Lady Gaga’s Army Owns Tokyo

By the time the Born This Way Ball reached Tokyo in spring 2012, it had become less a concert tour than a traveling church—Gaga as high priest, the Little Monsters as congregation. Japan has always had a peculiar relationship with her. The theatrical excess, the costumes that function as armor or sculpture or both, the insistence that being a freak is not a condition to overcome but an identity to inhabit: all of that lands differently in Tokyo, where pop spectacle and subcultural devotion operate on a scale that makes Western fandom look casual. Watching footage of her Japanese audiences, you get the sense that they understood the brief before most of the Western world caught up—that this was never just a pop act but a complete aesthetic proposition, and they were signing onto the whole thing.