I am so excited for the recently announced musical, and I'd like to travel to Japan to see it. Do you happen to know how difficult it is to get a ticket, from out of country? I tried looking up how the previous musicals sold their tickets (sale date, sites, etc) but there's so little information still available. (This is all assuming it's a similar process as it was in the past, I guess.) Thank you for all your hard work <3
All the ticket sites that will have Hetamyu when sales go up are, naturally, going to be in Japanese and additionally, depending on how the sites handle payments, might want a Japanese bank account/credit card. When I’ve shopped online for Japanese merch, normally I can get away with my American debit/credit card but I can’t guarantee that will pan out as easily (there have been a few rare times when my card(s) have been declined and I had been asked to use a bank transfer method via a (nonexistent) Japanese bank account).
Of course, that isn’t to say that it’ll be impossible to get a ticket and in order to do so, I would recommend looking for a proxy seller who lives in Japan and is able to handle buying the ticket for you. This is exactly the method I went for when I went to Japan in 2019 to watch a Toumyu production. When I went to Hetamyu back in 2015, I was already there for study abroad so my method to getting my ticket was much different from 2019. Either way, however, you will have to be aware of the very real chance you’ll have of getting tickets at scalped prices.
If you can get your ticket proxy seller to try for the ticket right when sales begin and they manage to get it, that’s awesome! Tickets will likely be at a base price of about ￥8,000 (roughly $80 USD), so naturally that’s what you’d ideally be spending. However, to use my Hetamyu and Toumyu tickets as an example, both shows sold out in like less than a minute and I was forced to go to resellers for the tickets. Hetamyu, I was able to get for a fairly reasonable $100, not that bad of a markup. Toumyu, however, got racked up to about $620 with that price being on the lower end of the spectrum for second hand tickets. For anyone’s sake in getting these tickets (myself included), I sincerely hope it doesn’t get that pricey for Hetamyu, but you’ll need to be aware of that possibility.
Jumping back slightly on the reseller topic, this is something that I was warned about when my proxy seller and I were discussing the Toumyu ticket: some productions check I.D. to ensure that the ticket holder is truly the same one as the name on the ticket stub. I personally had not run into this issue for either production and I would assume the new Hetamyu would be running along the same procedures as Hetamyu1 but I can’t guarantee that by any means. Thinking back to how Toumyu had us proceed into the auditorium, my guess is that an I.D. check might happen if you’re picking up the ticket via Will Call (in contrast, I already had my ticket since I’d met my proxy earlier in the week who had passed over my ticket then and only had to show the staff it before getting let in), but I’m not positive as those I had glimpsed getting their ticket from staff seemed to be going through the line too fast for a check like that. (I’m also half-Filipino and maaay have gotten a pass because they had assumed I was half-Japanese? Wouldn’t be the first time, but I’m not sure if that was the true reason.)
This is a bit of a winded answer, but I wanted to make sure to put in as much information as possible since there is a chance you could be spending a lot of money only to be ultimately not allowed in. From my experience, I am leaning more towards you being fine, but I want to make sure you know all sides of what could happen just to be safe.
