Japan Air Guitar Championships

I've never been a fan of air guitarists, but when I saw the event lineup in front of Yamakataya and Lotteria for the 2019 Japan Air Guitar Championships, I figured it would be good for a few photos for the blog.



Sunday, the weather was pretty good - a bit overcast, but humid. The event itself was pretty well attended, but it started out extremely slowly.



The schedule stated that the opening act would be around 3 PM, and then the first stage would start at 3:40. I got in at 3 PM, and the main host, an old guy with lots of earrings and a fake stick-on mohawk still hadn't begun warming up the crowd, and when he did he just spent too much time heckling the high school students that joined him on stage.



The "opening act" turned out to be a high school boys cheerleading dance squad that wasn't very good. And, after they finished, they left Tenmonkan and went off somewhere else. They didn't even stick around to watch the competition.



The MC, preparing to give the lead cheerleader a hard time.



I liked the design on the fans they were handing out to the audience. The kanji in the middle is for Yamakataya department store, the main sponsor. I kept hoping that someone would riff on the fan for their act, but they didn't.



When the competition itself actually started, I was so bored that the air guitarists would really have to work to get me interested again. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. Everyone seemed to have a gimmick - air soccer player, air ballerina, air Cinderella, air gorilla, air masked super hero, air old man - that took the first 1-2 minutes of the act to set up, and no one knew how to pretend to play guitar. Here, we have the soccer player starting things off. After each act, the MC would interview the performer until the judges finished scoring them, and then the judges would make comments. By the time the second stage was to start at 4:50, there had been fewer than 6 people on stage.



The performers ranged from young boys to high school students, men and women. The ballerina showed some promise until she tried to do a leap and only got a couple inches off the ground. All of the music was copyrighted, so there was no point in recording anything for youtube or facebook. The little pocket camera had problems snapping shots of everyone, with all the bouncing around they were doing, so I decided to go into Lotteria and eat a burger in front of the second floor windows, and just wait things out. The finals were supposed to be around 6 PM, but I didn't see anything I cared enough to follow further, and I went back home then.

The announcers made a big deal about how the winners might be able to make it to the world's championships in Finland in 2020. I don't think any of the players I watched have a chance to make it past the elimination rounds. There was too much emphasis on the gimmick, and not enough on stage craft and being able to play convincingly.