The early bird gets the bangers at this year's Summer Sonic
The festival, held simultaneously in Chiba and Osaka, has been sliding marquee names from J-pop and K-pop into earlier slots in recent years, a tactic that draws massive crowds before the temperatures hit their highs. For the 2025 edition, running Aug. 16 and 17, promoter Creativeman is doubling down, offering a new idea of what a summer festival can look like.
In Chiba, J-pop provides the wake-up call. On Saturday, boy band SixTones hits the main Marine Stage at 11 a.m., followed by LiSA at noon — where she's sure to perform songs from the mega-popular 'Demon Slayer' series. Sunday starts even bigger: Mrs. Green Apple, arguably Japan's most popular act right now, opens the day, followed by the one-two punch of JO1 and Be:First.
Osaka gets its own early-bird exclusives. Saturday kicks off with K-pop group Treasure ahead of BE:First and girl group NiziU, while Sunday morning belongs to Ae! Group, making its Summer Sonic debut.
Afternoons still pack firepower. Rap-pop newcomer Hana — whose debut single 'Rose' and ballad 'Blue Jeans' are among the year's biggest hits — takes Chiba's Pacific Stage at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday. On Sunday, neo-idol force Fruits Zipper brings kawaii-charged pop to the Sonic Stage at 12:30 p.m.
This scheduling makes for a summer festival loaded with 2025 powerhouses. Meanwhile, official headliners Fall Out Boy and Alicia Keys are sure to stir Millennial nostalgia for summer festivals of the past — even if they feel like echoes of an era built on international imports rather than the country's current pop reality.
One foreign act could upend that dynamic. Sunday night's penultimate Marine Stage set comes from aespa, the K-pop group whose sleek, house-infused 'Whiplash' dominated last year. If the crowd's energy holds, it might be the weekend's true main event.
Korean artists are well-represented at Summer Sonic this year, with singer-songwriter Woodz and rock band The Rose closing out Saturday on the Pacific Stage. Thai pop gets a rare spotlight via high-energy boy band Bus and balladeer Jeff Satur, giving space to one of the continent's rising music scenes.
For spectacle, though, Babymetal will be unbeatable. The metal-meets-idol icons play Saturday night on the Mountain Stage, a week after dropping a new album. Expect the usual mosh pit chaos, followed by The Prodigy's aggressive electronic assault to close the stage for the night.
That British electronic act will also appear at Sonicmania, the all-night Makuhari Messe blowout on Friday, arguably the year's most stacked single day of programming. The lineup veers from the theatrical menace of Gesaffelstein to the kinetic beats of Floating Points and genre-twisting newcomer 2hollis.
And that's just the overseas contingent. Sonicmania's domestic slate swings from Vocaloid wizard Kikuo and electro-pop veterans Perfume to disorienting rapper Tohji and rave revivalists Minna-no-Kimochi.
Summer Sonic offers Japan's mainstream; Sonicmania delivers its experimental fringe — and if you pace yourself on Friday, you can still make the Marine Stage for the morning's pop blitz.
