I have not been to a festival in ages. This summer, an opportunity presented itself to join a few friends visiting the Fuji Rock Festival. The festival is the largest of its kind in Japan and has quite an interesting history. The first Fuji Rock was actually held near Mt. Fuji but was a complete disaster due to a typhoon wrecking havoc during the festival. The venue was subsequently moved and found its present day home at the foot of Mt. Naeba in Niigata prefecture. While this is not at all near Mt. Fuji, the name of the festival sticked and it has been held at the Naeba Ski Resort location ever since.
While the Festival name has Rock in its title, all different music genres can be heard. This being Japan, it is also quite popular for families to visit. I was very surprised how many parents with small children were there. But then again, this is a very safe environment, unlike festivals in Europe or the Americas.
Everyone got this yellow band which has a chip that was scanned at the entrance.
People are back at festivals after 3 years of corona pandemic.
Group photo.
Garbage is neatly collected on the sides.
The main stage is huge and this is also where the headliners were playing. On this day, the biggest acts were Alannis Morissette and the Foo Fighters.
The summer heat in Japan is unbearable, even in these mountainous areas. Many visitors hanging out at the riverside on the huge festival area. To walk across the whole area and its 5 (or 6?) stages takes close to an hour I believe.
Alannis Morissette
Listening to Slowdive before returning to the main stage to hear the Foo Fighters.
Closer to the evening, we rushed to get to the shuttle buses to get back to the car, which had to be parked over 30 minutes by bus away. The number of people were so large that we had to wait close to an hour to even board the bus. This was already past midnight and it took us the whole night to drive back to Tokyo, arriving when the sun already rose around 5am in the morning.
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