Japanese Promoters’ 2016 Problem

According to a feature in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, a number of large and medium-sized venues in the Tokyo metropolitan area will start to close temporarily in 2015 for renovations and structural reinforcement. For a time, there will be a severe shortage of places where overseas artists ca in Saitama City, north of Tokyo, and Yokohama Arena.

The Super Arena first opened in 2000, and is scheduled for its first full-scale maintenance work, which the operators say will necessitate closing the arena for up to four months.

Yokohama Arena will soon be celebrating its 25th anniversary and the owners are also thinking of carrying out “renewal work” that will close the hall for an “indefinite period of time.”

Both venues are popular among major foreign artists. In addition, the Tokyo International Forum’s largest concert hall, Hall A, may be closed because it will be used for the weight-lifting event during the 2020 Summer Olympics, and will need to have its floor reinforced. The hall holds about 5,000 people and is often used for pop concerts. 

Two publicly run concert halls, the Shibuya Kokaido and Nakano Sun Plaza, will also be closed due to renovation work on neighboring buildings.

Shibuya Kokaido, which, along with the now closed Koseinenkin Kaikan in Shinjuku, were the two main concert halls for foreign artists in the 1970s and ’80s, will be closed in the fall of 2015 for about a year because the Shibuya Ward Hall, which is connected to it, will be torn down and replaced with a new building.

The same thing goes for Nakano Sun Plaza. It also contains Nakano Ward’s public offices, which will be “redeveloped” in line with the surrounding neighborhood. Then there’s the National Gymnasium in Yoyogi Park, which was originally built for the 1964 Olympics but has been often used since for large-scale concerts.

It also will be closed to prepare it for the 2020 Games since it will host the team handball tournament. The mid-sized Nihon Seinenkan hall nearby will be torn down completely to make way for the expanded new National Stadium being built for the Olympics.

The squeeze is already being anticipated. EX Theater, a new concert venue that opened in the Roppongi district at the end of last year, is already booked solid until next July, not just with concert events, but plays and musicals, too, since the Aoyama Theater, a popular venue for plays and musicials, will be closed in March 2015.

EX Theater management originally projected a 70 percent usage rate. The Concert Promoters Association told Asahi that, in fact, there is already a shortage of venues in Tokyo, even before the 2016 Problem manifests itself.

Japanese musicians have said they are frustrated because they can’t often book the right-sized venues for their needs at the time they need them.

The main culprit, if one wants to call it that, is the booming concert market. About 38 million people attended concerts in Japan in 2013, twice the number that attended in any year in the 1990s.

Concert ticket sales in 2004 amounted to ¥100 billion ($979 million). In 2013 the amount was ¥230 billion, and that’s not even counting merchandise.