For more information, visit summersonic.com.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Japan Times
9 hours ago
- Japan Times
Samansa bets on commuter cinema
In an industry where quick entertainment rules, Samansa is staking its future on movies short enough to watch on the morning commute. Founded in 2021, the Japanese startup specializes in content that runs three to 30 minutes in length, just long enough to watch on the train or during a lunch break. Samansa's platform, accessible via website and app, features an evolving collection of hundreds of films, ranging from sketch comedies like Dropout's 'If Google Was a Guy' to Oscar-nominated dramas like Doug Roland's 'Feeling Through.' Most of the titles come from American and European studios, and are subtitled in English, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Indonesian. Currently trending on the site is American film director Benjamin Berman's 'How to Lose Weight in 4 Easy Steps,' a seven-minute short that sums up Samansa's content. It begins as a comedic workout montage — complete with a cameo by U.S. talk show personality Conan O'Brien as a gym creep — and ends with an earnest contemplation on slowly embracing life-changing habits. 'We look for works that have a solid narrative structure and where the creator's message is conveyed clearly,' Samansa co-founder Takayuki Toyama says. 'If platforms like ours grow significantly, it may be possible for filmmakers to make a living off of short films alone, which many would gladly do.' The question is whether consumers, accustomed to watching short videos free of charge on platforms like YouTube, are willing to pay for these films. According to Samansa, at least 45,000 subscribers — the vast majority of whom are in Japan — think it's worth the monthly ¥490 ($5.79 for subscribers in the U.S.). Even five years ago, the idea of a paid service dedicated solely to short-form content would have startled the film industry — and it did in April 2020, when DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman launched Quibi. Their mobile streaming platform attracted buzz for its original 'quick bites' featuring major celebrities and garnered investments totaling $1.75 billion. Then, it failed. In six short months, Quibi shut down , hobbled by a modest subscriber count and increased competition at the height of the pandemic. The unicorn startup soon became an exemplar of what one management professor at the University of Warwick called the mistake of 'a perceived niche market (that) is only superficially different from what's already on offer.' Still, Quibi's founders remained largely supportive of its basic idea. 'We continue to believe that there is an attractive market for premium, short-form content,' Whitman said in an October 2020 news release. Another member of the Bald Men's club shares a story with Flix Oven filmmakers. The upcoming documentary will be available on Samansa, a streaming platform specializing in short-form content. | SAMANSA / FLIX OVEN Samansa was founded in April of the following year. On the surface, the two companies share similarities, even if Quibi's 10-minute films were typically shorter than Samansa's. Where the Japanese startup differs greatly from its American predecessor is in its selection of filmmakers. Samansa prides itself on its intimacy with up-and-coming creators seeking to establish their names. Toyama, a former production coordinator, says filmmakers 'whose works aren't directed by studio interests can better express what they truly want. ... I think that kind of authenticity resonates more with film fans.' In recent years, Samansa has expanded its efforts to commission original works from such creators. One commissioned film, a tragicomedy by Law Chen titled 'Balloon,' is now in talks for a feature-length remake. For young and ambitious filmmakers, Samansa offers the appealing prospect of having their shorts picked up and re-created for theaters, as happened with James Wan's 'Saw' (2004) and Damien Chazelle's 'Whiplash' (2014). In 2024, Samansa received a pitch from South Korean production company FlixOven for a documentary, one of the rarer genres in Samansa's collection. It was about a community of bald men who gather twice a year to compete in sporting events in Aomori Prefecture. Toyama and his team immediately got on board. 'When I saw the concept, it was just too interesting,' he says. 'I thought, this was totally Samansa.' The crowning event of the bald men's competition is a tug-of-war in which two competitors pull a short rope tied to suction cups mounted on their hairless heads from a kowtow position. 'While there's comedy, they take it very seriously,' says Thomas Maitland, one of the film's co-directors. 'On the surface, this is a silly story about a bunch of bald dudes who just like to hang out,' adds co-director Georgie Yukiko Donovan. 'But at its core, it's about community and finding a place in society that is increasingly isolating.' The documentary is scheduled for completion in spring 2026. Interest in Samansa may indicate that viewers are increasingly turning to short films not only as an alternative to longer works but as their primary preference. In one 2022 survey by research group Morning Consult, only a quarter of Americans between the ages of 13 and 25 preferred episodes of television at an hour or longer compared with 52% of adults who said the same. Similar trends are emerging with youth in Japan, where, according to Asmarq , train commuters spend between 30 to 60 minutes on their phones. These are encouraging numbers for short film businesses, like Samansa. 'Previously, we had platforms like Quibi, which didn't quite get there,' Maitland says. 'But it seems Samansa is catching the wave.' For more information on Samansa, visit
