). Midway through Asian Kung-Fu Generation's set, which was sandwiched between the pub rock of Tamio Okuda and the sublime atmospherics of elder statesman Ryuichi Sakamoto, the four-piece unleashed their recent No. 1 single "Blackout" and a sea of 20,000 festivalgoers in the late afternoon sunshine launch in unison into perfectly timed hand claps for the verse and familiar "ooh ooh oohs!" for the chorus. No one was left out, no one was left behind.
Such all-inclusiveness might be typical of summer music festivals, but Rock in Japan -- staged at a seaside park in Ibaraki Prefecture by the publishers of Japan's leading rock read, Rockin' On -- differs from Fuji Rock and Summer Sonic in one key respect. There are no foreign bands here. So the total of 135,000 fans who visited over the three days -- a bigger cumulative crowd than Fuji Rock -- were assaulted with the good, the bad and the beautiful of the Japanese music scene, from J-pop kitsch to J-rock and J-rap.