Festival Rocks Tokyo

The Japan summer festival season welcomed its newest event last month with the announcement of the first-ever Rocks Tokyo. It will take place May 29-30 at Wakasu Park in the Shin Kiba area of Tokyo’s waterfront district.

Presented by Summer Sonic producer Creativeman Productions – in conjunction TV Asahi, Pia magazine and several other entertainment entities – Rocks Tokyo will feature major Japanese rock acts.

Among the artists announced so far for the inaugural weekend will be Boom Boom Satellites, Sunny Day Service, Acidman, 10-Feet, and Asian Kung-Fu Generation, which holds its own punk rock festival at Yokohama Arena in August.

Rocks Tokyo will be the latest attempt to launch a regular summer festival within Tokyo’s borders.

The Tokyo half of Summer Sonic is actually held in Chiba, a suburb to the east of the city. Before it moved permanently to the mountains of Niigata prefecture, the Fuji Rock Festival was held on the Tokyo waterfront once.

There have been many one-off Tokyo rock festivals in the past, but they were usually limited to a single day and only a handful of acts.

In other festival news, Creativeman’s Web site says that this year’s Summer Sonic will be Aug. 7-8, which would seem to mean that the promoter has abandoned the three-day format it experimented with last year.