Japan Times
9 hours ago
- Japan Times
‘Yukikaze' turns fabled warship into floating snoozefest
Inspirational stories are hard to come by in the history of the Pacific War, but Japanese filmmakers keep looking for them. 'Yukikaze,' by first-time feature director Toshihisa Yamada, recounts the tale of an Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer that survived so many battles, it came to be known as the 'lucky ship.' This fabled vessel has also been valorized in a ghastly 1964 Shochiku film, 'Destroyer Yukikaze,' starring comic actor Isamu Nagato, and played a crucial (if perhaps ahistorical) role in Takashi Yamazaki's 'Godzilla Minus One' (2023). Yamada's movie has little in common with the former, save for the fact that both were produced with the cooperation of Japan's Defense Ministry and shy away from the ugly realities of combat. 'Yukikaze' gets off to a bracing start with a scene of bloodied bodies strewn around a Japanese ship during the Battle of Midway in 1942. However, this is a film that treats war mostly as an abstraction, plotted out on campaign maps and discussed in staid meetings among the navy's top brass. Battle scenes are confined mostly to the ship's bridge, interspersed with repetitive shots of gunners blasting away at oncoming aircraft. Anyone hoping for an epic spectacle in the vein of Junya Sato's 'Yamato' (2005) or Yamazaki's 'The Eternal Zero' (2013) — both problematic though undeniably entertaining movies — will be disappointed. 'Yukikaze' is a more circumscribed affair with subpar visual effects that appear to have been rationed out by the millisecond. In this fictionalized retelling full of scenes designed to appease the sensibilities of modern audiences, you could be mistaken for thinking the eponymous destroyer had been on a humanitarian mission. Yutaka Takenouchi stars as the benevolent Capt. Kazutoshi Terasawa (modeled on the real-life Masamichi Terauchi), who espouses progressive views about the sanctity of life and backs them up by sticking around during battles to rescue survivors from the sea. He's assisted by a jovial cast of character actors and the strapping Kohei Hayase (Hiroshi Tamaki), the ship's senior enlisted sailor and de-facto alpha male. The latter becomes a father figure to new arrival Sota Inoue (Daiken Okudaira), whom he first meets after plucking him from the water at Midway. It's all awfully chummy, with little sense of hierarchy between the crew — and certainly none of the corporal punishment depicted in 'Yamato.' The film gets some added sugar from a superfluous subplot about Kohei's younger sister, Sachi (Ami Touma). Kazutoshi also has a wife, Shizu (Rena Tanaka), and young daughter back home, though he spends far more time poring over a photo of his old naval academy pals who have all predeceased him. It makes for a drab and soporific drama, but 'Yukikaze' ascends to true awfulness during its epilogue, in which it cycles through a series of possible endings, each more ill-advised than the last. We get pixelated footage of the 1970 Osaka Expo to represent Japan's postwar recovery, a drone shot of the parade grounds at a present-day Maritime Self-Defense Force academy and a flash-forward revealing that Kazutoshi's daughter (played by Kasumi Arimura, in a big-name cameo) has grown up to become a rescue worker herself. The nadir is a scene of the Yukikaze's crew waving from the deck of the ship as they deliver a message to viewers, the gist of which is: Hey, Japan! We're watching over you! They may be disappointed to find that many of those viewers have already dozed off.
NHK
12 hours ago
- NHK
Awa Odori dance festival in western Japan in full swing
Hundreds of dancers have demonstrated their skills simultaneously at the Awa Odori festival in the western Japanese city of Tokushima. Full-scale outdoor performances started at several venues on Tuesday. As the climax of the day, "so-odori" dancing was staged at one of the sites, involving 1,700 dancers from 15 groups showing off their superlative skills. Women executed elegant dance moves in sync with one another, while men danced energetically. Some spectators took videos, and others clapped their hands in time to the music. A boy who came from Tokyo with his family said he enjoyed the show because the dancers were impressive and they performed with smiles. He said the festival was even better than he had hoped, and he wants to see it again. The Awa Odori festival will continue through Friday. The so-odori starts at around 9:40 p.m. each day.
