Asia News: AXA Dreamland Opens In Hong Kong; ‘Hiroshima Skipping’ Explained

HONG KONG

AXA Dreamland Opens

When the Kowloon Bay International Trade & Exhibition Center closed earlier this year after the land it was on was slated for redevelopment, Hong Kong’s concert-related businesses worried because its 600-seat Music Zone had been the “launch pad” for a fair number of the territory’s rising music stars. There was no other comparable concert venue available.

That problem seems to have been solved with the opening of AXA Dreamland, a 24,000-square-foot arena located in the Go Park Sai Sha complex that can hold up to 1,500 people and features 850 fixed seats. The arena was developed by Sun Hung Kai Properties expressly to meet the demand for a medium-sized indoor performance venue.

Since its late April soft launch AXA Dreamland has presented 11 concerts and fan meetings, including those by Taiwanese singer Shou, the Japanese alternative rock outfit Hitsujibungaku and Thai singer Korapat Kirdpan.

The venue is already being touted as a showcase for Western artists, and an executive at SHKP told the South China Morning News that it’s the perfect size for fan meetings because “artists and fans can be closer to each other, leading to more interactivity such as shaking hands and taking photos.”

AXA Dreamland fits into Hong Kong’s plans to tap the concert business as a main stimulus to recover from the pandemic. The local government hopes to attract 1.7 million foreign visitors to Hong Kong by the end of 2024 with concerts.

Already, the concert business has drawn 2.7 million mainland Chinese every month for the first half of 2024. The larger venues, such as the Hong Kong Coliseum, the MacPherson Stadium and Asia-World Expo are presenting dozens of major acts through 2025, including Cantopop king Aaron Kwok Fu-shing, Japanese rock group Love Psychedelico, Icelandic singer Laufey and K-pop act Super Junior.

JAPAN

‘Hiroshima Skipping’ Explained

It is traditional for Japanese mass media in early August to cover the commemorations of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are usually accompanied by related news features. However, the English-language Japanese culture website Soranews24 ran a feature about a different aspect of Hiroshima lore, something called “Hiroshima skipping.”

The term refers to the tendency for domestic music acts that tour Japan to “skip over” Hiroshima, despite its importance as a regional capital and population center in western Japan. The website decided to delve into the reasons.

One is that the city is about halfway between Osaka, Japan’s third-largest city, and Fukuoka, the biggest city on the island of Kyushu, and so certain acts may assume that fans in Hiroshima can attend larger shows in either of those two cities, but that would require overnight stays that involve extra outlays of cash for transportation and accommodations.

Still, such a rationale does not explain the paucity of concerts in the city. According to the All Japan Concert & Live Entertainment Promoters Conference, Hiroshima Prefecture receives only half the number of concerts that northern prefectures with much smaller populations do.

One problem that Soranews24 found is that the local government limits the number of “paid performance days” at the biggest venue in the area, the Hiroshima Green Arena. According to regulations, the arena can host performances only 10% of the number of days in a year, or about 36.

This rule, according to a local official, was implemented to guarantee that sports events get first dibs on the arena, even though concerts bring in much more revenue.
Hope may be on the horizon with the construction of the 10,000-seat Anabuki Arena in neighboring Kagawa Prefecture, which opens in February.

Also, a new professional basketball team is setting up in Hiroshima and plans to build its own arena that could be made multi-purpose, so there is still hope for Hiroshima music fans.