Bathe before entry: Japanese actress and singer asks fans to be clean before her concert

WASHINGTON (TND) — Concertgoers of all stripes are used to a bevy of smells in venues: spilled drinks, day-glow orange “cheese” and straight-out-of-the-20-gallon-barrel salsa for nachos, weed, etc. But performers who work in music and the Japan anime industry — and ticket holders to their shows — have to deal with a certain other smell: the crowd.

Anime fans, whether in Japan or the good ole USA are notorious for certain anti-social tendencies, especially the regulation of body odor. SoraNews, a website devoted to documenting and reporting on Japanese pop culture, wrote in 2016 something of an ode to the odor of anime conventions, where thousands of fans — even the most hygienic — bubble, bubble, toil and trouble with each other.

“Packing thousands of fans into confined areas for multiple days, often during the summer, produces a palpable miasma,” according to a 2016 article. “The exact bouquet is often a mix of excited sweat, dusty rare merchandise that was pulled out of a storeroom’s back corner, and the nourishing grease of cheap fast food.”

Users on the social media site Reddit have been less forgiving, calling the smell of an anime convention equivalent to “a rancid sewer” or “garbage mixed with wet dog.

For Rie Takahashi, a Japanese voice actress best known for her work in the “Fate/Grand Order” multimedia series and who has a burgeoning career as a singer in Japan, enough was enough. She took to Twitter the eve before her first-ever live show on Feb. 26, sharing a hand-drawn guide of concert tips with her 1 million followers.

Prominently among the tips was the illustration of a person bathing — in a more traditional Japanese style — and strongly but kindly suggested her fans do similar ahead of the show to avoid bothering or offending others with their personal body musk.

All of the responses have been positive thus far.

When one fan replied that they have difficulty bathing due to an injury, Takahashi replied with a recommendation of using sweat wipes and dry shampoo to both clean themselves and avoid any possible olfactory irritation from too much perfume.