We went to see Stardom: New Year Dream yesterday at Tokyo Garden Theatre in Ariake.
This was a much bigger venue that where we saw them last year, and the production qualities (and ticket prices) reflected this. It was also a long show: almost 5 hours including the dark matches.
Our seats on the first balcony were directly in front of the stage. We weren’t as close as last year but they turned out to be good seats and we had a good view especially of the intros which were spectacular.
We don’t watch Stardom (a Japanese joshi, or women’s wrestling league) and only recognized the ex-WWE wrestlers (such as Ember Moon) and the very famous Japanese ones (Dump Matsumoto, SLK) but it was very entertaining regardless.
As usual audience participation was a big part. Japanese fans are vocal and polite and even in the much bigger venue you could tell the wrestlers fed off the crowd support. Next to Kristin was a young girl (with her mum we think) who had big banners of wrestlers she supported that she would hold up during their matches. I hope they saw them!
It was fun, even though it went into the night and we got back so late I couldn’t go play games in Akihabara. It’s a good thing we’ve got a couple of days left 🙂