Lumos Maxima!

June 22, 2007: Some friends and I were riding on the Hibiya line back home. We had just gone to a 銭湯 (sentō) public bath-- very relaxing-- and following that a delicious dinner of Okinawan cuisine. As I usually do, I was looking around at the various advertisements on the train. It's always fun to decipher something witty or interesting, and Japanese train ads usually don't disappoint. Right in front of me hung a rather bland-looking blue poster, with an announcement that was anything but bland:


Magic Message. 6/28, 7:30pm, Roppongi Hills.
On June 28, 7:30pm, help out with Harry's magic.
Recite "Expecto Patronum!" in the direction of Roppongi Hills. When you do, something will!

In Japanese it is okay to leave your sentences unfinished sometimes ("something will!"), so frustratingly I had no idea what on earth this event was. Most of us there agreed we had to go and find out, and I resolved to look it up on the Internet somehow. Eventually I found the Japanese-language Harry Potter fansite pottermania.jp. There, among other articles I sifted through with the help of some automatic translating tools, was a schedule showing June 28 as the day of the Japanese premiere of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Upon checking with some other English-language websites, it turned out that this was not only the Japanese premiere, but the first premiere ever. The London showing calls itself the World Premiere, but that's July 3, and the last time I checked July came after June.

At any rate, this was pretty exciting, so it wasn't difficult at all to get together a group of people together to come see what "something" was. This Thursday, after my History of Japan class, six of us gathered on campus before heading out: Cameron, Jennie, Joe, Kelly, Seamus, and me. I had checked around for directions to Roppongi Hills, and along the way had come across some new information about the event. First, the red carpet walkers would start around 6:15pm. Second, the spell involved had been changed from "Expecto Patronum!" to "Lumos Maxima!" Third, pottermania.jp coyly recommended people who couldn't come to the premiere to at least look towards Roppongi Hills, as the "something" would probably be visible from a good distance.


We arrived at Roppongi Hills around 5:30pm, well in advance of the first celebrity attendees. The entire area was chock-full of Harry Potter publicity-- posters on walls and pillars, ads coming over television screens, even some images set up behind running waterfalls (see the very last picture below.) Since the red carpet was scheduled to be at Roppongi Hills Arena, we followed the maps right up to where the arena was supposedly located, only to find that we were five stories too high. My fault as navigator, but it did make for a nice overhead shot:


After running into several different guards blocking several different staircases down, we gave up and smashed into an elevator. Finally, the ability to throw the concept of 'personal space' completely to the wind (born of the daily crush of the morning rush hour) found its use. Once we were at ground level, we wandered around the outside of the arena. There were a lot of people already inside, and the only people going in when we walked by were the reporters and photographers. So, we decided we would find a place somewhere around where you could see the red carpet. This was the best view we got:


Yeah, it's not that great, because the press was kind of in the way. But we could see the red carpet, and we could see the stage, so I was relatively happy. The only thing was that the security people kept having to ask us to stay out of the walkway, so every few minutes or so we would have to squish in to the metal barriers, and then inevitably spread back out again a little later. I left to go take pictures from another spot, during which a Harry Potter bus randomly passed by:


It's so well done, you almost can't tell it's a bus, but I promise it's not a wall. Since this area didn't have a view of the stage, I moved back again, only to find the crowd there had grown even larger since I had left. Fortunately my backpack was saving my space. At this point, at least according to my own imagined version of the event, the security guards broke down. We were standing all over their precious walkway, and there was no way any of us was going to move and give up our view. So they got tickets for inside the arena from somewhere and started handing them out to the people standing in our area. There was a near-riot during which I definitely did not take advantage of my height and reach over three other people to grab a ticket. Okay maybe I did, but the point is I got one:


If you haven't picked it up by now, ハリー・ポッター does indeed say 'Harry Potter,' and the smaller text 不死鳥の騎士団 literally means 'Mounted Samurai Group of the Non-Dying Bird' or, if you like, 'Order of the Phoenix.' Since there were enough tickets for most everybody in the area, everybody in our group managed to grab tickets and join the small horde of people rushing toward the arena entrance area. There, unfortunately we had to turn in our tickets, but in exchange we got hanging badges assigning us to Section E. This, I firmly believe, stands for Exceeds Expectations. Although Section E was in the middle of the arena, isolating us from the red carpet around the outer edge, we got a good view of a giant TV screen as well as the stage:


This is another example of a situation in which it is very nice to be tall, especially in Japan. Jennie and Kelly both ended up standing on top of their backpacks to see over the crowd a bit. At this point there wasn't much of anything to see; people still hadn't started arriving yet and the giant screen was turned off. We did get to hear certain excerpts from the new soundtrack, many of which I recognized from hearing on the official soundtrack website, though of course in greater length and better quality. Suddenly some very loud, ominous music started playing, and smoke and red lights filled the stage. It sounded so evil I thought maybe Ralph Fiennes would be swooping in to Avada Kedavra us all, but no such luck. As the music reached a crescendo, the lights began to fade, then just as it stopped a single spotlight shone on... the announcer lady.


