Buck-Tickets

Hey, y'all. We're very sorry we've been so lax with the blogging... our personal life circumstances continue to be very tough and it's been difficult to find the time and energy to update. However, there's something a lot of you have been asking about, that we want to address: namely, tickets to B-T shows.

So, what's up with the tickets?

Now that Japan is finally reopening borders to tourists, a lot of y'all are wanting to come to Japan to see B-T live... and we have some very bad news for you about that, for which we sincerely apologize, though if we had our druthers it wouldn't be this way.

The news is this. Since 2020, Buck-Tick's management have instituted a ticketing system whereby you can only purchase e-tickets via your smartphone. The tickets are non-transferrable, meaning that if you buy a ticket, you can't gift it to anyone else, even if you become unable to attend the show. It goes without saying that the tickets can't be resold, either. This frustrating system was ostensibly introduced to prevent ticket scalping, but ticket scalping was in fact never a major problem with Buck-Tick shows. This reasoning feels a whole lot more like a glib excuse for mass surveillance.

How so? Well, not only do you have to register all your own personal information, but if you buy more than one ticket, you are required to enter the name, birthday, and other info about your plus one. Not only that, but in order to claim your tickets, you are first required to register an account on TixPlus, the extremely dodgy, shitty excremental, incompetent company that currently manages B-T's fanclub and ticketing (blame Victor for this one). You then need to download the TixPlus app - but you also need to download the official Buck-Tick app, because, though TixPlus administrates the ticketing, all B-T concert tickets, whether you get them through Fish Tank (Buck-Tick's official fan club), Love & Media Portable (Buck-Tick's official mobile subscription service) or general sales, I repeat, all Buck-Tickets can only be accessed through the Buck-Tick official app. Last time we checked, this app wasn't available to overseas fans, but if this has changed, please post a comment and let us know.

Once you download those apps, you also have to register a photo of your face on their facial recognition software, because apparently posting really shitty poopy, ugly selfies on a buggy app that doesn't work somehow prevents Covid (!?). Don't ask us why. At the concerts we've attended since this system was instituted, the venue staff have barely glanced at the photos. Oh, and it doesn't help that the facial recognition algorithm is so bad that there's a long line for the tech support booth before every show. The only plus side: the tech support people are the only people in this whole shebang who've actually been professional and helpful.

We don't blame y'all for not knowing this stuff, because the wall of text of disclaimers, rules, etc. that you have to scroll through before even applying to buy a ticket now amounts to at least 20 solid A4 pages in point 12 font. This is not an exaggeration, we actually measured it ourselves. Does anyone read this shit, you ask? Even people fluent in Japanese don't want to read 20 fucking pages of disclaimers just to buy a concert ticket! The disclaimer bullshit horse manure used to be around 1-2 pages, tops! Where did this shit poop come from all of a sudden? Well, kids, we don't have an answer, but we did read through all that garbage, last year, when we first tried to get a ticket under the new system and the app didn't work, and then the facial recognition didn't work... and then at the 35th Anniversary shows at Yokohama Arena the app didn't work again... and we had to stand in line for the tech support booth outside the venue in a rather long line of fans who were in the same fucking copulating pickle. 

Apps: kill them with fire, please. We politely tell them to piss urinate the hell underworld off.

Edit: something one of our lovely commenters brought up that we neglected to mention: if you uninstall and reinstall the Buck-Tick app more than once, you will become unable to use the app. This is supposedly to prevent fraud but seems in practice to be for giving fans headaches, toothaches and buttaches. However, the latest problem we had with the app was solved by a tech support official at the venue uninstalling and reinstalling the app in an official capacity. Basically, you can trust the tech support people (though since we have a Japanese phone we can't vouch for what happens with overseas phones). 

About the delay in two-step verification codes: DO contact Fish Tank and TixPlus about this. You paid for that Fish Tank membership. They owe you. Sure they suck at their jobs, but they are still obligated to fix the issue. In Japanese business, the customer is supposed to be always right.

Anyhow, the real kicker here for overseas fans is that the Japanese ticketing services, Ticket Pia and Lawson Ticket, only allow you to register on their service if you have a Japanese address AND a Japanese mobile phone number starting with the digits 070, 080, or 090. Furthermore, the phone number you register when you buy the tickets is the ONLY phone number through which you can claim your tickets - it's prohibited to buy tickets from a different phone than the one you intend to use at the concert. You have to physically bring your phone to the concert and present your e-ticket as displayed on your phone screen to the venue staff. We made several enquiries with Ticket Pia about this and they confirmed, in a maddeningly obnoxious fashion, that "Ticket Pia is a service only for people in Japan." Yeah, thanks Ticket Pia. Fuck fornicate you very much, too. You racist assholes anal orifices.

However, if you join Fish Tank (for only 6000 yen per year, how cheap that seems now that they raised the price of Buck-Tickets to 10,000 yen or more per show!)... if you join Fish Tank, it's theoretically possible to get tickets even if you're an overseas fan. We're not sure about Love & Media Portable - last time we checked, LMP was only available to fans in Japan (Fuck you very much, too. You racist assholes engage in sexual tacos with your own anal orifice, you discriminatory nationalists) but if anyone here has confirmed that that has changed, please do post a comment. Since we're located in Japan, with a Japanese phone number, we can't actually check ourselves to see if the service works overseas.

