Posts Tagged ‘japan’

Japanese a-ha tour cancelled

After having been rescheduled twice since March last year, the seven Japanese tour dates planned for next month have now unfortunately been cancelled altogether due to the current Covid-situation. The Japanese promoter Creativeman posted this message on its website:

For a-ha Japan tour in Jan of 2022, we were supposed to grant Special Permission for the visa issuance as a case with special exceptional circumstances. We were working on its application, but due to the omicron variant’s aggressive spread worldwide, the Japanese government has suspended all entries of foreign nationals for a month from Nov 30 as a part of the emergency precautionary measure from a preventive perspective against the Omicron variant and this has put our aforementioned application on hold. No further guidelines or specific plans for the easing of this restriction are announced yet and no words on whether the government will start taking “special exceptional circumstances” cases again soon or not either.

While all the governments offices will close for the holidays, under this current uncertain circumstances it’s highly unlikely to obtain visa in time and also hard to assume that this emergency measure against the omicron variant will be lifted before the tour considering more omicron cases are being found in Japan everyday. Therefore as much as we’d like to carry on we have no choice but to cancel the tour.

After the series of postponements, we are very sorry to deliver the news, but we’d feel more terrible to ask you to keep holding on to the tickets for another postponement in this uncertain situation and we sincerely appreicate your kind understanding.

Your tickets will be refunded at your poinst purchase during the refund window, Dec 24th-Jan31st.
(Please kindly note that the refund is only available during the set dates above and no refund can be accepted after)
Please refer to Creativeman’s website for further details of the refund process.

This means the next opportunity for the Hunting High and Low Tour to resume, is in South America in March 2022.

Japanese HHAL tour dates added

Five a-ha tour dates in Japan next year were announced today:

10 March 2020: Tokyo Dome City Hall, Tokyo
11 March 2020: Tokyo Dome City Hall, Tokyo
14 March 2020: Civic Hall, Fukuoka
16 March 2020: Festival Hall, Osaka
17 March 2020: NTK Hall, Nagoya

The band has previously toured Japan in 1986, 1987, 1988, 2000, 2009 and 2010.

This follows last week’s announcement that a-ha will also play in Dubai next year, their first ever show in the United Arab Emirates:

11 February 2020: Dubai Opera, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

The total number of shows on the Hunting High and Low Tour has now reached 24, with plenty more dates to be added.

Ticket info for all shows on the official site.

1987 concert dates rediscovered

I have now added a bunch of concert dates from 1987 that I was previously unaware of.

On a-ha.com and almost everywhere else, the 1987 Japanese tour in June/July has always been listed with only 7 dates (and several missing venues). But as can be seen on the Japanese a-ha fansite, it turns out that the band actually played 17 concerts.

Megumi, webmaster of the Japanese site, can confirm that all the dates are correct and that none of the shows were cancelled.

And Selina in the UK, who first brought this to my attention, points out that the dates are all listed in the 1987 Japanese tour programme.

So, translated from Japanese, these are the correct tour dates (notice that the Nagoya concert should be June 21st instead of July 21st):

21 June: International Exhibition Hall, Nagoya, Japan
22 June: Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan
23 June: Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan
25 June: Makomanai Indoor Stadium, Sapporo, Japan
27 June: Sendai City Gymnasium, Sendai, Japan
29 June: Osaka-Jo Hall, Osaka, Japan
30 June: Kobe World Hall, Kobe, Japan

1 July: Yokohama Cultural Gymnasium, Yokohama, Japan
2 July: Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan
3 July: Shizuoka City Culture Hall, Shizuoka, Japan
5 July: Kosei-Nenkin Hall, Hiroshima, Japan
6 July: Fukuoka Convention Center, Fukuoka, Japan
7 July: Matsuyama City Hall, Matsuyama, Japan
9 July: Nagano City Culture Hall, Nagano, Japan
10 July: Citizen’s Culture Hall, Yamanashi, Japan
11 July: Niigata Prefectural Civic Center, Niigata, Japan
12 July: Ishikawa Kosei-Nenkin Hall, Ishikawa, Japan

This brings the number of concerts on the 1986/87 world tour up to 169, and the total number of all regular a-ha concerts between 1986 and 2010 is now 564.

(Thanks to Selina, Megumi and Suzie)

Festival concerts in Japan

Osaka, August 8th

Osaka, August 8th

a-ha did two concerts at the Summer Sonic Festivals in Tokyo and Osaka last weekend.

Because the band was not headlining, the setlist was considerably shorter than usual:

1. The Bandstand
2. Foot Of The Mountain
3. Move To Memphis
4. The Blood That Moves The Body
5. Stay On These Roads
6. Scoundrel Days
7. I’ve Been Losing You
8. Cry Wolf
9. Hunting High And Low
10. The Sun Always Shines On TV
11. The Living Daylights
12. Take On Me

Here are more pictures from Tokyo and Osaka. And there’s a high quality clip of TSASOTV on YouTube, taken from an HD TV broadcast (starts at 0:56 mins) – plus a small interview after the song.

In addition to the concerts, the band found time to do some shopping and promotion. And Magne and his family had a special meeting with the sumo wrestlers Konishiki and Musashimaru.

(Thanks to Megumi and Miko)

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