The Beatles: Rock Band / 09.09.09

Imagine how strange it felt for The Beatles to play to an audience that couldn’t scream, couldn’t dance or rush the stage, and instead just sat politely and clapped after each song. That was the scene at Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan in 1966 – and though it may have seemed far from the fan mania of their U.S. shows that year, The Beatles broke an important cultural boundary just by being there. Built only two years earlier, the central Tokyo arena was designed for the martial arts (its name translates as “martial arts hall”), and not for rock.

At the time, judo and martial arts exhibitions were considered noble, and Western rock & roll was not – the cultural gap was wide enough that protesters threatened to disrupt the concerts, the first by a Western rock group in the arena; they thought that The Beatles’ presence would desecrate the hall. Japanese fans of course felt differently; one later reflected that “We really felt that they were singing for us. They sounded completely different to Japanese music or jazz or American pop, so initially it was rather shocking. But young people in the ’60s had no problem accepting them because they seemed to be giving voice to our feelings.” The British ambassador to Tokyo was also in The Beatles’ camp: “no recent event connected with the UK – apart from the sole exception of the British Exhibition of 1965 – has made a comparable impact on Tokyo,” wrote Michael Stewart at the time.

The shows came out successfully, despite the presence of a police officer in every row to keep order. The relatively quiet crowds allowed The Beatles to polish their musical skills onstage, now that someone could finally hear them play, and fans valued the high-quality recordings that came out of those performances – first as bootlegs, later excerpted in the Anthology DVDs.

Once The Beatles played the Budokan, the floodgates were open; there have now been so many Live at Budokan albums that the place is synonymous with rock concerts. Confirmed Beatles fans Cheap Trick made a successful live album there in 1978 and dozens of heavyweights – Eric Clapton, Dream Theater, Pearl Jam, and Bob Dylan among them – have all played or recorded at Budokan. The Budokan still functions mainly as a martial arts arena, with wrestling, karate, and judo tournaments held regularly, but nothing’s been quite the same since The Beatles first hit town.