Note: if you buy tickets through Fish Tank, you need to write 000-0000-0000 in the Japanese phone number field, and fill in your overseas phone number in the field below.

The bottom line: we wish we could still help you get tickets to concerts, but the new ticketing system has made that pretty much impossible. The only ways you can get B-T tickets now, as an overseas fan, are:

1) Join Fish Tank and get tickets in the fan club lotteries. Is this a money-grubbing strategy by FanPlus to get more people to pay for Fish Tank memberships? You tell us.

2) Get someone in Japan to rent you a Japanese mobile phone to take to the concert, and use their address and the rental phone number to make an account on Ticket Pia to buy tickets through general sales.

3) Wait till you get to Japan to buy the tickets, rent a phone at one of the rental kiosks at Narita Airport, and use the address of your hotel to make a Ticket Pia account. Buck-Tick shows have been seriously undersold since the pandemic - almost none of the tour dates are selling out, and at every show we've attended since 2021, large sections of seats have been cordoned off, unused (what a crying shame! If they'd only issue paper tickets at more affordable prices, maybe they could still fill the venues!) Anyway, it's likely that you would still be able to buy tickets once you get here.

4) Last-ditch measure - go to the venue early and buy same-day tickets. Since the shows are no longer selling out, same-day tickets have been on offer at most shows, and the next kicker here is that the same-day tickets are real paper tickets! (If we could lock whoever designed this system into the old-fashioned Medieval stocks and pelt them with rotten tomatoes, you betcha, we'd do it.)

However, we did a little digging and it seems there are some services available that will let you either create a virtual Japanese phone number, or rent a Japanese SIM card from outside Japan. We're not sure if any of these services will work for this ticketing system, and we can't vouch for their credibility, but if you're very desperate, we encourage you to search around and see what you can find, using keywords such as "rent Japanese phone from overseas" or "get Japanese phone number from overseas." Since we live in Japan, we can't verify that any of these services work, so keep on alert for scams and misinformation and read all the fine print. Getting a phone number won't get you around the address problem, but since none of these services are ever going to send snail mail to you anyway, we offer the trollish suggestion of either registering the address of the hotel where you'll be staying, picking an address at random from Google, or just making something up. We can't be entirely certain of this because we haven't tried it, but we're pretty sure they won't know and they don't care.

Very unfortunately, since Buck-Tick became slaves to The Evil Empire (cough, Victor Entertainment, cough), they have done away with their general enquiries email address. Now, if you want to contact them, you have to do so through the Fish Tank web site, which you can't access unless you join Fish Tank (is that a money grab? You tell us). Those of you who are members of Fish Tank already know that the current Fish Tank web site is a mire of un-navigable gobbledygook and garbage machine translated Engrish, and it's very hard to find the enquiry page, but if you scroll through the help sections, you'll find a link to click on at the bottom, which will send you to an enquiry form. We highly encourage any and all of you to write to Fish Tank and complain about the fact that overseas fans are barred from getting tickets. They have been known to respond to feedback in the past - back in 2017, I encouraged all Blog-Tick readers to write to Fish Tank and ask for Buck-Tick's music to be available for digital download internationally, and within two months, they actually made that happen - they did listen to us! So probably, the best thing you can do is write to them and explain your situation. The customer support from TixPlus/FanPlus is absolutely terrible, but this is all we've got, in this modern world of increasingly crappy feces-covered software updates and separate apps for each of your toenails (too bad the bugs in the app prevent your little toes from logging in! And the app for your big toes painted your toenails orange overnight, without even asking you! But you can't complain, because by agreeing to this Terms of Service agreement, you waive all your civil and human rights forevermore. Fun fact: the German industrial rock band Rammstein have a song called "Buch Dich," which means "bend over" in German. Does that **** in your *** feel good? No? What's wrong with you, we thought you just love yaoi manga! And in yaoi manga, everyone knows that no means yes and yes means more b*tt**x!!!!!11)

You can also consider writing to the B-T members directly and letting them know how sad it makes you that you can't get tickets just because you live overseas. The post-show feedback questionnaires have even been eliminated now, so at this point, anything's worth a shot.

So yes, this situation sucks. We are very sorry. If someone would just tell us us who we could pelt with rotten tomatoes... we'd be on our way there now...

But, in conclusion, we'd like to say the following. This new policy is not, and we repeat, is NOT the fault of the band members. This is a management decision. The band members actually have limited control over these things. In fact, Sakurai has very gently hinted a number of times that he is dissatisfied with how things are going with the management, though of course he can't come out and say it. But Buck-Tick aren't unique in this predicament - since the pandemic, most major label Japanese artists have instituted systems like this. In Buck-Tick's case, this was likely a management decision by TixPlus, which is a shady umbrella company that manages a lot of ticketing services and band fan clubs (very badly. Atrociously. Come at us, TixPlus, we've got a big basket of stinky, moldy tomatoes right here waiting for you.) Buck-Tick switched to having Fish Tank managed by TixPlus after they switched their label back to Victor, so this was also a management decision on the part of Victor. (Rumors of yakuza connections are currently unconfirmed, but it's been the way of the world forever that the relationship between organized crime and the media and entertainment industries is, shall we say... hygge-transcendentally cozy. A laundromat to wash your money in! Who doesn't want one of those!?) 

