The Fuji Rock Festival had been an event I’d wanted to head to for quite some time, but as with many things in life that take a good deal of organisation, planning (and money!), you tend to put them off year after year, until finally you either get your act together or forget you ever wanted to do it in the first place. Luckily for me, 2005 marked the year I did the former and finally ticked Fuji Rock off growing list of ‘places I have to go to before I die’.

Strangely, Fuji Rock doesn’t actually take place at Japan’s famous Mt Fuji, but in the ski resort town of Naeba relatively close by. Having arrived in Tokyo a week before the festival we were able to spend some time acclimatising to Japan’s inimitable culture and way of life, and in retrospect I’m glad we did it that way. It would have been a pretty full on culture shock to step off the plane from Australia and travel straight to something the size and scale of Fuji Rock!

Travelling from Tokyo we took the Shinkasen (Bullet Train) to Echigo Yuzawa, which took around an hour and a half, then lined up for the shuttle buses to the festival location. The first thing that struck me about how this festival would differ from anything else I’d attended in Australia was how incredibly respectful and courteous Japanese people are of each other and of rules set out by the event organisers. Waiting for the shuttle bus, everyone was standing in perfectly ordered lines and there was no pushing or shoving. As a result it didn’t seem like making our way to the venue was a frantic or hurried ordeal at all.

After about 40 minutes waiting in line for the shuttle we finally boarded a bus and begun the journey through the mountains to the festival location. The bus ride was breathtaking and I spent the time imagining what the area looked like in winter, blanketed in snow! The weather was hot and humid, but coming from down under in the winter time I wasn’t going to complain. Descending on the valley and seeing the mainstage and camp area sprawled ahead of us, it finally dawned on me that this was going to be one amazing weekend.

It was mid afternoon on Thursday, and we made our way to the ticket collection area to pick up our reviewer and photographer passes. On the shuttle I thought I was being nice and smart by writing out a few key words in Japanese. ‘Journalist’, ‘Photographer’ and ‘Media’, that should do it? Wrong. No one we spoke to had any idea what we were going on about, and I had a sudden sinking feeling that we’d travelled all the way from Australia to be knocked back at the door (the festival had sold out by this time so we couldn’t buy tickets if we’d wanted to!)

After a tense hour or so of stilted conversations with a few different people we finally worked out that the word ‘Media’ didn’t mean anything, and that I should have been saying ‘Press’ instead. Crisis averted! We collected our camping passes and made our way into the camp area to setup. The campsite is on a golf course, which sounds like a recipe for disaster, but all of the putting greens were cordoned off from punters so they stayed unharmed for the weekend. I found it absolutely amazing that people stayed off them, but again it seems that was an inherent difference between Japanese festival goers and what you’d expect here in Australia!

By the time we’d made it to the camp area a lot of the flat areas had been taken. The golf course, quite bizarrely, is on a hill. We setup our spot on a gentle slope, put up our Australian flag (probably the only time I’d been so patriotic in my entire life?) and then sat back and watched the campsite slowly fill up. Thousands and thousands of excited Japanese music lovers filed up the hill, dragging carts loaded with camping supplies. It seems Australians are quite favoured by the Japanese as our flag won us a number of visitors, all making the effort to stop by and chat.

On the first night there was an opening party. When we went down to check it out we found ourselves walking around wide eyed with amazement, it was the most awesome assault on the senses – so much to see, hear and do, and this was only the first night. We didn’t find out until Friday, when the full event opened, that we’d had the chance to explore only one small part of the entire festival site the night before!

Rising relatively early on Friday we made our way into the event and set about exploring the entire site. The festival is spread out down the valley, with 7 stages linked consecutively by a path and boardwalk. Getting from one end of the festival to the other was no mean feat, especially as it got busier, but with so much to see along the way it never felt like an effort. Early in the afternoon is began to rain, and so the poncho came out for the first time (little did I know I was about to become rather friendly with that piece of yellow plastic).

One of the more amazing parts of the festival that I’d been looking forward to was the chill out area, ‘Day Dreaming and Silent Breeze’. Not your regular chill out space with a few beanbags and some hippies smoking joints, this is a full four and a half kilometers up the mountain via the world’s longest gondola chairlift! It took about 25 minutes to reach the top, running through what was without a doubt the most breathtaking scenery of the entire trip. When we reached the top we could do nothing but stand there, speechless, for a good 5 minutes.

