It’s finally here.

A few months ago, I spent 13 hours in an oversized aluminium alloy tube to get to Japan and back so that I could attend Maaya Sakamoto’s 15th anniversary concert at Budokan. A few days ago, the DVD and Blu-ray recordings arrived at my door step. A few hours ago, I finished encoding them into H264 MKV files and went out for ramen.

Packaging

The first press releases of the DVD and Blu-ray come with a special matt cardboard packaging and a ribbon. Future releases will only come with the plastic DVD case found inside the box. The Blu-ray box is white while the DVD box is black, but I suspect the actual plastic cases have the same cover design. (I don’t have a Blu-ray player, so I only opened the DVD version.)

DVD edition with red ribbon

The ribbon comes in either red, blue or gold colour at random. The gold version is supposedly a “rare” item, but I suspect it’s only there because they ran out of red and blue…

The special box has a cover fold that doubles up as a small photo booklet. It’s pretty decent considering that it’s a freebie for first press buyers.

The DVD casing is a regular plastic case. The front cover art is a photo of Maaya playing the guitar intro for “Get No Satisfaction!!” and the back is a song list.

There’s another smaller booklet of credits and a few photos in the DVD case itself.

The DVD edition comes in two discs. The first disc contains the main concert itself (2hr+) and the second disc contains the encore (40min) and two short specials (behind the scenes footages and Maaya practising the guitar).

Concert

The recording is pretty decent, although the Blu-ray version should be even better. I sat pretty far away from the stage during the concert, so it’s nice to finally get to see the performance close-up. But it does kind of miss out on the stage effects.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the most memorable moment for me was this part where all the lights were switched off, leaving a few spotlights trained on Maaya as she was slowly elevated by a mechanical platform in the centre of the stage. When she reached the chorus of Hikari Are (“Let there be light”), the lights came on. This effect is quite unnoticeable in the video because the camera auto compensates for the change in ambient brightness. Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

Her first costume was a “gift”

Guitarist Masato Ishinari

Vocalists Kazco and Mari Asai

Her second costume. She’s wearing the third one underneath

Yoko Kanno

Maaya performing with a guitar for the first time

Her third costume is…colourful

Hikari Are

If you squirm hard enough, you can see me. Or at least my seat section…

Composer Shoko Suzuki at the drums

Maaya’s fourth costume

I have that T-shirt :D

Maaya plays the piano for Everywhere

Maaya leads a sing-along POCKET wo Kara ni Shite

Refer to my post on the concert for more thoughts.

Watching through the DVDs, I’m actually quite surprised by how much I managed to cover in my last post by memory. I’m usually not very good at remembering details. The only thing that I didn’t catch was when Maaya missed a line of PLATINA.

I also love the MC sessions where Maaya talks about her personal take on life and how she expresses it through her songs. Not all singers can do it the way she does, full of sincerity and meaningful pauses.

Specials

The two omake footage on Disc 2 show the lead-up to the big day.

There’s a scene in the encore, where Shoko Suzuki presented Maaya with a surprise birthday cake and Maaya blew the candles while the audience sang Happy Birthday, that was cut from the main recording for some reason. The first omake footage contains a short portion of it starting at around 13:30.

Don’t know why they cut it from the main footage. Maybe they forgot to keep the cameras running… Oh well.

Oh noz, no one showed up

Yoko sending off Maaya

Group cheer before the show

The brithday cake’s hiding place under stage

Air guitar

Conclusion

It’s damn awesome, so please buy the DVD or Blu-ray if you can (or if not…). In the meantime, I am working on translating and subbing the entire thing. Will post it up somewhere When It’s Done™.

I was in an apartment somewhere in Malaysia, sitting on the floor of an under-furbished room with two vicious felines plotting the death of my sleeping bag. The stench of cat feces permeated the air, but fortunately my nose was blocked.

You have read the event coverages of DaiCon, the anime convention held in Cyberjaya, Malaysia last weekend. Now you can read the exhilarating story of how I spent my weekends at DaiCon and saw Minori Chihara live, based on the true story of the past three days of my life.

July 10, Friday – 1330 Hours

It is D-Day. Our destination is the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, a world-renowned airport recently rated best in the world (in the 15-25 million passengers category). Bring it on. But not too hard.

I am meeting up with TJ Han at Changi Airport’s relatively-new budget terminal. In the dark and seedy underbellies of Terminal 2, I board a shuttle bus with ridiculously low ceiling. As it approaches the budget terminal, I take a moment’s pause to marvel at how closely this humble airport terminal, built to serve the budgetary needs of cheap-ass American backpackers and third-world virgin flyers, resembles my factually-baseless mental image of what airports in Cuba look like. It is awesome beyond my wildest imagination.

