YOASOBI Never Ending Stories Tour (Seattle 2026)

This week, my siblings I went to see YOASOBI at Seattle's Climate Pledge Arena. Although I genuinely like some of their songs (夜に駆ける Yoru ni Kakeru was one of my most played songs in 2025), I wouldn't count myself a huge fan. Still, I figured that while I was in the city, I might as well enjoy a rare dose of live J-pop.

The opener was (of course) アイドル Idol, and within the first 30 seconds I was already feeling tears well up in my eyes. Yep, I'm a concert crier, and a pretty prolific one at that. The song doesn't need to be sad; I just need to be moved. And moved I was.

Before the concert started, they had ads playing on the screens. One of the ads was for Crunchyroll, and it advertised anime as such a cool thing to partake in. As I sat there, an elder millennial in her late 30s, it really struck me how far Japanese culture has come. In middle school, I was constantly teased for enjoying anime. I hid my Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon manga in my binders, silently passed manga between my closest nerdy friends, and drew hearts around faded printed collages of Sesshoumaru from Inuyasha. The anime club in my school was maybe 10-15 students large. I remember going to my school librarian and suggesting manga titles for them to purchase. I begged my parents to order me imported CD singles despite their horrendous inflated costs (bless you, Yesasia). It took about 3 hours to download a single 25-minute episode of an anime from a torrent (and most of the time it was a raw, without subtitles), but we did it anyways to keep up with our shows. I remember when the manga section at Waldenbooks (rip) was one tiny little endcap bookshelf in the back corner of the store. Manga in the West back then was so limited that I memorized Tokyopop's catalog and therefore, knew every single series that was available in English translation.

And yet here we are, 20 years later, and although every otaku gets a questionable side-eye from time to time, it is far more acceptable to embrace your fandoms. Not just anime/manga, but J-pop, J-dramas, and other aspects of Japanese culture as well such as gothic lolita fashion and tea ceremony. With that, it is also cool to enjoy K-pop, Chinese costume/period/wuxia dramas, and even niche Asian idols such as no na from Indonesia.

So as I sat there, listening to the opening lines of one of the most famous J-pop/anime songs in a while (indeed, Idol deserves a spot up there with the likes of 残酷な天使のテーゼ Zankoku no Tenshi no Thesis and ムーンライト伝説 Moonlight Densetsu), seeing a sea of fans with their lightsticks filling up an arena, even noticing a few folks doing wotagei... it really touched me. The first J-pop concert I ever watched (and indeed, one of THE biggest ordeals at the time) was Morning Musume's performance at AX 2009. They didn't even give them a decent concert setup - there was no lighting, they used mics that were set for spoken presentations (such as panels) and not singing, and we all sat in plastic folding chairs. Still, the fans that showed up to that concert were passionate, and it feels amazing to know that I played my tiny little part in ushering the rise in popularity of Japanese culture to the West.

The rest of the concert went by in a blur. I cried again when they performed たぶん Tabun, which was a gorgeous acappella rendition with everyone's phone lights turned on. Speaking of, Ikura's voice is absolutely amazing! She sounds exactly like she does in studio. (And as always, I am constantly astonished at the ability of J-pop idols/singers to maintain such good vocal quality while dancing and jumping around the stage. K-pop could never 😅)

And again at the very end when they performed 夜に駆ける Yoru ni Kakeru as one of the encore songs. (Speaking of encores, the crowd was terrible at calling for an encore! I felt kind of bad - when I went to Japan for Morning Musume's spring 2024 concert, the room kept up a very loud chant of アン! コー! ル! (an-ko-ru, the three-syllable Japanese pronunciation of encore) for a good 10 minutes. This one (we shouted もう一回 mou ikkai which means "one more time" and is part of the chorus for the YOASOBI song Players) died after a minute or two, was picked up again after a few minutes, then died again... ah well. Japanese concert etiquette is strange sometimes!