Anyway, do not assume that the band members are xenophobes or hate foreign fans - all the evidence points to the contrary. The band members have consistently looked visibly pleased by seeing foreign fans in the audience, and before all the pandemic stuff happened, Sakurai had even taken to addressing the crowd in English and Spanish at certain shows. Never fear that the band members hate you! They love you. For any artist, getting fans from around the world to love your work is a dream come true. Furthermore, the band members, Sakurai, Imai, and Hide in particular, have worked with foreign artists on numerous occasions (see Schaft, Schwein, Ai no Wakusei, and dropz). Sakurai still talks about how he loves to travel abroad and how much he loved recording in London. This is not, I repeat NOT, the fault of the band.

Rather, upper management at large, stodgy Japanese companies like Victor tend to be extraordinarily ignorant of how things work in the rest of the world - sometimes it feels like they don't even know there is a rest of the world. These are supremely imbecilic, ignorant people who are making these decisions. Not only can they not manage to build apps that work, the thought that overseas fans might want to attend concerts in Japan has probably literally never crossed their minds - that's the kind of small-minded, self-centered world of the Japanese corporation. I worked with people like this for years in my stint as a Japanese office drone, and talking to most of them was like talking to one of those creepy Japanese Pepper robots most of the time. They don't care about you. They have no idea what your difficulties as a foreigner in Japan might be. They can't even conceive of it. They have no idea what things are like elsewhere in the world. They have zero imagination and little empathy. It's not even that they hate you. They are just, pardon my French, dipshits a la fuckee I ran out of censored swearwords so fine, I'ma just go with fucking dipshits here. 

Anyway, to reiterate, don't blame the band members. They're not the ones betraying you. Instead, if you can, send feedback to these corporate robots. The more of you send feedback, the more likely they'll rethink their asinine system. (Please note that the Japanese postal service prohibits the sending of rotten vegetables from overseas, but if you send us donations, we'll buy extra rotten tomatoes for you).

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So, I'm sorry. I really don't like to take such a negative tone on Blog-Tick. I want this to be a place where fans can gather and enjoy themselves while learning more about B-T. But... this shit poo-poo is bollocks buttocks. I am so, so sorry that after 35 years, this is what Buck-Tickistan is coming to. Tonight, we're going to go drown the Victor offices in rotten tomatoes, so just wait for us in that shelter. 

I feel sorry for the tomatoes, though. They didn't do anything to deserve this crap.

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Note: This is NOT Greatest Site is currently frozen due to the updates in the Google Sites platform, and we haven't yet been able to port it to another platform. Until we do so, all information on Blog-Tick posted after 2020 takes precedence over the information on NGS, which is now out of date. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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DIQ Ticket, Androgynous Angels, DIQ Goods, Cayce's Christmas and other stories

Hey, kids. First off, an announcement: despite all that hard-scrabble heartache trying to wangle non-existent tickets to this year's The Day in Question 2019, somehow we ended up with an extra ticket to the DIQ show on December 29th in Yoyogi, Tokyo. If you're interested, send us an email!

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Second, the jacket art for Datenshi has been released, and in fact, there are two whole jacket arts to see! First is this original drawing by Uno Aquirax for the limited edition:

Second is this eerily effeminate soft-focus photo of Mr. Sakurai for the regular edition:

The images mirror each other than that both Mr. Sakurai and the girl in Uno Aquirax's work are holding similar poses, hand raised, fingers curled expressively. Sakurai's dark eyeliner and lipstick also echo the face of Uno Aquirax's lady. Aquirax's drawing is obscure - though that's probably no more to be expected. What is that shape in the foreground? Is it some kind of stylized rendition of a map of Japan? What's the photo in the background? Is it Mount Fuji or somewhere else? As in much of Aquirax's work, the nature imagery is strong, conjuring images of pagan rites or animal medicine. The girl holds a flower that might be a higanbana, which on closer inspection reveals itself to be made of devil faces. A tree sprouts from her head, as if she's some kind of earth goddess. She has both a man's leg (devoid of garters but we're pretty sure we know who's leg that is) and a bird's leg - is this Inter Raptor back again? 

