Tokyo
CNN
—
Long lines in snowy weather to buy merchandise days in advance. Hordes of fans, some from other countries, filling up the 55,000-seat Tokyo Dome, excitedly swapping homemade bracelets. People around the world feverishly calculating time zones and watching online flight trackers.
This is the Taylor Swift phenomenon – and the mania that has followed the pop superstar as she prepares to perform four nights of sold-out shows in Tokyo before potentially jetting back to Las Vegas to watch boyfriend Travis Kelce play at the Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs.
The Tokyo leg of Swift’s Eras Tour – a multi-continent extravaganza that could end up as the highest-grossing tour of all time – kicked off Wednesday evening and ends Saturday night.
The area outside the Tokyo Dome was packed hours before doors opened on the first night Wednesday, with fans decked out in glitter, tassels, tiaras and kimonos.
Kane Ishiyone, 28, traveled from her home in Fukuoka, in southwestern Japan, to Tokyo for the concert – for which she has bought tickets to all four nights. She has loved Swift since 2009 – to the point she learned English to understand the song lyrics, and left her job to move about more freely during the tour.
“I’m taking a two-year break for going to her concerts,” she said, speaking outside the concert venue with pink stickers on her cheeks. “I quit my job when she announced this Eras Tour.”
The Eras Tour had its first show in March 2023 and will continue through December 2024.
To date, Ishiyone has attended more than 20 concerts in eight cities – and is already planning future trips to Germany, Austria and the Netherlands to attend Swift’s shows there.
Childhood friends Sarina Saito, 18, and Aimi Satou, 19, said they were looking forward to doing TikTok chants at the concert. “We worked hard at part-time jobs (to afford) this,” they said.
Excitement among Swifties, as her fans are known, had been building for days.
Organizers began selling tour merchandise at the Tokyo Dome on Monday, with large crowds waiting outdoors in the snow and sleet for Taylor-branded hoodies and sweatshirts. One fan from the Philippines, who flew to Tokyo for the concert, said on TikTok she’d stood in line in temperatures hovering around zero for two and a half hours.
Fans have also prepared through rituals that have by now become established traditions among the Swiftie community: making personalized friendship bracelets to trade with other concert attendees, practicing crowd chants and curating carefully chosen Taylor-themed outfits.
“What we’ve seen with the Taylor Swift tour is something that we’ve not really seen before,” said Richard Clarke, an analyst at investment firm Bernstein. “It’s been a very well-timed post-Covid event, a sort of cultural event, everyone seems to want to go to this.”
“It’s been such a popular tour that people have found that their home markets are often sold out, and therefore have begun to travel to other markets to try and find tickets,” he added. “I’m sure that’s going to be the case with Asia as well.”
Two fans at the Tokyo Dome on Wednesday said they’d traveled from New Zealand for the concert. “We tried to get tickets to Taylor Swift in Australia, but we just could not, it was two weeks of pressing the refresh button, trying to get tickets, couldn’t get tickets, and (my friend) said, let’s try for…
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