Taylor Swift at Tokyo Dome

The End Of An Era

We arrived back in Tokyo after a prolonged fall in Europe and were very excited to be back in Japan. We were looking forward to Japanese food during our entire time in Europe. Japan is definitely our favourite place in the world!

We were originally planning to return to Japan in the spring but decided to return earlier to catch the last leg of Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour. Her last two concerts of tour were in Tokyo and Yuki befriended some other Swifties online, one of whom got tickets for Yuki (you have to be in the country to collect tickets from a 7-eleven). Her name is Rey and she’s really sweet. Yuki met her the day before the concert to collect the tickets and to explore some Taylor Swift locations around the city. They went to a Taylor Swift Fujifilm Instax pop-up exhibit as well as the film locations for her End Game music video.

Although Taylor Swift had two back-to-back shows in Tokyo, we only bought tickets for the second and final night of tour. That didn’t stop us from going to the stadium on the first night to meet many of the other Swifties Yuki had been chatting to on Twitter over the past few months.

As it was in Boston and Toronto, it was really great to meet some very sweet people. One Swiftie, also from Thailand, actually ended up giving Yuki a ticket to Night One! The ticket was originally for her chaperone, who was fine missing the show. That was a pretty stellar surprise and something we’re really grateful for.

On Night Two we met more Swifties and by the end of it we had lots of photos to make some mosaics with. It turns out that there aren’t actually enough photos to make one without duplicates. I didn’t want to have lots of duplicates so the overlay image of Taylor Swift isn’t as prominent as on past mosaics I’ve made. On the other hand, with fewer tiles, clicking on the image to enlarge it enables everyone’s face to be visible and identifiable.

It was interesting to experience a pop concert in Japanese culture. The audience is much more reserved and the sound is turned down a little so the show isn’t deafeningly loud. Although many in the audience probably don’t understand the English lyrics, the shows were still completely sold out.

The show was both great and sad, because the tour was ending. Almost everyone’s hopes and aspirations, though, were for what would come next.