Meanwhile, the photo of Sakurai seems like an overt reference to both "Dress" and "Heaven" - the feminine make-up and misty lens call to mind the looking-glass gender-bending of the "Dress" music video, while the overall white color scheme mirrors the cover of "Heaven" while making it clear that this time, it's after the fall - black hair, black lips, no all-white innocence anymore. In addition, Buck-Tick's home page has this mysterious new title graphic, in which the band members embrace empty white cutouts:

What does it mean? Sakurai has been working with the idea of duality and non-duality for a long time, and on the topic of "Satan," he stated in one of the Rock & Read interviews that he wasn't interested in any subject that couldn't be seen from more than one perspective. This theme appears in many songs - "Cabaret," "Melancholia," "Mudai," "Bishuu Love" - but "Dress" may be the song in which Sakurai explored it most fully - a love song to his inner woman, his reflection, his looking-glass self. The twin soul idea was the central theme of Shiina Ringo's "Elopers," but now it seems that in visuals, at least, all the Buck-Tick members are joining in to explore this theme. Who is the other half, the other self? Where can she be found? There's no question that the Divine Feminine is denied and repudiated in society today. Without restoring balance between masculine and feminine energies, how can we heal the problems we've inflicted on the natural world (that Uno Aquirax draws so beautifully) and in human society? If Buck-Tick are speaking up for balance, it's a message everyone should listen to.

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And third, on a completely different topic, the tour goods for The Day in Question 2019.

Ugly rubber bands that cost a whole 500 yen each!

Cute little band member charms that cost a whole 500 yen each and you can't choose the band member (random draw, yo) and what they didn't tell you is that that Acchan-chan ones don't actually exist, they just pretend they do to get the fangirls to spend moar moar MOAR moneyzzz hoping against hope that they can snag a Ken-doll smooth round plastic Acchan-chan to stick down their underpanties! Tough luck, suckers!

Trading cards that cost a whole 1000 yen for one pack, that's 200 yen per small laminated piece of paper. But who are we to judge? These are memories in the making!

This absolutely beautiful tour towel featuring a black-and-white graphic of a cosmos flower. And it's 100% cotton and made in Japan. 2000 yen.

This ridiculous fake-leather coffee cup holder for the Starbucks-addicted among y'all! 2500 yen.

This year's guitar pick set, a bit uninspired, but Hide's making the most out of that 66-6-16 birthday of his! 666, Number of the Beast? Nu-uh, more like number of the Sexy Beast!!! #SexyBeastHide Another 2500 yen.

The tour pamphlet, featuring another lovely cosmos flower graphic. What will we find inside? Fake candles? Photoshopped wrinkles? Faux-fur mumus? Ball-jointed-doll makeouts? For 3500 yen, you can be the one to find out!

A very expensive "multi-case" featuring a vaguely zebra-striped Buck-Tick logo print. If you have 4800 yen you'd like to throw away.

A very expensive spotted tote bag. Nice, but maybe not bestial enough? Where are the feathers, the horns, the pink eyeshadow? 5500 yen.

The tour t-shirt, complete with tour dates on the back and the band members pictured as flowers on the front. We have to say, this is one of their best tour t-shirt designs in recent memory. Simple, elegant, black and white, no bullshit, no extraneous ugly colors, and no graphics depicting the band members as unappetizing forkfuls of food. It even comes in four sizes: small, medium, large, and extra large. 3800 yen.

What is the point of this other t-shirt? Nothing about this is original or interesting in any way. And it costs 1700 yen more than the other t-shirt just because it has a tiny useless pocket over the left nipple. What about that poor cold right nipple, eh? 5500 yen. If you want a pocket for your right nipple you have to pay extra.

An 8-bit Christmas t-shirt that only comes in sizes medium and large, because thankfully, Buck-Tick understand that small people hate Christmas. 4500 yen, because Christmas celebrates the Birth of the God of Capitalism and everyone should spend, spend, spend.

Oh wow, kids, here it is! The first-ever hoodie Buck-Tick have ever made that's actually cool looking! Took twenty years or more, but zomg, those years paid off! It looks great! Look at that red-lined hood! Those simple, elegant, black and white graphics of pretty flowers, devoid of extraneous ugly colors! Why did you have to appear in the year when Cayce's broke and can't buy you, eh? 9500 yen, for people who've been saving for twenty years for this bittersweet moment. If anyone wants to buy us this one for Christmas, we'll wrap it around our cold lil' shoulders and sing you a Christmas carol Acchan-chan style and love you forevermore. (What carol would he sing? "In the Bleak Midwinter"? "Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella"? "The Holly and the Ivy"? Leave your vote in the comments!)

And finally, for those of you who are still old-fashioned enough that you enjoy the anachronistic thrill of paper notebooks, the obligatory Buck-Tick agenda, 2020. God we love these. They have about 5000% as much personality as a smart phone and they don't even need to be charged in a wall socket. Plus, everyone in the know knows that 2020 is the year when the aliens make contact with earth. You'll want a hard copy record of the events to come, and Buck-Tick is here to help (what they're not telling you is that they ARE the aliens... they've been hiding in plain sight this whole time... why did you think Imai was so weird? "Buck-Tick Agenda," oh yes, oh yes they have an Agenda... oh shit, we weren't supposed to say that! We blew it! If you don't see us posting, assume the FBI swallowed us whole and say a prayer for our souls. Or, y'know, call Agent Mulder.)

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And now, what you really want... the band member produced goods!

First up, a t-shirt with an angsty photo of Acchan-chan, and Acchan-chan's angsty-looking initials! T-shirt: 500 yen. Acchan-chan mojo: 6000 yen. That's awfully cheap for Acchan-chan mojo, kids. Snap it up while you can and you'll have the neighborhood cats all over you screaming for love till you're nothing but a dried-up drained husk lying lifeless in the street.

