Millions of people assemble outside the Tokyo Dome in anticipation of Taylor Swift’s concert on February 7, 2024. Taylor Swift has solidified her position as the leading female musician who draws immense crowds.

To date, Ishiyone has attended more than 20 concerts in eight cities – and is already planning future trips to Germany, Austria and the Netherlands to attend Swift’s shows there.Childhood friends Sarina Saito, 18, and Aimi Satou, 19, said they were looking forward to doing TikTok chants at the concert. “We worked hard at part-time jobs (to afford) this,” they said.

Excitement among Swifties, as her fans are known, had been building for days.Organizers began selling tour merchandise at the Tokyo Dome on Monday, with large crowds waiting outdoors in the snow and sleet for Taylor-branded hoodies and sweatshirts. One fan from the Philippines, who flew to Tokyo for the concert, said on TikTok she’d stood in line in temperatures hovering around zero for two and a half hours.

Fans have also prepared through rituals that have by now become established traditions among the Swiftie community: making personalized friendship bracelets to trade with other concert attendees, practicing crowd chants and curating carefully chosen Taylor-themed outfits.

What we’ve seen with the Taylor Swift tour is something that we’ve not really seen before,” said Richard Clarke, an analyst at investment firm Bernstein. “It’s been a very well-timed post-Covid event, a sort of cultural event, everyone seems to want to go to this.”

“It’s been such a popular tour that people have found that their home markets are often sold out, and therefore have begun to travel to other markets to try and find tickets,” he added. “I’m sure that’s going to be the case with Asia as well.”

Two fans at the Tokyo Dome on Wednesday said they’d traveled from New Zealand for the concert. “We tried to get tickets to Taylor Swift in Australia, but we just could not, it was two weeks of pressing the refresh button, trying to get tickets, couldn’t get tickets, and (my friend) said, let’s try for Japan,” one said.

In a sign of just how international the crowd was, one attendee described hearing multiple Asian languages inside the stadium on Wednesday. But then Swift appeared, the music began playing and tens of thousands of people sang as one in the common tongue of her lyrics.