July 10, Friday – 1445 Hours

The “boarding gate” or, as I like to call it, the “featureless corridor that leads to a door which opens up to the tarmac”, has a grand total of 5 plastic seats, the kind you find in the waiting lounge of rundown public health facilities. Our plane, a Tiger Airways Airbus A320-200, stands motionlessly on the tarmac like a stuffed dead bird (thank the secular cosmic forces of the universe it wasn’t an A310). The machine that reads our boarding pass is, on closer inspection, basically a cheap computer on wheels with a USB (or god forbid, serial) barcode scanner.

And that is the exact moment when I fall in love with the budget terminal.

July 10, Friday – 1520 Hours

Watching How I Met Your Mother on my venerable iPod touch. Barney is upset that his friends call him Swarley when in fact he should be upset with his mother for naming him after a gay dinosaur.

A homely-looking (budget) flight attendant takes orders for overpriced beverages served in styrofoam cups made of pure environmental rape. The exorbitant price tag of three bucks for a cup of coke is really Tiger Airway’s self-sacrificing initiative to save the world.

Aww, Robin and Ted would make such a great couple. I take a moment to reflect upon the cruel realities of life before dozing off for a bit.

July 10, Friday – 1700 Hours

We are stuck in this long immigration queue in this building that looks like a poorly-refurbished warehouse. Every other queue is moving faster than ours, an unexplainable phenomenon waiting for its Nobel prize-winning theorem. New faces mysteriously appear in front of us in the queue from time to time. Apparently the queue is moving so slowly that the people in front of us got married and gave birth to two daughters and a son during the time it took for us to turn the last corner.

July 10, Friday – 1730 Hours

It took us a while to realize that this horrible place we are in is actually KLIA’s equivalent of our budget terminal. That was a close shave. My impression of Malaysia rebounds significantly from the abyss of negative infinity.

July 10, Friday – 2100 Hours

After many various other trials and tribulations involving a long bus ride around the entire rural outskirts of the airport runways and a ride on the KLIA Transit rail service, we found ourselves in Putrajaya, a planned city in the middle of nowhere that perfectly juxtaposes its modern amenities with the vast areas of trees and hills that surround them, reminiscent of China’s many new industrial parks and universities. It’s like finding a Hilton Hotel in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Or one of those Soviet-era mega-projects that never go anywhere.

Finally, we reach Kurogane’s house, where we are to spend the next two nights. I find myself sitting on my sleeping bag in an unfurnished living room inhabited by two cats. Aww. How cute. I love cats.

July 11, Saturday – 0030 Hours

One of the cats has just killed a moth on my sleeping bag and is slowly mutilating its dead carcass into dozens of pieces. Not so cute. I am sleepy.

Chewing on a juicy moth. Yum

July 11, Saturday – 0400 Hours

I am still not asleep. The cats take turn to pretend rape each other, a violent and noisy process which involves them jumping onto my sleeping bag from time to time. Aww… How… cute… I… love… cats… Sleep… Murder… those… fu…

DaiCon

Now, instead of going into the boring details of what did or did not happen at DaiCon, I shall just give my general opinions of the whole event and whatever else results from the random firing of my neurons because the entire experience kind of merged into one continuous march of the living dead who lacks sleep. So let’s do this PowerPoint style, doubleplusquick.

Commendable efforts.
Before I get down to business, let me first start off by saying that the event was better than I expected, mainly because I didn’t expect much. It was quite incredible for an event organized by a school anime club. Now on to the unpleasantries.

The location of the event was terrible.
I hold the urban elitist belief that such events should always be held in the city centre so that you can pad the crowd numbers with curious onlookers and lost tourists who make the event area more lively.

TJ Han had to climb a mountain just to get his media pass

There was not much to do.
The event items clearly catered to existing fans of anime, and yet at the same time did not provide much in-depth content for the truly dedicated. The lack of real industry support is glaring, with the only professional presence being maintained by Hotlink Youth Club, a local mobile service whose name sounds a lot like a dating chatline, and Dell, a faceless multinational PC manufacturer who seeks to ruthlessly crush its oppositions like many East-Asian ruling political parties.

Mass-produced PVC figurines were pretty much the only things I took pictures of

Too much focus on Minori’s concert.
I’m probably not expressing a very popular opinion here, but I believe that the vast sum of money spent on Minori’s concert could have been used for a lot of other things. Half of the event hall was taken up by the concert area and the other half felt more like a sideshow than anything. Of course, given Malaysia’s weaker anime industry presence, it may very well have been the case that even throwing more money at the problem wouldn’t have solved anything, but still… Does a seiyuu concert opened only to ticket holders (and fake bloggers with media passes) really serve the purpose of promoting anime? Hmmm.