Second, the Hoshino Hidehiko Conservative Japanese Middle Aged Lady Approved Boring Colors Collection. It's a well-known fact that "fine upstanding citizens" in Japan shrink and shy from ever wearing any color that could be considered cool, stylish, funky, sexy, or God forbid, fun. Serious People wear beige. Serious People wear charcoal grey. Serious People wear brown. And if they're feeling eDgY, they wear navy blue. Because black is a scary color for scary, bad people who like scary, bad things like rock-n-roll bands, evil guitars and leopard-spotted hellcats. Serious People eschew graphic prints for something sensible. Take your pick: stripes or polkadots? Could be whimsical, but not in Serious People Colors (tm). Show them how grown up you are this Christmas. Show them that even Muji is too fashion-forward for you. Show them you choose Old Man Hide's for all your "fashion" needs.

Boring Color Towels, 1800 yen (boring colors cost more to dye than fun colors!)

Boring Color Sex Toy Case Cosmetics Case, 3500 yen. (Do people who wear colors this boring even bother with makeup? And we know they don't use *gasp* sex toys. Clutch your pearls now!)

(We are sorry, Hide. We still love you. But these colors are really, really boring.)

But! As if in defiance to the Boring Colors, we have the A-Fucking-Dorable Cute AF Serious Bear Lolita Edition goods!

A DIQ Christmas stocking with Serious Bear's lil' head poking out? 2000 yen, but that's a small price for the joy this will bring you.

Or what about a floral-print Serious Bear coffee mug, complete with a Serious Bear figurine head to keep your coffee as warm as your warmed-up heart? Awwww. 3800 yen is nothing for this level of good cheer.

But if this feels a wee bit too childish for your old-man self, why not try Yagami Toll's Old Man Collection?

Reading glasses, complete with case, for your failing eyes. Collaboration with ZoffDeca. Comes in a choice of black or purple leopard print. No boring colors here! 10000 yen for brand-name cachet.

And a super-cool Buck-Tick logo digest tissue case, so you can cart around enough tissues to wipe your winter cold runny nose in style. 3500 yen.

Everyone knows that the best part of winter is sleeping. It's cold and snowy outside. It's dark all day. So why leave your futon? But if you always felt that the one thing missing in that fluffy, comfy, warm futon of yours was a little bit of trashy Imai style in Certified Definitely Not Boring Colors, wow, has Imai got just the thing for you: the Evil GTR Sleepwear Collection, Sleep With Imai Sleep Imai Style 2019.

Zomg! Imai-print pajamas! And then come in a men's and a lady's version! You can die, sleep, perchance to dream happy! 9500 yen, but this is a steal. These will be collectors' items. Get a pair for you and one for your honey-bun to wear while you listen to Buck-Tick in bed!

And while you're at it, get the Imai-print bedroom slippers to match, so your little toeses won't be cold when you have to get up to pee after drinking too much tea! 3800 yen.

And finally... last but not least... this incredibly beautiful object that hardly looks as though it came from Planet Earth. We haven't cried this hard over tour goods since the GothyGoth Scarf of 2017, a whole two years ago (that's a long fucking time! Kids go from bundles of cells to pooping, puking bundles of mayhem in two years!!!) It looks like it came from the same collection as the GothyGoth Scarf 2017... a collection we might title, "The Inside of Cayce's Sadly Yearning, Horticulturally Enthusiastic Gothical Soul (or what's left of it after several Seasons in Hell)." That butterfly, kids! The butterfly of the soul, of transformation. Black for mystery and magic, red for blood and passion. Butterfly as mask, symbol of the transformation from persona and roleplayed ego-self to the truth of the inner self, or higher-self, everted into that crazy, out-of-control, out-of-season flower garden Mr. Sakurai loves to sing about. Roses for love, poppies for dreams, red lilies for sacrifice, alstromeria for survival, devotion, and never giving up, pink peonies for the Divine Feminine. We could write a whole paper on this bag. Surely the only objects appropriate to carry in the hallows of this bag are power crystals, tarot cards, Ollivander ebony-and-unicorn-hair magic wands, red lipstick, Buck-Tick perfume, purikura of your beloved, special brownies, Shinto good-luck charms, seashells from Okinawa, miniature bottles of wine, sex toys, 45 rpm vinyl records, extremely tiny yet playable guitars, and pictures of your cats. How is this only 3800 yen? 

As always, we're willing to line up for goods for our readers far and wide who can't make it to Japan this year, or help you order them through the B-T web shop, so if you want to order any of these items through us, just send us an email and we will do our best to get you what you crave.

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Tickets for International Fish Tank Members

Various Blog-Tick readers have brought it to our attention that the EMTG system requires international Fish Tank members to register a Japanese phone number in order to apply for Fish Tank Only tour tickets.

To reiterate: according to the announcement on the Japanese Fish Tank site, international Fish Tank members (that is to say, Fish Tank members with addresses outside Japan) are ONLY allowed to purchase digital tickets.

To purchase digital tickets, you first have to install the EMTG app on your smartphone.

