Uma 7th is cancelled because the visas didn’t come through in time. People were planning on going to this big show and are expectedly let down, like me. I am just going to write some thoughts down and hopefully that can be helpful for those coping, but also just for your information!
For starters, the baseline here is to understand what is necessary to put on a concert. You need obviously the cast and staff. When it comes to Japanese talents, you also need to have handlers and interpreters, so people flying in have basic hospitality support and can communicate with local workers; and obviously local contractors like a normal concert of this scale to do the concert production.
You put this together with your concert promoter team as well as a live production company who can source all this. Since it’s international in nature, the team will need to also handle folks on the Japan side and the US side. People need visas, so the production company will need to hire lawyers and do the in-between work to get those visas filed and approved. On that note, one fact we got from the announcement was that Cygames worked with a lawyer, and likely with Bandai Namco Music Live, to put on this show (BNML runs their shows in Japan also, and brought numerous artists to the States with this type of visa). This says to me that they 100% used the expedite process. It’s not that much more expensive given the scale of things in this case (total of 6 digits worth of costs versus a 4 digits fee), it’s once per petition (25 people each), and they probably needed 2-3 petitions worth of people.
It’s kind of silly to look at the low-level takes on twitter, with people not even realizing you can work around the need for a work visa, or that a work visa is even needed. Yes, if you are on a waiver or ESTA, you can only travel to the US for tourism and limited business stuff (such as for a business meeting, for a conference, etc). To come here to put on a concert, you need a visa suited for that.
Just to iron out the political aspect of the visa situation–it is a bipartisan problem. Artist visas are hard to get no matter who’s in office, when compared to other countries. However, this is the big picture take. The reality is because there hasn’t been a well-planned and competent execution behind Trump’s immigration strategy, you get a lot of herky-jerky policy changes that impacts USCIS’s capability to process the paperwork. This causes the bureaucracy to gunk up. In addition, these sudden policies are sometimes challenged (and lost) in court, adding layers of uncertainty and other sudden changes of direction in how the immigration and visa processing is done. What impacts H1B visas and student visas, for example, impacts the same pool of labor that processes O and P visas, which are the common ones for entertainment/concert purposes.
What we really need, writing as an American, is comprehensive legislation on immigration reform that reflects the current times. We almost had a bit of that in 2024! But nope, Trump wanted to run on “immigration” so the Republicans backed out of the bipartisan legislation during the presidential campaign. This meant while the ICE money got through another way later, we missed a chance to add budget to the CBP office, add more immigration judges and other improvements to the system. It doesn’t address O and P visas directly, but it would help with the processing times. And to be fair, the odds of the O/P visas being significantly revamped is not going to be great, it will take a senator to go bat for the oversea artists agents and not run afoul the various lobbies who may have a stake, which doesn’t seem likely.
Then there are the nitpicky armchair immigration lawyer claims–most I read online were actually wrong (at least on the EN side). Like, obviously this is gonna be a P or O visa. There are still people who are saying ESTA is good? Please don’t. There’s a 6 month filing period that you can try for (no earlier than 6 months), and you can pay extra to expedite the case and have it assigned to an inspector from the start. This is where people ought to say IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) or I don’t have any details. If you thought you can read it between the lines, as someone who actually have real details (albeit a tiny amount) and can also read between the lines, I can say you’re wrong if you think BNML/Cygames didn’t do any of those things correctly, at least based on a cursory understanding (as I’m not a part of this either). Well, what is incorrect perhaps I will keep to myself, but let’s just say we are in the immigration lawyer realm of things and for those of us who don’t practice AND don’t have first person details, we should keep our opinions to ourselves. Basically the people who can open their mouths are basically the ones who don’t have answers, and those who have answers either can’t speak because they know what’s going on and thus gagged, and are just very few to start so they’re drowned out. Here is a hypothetical play-by-play from an online not-IANAL if you want more of it spelled out.
The real issue as others pointed out is that because the USCIS is overloaded, and even if you expedite your application you might still get hit with the dreaded request for evidence (RFE). It basically resets the clock on the USCIS end and you (and your lawyers) have to figure out what they need to move the application forward, again. It means slow x slow. It’s probably the case this happened. The lawyers doing this would know best how much time to hedge, or they didn’t fully grasp the difficulty, or it could be a number of things. Maybe things are just slower right now for some reason. There are good reason to assume currently USCIS is having a slow patch, because this just happened recently, which caused a flood of halted application to hit the system. Even before these types of disruptions at the USCIS, getting those P or O visas approved on time was not a sure thing. The post-COVID period gave us things like the below greatest hit, imagine all those visas were halted due to the pandemic and now thawing into the system.
And in truth, the more you hear about this, the more you realize it’s amazing we even got seiyuu and Japanese artists performing at cons and what have you. It’s a lot of pain. It’s related to politics, but not the way you think, and unfortunately it took the most epic 2.5D josei seiyuu live concert on US soils off the table. Hopefully Cygames will try again. At least, I think they can afford to, given this whole venture does not seem to be premised on making money, and more about making money back so they’re not in the red that much.
Anyways, it’s not uncommon for artists playing shows or doing various things in the US to have to cancel because their visas failed to come through on time. This is different than artists whose visa was denied, or whose visa had to be worked on further so they run out of time. I think Uma’s case was one of the first, not the second or third. There has been artists who was flagged for traveling to certain countries (this is among the leading causes of visa consternations). In non-commercial visa cases this is usually something you can eventually proof out with the USCIS but it will take time. This is also not related to the ESTA “they put me in a room for 6 hours then I was put on a plane back home” cases, which is more wild to be honest but it has happened at a higher rate the last 2-3 years at certain ports of entry. Anyways, the reason behind this thinking for me is the way they gave us a 2-day notice as if things could come through, but I guess it didn’t.
Personally, the extra heads up gave me time to cancel my hotel booking without penalty, but I ended up keeping it since I still wanted to visit friends in town who are already there or are local, or are going anyway because they couldn’t cancel. My flight was not refundable but I can always turn it into future travel credit of some kind if I didn’t want to go. Unfortunately I think having to deal with the drama from Monday just made the suffering longer, since it’s not going to be over until after Friday, at any rate.
PS. Before I forget, I am not a practicing lawyer and don’t take any of this advice above or below as legal advice.
PPS. Instead of “Umamusume 7th Live Tour” they could made this “Umamusume Fest” and just have the tour stop be part of it. The “Umamusume Fest” part can be all the fan gathering and goods sale stuff. Can be “free to attend.” Why? Because this is a way to give a shape to the event the visa applicants are trying to go to, instead of a just concert stop on their world tour. Why not a concert stop? Then you really have to sell Umamusume as a music act, when they are more a theatrical/musical act, and you really are waist-deep in explaining the glorious seiyuu live performance stuff. It’s fine and all, but you probably don’t need to go that way, when a well-trodden path exists already. The price of being a trailblazer I guess.
Leave a Reply