Arashi ends 26-year run with final Tokyo Dome concert

Arashi brought down the curtain at Tokyo Dome with a final concert that felt less like a breakup than the closing of a national pop institution. The five-member group ended its activities on May 31, finishing a 26-and-a-half-year run that began with a cruise-ship announcement off Honolulu in September 1999 and an official debut on Nov. 3, 1999, with ARASHI.

The last show, part of ARASHI LIVE TOUR 2026 We are ARASHI, featured a 33-song set that folded the group’s history into one arena night. ARASHI and Five were both on the setlist, giving the Tokyo Dome finale a full-circle feel for fans who had followed Satoshi Ono, Masaki Aiba, Jun Matsumoto, Kazunari Ninomiya and Sho Sakurai from teenage idols into middle age. Ono is 45, Sakurai 44, Aiba 43, and Ninomiya and Matsumoto are 42.

The farewell tour itself underscored how deep the group’s reach remained even after activities were suspended at the end of 2020. The 15-show run began on March 13 at Sapporo’s Premist Dome and moved through Tokyo, Nagoya, Fukuoka and Osaka before ending back in Tokyo. By the end, the tour had drawn an estimated 490,000 fans, a striking number for a group that had spent years away from the stage.

That scale matters because Arashi was never just a pop act. The group helped define the modern Japanese idol system, where music, television variety, acting, merchandising and fan clubs operate as one commercial ecosystem. Arashi became one of the faces of that system, turning songs, appearances and branded goods into a cross-generational presence that reached far beyond concerts and CDs. Their farewell closes a chapter in mainstream Japanese entertainment that touched media, retail and the routines of fans who grew up with them.

The final Tokyo Dome performance was also streamed live for fan-club members, with a repeat-broadcast window running through June 15, extending the goodbye beyond the arena itself. Arashi announced on May 6, 2025, that it would end activities after a final concert tour, and the ending arrived with the polish and scale that defined the group for more than two decades: not scandal, but gratitude, and not disappearance, but a carefully staged exit from the center of Japanese pop culture.