However, according to what y'all have told us, installing the EMTG app requires an SMS-equipped Japanese phone number with an 070, 080, or 090 area code.

Of course, it's highly unlikely that international Fish Tank members possess Japanese phone numbers. In fact, so far as we know, Japanese phone numbers don't even work outside of Japan.

Since international Fish Tank members can't have access to Japanese phone numbers, but are only allowed to purchase digital tickets, but a Japanese phone number is required for digital ticket purchases, what this means is that effectively, under the current system, international Fish Tank members are physically unable to purchase tickets through Fish Tank.

This, despite the fact that the cost of an international Fish Tank membership is the same as the cost of a Japanese membership, and access to Fish Tank tickets is the main benefit of joining Fish Tank.

Obviously, this is a totally unfair situation and needs to be solved immediately.

We sincerely doubt that Fish Tank, Victor, and EMTG intended this situation to occur when they set up their new system. As we explained in our previous article, it's likely that the people making the decisions are so out of touch with the needs of foreign fans that they never even considered the phone number issue. Surely, they want y'all to be able to purchase tickets, because they want your money, so it's in their interest to fix this problem as soon as they can.

Luckily, the ticket applications are open until July 24th, so you still have time.

What should y'all do?

Write to Fish Tank IMMEDIATELY, and explain the problem. We encourage you to use your own words. Write in Japanese if you can speak Japanese, but if you can't speak Japanese, do NOT use Google Translate. Instead, write in simple English. Fish Tank needs to see just how many foreign fans are out there who want tickets and who require English-language service. Every single person who is affected by this problem needs to write - the more complaints they get, the better. The more English letters they receive, the better - we want to impress upon them that the Japanese-only service thing is not going to work for international fans. 

And do not think for a single hot minute that you aren't entitled to these tickets. This is the privilege you paid 6000 yen to join Fish Tank to receive. They are not giving you what you paid for, so you have every right to complain. If they weren't willing to do business with international fans, they should never have opened up Fish Tank to international membership, but the fact is that Fish Tank has accepted international members for as long as they've existed, and to stop now just because more people from overseas are joining would be crazy. Japanese companies are highly attentive to customer service and customer needs. If enough of you write to them, they will feel ashamed and they will fix the problem. Write immediately.

If this situation continues to develop, please keep us updated in the comments section. We can't check on international fan issues for ourselves because we are located in Japan.

New Ticketing System and Call For Feedback

Last summer, when we posted our first open letter to Fish Tank regarding their handling of Foreign Policy, a number of y'all expressed your doubts that Fish Tank would pay any attention to our recommendations. In fact, some of y'all even suggested they'd be angry about it and punish us for it, because apparently, some of y'all believe that Fish Tank hates foreigners so much that they don't even want to touch your cold, hard cash, let alone your cootie-infested gaijin skin.

Sorry, fans, but we got the last laugh! The proof has now flown shrieking out of the pudding like a flock of four and twenty blackbirds.

As regular readers may recall, we made two main suggestions to Fish Tank in our letter:

1. Make legal access Buck-Tick's music more easily and cheaply available to foreign fans by providing digital downloads on international digital music platforms such as iTunes.

2. Make it worth it for foreign fans to join Fish Tank by providing an English language version of the Fish Tank newsletter.

And as y'all may have noticed, Buck-Tick's management adopted both suggestions in short order, at least partially, by

1. Putting Buck-Tick's new releases up for international digital download on iTunes, and putting a portion of the band's back catalog on Spotify

2. Setting up an English language version of Fish Tank Web, if the gobbledygook therein can be dubbed "English language," which is debatable.

Anyhow, we'd love to crow in triumph over the fact that not only do they clearly read our blog and/or pay attention to feedback from our readers, they actually took our advice and did something smart for once, instead of remaining obstinately devoted to inefficient and unprofitable business practices as is so common in the corporate world here.

HOWEVER.

Since the new site is still an un-navigable shambles of Google Translate word salad, seems like its time for another round of constructive feedback. Therefore, we would like to call upon all of you to write to Fish Tank with the following suggestions for improvement.

1. The English on the Fish Tank site is so bad as to be borderline unreadable. Bad English makes Fish Tank look unprofessional and untrustworthy. They need their English to be checked by a native speaker, pronto. Not only that, but the formatting is awful.

2. The English-language version of the Fish Tank site doesn't contain the same information as the Japanese site. For one thing, there is no English language information about tickets to the Fish Tanker's Only tour. Plenty of foreign fans have attended Buck-Tick tours in the past, so how is this fair? The English and Japanese sites should have the same content.

3. Fish Tank members who are foreign residents of Japan are required to register their names in katakana, despite the fact that the "gaijin cards" foreign residents are required by Japanese law to carry at all times must bear the resident's passport name - that is to say, the name in Roman letters, not in katakana. It's almost as if Fish Tank thinks that if you live in Japan, that means you must be Japanese. This is a profoundly ignorant and xenophobic assumption that's also totally out of touch with reality (there are actually a lot of foreigners living in Japan, including some of y'all). Let's gently encourage them to act a little less like angry, old-fashioned, racist grandmas.

