Well, I must say that Day 2 at Anime Expo was amazing. For Hello! Project fans, there were 2 main events to look forward to for the day: 1. Morning Musume’s concert (duh) and 2. Hello! Party hosted by Bryan and Jen of Hello! Ranking.

Up first was the concert. It lasted a total of 1 hour and 30 minutes, though most of the last 30 minutes was talking about the MySpace OPV contest.

The concert started with the usual opening video segment, with introductory pictures of each of the girls. They then went straight into Mikan to open up the concert, which was immediately followed by 3, 2, 1 Breakin’ Out.

Up next was member introductions, which was absolutely adorable seeing as the girls introduced themselves in Japanese, but had an short something to say in English as well. JunJun and LinLin’s English were particularly impressive here.

They then went to into a flow of songs (see setlist below) until eventually, they went into an MC segment where Takahashi Ai introduced “Ame no Furanai Hoshi de wa Sasenai Darou?” She gave a little speech in English about global warming. Ai-chan speaking English (well any of them speaking English) is too cute!

After a few more songs, Morning Musume’s handler (after a cute intro from Michishige Sayumi, who had a momentary lapse in memory and stumbled over her MC ^_^) came out to start the segment regarding the OPV contest. She then called a surprise guest onto the stage… Can anyone guess who? …. HANGRY! And then she called up a second special guest: Tsunku!

There were 3 categories for OPV contest winners. 1st up was the Morning Musume award, which was of course chosen by Morning Musume. Up next was the Tsunku award, chosen by Tsunku. And 3rd was an the grand prize, an OPV chosen by Morning Musume, Tsunku and high level staff of UFA. Here are the winning entries:

Morning Musume award winning OPV.
Tsunku award winning OPV
Grand Prize winning OPV

And then finally, to close out the concert, the girls sang 3, 2, 1 Breakin’ Out once more, which was fitting seeing as it is the theme song for Anime Expo 2009.

With the highly energetic and historic (for international fans, at least) concert complete, the next thing to look forward to was Hello! Party. I am very happy to report that it was a complete success! So many people attended (nearly all the name badges were used (I picked Niigaki Risa as my favourite member, after a long time trying to decide between her and Takahashi Ai).

The event was live streamed, and after a tweet about the live stream with the hashtag #MMAX, 2chan got word of the feed and viewers of the live stream got to 200+. I would estimate that over 200 people showed up for Hello! Party, which means with that many people watching through the internet, we had a Hello! Project fan event of 400+ fans. That’s absolutely amazing! For those of you who attended Hello! Party, I was manning the sign-in table through most of the night with johpan and Amy (she left at around 10:30).

Up next for tomorrow is Tsunku’s panel and then a day of autograph sessions for Morning Musume. Look forward to our report on Tsunku’s panel! Also, the transcript of Morning Musume’s Q&A panel is still to come.

Concert setlist:
1. Mikan
2. 3, 2, 1 Breakin’ Out
3. MC
4. Shouganai Yume Oibito
5. How Do You Like Japan?
6. Resonant Blue
7. MC
8. Medley
- a. I WISH
- b. Happy Summer Wedding
- c. Koi no Dance Site
- d. Souda! We’re Alive
- e. The Peace!
- f. Renai Revolution 21
9. MC
10. Love Machine
11. Sono Bamen de BiBiCha Ikenaijan!
12. MC
13. Ame no Furanai Hoshi de wa Sasenai Darou?
14. 3, 2, 1 Breakin’ Out OPV Contest winners MC with HANGRY & Tsunku
15. 3, 2, 1 Breakin’ Out encore