It’s Minori

Minori sang well.
Unfortunately, she has bad songs. This is a sad reality for many J-Pop singers with great voices. Just look at May’n before her stint under Yoko Kanno…That’s what she said! (Although I kind of liked “Crazy Crazy Crazy“) Also, the sound system was bad. The lack of proper acoustic design in the event hall did not help either.

Moving stage lights were made of Satan’s hellfire.
They burnt a permanent pentagram onto my retinal. The disclaimer at the bottom of DaiCon’s large banner made so much sense after the concert.

“EMINA will not be responsible for any epileptic seizures caused by the extremely exciting nature of our events.”

The MC tried too hard.
I felt embarrassed on her behalf. How noble of me.

TJ Han finds Minori’s hairdresser attractive.
Unfortunately, someone else hit on her first. Smooth.

Event-organizing involves a lot of politics.
It’s a stepping stone to becoming the next Obama, really. What do you think he did as a community organizer in Chicago? He ran an anime convention, duh.

Indirect kiss is only cool in anime.
In real-life, it’s just a way to spread H1N1. It’s also kind of creepy, but whatever floats your boat. Still, it was probably not the best idea in the world to make a blog post about your first indirect kiss with a somewhat well-known mid-tier voice actress. Hell hath no fury like a seiyuu otaku scorned. They can do terrible things to you, like leave angry comments on your blog or sign your email up for porn mailing lists. The horror. *click*

The Rest of It

That’s about all my thoughts on the subject matter of DaiCon actually. I have plenty more on Malaysia and its transportation system, but you know the kind of blogger I am — I just hate digressing from the topic at hand… Oh, did I tell you how I only found out last night that one of the cats that had been terrorizing me in my state of semi-comatose was actually a male? Yeah.

Oh yeah, we actually met up with Owen S and Faye during DaiCon. I didn’t know them before that since I am not an anime otaku and I don’t run an anime blog; I am just a lost soul walking though this surreal world that exists beneath the surface of what most agree to be reality.

Also had supper with Silencer, who happens to be the president of the university’s anime club. This is what we ate:

Maaya Sakamoto, the greatest singer/seiyuu in the history of the universe, held a live tour at the start of this year (2009) called “We Are Kazeyomi!” This was her first proper concert in the five years since she released her album Shounen Alice and her third since her debut as Hitomi in Visions of Escaflowne.

This is a story of what may be the greatest regret of my life. And oh yeah, the official concert DVD is out too.

I am a terrible fanboy. Terrible in the sense that if companies depended on fans like me to survive, they would probably be worse off than General Motors. I just can’t keep my attention focused on something long enough… Ooh Shiny.

It is therefore rather amazing that I have been a Maaya fanboy for the past six years, ever since I first listened to her performance in RahXephon. It’s probably not too far-fetched to say that during my rise from adolescence, my love for Maaya is the only constant in my life. Watching Maaya perform live is a dream that has always been at the back of my mind.

Although I’ve been to Japan numerous times, I never had the opportunity to attend her many performances. (Kazeyomi is technically her third live tour, but she does a lot of smaller promotional concerts and also voices Eponine in the Japanese production of Les Misérables.) This was because concert seasons tended to fall in the middle of my school terms. I accepted, rationally if not emotionally, the fact that in all likelihood I would never see my wish come true. Will I find the time to realize my dream, or will she retire from performing before that? I was not hopeful.

Kazeyomi gave me hope. At the end of 2008, I had just graduated from Singapore’s equivalent of high school and was planning a year-end trip to Japan with my classmates. Kazeyomi was to be held in late January. I applied for a ticket through the official Maaya fan club (I am probably its only Singaporean member?) and won the draw for the Nagoya stop. I had to pay upfront to secure my booking, but because I was then uncertain about my schedule in January, I decided to give it up. I thought I could purchase a ticket (preferably for Tokyo instead) later during the regular ticketing period, after I had confirmed my availability.

Long story slightly shortened, I ended up with nothing. By the time I realized that my schedule did in fact allow me to attend the concert, it was too late to get a ticket.

Looking back, it would’ve taken me a good amount of money and trouble (including staying in Tokyo for an additional two weeks) to make it all work, so the outcome was probably for the best, all things considered. But deep down in my heart, I knew that I would live to regret not giving in to my impulsive desires for that one time.