4. Apparently Fish Tank locks your location so you can't change your country of residence, which is ridiculous. People move. Some people move to Japan from overseas. The old system accounted for that, so why is the new system so rigid?

5. Though there's no English language info about tour tickets, on the Japanese ticket info page, it says that foreign members of Fish Tank can't apply for paper tickets, they can only apply for digital tickets. However, none of the complex info about the digital ticketing system is available in English.

6. Please, please, please encourage Fish Tank not to do away with paper tickets, and to continue to allow overseas members to purchase paper tickets. Some people don't have smartphones. Some people who have their smartphones don't want to bring them to gigs. The option of digital ticketing might be nice for some fans, but doing away with the paper ticket option would pose a severe inconvenience to some people depending on their circumstances and it would be really nice if that didn't happen.

7. The ticket trade fees are outrageous profiteering and should be scrapped. It's not as if these tickets aren't already expensive to begin with.

8. It's very difficult to figure out how to send feedback. The FAQ doesn't remotely begin to cover all the issues. The feedback form should be linked in a more obvious place.

9. Anything you've had trouble with that isn't on this list.

Of course, you don't all have to include all these suggestions in your feedback, and certainly, please use your own words and don't copy and paste text from this blog, or we fear that next thing we know, the Fish Tank Police will show up at our house in the middle of the night to clap us in irons and drag us away kicking and screaming. But if past experience is anything to judge by, they are actually reading your letters and taking your suggestions into consideration, albeit in a slightly clueless fashion. The more letters they get from you, the more likely they are to act on your suggestions. So please, write to them as soon as you can. For we swear to you that as long as we draw breath, we shall not allow the noble English language to suffer such ignominious persecution at the hands of Buck-Tickistani bureaucrats. If they want your money, give them to know that they must woo you with words of honey, and not the mechanical clanking of robots. Mr. Sakurai himself probably writes better English than the gibberish spattering their site at the moment, and if they're not aware that they should be ashamed of that fact, then it's our job to make them aware.

To send feedback, go to the Buck-Tick homepage, scroll down to the bottom, and click the "Contact" button, which will take you to the Fish Tank site FAQ. Click on any of the FAQ questions and scroll down to the bottom, where you will see a line that says "If the above examples do not resolve your issue, please inquire through the link below." Click the "contact" link and fill out the questionnaire form. Feel no need to write in Japanese. Writing in English or in your native language will impress upon them that they have a lot of fans in different countries around the world and they need to improve their multi-lingual support accordingly. Make them feel ashamed of themselves for being so provincial, when the band members themselves know cool words like "Iconoclasm."

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Oh, but what's this about a digital ticketing system?

For the upcoming tour, Fish Tank members will be able to purchase either digital tickets or paper tickets. The main differences are as follows:

Paper Tickets: These are exactly what we're used to, though they're now unavailable to foreign members of Fish Tank. They'll be sent out three weeks before the show, as usual. They will be tradeable under the new ticket trading system but if you trade them in, they'll be converted to digital tickets (more on that in a bit).

Digital Tickets: This is the only ticketing option open to foreign Fish Tank members, because apparently, Fish Tank hates you after all. If you don't like it, write to Fish Tank and complain, by all means. The digital tickets will be issued to your smartphone via the EMTG app two weeks before the show, and if you buy multiple tickets, your phone will display all the tickets for your party members, though it also looks like it's possible to digitally distribute them to other people with the app (however, there's no detailed info on this). The digital tickets will be tradeable under the new ticket trading system. 

The service fees for the digital tickets are cheaper, but don't be fooled - this is just to sucker you into buying them so you won't be able to resell them later and you'll be forced to use their system. Buyers of digital tickets will also receive commemorative dummy paper tickets that they can save as mementoes, while feeling sanctimoniously superior that they contributed to a system in which evil resellers of paper tickets may be legally hung, drawn, quartered, and fed to the crows. 

Oh yeah, and digital tickets are ONLY available on smartphones, not on feature phones, tablets, or computers, which means that if you're a foreign member of Fish Tank without a smart phone, you're fucked. If this applies to you, you should definitely write to Fish Tank and complain. Also, if you have an iPhone, you need it to be SMS-compatible in order to use the EMTG app.

All of this is annoying, but at least Fish Tank have now instituted a system where fans can legally trade tickets if they become unable to attend a show at the last minute... that ought to be a good thing, right? Well, maybe. Under the ticket trading system, fans will only be able to resell their tickets for the original price, so nobody will be able to charge you an arm and a leg for good seats - however, the trading system is also a lottery system, meaning that you can't decide who you resell your tickets to, and you can't choose whether you get good seats, because Fish Tank really, really want to make sure that you always get shitty seats in the back and will never be able to see the stage, ever. Paper tickets can be submitted for ticket trades up to one week before the date of the show, while digital tickets will be tradeable until noon on the day of the show.

