Neko Planet may have come and gone but I might as well post up why I ended up doing this tour. Neko Planet was in the planning stage well over two years ago when I started talking to the acts and realising that taking Neko Nation to the next level with live acts and internationals was possible. For me this was a pretty huge undertaking, I was barely struggling to do Eastern state shows let alone the daunting prospect of 5 shows all in one hit, organising international acts to come here and all the logistics involved.
But the reality was, the idea never went away, it was something that excited for quite a long time and to be honest, after having attended the first show with SiSeN many years ago as a massive fanboy making the trip over to Perth to Adelaide to see him, the prospect of being in charge was a mindblowing one. With that said, of all my dreams and goals this was a bit of a farfetched one and a hugely difficult one to tackle so I needed a lot more motivation than just doing it because it was cool.
What really got me excited was once I was able to slowly raise up funds and interest, the time slowly appeared to be right, Neko Nation had started growing huger and stronger, it wasn't some shortly lived phase as it was starting to get closer to the three year mark, I decided to dive in and go for it. For a long time Australia had seen the growth in anime, cosplay, Japanese music, we started seeing cons grow bigger and bigger, the anime and cosplay scenes growing, more interest in Japanese music and yet it was a rarity for Japanese acts to grace our shore, much like how I saw little happening when I first started Neko Nation I felt the same way when it was time to launch Neko Planet.
Ironically enough closer to the event it was far from the case, Dir En Grey and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu came over, not that it honestly interfered with our plans but if anything it worked well for us, we started to see that even though we weren't exactly going to be the first out of the blocks it was nice to see that we weren't alone and we weren't the only ones who saw it. It got us excited that we were going to be part off and the start of a potential Japanese music revolution in Australia.
