From our other sites
The story
Mao Akiyama of Tsubaki Factory held her graduation concert at Nippon Budokan, but blackout curtains were hung across the back and upper sections of the audience seating, sparking discussion on 5ch’s Hello! Project board that it might be a move to hide empty seats. In the thread, posters lined up photos from Kiku Niinuma’s graduation concert at the same venue, with a string of replies speculating about turnout based on the amount of blackout curtain and how the house lights and penlights appeared. Meanwhile, past concerts by other groups like Angerme and Juice=Juice were also brought up for comparison, and opinions were divided on what standard should be used to measure attendance.
What people said
If ℃-ute ever pulled something like this, it'd be the legendary 'ping-pong table Budokan' (referencing a notorious past show so empty they reportedly set up a ping-pong table in the empty seats).
Still beats Angerme's spring show in attendance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSrD1I-mRE
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/moSrD1I-mRE/hqdefault.jpg
https://imgur.com/URiFEfu.jpeg
Less blackout curtain than today's show.
Turnout's worse than this one.
They're trying to make it look full, but the sparse penlights give it away.
And that's with the 'all the original members reunited' lethal weapon factored in.
Niinuma wasn't popular back then, but she wasn't dead last either — Mao-pin is literally the least popular member in Tsubaki right now, though…
https://imgur.com/URiFEfu.jpeg
Does that have anything to do with Budokan?
This is about the shape of the Budokan venue itself — what's that got to do with penlights?
which is why it was the last time all the original members gathered.
She's just barely falling short of Niinuma, who had such favorable conditions going for her — she's doing fine.
If the original-member reunion was announced in advance, that does give Niinuma the edge — Akiyama got no such announcement at all.
Still beats Angerme though.
If Angerme withholds attendance one more time, they'll catch up to Juice lol
Tsubaki has never once failed to announce theirs.
The hall-event capacities aren't that different, but for solo events Murata's less popular.
Solo events have nothing to do with this.
Well, it's a band-live show, so the budget's going into that instead.
It's Akiyama's graduation concert, so it's basically equivalent to a non-graduation show.
They're not even on our radar.
And the official 'HQ announcement' (sarcastic term for inflated official figures) for this one was 8,000 people, right?
So nobody'd bat an eye if today's Tsubaki show claimed something like 9,000, then.
Background and Points of Debate
Nippon Budokan has long served as a benchmark venue for gauging the drawing power of Hello! Project idols, and since attendance figures often go officially unannounced, fans are left to estimate turnout from how the seats look. Hiding the back and upper sections behind blackout curtains to mask empty seats is a tactic that’s been called out repeatedly in the past, and this time the amount of curtain used became the main point of comparison. Kiku Niinuma, whose photos were brought up in the thread, is a former Tsubaki Factory member who already graduated, and her show was a special one where all the original members reunited — a very different set of conditions from Akiyama’s graduation concert this time. It’s hard to judge attendance definitively from a single photo, since the way things look can shift depending on seat position and lighting angle, so opinions in the thread split between ‘Budokan lets you fake it’ and ‘no, you can tell from the house lights and penlights.’
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “[Sad News] Tsubaki Factory’s Mao Akiyama Graduation Concert at Nippon Budokan Turns Into a Blackout-Curtain Festival wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.”
Leave a Reply