Beyond Tokyo: Tyla’s ‘We Wanna Party’ Asia Run Hits Manila & Seoul

On 11 November, the We Wanna Party Asia Tour finally moved from Instagram fantasy to real-world sweat, opening in Tokyo as Tyla’s first full-scale headlining show since injury forced her to cancel a 2024 world run.

The Ariake Arena date sold out its 15,000-capacity, a landmark moment for a 23-year-old South African pop star who has spent the last two years turning “Water” from TikTok trend into global calling card.

From the minute the house lights dropped, you could feel that this wasn’t just another stop on a tour schedule; it was a reset button for an artist who’s been loudly manifesting “global pop star from Africa” and quietly rehabbing to get back on stage.

Clips flooding YouTube and fan timelines show Tyla framed by towering LED panels and a tight squad of dancers, moving like one big popiano organism. The stage design leans into her visual language: chrome, yellows and club-ready strobes that echo the artwork for her WWP (We Wanna Party) EP, already past 100 million streams and counting.

 Japanese crowds have a reputation for being polite and reserved, but on the full-show uploads from the night you can hear them singing along to “Water” and “Truth or Dare,” word-perfect, phone flashlights bobbing like a low-lit ocean.

But as every African touring story reminds us, nothing about global expansion is straightforward. When we first covered this Asia leg, Bangkok and Hong Kong were framed as part of a historic first wave: sell-out Thailand arena, Manila’s Mall of Asia, a clean five-city sprint from Tokyo to Singapore. Since then, real-world politics and logistics have come knocking. Thai outlets now report that her sold-out 14 November Bangkok show at Impact Challenger Hall 3 has been cancelled in observance of the national mourning period for the late Queen Mother Sirikit.

Live-updating tour page also shows Hong Kong’s AsiaWorld-Expo date as cancelled “for unknown reasons,” even as new mainland China and Gulf shows are added to the route.  Across stan forums and pop gossip threads, fans are debating everything from routing politics to over-ambitious scheduling a reminder that the business of putting an African woman at the centre of an Asian arena run is still fragile.

What’s not fragile is the cultural subtext. A South African pop star, shaped by amapiano, gqom and Bacardi, just sold out a 15,000-cap arena in Tokyo a city that helped break everyone from Michael Jackson to BTS with an 11-minute EP and a handful of singles as her primary arsenal.

On Tyla’s Instagram, the tone is breezy tour fits, rehearsal snippets, a quick “Asia, I love you already” energy but behind the grid is a highly organised push: the Pandora collab charm for her Tygers, the fashion-girl co-signs, the We Wanna Party EP doing numbers and seeding lyrics crowds in Tokyo now scream back to her.

From here, the party snakes through mainland China, Southeast Asia and the Gulf, with arena and festival plays lined up from Hangzhou to Singapore, Mumbai, Riyadh and Dubai, according to the official tour hub at wewannaparty.asia.  

Manila’s SM Mall of Asia Arena on 3 December and Singapore’s Arena @ EXPO on 5 December are already drawing feverish coverage from regional outlets positioning Tyla as the next big non-K-pop youth magnet.

If Tokyo is the template tightly choreographed, visually sleek, emotionally loose those stops could become the images that define this era in the global African pop story.

For now, though, the headline is simple: after months of speculation, cancellations and discourse, Tyla has finally walked onstage, in Asia, as the boss of her own arena show and walked off having proved she can carry it. The route may shift, cities may drop off and new ones may light up, but the energy that exploded inside Ariake Arena is the point.

She told us to party w her in ASIAAA!!!; Tokyo said “bet.” The rest of the continent is up next.