Tokyo: My obsession with China led me to become the king of Japanese entertainment.

Chapter 77 The Show Begins

2019年3月2日星期六，晚19：10，某特摄同好群。

"The live stream is on!" The group admin tagged everyone, but no one replied, because almost all the active users flooded into the live stream from various platforms at the same moment.

This is not an isolated case, but a common phenomenon in the entire tokusatsu (special effects) industry.

2019 can be considered the heyday of tokusatsu, with the revival of Ultraman and the peak popularity of Kamen Rider and Super Sentai in China. So far, their reputation has not been ruined by the endless stream of terrible works and increasingly obsessed fans in the coming years.

Some content uploaders can easily garner hundreds of thousands of views per video by simply reposting the original content without any changes, let alone masterpieces like Ultraman Tiga.

The news of Daigo's return has been bombarding the entire tokusatsu (special effects) community repeatedly during this period, with related discussions reaching hundreds of millions. From rumors to confirmation and then to official announcement, the emotions of tokusatsu fans have fluctuated from tension to anticipation to ecstasy.

What ups and downs? Ever since he finished Johnny's Entertainment, he's been taking off and has never landed!

These past two days, countless tokusatsu fans have been so engrossed in their work that they've lost their appetite and eagerly await the moment of reunion.

Unfortunately, Jun Sakurada was cunning. He knew very well that popularity would drop quickly without sustained support, so he did a lot of things during this period, such as urging Tsuburaya Productions and Johnny's to organize small events to maintain the hype.

Of course, it's not the kind of promotional price cuts that are obviously designed to make money; anyone who cares about such a small amount of money is an idiot.

Instead, these are all works that skillfully evoke passion and sentiment, allowing fans to genuinely participate, rather than just watching Tsuburaya Productions and Johnny's make empty promises.

The results will be clear soon enough.

After more than a week of agonizing preparation, the moment the live stream started, the massive influx of viewers nearly overwhelmed some less prepared platforms.

Of course, it wasn't just tokusatsu fans who were attracted.

Tsuburaya Productions, New Creation, and Johnny & Associates went all out this time, not only launching live streams simultaneously on almost all platforms across the internet, but also spending a lot of money to promote and drive traffic to this live stream.

It wasn't just them; the platforms responsible for advertising were also well aware of the emotional appeal of the names Ultraman Tiga and Daigo in China, and they promoted them with great enthusiasm.

In the past few days, it can be said that anyone who is still surfing the Internet has more or less heard about this live broadcast.

And the results—were surprisingly good.

Those born in the 80s, 90s, and 00s reminisce about their childhood, younger children look forward to heroes, and even those born in the 70s and older generations, including some who watched Ultraman Tiga with their children and grandchildren when they were young, are more or less curious.

After all, compared to the usual random celebrity recommendations, recommending childhood heroes to kids seems to sound more positive.

If possible, Xinchuanghua even wanted to get a broadcast on TV, but unfortunately, time was too tight and they couldn't complete the review process, so they had to give up.

Even so, they still did their utmost to secure a valuable endorsement:

Congratulations from CCTV Children's Channel's official Weibo account.

It has to be said that Ultraman Tiga has a really good image in the Chinese government. Famous quotes related to light, such as "In those years we all became light", have been used by many official accounts many times, and they seem to enjoy it.

It truly deserves its reputation as the only Ultraman series to be broadcast on CCTV.

This congratulations served as a reassurance to some skeptical parents, allowing them to confidently bring their children to watch the program.

With a wide enough audience, a large enough publicity campaign, and sufficient official endorsement, what kind of feedback will this combination of tactics bring?

It can probably only be described in one word:

explosion!

100,000, 500,000, 1 million, 5 million, 10 million —

The popularity of the live streams on various platforms skyrocketed, with the numbers changing at a dizzying speed.

The show hadn't even started yet, and the live stream had only been open for less than a minute when the combined popularity of all the live streams had already exceeded 50 million, and it was still skyrocketing!

"Fifty million! Fifty million over in China!"

"Just throw out all the celebratory posters for ten million to fifty million! Then send out another poster every fifty million!"

Tell the graphic designers to hurry up and release a few more images! The Chinese fans are so enthusiastic!

The PR departments of Johnny & Associates and Tsuburaya Productions are going crazy. They expected the buzz to be high, but they never imagined it would be this high.

No, you mean that one Ultraman Tiga could allow Chinese people to mobilize an audience of half the Japanese population in a minute?

It can only be said that the people at Johnny & Associates didn't know enough about the Chinese live streaming market in 2019.

This is an era where top streamers can get incredible nine-figure contracts, major live streaming platforms are still burning money and competing with each other, and the live streaming industry is still booming.

Even a newly launched streamer might have a popularity score of several thousand on platforms like Douyu or Douya, let alone such a terrifying amount of traffic.

If it weren't for Xinchuanghua's foresight in repeatedly telling platforms like Douyin and Douyu to be careful with inflated viewership, they could probably create the bizarre phenomenon of over a billion views in a live stream by now.

Even with less padding, the actual number of viewers in the live stream is still conservatively close to ten times lower than the number of real viewers.

So these 50 million popularity points actually correspond to about a million concurrent online users—is that really that little?

Of course not, especially for Japanese people who are used to small numbers, this is a number that can make them so excited they'll faint.

As for the inflated 50 million, it was enough to silence the entire Japanese entertainment industry, and even leave Japanese Twitter speechless.

Johnny's remained silent, only allowing tabloids to flood the newspapers with posters. The graphic designer responsible for creating the posters was in for a treat today.

Over the next ten minutes or so, as more and more people poured in, even though each platform had urgently lowered the percentage of inflated numbers again, the numbers remained terrifyingly high.

From this moment on, no Japanese person who has experienced this will ever dare to question the potential and value of the Chinese market.

"When will it start airing? When will it start airing? When will it start airing?"

"Tiga Tiga Tiga Daigo Daigo Daigo!"

"I'm going to make a scene! I'm going to make a scene! I'm going to make a scene!"

The live stream was filled with Cheng Jisihan and Jixian Warriors rolling around in the air, interspersed with a few Japanese rolls and expressions of anticipation.

The idea of ​​a Johnny's debut artist doing a free live stream was like a fantasy to Japanese fans, so much so that many people, especially longtime V6 fans, chose to go to the internal network and watch this free live stream of their idols despite the language barrier.

Time flowed slowly amidst the intense anticipation of the crowd, gradually approaching that destined moment. Some in the audience were so nervous that they counted down the seconds, making the scene comparable to the Lunar New Year.

Finally, as the clock struck 7:30 p.m., the live stream suddenly went black, the barrage of comments was cleared, and after a moment, several large characters slowly appeared on the screen.

It uses Ultraman Tiga's signature red, blue, and silver color scheme, but the font unexpectedly has a slightly goofy feel:

What is Ultraman Tiga?