Anyone who makes the trek out to the mountains of Naeba for the annual Fuji Rock Festival will tell you two things, apart from that they had a great time: It rains, and it¡¯s clean for an event of such enormous scale. But it¡¯s not completely sterile.
¡°I don¡¯t like it when things are too clean,¡± says president of Smash and festival-founder Masahiro Hidaka, with his trademark dry humor. ¡°There are countless types of people out there, so it makes me feel sick to my stomach when things are too strict.¡±
Nevertheless, the event that he founded in 1997 is known to be the cleanest large-scale music festival in the world. And for good reason, too. Punters will be hard-pressed to find the garbage that is so prevalent on the dance floors and mosh pits of many of the world¡¯s major musical gatherings. That¡¯s because a large portion of it ¡ª as well as solar energy ¡ª is used to power three of the stages as bio-diesel energy: The New Power Gear (part of the Gypsy Avalon field), Mokudo Tei and The Field Of Heaven.
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