Perfume give their first televised performances of “Ima Ima Ima”

Perfume performed on a Japanese TV show AND THE OFFICIAL YOUTUBE ACCOUNT ACTUALLY UPLOADED THE PERFORMANCE!?

Well, they only uploaded half of it. And they’ve already set the video to private. So, here’s Perfume’s full performance of “Ima Ima Ima” on NTV’s With Music, uploaded to YouTube by a fan. A fan who is going to get all of the views that NTV coulda had, if they’d just uploaded the damn thing in its entirety and left something of it up for longer than a week.

Perfume also Perfumed “Ima Ima Ima” on CDTV Live! Live!, along with a performance of “Tokyo Girl”. But we don’t care about “Tokyo Girl”. We’re all about “Ima Ima Ima” right now.

I don’t know what it is about the cameras they use in Japan or the broadcasting equipment and / or technology. But Japanese television stays looking soft and washed out. And it’s becoming more noticeable to me than before, at a time when global media is becoming more widely available and the fidelity and image quality of media is more notable. It’s like everywhere else is shooting and broadcasting in HD, but Japan just…isn’t. No surprise there if it were the case.

HENNYWAY.

I am still a bit obsessed with the routine for “Ima Ima Ima”, ever since Perfume debuted a performance of the song. It really is so good and I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about this routine that’s got me so enamoured. And I think it’s the same thing that got me with “Polygon Wave”—it still has the Perfume-isms, but there’s a new energy to it. It’s a cool mix of signature Perfume, but also newness in us seeing Perfume move in ways we don’t often see. And it’s not the type of routine I ever imagined a song like this having. I didn’t think there’d be so much movement. I was expected more static and contained—something like “Night Flight”.

The twisty foot shuffle has so much potential to end up as a TikTok dance trend. I hope fans act fools and do that shit to enter Family Mart’s, get on trains, cross the roads and enter classrooms. All safely and without public disruption of course. And I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing some of the groups who cover Perfume dances make their own equivalent of the Nebula Romance – Part 1 outfits and dance the routine.

Perfume are great dancers with an amazing sense of spatial awareness and timing and this routine really highlights that. I recall a-chan had said in an interview (if I can find it, I’ll add the link to this post) that when presented with options for moves and routines, they usually end up picking the more complex ones. And I imagine this is a mix between the complex routines and moves probably looking the coolest, but Perfume also liking the challenge. After all, they’ve been learning these sorts of routines and performing them yearly for 25 years.