News

Japan’s Supersonic Rock Festival Falls Victim To COVID-19

Japan’s iconic Supersonic rock music festival has been cancelled – or more properly postponed….until next year.

Initially scheduled for September in the Japanese capital Tokyo and Osaka to the west, the festival will now take place in 2021 organizers announced yesterday.

Ad screenshot of Supersonic 2020

The reasons behind the delay were initially put down to problems with the artists scheduled to perform getting to Japan safely amidst a global pandemic with large areas of the world locked down and quarantine in place around the world.

Another issue faced was the difficulty guaranteeing the safety of all those related to the festival as well as the tens of thousands of fans expected to attend.

Japan, whilst not suffering as badly as elsewhere has seen something of a COVID-19 spike in recent days and weeks with 49,000 so far having been infected by the virus and 1,052 losing their lives as a result.

No announcement was made as to whether or not the festival would be renamed Summer Sonic when held in 2021, as the current ‘Supersonic’ moniker is a wordplay on the globally renowned Summer Sonic rejigged in order to help avoid issues with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics – also at this point in time rescheduled for summer 2021.

Mark Buckton

Mark is a journalism vet of 20 years with most of those years spent in Tokyo, Japan, as a columnist for The Japan Times and numerous other publications. His work has appeared on CNN, in the BBC, NPR, and in several dozen other media forms and publications across five continents.

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