HOWEVER, they will still take your money! Fans who wish to trade tickets will be required to pay a whole 600 yen per ticket to list their tickets on the trading system, while fans who bid on traded tickets will be required to pay a further 300 yen per ticket. This would make sense if it covered shipping fees for paper tickets, but it doesn't! All paper tickets submitted to the system will be converted into digital tickets, just to punish people without smartphones and force them to pay lots of extra money to mobile phone companies! Somebody tell me, does EMTG have a secret backdoor deal with SoftBank or Docomo?

Seems to us that charging fees for digital tickets is just a way for EMTG to get rich off you while pretending that they don't like ticket scalping. Perhaps they're trying to cut back on fans trading again and again in hopes of getting better seats, but good luck, guys - fans on resale sites sometimes pay more than 50000 yen for front-row tickets. Do you really think a measly 600 yen is going to stop them?

The site claims that "resale of tickets by third parties has caused a great deal of trouble at concerts." While that may be true for some artists, it's certainly not true for Buck-Tick. Why? Because the ticketing system already pretty much prevents people from buying mountains of tickets in order to scalp them. Some unscrupulous fans may buy extra tickets in small quantities in order to make money off resales, but we're talking a few dozen tickets per show, at the very most. Is that really worth getting this upset over?

Furthermore, the advantage of ticket resales is that they allow people to get tickets to shows that have already sold out, without having to be members of Fish Tank in order to do it. Yeah, it's a little shitty that fans resell tickets for higher than the original price in order to make a buck, but since it only takes place on such a small scale, again, is it really worth freaking out to this degree? 

No matter what the website says, the fact is that in most cases, ticket resellers and resale sites hide their identifying information well enough that ticket resales cannot be traced. Venue staff don't check the names on tickets at the door - nor should they, since buying tickets for your friends is still perfectly legal under their rules (and why shouldn't it be?) In a few cases, people who purchased resale tickets were denied entrance to the venue, but ultimately, isn't this hurting Buck-Tick more than letting them in? After all, if people wanted to see B-T so badly that they were willing to buy resale tickets, chances are, they're big fans, so what does banning them from a concert actually accomplish except making everyone feel a little less welcome?

If resales were widespread enough to the point that fans who wanted to obtain tickets through normally sanctioned sales were unable to get tickets because the tickets were all going to resellers, that would be a problem in need of a solution. However, in the case of Buck-Tick, almost all the tickets are bought by Fish Tank members, and since Fish Tank only allows members to register under their real, legal names, it's impossible for one person to have two Fish Tank memberships, so anyone wanting to use a Fish Tank membership for scalping purposes would have to either be a bona-fide fan putting his/her membership on the line for the purpose of making a little extra money reselling tickets (which is, in actuality, a pain-in-the-ass and not very lucrative business venture), or a non-BT fan who nonetheless decided to spend 6000 yen on a Fish Tank membership for the sole purpose of scalping B-T tickets... and maybe there are some people like this, but there clearly aren't very many, because Buck-Tick just aren't that famous anymore. They have a limited fanbase, so opportunity to make money off them is limited. For professional scalpers, going after more popular artists like idols and the like is a lot more attractive, because there are a lot more potential buyers and therefore a lot more money to be made.

For the most part, people who resell Buck-Tick tickets are either fans who became unable to attend shows, or fans who got together with their friends and applied for two sets of tickets, either to have a better chance of getting good seats, or to have a better chance to just win tickets at all. And it's understandable that people want to do this, since oftentimes, the allocation of good seats and of tickets in general doesn't appear to be fair. It's hard to tell exactly what the bias in the system is, but certain people seem to win a lot more than other people, which is something all long-time Fish Tank members have noticed. If Fish Tank want people to trust in the fairness of the system, they have to ensure that the system is fair in the first place, and that, they're not doing. 

Also, a lot of the people who resell their tickets for the reasons stated above resell them for the original price, which shouldn't be a problem, but for some reason, the Buck-Tick management even freak out about ticket resales in cases where the ticket is being re-sold for the original price, or less than the original price, which proves that it's not about preventing unscrupulous fans from profiteering off Buck-Tick's popularity, it's simply about control.

To which we say: chill the fuck out, Buck-Tick's management. Stop making the fans feel like criminals, when all they want to do is get tickets to see the goddamn band.

The bottom line: this system is probably a setup for a totalitarian takeover. Resales do happen in Buck-Tickistan, but not to the extent that they pose an actual problem, and limiting foreign Fish Tank members to digital tickets implies that foreigners are the source of the resales, which they certainly aren't. Why? Because as many of y'all know, in most cases, to buy tickets through a Japanese ticket seller, you have to be physically present in Japan and/or in possession of a Japanese credit card. If foreigners have ended up buying Buck-Tick resale tickets, it's only because they haven't been able to access tickets in any other way. Therefore, definitely feel free to complain that foreign fans are being forced into digital ticketing only. In fact, depending on how people's data plans work, there's some question of whether foreign fans will be able to use the EMTG app on their non-Japanese data plans while in Japan, which would defeat the entire purpose. And again, please complain about the ticket trade fees, since they seem to serve no purpose other than to opportunistically bilk fans for their cash, which is exactly what the "no resales" policy is supposed to prevent.

We believe in y'all. Together, we are strong! Go out there and tell them just exactly how full of shit they are. We know they're listening.