Asia News: Olympic Committee Head, Montreux Jazz Festival & More

The head of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, was in Tokyo on Nov. 16 and said he was “very, very confident” that people would be able to attend next year’s postponed Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics in person despite the continuing COVID pandemic. 

Japan is now experiencing a spike in infections owing mainly to colder weather, though the increase isn’t as alarming as it is in Europe and the U.S. Consequently, there had been speculation in the local news media about Bach’s visit and whether it might signal some indication that the Games would eventually be cancelled. The tone of Bach’s comments, however, seemed designed to dispel any such speculation.

The Games’ local organizers and Japanese government officials have continually maintained that the Olympics will go ahead no matter what, and are busy putting together a series of measures to make sure the pandemic, should it continue unabated through next summer, doesn’t interfere. 

According to media reports, Bach said after his meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, “We are putting a huge tool box together in which we will put all the different measures we can imagine. Next year…we will be able to take the right tools out of this tool box and apply them in order to ensure a safe environment for all participants in the games. This makes us all very, very confident that we can have spectators in the Olympic stadiums next year.”

Part of this plan would be to make sure visitors to Japan who plan to attend the games would be vaccinated beforehand, given that a vaccine will have been developed and available for distribution by then. 

A COVID task force has proposed that athletes’ movement be limited during the games and that cheering be banned in the venues. 

Another positive note was struck by good reports from the four-nation gymnastics meet that was held in Tokyo the week before Bach’s arrival. 

It was the first international sporting event held since the pandemic started. Athletes from the U.S., China and Russia participated in the meet with local gymnasts, all traveling on charter flights and restricted to hotels, special buses and competition venues. Spectators were required to wear masks and undergo temperature checks prior to entering the venues. 

During his four-day visit, Bach also visited the athletes village and the new National Stadium.

The original French production of the musical “Notre Dame de Paris” began a run of performances on Nov. 10 at the Blue Square Interpark Hall in central Seoul that will continue until Jan. 17. 

The 1,760-seat auditorium was almost completely full as the city’s new Level-1 distancing rule had gone into effect on Nov. 7. According to the new rule, performance venues no longer had to adhere to a “middle seat vacancy” restriction. The opening performance received a standing ovation.

Despite the good results, the Korea Herald reported that the enterprise started off inauspiciously, when 14 of the company’s 30 staff members were confirmed to have been infected with COVID-19 when they arrived in South Korea from France in October. 

The local management company told the Korea Herald that prior to leaving France the staff had tested negative three times. Fortunately, all 14 members made full recoveries well before the start of the legitimate run of the show, which features actor Daniel Lavoie, who originated the role of Archdeacon Frollo in the original French stage production. 

Oriental Land Co., the operator of Tokyo Disneyland, has reported that it expects a net loss of about $490 million for fiscal 2020, which ends next March. 

Last year, the park recorded a profit of 62 billion yen (about $500 million), but due to the pandemic sales this year have dropped by 60 percent. 

Oriental Land closed both Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea in late February and didn’t resume operations until July 1, albeit with limitations on the number of daily visitors. 

For the March-September term, the park saw a net loss of 30 billion yen compared to a 42 billion yen profit during the same period in 2019 on sales of 59 billion yen, a decrease of about 76 percent.

Chinese news agency Xinhua reports that the Montreux Jazz Festival will expand into China in 2021 with a “mission to build more cultural bridges between East and West.” 

Held every summer on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the festival will hold its first China edition in the eastern city of Hangzhou on Oct. 5-8 next year as a means of celebrating China’s history and ivision for the future. 

Mathieu Jaton, CEO of the festival, told Xinhua, “I’m really looking forward to having the first Montreux Jazz Festival in China next year,” adding that the festival has been “exported” to many other international venues over the years. 

Other versions of the festival slated for 2021 will take place in Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. Jaton has already visited Hangzhou and says he was “seduced” by the city and its vitality. 

The Montreux Jazz Festival started in 1967 and has since expanded its brief to include popular music forms other than jazz. The Hangzhou version will feature both international acts and local acts, including those that play music specific to Asia. 

“Every time we do a festival abroad, the idea is to keep the local culture and to mix that with an international culture,” said Jaton. “So it’s important for us that musically it is a bridge between all musics in the world. Music has no barriers.”

 

Jaton was quick to point out that the festival in Hangzhou will be held in both a physical and a virtual format, a combination, he says, that will likely become the norm for most festivals in the post-pandemic world. 

Two of the biggest acts in Asia recently announced New Years Eve concerts. The veteran Japanese boy band Arashi, which is calling it quits after 2020, will live stream a show from an undisclosed location. 

Presently, it hasn’t been decided if the show will actually take place on Dec. 31, but according to the group’s website all the details will be announced in coming weeks. 

The K-Pop juggernaut BTS will also headline a year-end concert that is being organized by the group’s agency and label Big Hit Entertainment. The concert, which will also feature GFriend, Tomorrow X and others, will take place at the Korea International Exhibition Center (KINTEXT) south of Seoul, on Dec. 31 at 9:30 p.m. It will also be streamed online. 

However, almost as soon as the concert was announced many BTS fans complained that the price of both offline and online tickets was too high, especially given the fact that BTS will not be the sole attraction. 

Other acts on the roster are considered relatively insignificant in the K-Pop universe, prompting some fans to say that it’s mainly a showcase for Big Hit’s subsidiary labels. 

According to the fansite KpopStarz, even the BTS ARMY has said they do not support the show. In addition to complaining about the high ticket prices, some fans say KINTEXT is inappropriate since it is not a bona fide concert venue but rather an “exhibition space” with notoriously bad sight lines. 

After the prices were announced The BTS Gallery Fan Union launched a petition to boycott the concert, the main reason being that, since it would be BTS’s first offline show since the pandemic began, the fans deserve something more. They were also discouraged by the proposed ticketing system, which will be distributed by means of a raffle that will only be open to official fan club members. The petition points out that two Big Hit artists scheduled for the concert have no official fan clubs, so their fans would be effectively shut out of the drawing.