Since my camera doesn't do very well in low-light situations, I ended up taking pictures of the TV screen for some of these next shots. You can see the boom microphones of the media section poking up at the bottom of the picture, though why they would be pointing boom microphones ten or twenty feet in the air is beyond me. The announcer lady greeted us all, gave a little speech about how this was not only the best Harry Potter movie ever, but the best movie ever made period, then proceeded to interview the arrivals on the red carpet. There were so many interesting ones-- the solitary American star of Cold Case, the lady with a purple-and-gold hat half the size of a normal one, the kid celebrity who liked "action movies, the kind with fighting," all the Japanese celebrities struggling to describe exactly why they liked the Harry Potter series-- but then somebody showed up and stole the entire show.


It was Daniel Radcliffe, aka the actor who plays Harry Potter, aka the reason why hundreds of Japanese teenage girls started screaming simultaneously in the middle of an interview with the tiny hat lady. The lady to the left seemed like his agent or something, she stayed with him the entire time; the lady to the right served as a translator so that Radcliffe could answer the many questions of the Japanese TV crews. First he went to the media section, then he slowly made his way around the red carpet, signing autographs and talking to whatever fans could speak a little English. From our section, the television was pretty much our only view of the action, but I did manage one shot of half of Radcliffe's face in the middle of the crowd:


After a good while, all the little interviews were over and everybody had made their way around the carpet, so it was time for something different. Announcer Lady came back up to the stage and talked a little more about the film, then pointed everyone over to the big screen for some clips from the movie. These were fun, about a minute apiece, spoken in English but subtitled in Japanese. The first was fun broom flying, the second was Voldemort's plans, the third was Umbridge's class, and the fourth was Umbridge's general reign of terror. Just in case you weren't situated where you could see the screen (and happened not to understand the English being spoken), Announcer Lady kindly summarized each clip after it played.


After all the interviews and movie clips, it had become quite dark outside-- since Japan doesn't use Daylight Savings Time, the sun rises and sets earlier than I'm used to in the States at least. Announcer Lady let us know that it was now time for the main event, a talk with Daniel Radcliffe and David Heyman, the movie's producer. Epic music began to play, the smoke machines worked double time, and the lights swung around wildly pretending to be a laser light show. A cloud of smoke obscured all of center stage, but just as the music reached its climax, the smoke blew away, tiki torches burst into flame, and Radcliffe and Heyman emerged, simply grinning at the crazy spectacle and crazy fans.


First Heyman, then Radcliffe read off a couple short phrases of Japanese from notecards. These were hilarious. Both of them had the very clearly discernible accent known as 'an English-speaking person reading romanized Japanese.' At least they picked simple enough sentences that they were easily understandable-- 日本の皆さん今日は "Hello to everyone in Japan!" 僕はダニエル・ラドクリフです "I am Daniel Radcliffe." 日本のファンは最高 "Japanese fans are the best!" After they were finished mangling the admittedly complex language I am learning here, Announcer Lady turned to asking actual questions about the movie, which meant the rest of the conversation was held through Translator Lady.


Heyman and Radcliffe made some generic comments about how the whole series and the books are all great, but that this movie was even better than anything that had come before... how the actors are all growing up... how the films are becoming darker in tone... the usual questions and the usual answers. Translator Lady made regular notes on her pad, then once Heyman or Radcliffe had finished speaking, went through them to make sure she reproduced what they had said-- as far as I could understand, it was pretty exact. Radcliffe appeared maybe a little nervous, but I imagine I would be too if I had legions of fangirls screaming after me wherever I went. Though if I did, I'm not sure if I would be complaining either...


Finally, at 7:30pm the last interview was over and it was time for the "something." Announcer Lady explained to the crowd that we would count down (in English) "3, 2, 1" then everyone would say "Lumos Maxima!" Radcliffe apparently thought that was the actual cue, so he yelled the spell quite loudly, but nobody else did. Realizing his mistake, he said "Oh, that one was just a practice," and Translator Lady related that to the crowd-- there was some giggling. After a few more practices and some pretend false starts from Radcliffe, it was time to do it for real. Together we chanted "3, 2, 1, Lumos Maxima!" and behind us something burst into light.


We couldn't tell what it was at the time (this picture is from afterwards), but we had just conjured up a great pillar of light next to the Roppongi Hills tower. I'm not sure whether it was the smoke machines operating for a few hours straight or else the general quality of Tokyo air, but you could see the high-power beams pretty clearly all the way up to the cloud level above. Having so magically created this shining apparition, we turned back to the stage only to find that Radcliffe and Heyman had disappeared again behind an impenetrable wall of smoke, sparks, and crazy lighting. Further helping the two make their escape, giant silver streamers shot from the top of the stage out over the audience. I kept three strands as souvenirs-- those and my "E" badge are the only physical proof I have of attending the premiere.


How I managed to get them in the frame I will never know-- I am always terrible at action shots-- but you can see the streamers just being shot at the top of this picture. With this as the finale, the premiere party was officially over. Those of us that were standing on top of backpacks got down again, we waited for the guards to let us out of our section, and after five minutes or so we had gotten free and were on our way to dinner. We didn't get to see the movie, but honestly I wasn't expecting to; all reports indicated that it was only celebrities, media, and a few lucky contest winners that got to go in to the theater. We were lucky enough just to get inside the arena I think, and it really was a lot of fun.


Until next time, be like me and Neville: Constant Vigilance! (Yes, I am holding an oversize cooking chopstick in my hand as a wand. And that is Norbert on my shirt. If you think that's overkill, then you may want to avoid this blog around July 21...)