Fuji Faithful Hold Strong

The Fuji Rock Festival 2011 was a wet one, though there is some argument over whether it was wetter than previous years.

The entire eastern portion of Japan was covered by a rain front the weekend of July 29-31. Some sections of Niigata Prefecture, where the festival is held, were flooded, resulting in landslides and evacuations of isolated communities.

However, the Naeba Ski Resort, where Fuji is held (several hundred kilometers from Mount Fuji, in fact), was mostly spared this extreme precipitation.

Heavy downpours were limited to the early morning, when most people were sleeping off the previous night’s revelries, while during the day the rain could mostly be characterized as periodic sprinkles.

There was also a fairly strong earthquake in eastern Japan Sunday morning, but few people at the festival seem to have felt it. Sunday was mostly rain-free. What might have made people obsess over the rain was the fact that the sun shone for only a brief spell Sunday afternoon, and that temperatures were cool for the length of the festival.

As one merchant told the Wall Street Journal, the weather was really a damper on beer sales, which may be as good an indicator of the mood of the attendees as anything.

Of course, prior to the festival some believed that last March’s triple disaster would have an emotional braking effect on this year’s festival attendance. There was the danger of foreign artists booked before the disaster pulling out later over concerns about radiation.

Four did cancel – Queens of the Stone Age, Tangerine Dream, Jenny and Johnny and the Avett Brothers – though it wasn’t publicly made clear what their reasons were.

Buddy Guy was the only artist who canceled during the festival, but it was due to health reasons. The bigger concern was whether Japanese rock music fans would feel like going.

The Fuji faithful, who buy three-day tickets as soon as they go on sale, were not a problem. It was mainly those who come up for only a day or two to see a specific artist. Naeba is a fair distance from Tokyo.

Consequently, Masa Hidaka, the president of Fuji organizer Smash Corporation, put more personal effort into promoting it this year than in the past, granting numerous interviews to the Japanese and foreign press.

In these interviews he also made the potentially risky choice, at least for the local press, of publicizing Fuji’s dedicated stand against Japan’s national policy of nuclear energy, which has become extremely controversial.

In fact, a number of people online called for a boycott of Fuji because of its anti-nuclear stance. One of the stages, the small Gypsy Avalon, usually given over to folk acts and smaller niche bands, was subtitled the Atomic Cafe and featured discussions by non-profit groups about the dangers of nuclear energy and the benefits of renewable resources.

In any event, official attendance for the weekend was 115,000, or about 10,000 fewer than last year.

The two most popular headliners in terms of what’s big in Japan were Coldplay and Arctic Monkeys, but both played Friday night, when attendance is traditionally lowest (31,000 this year) because many are still at work.

The headliner on Saturday, traditionally the most attended day of the fest (34,000), was the reconstituted Faces, with Mick Hucknall covering the vocal chores for Rod Stewart, who didn’t join the reunion, and the late Ronnie Lane.

The attendance for the Faces’ show on the main Green Stage was relatively sparse, while the field in front of the secondary White Stage was so packed for headliner Incubus security had to steer people away. It was similar for Asian Dub Foundation, who went on before Incubus.

Nevertheless, the festival continued to parade its diversity, with three top-grade African acts (Amadou & Mariam, Congotronics, Tinariwen) and more Asian bands than usual.

There was even one traditional country-western group who performed three times.