After School AFTER SCHOOL AFTER SCHOOOOOL

Who here remembers that secret I found out about a few weeks ago when I went to Shibuya by myself?  The on I wasn't going to talk about until after it happened?  Well, it happened.  It was this:



Shibuya 109 is a world-famous department store where all sorts of Japanese people shop and where all sorts of foreigners go to be confused.  We did not actually go in there, because the event was held in another building.  This building:

The reason I knew about this event was because when I went to Shibuya by myself, I saw a poster for it.  Normally, I would not have gone to a gal fashion show ("gal" here referring to a fashion subculture where everyone's brown/orange and really into hair bleach), but there was a "secret live" performance promised by a group shown only in silhouette.  As a tremendous After School fan, it was immediately obvious to me that the group was After School.  I even knew exactly which picture they'd blacked-out to make the silhouette.  The event was free, so of course I had to go.  However, that also means I had to get up at 4:00 A.M. and get down to Shibuya as soon as I was done getting ready.  We ended up in Shibuya around 6:50 or so, and we found the line for the event very quickly.  Here it is!

Almost everyone that got there THAT early was there for After School.  Seeing as how the event began at 11:30, we were all guaranteed pretty good seats.  The time in line was spent talking to other fans and being terribly, terribly cold.  Frequent trips were made to a nearby convenience store in order to not freeze to death.  It's always fun to talk to Japanese fans, because for the most part they're very good fans.  This guy even had the group logo and his favorite member's name tattooed on his arm.

I was a little jealous of this girl, because not only did she have the Hello Kitty x After School towel that I think is hilarious, but she was able to keep warm with it.

Eventually (around 10), they actually let us inside the building.  At this point I didn't even min that there was much more waiting to be done, because it was somewhere warm.  The event was on the 11th floor.  Here is the 11th floor.

Here is where we were to line up.

And here is us lining up.

I am not at all in the habit of taking pictures during concerts and things.  usually it's not allowed anyway, but I also just hate watching things through a lens if I don't have to.  This was the stage right before the event began.

If you're reading this blog, I assume you have also been reading my brother's blog, and so my account of the event will be brief.  I was also pretty freaked out by the models.  It was very strange to sit through an actual fashion show for the first time in my life.  It was also excruciating to stand there that long, and even more excruciating when Hello Kitty acted as a DJ for about fifteen minutes.

However, it was all very worth it when After School came on.  For those that don't know, After School looks like this:

Except the one in the back, who has since gone back to Hawaii to pursue other opportunities.

My favorite member, in the pink dress, is Named E-Young.  I know I've talked about her here before.  During one of After School's brief talk sessions, my excited waves and cheers earned me a shy smile and wave from her, and after that she kept staring at me out of the corner of her eye.  Some people think being white in Japan is hard, but it sure helps you get noticed by all the right people.

After the event was over, we did some wandering and trying to find the members of After School, but we had no luck.  We waited for them to leave, but again, no luck.  That's okay, though, because E-Young looked at me a lot.  Then we went to Harajuku.

This was out the back door of a store in Harajuku, which is actually in a crowded shopping district.

Here was my lunch/dinner!  I was nearly dying after all the standing in line, but even if that were not the case, Japanese McDonald's is actually a little better.  In addition to tasting better, it looks like this:

Here's the street we were on, as viewed from the train station.

In Harajuku I bought these things.  The pins were already on my backpack when I remembered to take a picture, so that's what's going on with that.  I got Sunny Hill's Midnight Circus, Rainbow's "To Me" and some pins of T-ara's Hwayoung and Eunjung and SNSD's Tiffany.  Some girls in our class have pins of male idols all over their backpacks, so I'm hoping to even out the numbers a bit.