Of course, I preordered the official concert DVD which is in my hands now. (Can you expect anything less from a guy who owns every album and single released under Maaya’s name?) The DVD is great and all — in fact it is awesome and brings tears to my eyes — but it also serves as a sad reminder of what could have been.

During the concert, Maaya performed both her new works and old favourites, including Triangler, Ame ga Furu, Kiseki no Umi, Praline, Platina, tune the rainbow, and a rather awesome rendition of Poketto wo Kara ni Shite. Including the rather long encore, it was a total of two and a half hours of awesomeness.

There was plenty of concert theatrics, some of which I’m sure were pre-planned. (See: the encore.) Maaya’s performance was not perfect either — she even forgot one line of lyrics during Yubiwa! But no matter how I try to play it cynical cool, I know that this flawed and deeply human performance is exactly what I would like to have watched live. (And maybe it’s just the fanboy speaking, but I find that she performed much better for her older songs.)

Maaya’s emotional displays might very well have been staged, but ultimately it didn’t matter. The transient relation between a performer and her audience remains a fleeting illusion as it has always been. The audience’s reaction is the only meaningful outcome. I just wish I were part of it. (Also, the fanboy bias in me tells me that Maaya’s words were sincere. I want to believe!)

I still hope desperately to watch Maaya perform live at least once before either one of us dies. It is a tiny wish that rests in an inconspicuous corner of my mind, waiting for its moment to come — one which may never arrive. Then again, now that Obama is president, anything is possible.

Unfortunately, the signs are not looking favourable. TBS recently cancelled her weekly late-night radio talkshow Chizu to Tegami to Koi no Uta (which I miss terribly) and the official fan club stopped its online merchandise sales. Is Maaya getting ready to retire (or fade into talent management like many older seiyuu)? I hope I’m just being over-sensitive…

This is starting to feel like LiveJournal, so I shall stop. Oh yeah, the DVD is really great. You should get it if you love Maaya. *Pokes Omo*

“DM, why didn’t you cough up 7,000 yen + lodging to watch my concert?”

Why indeed… orz

P.S. Does worrying about my favourite singer retiring mean that I am getting old? :( I hope I don’t start to chase young whippersnappers off my imaginary lawn soon.

AFA08 pre-registration is now up. Only the $8 two-day ticket is available for pre-registration. Details on the special VIP seating for Mei’s concert (tier pricing and sales location) will be released early next week. Head to the official ticketing site more for information.

Yes, this is NOT a joke. May’n (May Nakabayashi), the beautiful voice behind Sheryl’s songs in Macross Frontier, will be making her way down to this tiny-red-dot island to perform live at the inaugural Anime Festival Asia, previously introduced on my blog, to be held on the 22nd and 23rd of November 2008. This will be her first live performance outside of Japan and will possibly mark the greatest moment in Singapore’s short and pathetic history.

More details after the break.

Dentsu, the organizer of AFA08, held a small informal session today to announce a few new details on the upcoming event.

Here’s a list of things about the concert that have been officially confirmed by the organizers:

• May’n will be performing at least 7 songs.
• There will be an autograph session but the exact procedure for it is to be determined.
• No additional ticket purchase is required for the concert; everything is included in the convention entry fee.
• There will be premium tickets for reserved seats, but the details are yet to be confirmed.

Here are some other things about the convention that have been confirmed:

• Kunio Okawara, the mechanical designer of Mobile Suit Gundam and Gundam 00, will be appearing at the event to sign autographs and judge the Bandai Action Kit Universal Cup Competition (BAKUC).
• Kotobukiya, Good Smile Company, Kaiyodo, Alter, Square Enix, Revoltech, and other companies will have retail presence at the convention.
• Kotobukiya is releasing an exclusive limited edition Armored Core model for sale during the convention. Other companies may have exclusive merchandises too, but details are not yet available.
• Jump Super Anime Tour will be part of the convention.

Unconfirmed rumours:

• There is at least one other seiyuu yet to be announced.
• She is not Megumi Nakajima.
• Possible Revoltech release.

See, I told you AFA08 will be awesome. So yeah, come down to Singapore in November if you want to see May’n live! You can read up on all the above details on the official AFA08 website. Once again, the ticketing details for AFA08:

Date: 22nd and 23rd Nobember
Time: 10:00am to 9:00pm
Venue: Suntec International Convention and Exhibition Centure, Halls 403 and 404
Ticket: $5 for one day, $8 for two days, children under 6 free

Cosplayers who pre-register will be able to enter for free.

P.S. Nyan Tora is pretty good but it doesn’t have Maaya’s cover of AIMO!