Half the World Away
Oasis' sold-out Tokyo leg shows human nature doesn't change. If AI democratises competence, presence is all the more important.
Otium Den recap:
Close to the tranquility of Tokyo’s upscale Iidabashi district, a crowd of 55,000 gathered to watch two brothers from Burnage. Persistent rain was one of the few similarities between the Manchester suburb and the heart of the world’s largest city. One might even say the two are Half a World Away.
But distance didn’t dim enthusiasm for Oasis. It was a capacity crowd at the Tokyo Dome on Saturday and Sunday night. The two gigs marked the end of a brief Asia leg on the band’s 2025 tour, which also included one night in South Korea.
Ordinary fans paid between ¥20,000 and ¥75,000 (£100 - £370) for the privilege of seeing the Gallaghers live. There was a non-negligible Anglosphere presence, dominated by Manchester diehards and Americans. (I met a group of the latter afterwards. Hailing from Anchorage, Tokyo was the closest stop on the tour.) But this was a largely local crowd, perfectly reciting lyrics that are nebulous enough for English speakers:
Maybe I don’t really wanna know how your garden grows ‘Cause I just wanna fly.
When Liam reappeared on stage in a bucket hat after a brief interlude and said “scousers: if they’re not trying to pickpocket you, they’re trying to run you over”, it made little sense to anyone removed from Manchester-Liverpool rivalries.
Loneliness, Effervescence and Japan’s Demographic Decline
The appetite for such collective engagement is both an antidote to, and symptom of, Japan’s so-called loneliness epidemic. That crisis is best represented by its fertility rate, one of the world’s lowest. There were almost a million more deaths than births last year, as the country experienced its steepest annual population decline since surveys began. At current rates, demography professor Hiroshi Yoshida predicts there will only be one child left in Japan by 2720.
Isolationist tendencies driving this are characterised in the phenomenon of the hikikomori. These are young adults, predominantly men, who withdraw entirely from the outside world. They don’t leave their bedrooms for months or years, even competing online for increasingly ingenious ways to avoid bathroom breaks. Two percent of the labour force are estimated to live like this, the extreme embodiment of reclusive tendencies that reverberate far more widely.
The Japanese context is an acute example of global trends. Exacerbated in recent years by Covid lockdowns that took people out of communal places of work or education, we’re becoming a more anti-social bunch. Pervasive smartphones encourage passivity with more than 80 percent of time spent on Facebook and 90 percent of time on Instagram spent watching videos. This screentime has none of the social aspects of television, in the forms of family viewing or “water cooler” moments discussing the latest episode of a blockbuster Sunday night drama.
The Return of Ritual
But this era of atomisation hasn’t destroyed the allure of live events. The longing for what Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence - the heightened sense of unity and energy from collective rituals - is steadfast. We see this in stories of increasing religiosity, sold-out football matches and concerts like Oasis, Coldplay and Taylor Swift. All elicit a sense of fandom that is absent in algorithmic TikTok scrolling. People don’t just come to be entertained but to participate.
Oasis & Taylor Swift: Different but the same
Oasis’ appeal lies in its rawness. No fancy choreography. Just Liam in a parka, hands behind his back, snarling into the mic. Fans buy into that sense of defiance and identify with it.
By contrast, Taylor Swift, whose 2024 Arenas tour was the highest-grossing in history performs with meticulous stagecraft. But such devotion thrives on narrative as much as spectacle. Fans have followed her heartbreaks like a Jane Austen novel: Wickhams and Willoughbys finally giving way to an Edward Ferrars in Travis Kelce. Both acts prove that in an age of AI-generated content, personality still wins out. As competence and content proliferate, narrative and charisma become a moat.
Presence in an Age of Passivity
It’s not just about live entertainment but a wider lesson for how we work. The great casualty of remote culture is socialisation. A generation is entering professional life under-networked, under-mentored and unprepared for the ineffable qualities that drive opportunities. As routine tasks become automated, success depends less on diligence and more on presence. People want to work with you when they feel good about you.
That’s why I paid over the odds for a last-minute ticket, flew seven hours each way, and spent 36 hours in Tokyo to see two ageing rockers. It’s not rational economic decision making but something more fundamental in human nature. What stays the same is just as important as what will change.