Heading back down the mountain to the festival, we saw that we’d missed another downpour (yes, we were that high up!) The rest of the day was filled with impressive band after impressive band, starting with the Kaiser Chiefs, then The Music, Coldplay and the Foo Fighters. Unlike a concert in Australia the crowd wasn’t crowding towards the front, meaning it was relatively easy to find a great spot that had a great vantage point for all the action going on up onstage. It also didn’t hurt that I’m 6 foot and the average height of the Japanese crowd seemed to be in the lower regions of 5 foot!

When the mainstage acts finished for the night at around 11pm the Red Marquee switched over to dance party mode, with DJs and live acts appearing through until sunrise. Headliners for the first night were DJ Kentaro, an outright legend in Japan and a World Champion DMC turntablist, and UK breakbeat duo Evil Nine. The only problem with fitting so much in during the day was maintaining the stamina to last through the night!

Waking on Saturday to buckets of rain, I made the choice to brave the weather (you only live once, right?) in place of taking shelter in the tent. I regretted my decision before even reaching the gates of the festival, with my shoes completely soaked through. But, again, you only live once… and they’d dry, so I soldiered on to the mainstage to check out Maximo Park. By now, with rain overnight, the linking pathways inside the festival had become expansive tracts of mud, so getting from one place to another became increasingly difficult. That was until I resigned myself to the fact that my shoes were going to get dirty regardless, then it was a lot more fun traipsing about in the sludge!

The rain on Saturday was pretty consistent, with patches where it would dry up for an hour or so at a time. I caught The Bravery, Asian Dub Foundation, Beck, Fatboy Slim, and Mercury Rev, who proved to be one of the unexpected highlights of the whole weekend. Their optimistic tone filling us with hopes for a clear day devoid of rain to end the festival the following day.

I headed back to the campsite late in the evening to check out whether our tent had been washed away in the deluge. It hadn’t, and everything was surprisingly dry! Looking at the pools of mud in the flat spots of the camp area our decision to setup our tents on an incline now seemed like a damn good idea in retrospect! That night on the dance front we were treated to United States of Electronica (which a friend aptly described as “a cross between Daft Punk and the Scissor Sisters”), Caged Baby, Vitalic, and Towa Tei, who turned out to be my personal favourite.

Sunday, the festival’s final day, had always held the strongest lineup of acts for me, so I was particularly eager to get into it. The days of partying, however, were beginning to catch up and we didn’t make our way into the festival until a little after midday. We decided to head up the gondola chairlift one last time, and when we reached the top happened upon the only hot water taps we found all weekend. They were a godsend, as by this stage of the weekend we were all starting to look a little worse for wear (6 cold water showers among 70,000 festival goers… you do the maths!)

Making it back to the bottom of the mountain early in the afternoon, the final day’s entertainment kicked off with Athlete (a poor mans Coldplay?) It was then time to high-tail it back and forth between stages for the remainder of the day, with the Doves, the Beach Boys, Royksopp, Moby, The Mars Volta, New Order, Sigur Ros and Primal Scream all running one after the other across three of the festival’s stages until midnight. Royksopp and New Order stood out as highlights, but suffice to say it was the most amazing 9 hours of music I’d ever experienced! Mylo was headlining the dance tent on the final night, and with my tired and weary body more or less at the point of collapse I had to call it a day, but from reports he kept the more hardened punters dancing throughout his set.

Packing up the campsite on Monday we had fears of facing long lines and hours of waiting while we made our way back to Tokyo. But, in fine Japanese fashion, everything was impeccable organised and augmented oh so perfectly by the general attitude of respect and consideration of the local people. Checking into our hotel back in the big city I’d never looked forward to a hot shower so much in my life, but I couldn’t help thinking about the amazing weekend I’d just had.

If heading to Fuji Rock, or any number of similar events around the world like Glastonbury or Creamfields in the UK, Sonar in Spain, or Dance Valley in the Netherlands, has always been on your list of things to do I urge you to make whatever the necessary sacrifices are to get there! As an event the ticket price was unusually high (roughly $500 for a weekend pass), but it’s entirely worth it for the memories I’ll have etched into my mind until it turns to mush.