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Woman arrested for reselling Arashi tickets in Japan

By | Published on Thursday 22 September 2016

Arashi

A woman in Japan has been arrested for reselling tickets for concerts by popular boyband Arashi, netting herself ¥10 million (over £75,000) over a two year period.

According to RocketNews24, Izumi Nakayama funded the purchase of around 300 tickets through her work as a dog breeder, putting them back onto the resale market at inflated prices once the performances had sold out. However, she was arrested this week on suspicion of violating Japan’s Secondhand Articles Dealer Act.

Exactly why Nakayama has been singled out isn’t clear, when a quick online search will throw up many individuals reselling Arashi tickets. It’s possible that she just wasn’t as careful in masking her identity as others and is being made an example of to deter others. She may also have been found out when Arashi introduced facial recognition scanning at their shows.

Touting has become a big topic in Japan of late, after the industry there launched a campaign against the secondary market, similar to the FanFair campaign in the UK.

The group, who added their name to that campaign, are currently poised to become Japan’s number one boyband once veteran pop outfit SMAP finally retire at the end of this year, and they have a particularly fervent fanbase (as shown in one of our all-time favourite Beef Of The Week columns). So, picking on someone who exclusively sold tickets to their shows does make it a more high profile arrest.

Precise laws around ticket touting vary from county to country, and in the UK only reselling tickets to football matches is actually a criminal offence. Explaining the local laws, Tokyo Metropolitan Police state that while it is fine to purchase a ticket to an event and then resell it if you find that you are unable to attend, buying tickets only with the intention of reselling them is illegal without a proper permit. Nakayama seemingly did not have such paperwork, and clearly wasn’t buying 300 tickets because she likes some space around her at boyband shows. She has reportedly admitted that she was acting commercially.

Whether targeting individual resellers like this will have any effect on the market is debatable. Despite the laws explained by the Tokyo police, secondary ticketing is widespread in the country. Japan has a number of domestic ticket resale websites and, as RocketNews24 notes, there are a number of nationwide secondary ticketing chains which have physical shops too.



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