Vocaloid
Originally, Hiroyuki Ito—President of Crypton Future Media—claimed that Hatsune Miku was not a virtual idol but a kind of the Virtual Studio Technology instrument. However, Hatsune Miku performed her first "live" concert like a virtual idol on a projection screen during Animelo Summer Live at the Saitama Super Arena on August 22, 2009. At the "MikuFes '09 (Summer)" event on August 31, 2009, her image was screened by rear projection on a mostly-transparent screen. Miku also performed her first overseas live concert on November 21, 2009, during Anime Festival Asia (AFA) in Singapore. On March 9, 2010, Miku's first solo live performance titled "Miku no Hi Kanshasai 39's Giving Day" was opened at the Zepp Tokyo in Odaiba, Tokyo. The tour was run as part of promotions for Sega's "Hatsune Miku: Project Diva" video game in March 2010. The success and possibility of these tours is owed to the popularity of Hatsune Miku and so far Crypton is the only studio to have established a world tour of their Vocaloids.
Minoru Miki
From 1992 with "Wakahime", Miki turned to a pan-Asian perspective, incorporating music and instruments from a number of Asian countries in his compositions and collaborating with a number of Asian artists. Some of Miki's operas from then on – and notably "Wakahime" and "Aien" – also increasingly tend to deal with episodes of Japan's presence and interaction with its Asian neighbouring countries, often incorporating the use on stage and within the plot of such countries' traditional instruments.