Up until last year, Japan was notorious for “fueiho,” or its no dancing laws. The laws essentially required clubs and other “adult entertainment establishments” to close at midnight. For about 60 years, going to a club in Japan would often feel like a scene out of Footloose. No dancing. Ever. According to a friend from Tokyo, the laws were rarely enforced, but they still put a dampener on clubbing; rather than choosing to dance, most clubbers chose instead to slowly sway on the spot, attempting not to tempt fate and risk dancing during an inspection. Mid-2015, these laws were amended, allowing venues lit at 10 lux (“candlelit”) or above to obtain 24-hour licenses. New clubs have cropped up in Tokyo since fueiho was amended, including Circus Tokyo, the venue set to host to flagship PC Music artist SOPHIE’s first ever Japan show.

On my second night in Tokyo, I’m taken to some of Tokyo’s seedier clubs by an acquaintance who’s been living in the area for a while. Beginning the night at Gas Panic—essentially Tokyo’s answer to Melbourne’s Revolver—we slowly find our way to Roppongi.

As you walk through the main streets of Roppongi, huge bouncers with American accents try to hustle you into their clubs—cavernous rooms with glittery bars and sticky floors, places where old men sit alone in booths waiting for escorts or single girls to hit on. As we entered one particularly slimy-glamorous place, my friend leans over and warns me to hold onto my bag and my drink. “This is where people get roofied,” he said. His warning seems to stem more out of urban legend than anything that’s happened to him or his friends, though there were reports of increased drink spiking in the area around the turn of the decade.

I don’t have particularly high hopes for Circus, but my fears are unfounded. Sequestered in a dingy back street of bright, busy Shibuya, we arrive at Circus around 11PM, before most of the crowd has arrived. We pay around ¥800 more than the advertised door price, but are presented with a drink token—a general standard in Tokyo clubs. Inside, YONEDA is almost exclusively playing PC Music tracks to a crowd almost exclusively made up of foreigners. The room is softly lit and decorated with low-hanging bare lightbulbs and small wooden tables.

The venue begins to fill with an intensely trendy crowd—girls decked out in House of Holland and boys in oversized all-black outfits. I watch a girl with a choppy blonde bob throw back a tequila shot before running downstairs into the main room of the club, a trail of friends following behind. My friends and I follow the crowd down into the basement room, a cramped space with a low ceiling and colossal speaker stacks in the corners of the room. PARKGOLF is unleashing a bizarro-world pop set onto the swaying mass in the centre of the room, his aggressive beats and angry synths rubbing shoulders with Snoop Dogg, 80s pop and psychedelic interludes.

Read: PC Music: Are They Really the Worst Thing To Ever Happen To Dance Music?

Back upstairs, I chat with Neptune, the blonde who I saw drinking tequila. She’s a Londoner studying in Tokyo for a year, and enthusiastically describes the clubbing scene to me. Neptune often goes clubbing in Tokyo, but finds the scene a lot smaller than in London, despite Tokyo’s size. “Clubbing is more of an underground thing here,” she tells me excitedly, “But the clubs here are still really good!” According to Neptune, the locals don’t go clubbing much, generally because of the high cost. “Wherever you go, half the people are foreigners.” She explains to me that there’s hardly any pill culture in Tokyo, as they can often be around ¥4000 and are rarely of a high quality. Acid is supposedly a widely used alternative, due to its cheap price and easy availability.

At 12:45AM, SOPHIE enters the venue through the front door, surrounded by a posse of six men, including PC Music boss A.G. Cook. The crowd gawks, quietly surveying the producer’s glossy, undulating black jacket and bright orange hair, and continues to stare as he disappears into the main room.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s a popstar on the level of Kyary.

By 1:30, the venue is packed. Punters line the stairs and the crowd is only absentmindedly dancing to Masayoshi Iimori, a DJ playing rap bangers before SOPHIE. SOPHIE walks onstage, the crowd hollers and cheers, and suddenly a tight crowd becomes an aggressive one. Audience members push from all sides, hoping to make their way through the throng to the front of the pack. It’s a very mixed crowd; there are many Japan and there seem to be people of all ages, but there’s a distinct gender imbalance; about 90% of the audience is male. As SOPHIE begins his set, the crowd begins to scream his name, and phones are pulled from pockets to try and grab a photo or video. His presence causes an insidious change in the crowd; initially playfully pushy, the mass suddenly becomes feral, frenzied, aggressively trying to catch a glimpse of him. The audience is acting as if they’re at a Skrillex concert, violently moshing and screaming throughout. Neptune described Tokyo clubs as “A lot more loving” than clubs in the rest of the world; even if that’s the case, it’s hard to see it here. There’s an overall air of insensitivity pervading the crowd. Even the audience members who aren’t moshing or screaming are still knocking into people when dancing, spilling drinks on others or simply standing too close for comfort. (For reference, Circus can probably hold 150, maybe 200 people max in the main room. It’s a small space.) At this point, enough Red Bull has been spilled that the room stinks of the sickly sweet drink. Barely ten minutes into SOPHIE’s set, the atmosphere turns sour; one of the friends I’m with had been groped by an older man standing behind her. It’s pretty demoralising to realise that clubs in cities halfway across the globe can be as sleazy as the ones back home. It wasn’t at all surprising to find out later that Circus apparently has no maximum capacity – “They just fill it out until nobody else fits,” according to a man standing near us.

There’s an intense and tangible connection between crowd and performer that wasn’t as present in SOPHIE’s Australian shows. SOPHIE’s music is often described by mainstream press as dark or twisted; in the world of J-Pop, that’s the norm. One of Japan’s biggest stars, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, is notorious for her “traumatic” cuteness; it’s hardly any surprise that SOPHIE, with his schoolgirl chants and chipmunk voices, has garnered such a devoted fanbase in the country. In Tower Records Shibuya, Tokyo’s biggest record store, large displays advertising his CDs and records have been placed around the shop. Seeing the way he’s advertised throughout the store, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s a popstar on the level of Kyary.

Despite the offputting crowd, SOPHIE pulled out a solid, energetic set; opening with recent single ‘LOVE’, he burned through around an hour’s worth of material both new and old. There’s a significant reaction from the Japanese contingent of the audience when he drops “Get Higher”—a Japan-only bonus track from his most recent singles collection—and “B Who I Want 2 B”, his recent collaboration with former J-Pop queen Namie Amuro. The audience is die-hard; they sing along with unreleased tracks and gurgle & bleat along with instrumental portions of the set. He ends his set with ‘MSMSMSM’, waves goodbye, and promptly leaves, his posse hustling him through the crowd and up the stairs. He seems as eager to leave the club as we are. The crowd continues to sway, bounce, scream, jump, pleading and moaning for more; If 2015 was the year of SOPHIE the mysterious Top 40 pop producer, based on the crowd’s aggression and adoration 2016 could well mark the year of SOPHIE the legitimate pop star—in Japan, at least.

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