The Fuji Rock Festival went off without a hitch or a typhoon this year. Philip Brasor, Simon Bartz, Jason Jenkins and Mark Thompson were there to bear witness.
The announcement that Smash would sell only three-day tickets to this year's Fuji Rock Festival, thus retracting the one- and two-day tickets it had previously offered, received mixed reactions. On the negative side, some in the media suggested that Smash was unfairly snubbing people who had to work for a living. Aera, in fact, ran an article early in the summer covering all three of the summer festivals and made a point about the three-day ducat rule. After praising the new dinosaur-heavy stadium fest, Rock Odyssey, the magazine quoted one man who said if he could buy tickets for only Saturday and Sunday, he'd like to go to Fuji and bring his kids, but Friday was a school day. The reporter neglected to follow up on this curious criticism: Japanese schools let out for the summer the week before Fuji started.
The three-day system benefits Smash in terms of neater bookkeeping and easier security, but not necessarily in sales: one- and two-day tickets are more profitable. But the main idea of the system has more to do with accomplishing the ultimate aim of the festival: to be a complete event and not just a series of concerts. They sold about 30,000 tickets, and almost half of the patrons (14,000) camped out.