YOU GET THE feeling that these days not much can faze Japanese pop queen Yumi Matsutoya. She has seen 30-odd years in the music and entertainment business go by and with them some 41 million records sold of the 30 albums she has recorded in that time.
She has also been responsible for some of the most audacious concert series in Asia; all wild costumes flitting about stages packed with dancing hordes under extravagant and spectacular light shows. Her props have also included a dragon (fake) and an elephant (real). It has long been said that her shows of the early 1980s were the forerunners of the J-pop and Canto-pop extravaganzas that are now common. And the latest of these productions is her biggest yet. After taking her Shangri-La concert series to some 320,000 people during 44 shows in her homeland in 1999, Yuming (as she is more commonly known) has brought Shangri-La II: The Planet Of Ice to town for two shows at the Hong Kong Coliseum this weekend.
Along with her comes a combined staff of about 200, which includes the 44 members of Russia's Artistic Circus. Fresh from their 51 performances across Japan, they have been embroiled in a frenzy of activity at the Coliseum all week, setting the stage - including a 40-metre long shipwreck and a skating rink - for this weekend's events. The whole shebang has cost about $23 million and reports this week even have it that a few thousand of Yuming's Japanese fans have come to town as well, desperate not to miss out on the action.
The InterContinental hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, where the Yuming camp has been attending to the local media, has also seen a flurry of activity. People come and go continuously, as last-minute instructions are formulated and dispatched. But Yuming remains the calm centre of the storm that billows around her. During a day of interviews in a plush suite, Yuming can be found relaxing on a sofa as a room full of stylists, assistants and general hangers-on undergo a hive of activity. It is, she smiles, all in a day's work. 'We have been doing this for a long time,' says the 49-year-old. 'So we are by now used to all the fuss.'
The other half of the 'we'' Yuming is referring to is the man sitting at the opposite end of the sofa - her husband of 28 years, and the general director of the show, 52-year-old Masataka Matsutoya. The pair met when he - once a session musician - had just begun to earn his producing stripes. It speaks volumes about the strength of their relationship that it has endured and prospered through the highs and lows of both the personal and professional sides of their lives. They often finish each other's sentences, cast knowing asides and defer in turn if they think the other can flesh out a response.
When asked to categorise their relationship, Matsutoya laughingly refers to it as like that of a boxer and a trainer. Yuming interjects: 'No. It's more like a horse and a jockey. And I'm the horse.'
The idea behind staging such elaborate concerts came first to Yuming during her early days as a singer when she witnessed one of the legendary shows by British progressive-rock super group Emerson Lake & Palmer in the mid-1970s. Thankfully (some may say), it wasn't the music that inspired her but the fact that they were known to spare no expense on live shows, and Yuming dreamed of the day she could do the same.