Anime Convention

Can I consider myself an honest to goodness otaku now? Click the link if you want to know what otaku are. I'm not there yet, and probably never will be, but I did have great fun at the Tokyo International Anime Fair this weekend, which featured everything from Spongebob (not what I consider anime) to celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the much-loved, much puzzled over Evangelion series. And yes, of course, Pokemon. They even had previews of new Nintendo consoles and games, which of course, made me wish that my favorite Nintendomaniac cousin John was there with me.

We caught the Yurikamome Line to Ariake station, and while the line is above ground and resembles a monorail, we mostly passed amusement-type stuff like bumper boats and huge malls and ferris wheels. All and all, a pretty good view of some of Tokyo's seaside amusements, though everything we passed was manmade AND the train had no driver, which was somewhat omnious and Brave New World-ish.

The convention itself was fun, but not as huge as I thought it was going to be. I was expecting all sorts of anime crazies wearing costumes and acting like true stereotypical otaku, but no go. The only costumes were worn by the anime exhibitors, and most of them were these extremely skinny girls in hot pants and bras. The most deviant behavior I saw was some Japanese men with video cameras zooming in on particular body parts of these lovely, yet scantily-clad ladies. Nobody was even sitting at the makeshift maid cafe at the concession part of the convention center. Harummmph!

For those who don't know what a maid cafe is, it's basically a place where the waitresses dress in little skimpy maid anime type outfits and call the patrons (mostly otaku men) "master" and talk in those helium-induced anime babe voices. It's exceedingly gross, and there are host of these places around Akihabara, the electronics capital of the city and a huge otaku hangout in Northern Tokyo. I will try to post more about Akihabara soon.

Best part of the convention was scoring all kinds of free swag, thanks mostly to Rachel's free-wheeling, no-holds-barred bargaining techniques. We ran the circuit and saw all the costumed vendors, took lots of ads and goodies, listened to some J-Pop bands, etc. My favorite part was watching a 60-year-old woman do a reading of this really high-pitched anime voice, surprising everyone to find out that she was the actually voice of this really buxom anime babe. Awesome. Also great was finding the grab bags of real anime cels for only 500 yen for 10 hand-drawn cels and Tamahome postcards. Oh yes. I scored Tamahome postcards.

Here is me doing my best Charizard impersonation. And here is a big saw sticking out of the ground for no particular reason.