Day 8 - Tokyo Anime Fair 2010 (Part 1)

As some of you may already know, I am an avid consumer of anime and manga. As I was planning the trip, I thought it would be fun to attend the Tokyo Anime Fair, which happens in March in Tokyo. This particular fair or convention isn't as fan-centric perhaps as Wonfes or even Comiket since it is largely corporate-driven.

For lack of a better comparison, it is essentially being a car enthusiast going to an auto show, seeing what's coming up for this year, and potentially getting suckered into taking home a ton of free literature, and buying merchandise from on-site vendors. Not a bad way to spend the day for an anime fan.

Now, in a little break from the norm, some people might not care to hear the explanation behind the pictures, so feel free to dive straight into the picture collection instead if that's the case.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wake-eat-sleep/collections/72157623589075809/

Otherwise, on with the post!

The Tokyo Anime Fair has been held at Tokyo Big Sight, an enormous convention hall located on Odaiba, a large artifical island that sits in Tokyo Bay. It is a bit of a destination of sorts for some folks for shopping and restaurants, in addition to having a statue of liberty and a Ferris wheel.

Now, I had already heard that some people show up pretty early to line up and be one of the first to enter. The reason behind this is to ensure their chances at getting any limited free things that might be available, or limited tickets to special concerts and events that are happening that day, or even to gobble up any limited merchandise that may be sold that day. Me? I figured that since I was armed with only a limited amount of usable Japanese, it may take me a bit to even figure out if any of the concert or events were ones that I wanted to see. I decided to take it easy, and leisurely make my way over.

Having read various manga and watched various anime, I had been exposed to various representations of Tokyo Big Sight before. I would like to say "kudos" to all of these, since they did a great job of representing its massive scale.

At distance, it's pretty imposing already:

And up close:

Of course, it was no surprise that I would have to wait in what looked like an extremely long line. No wonder people showed up earlier!

A quick note about tickets is that you can purchase tickets ahead of time at Lawson Convenience stores. You also can buy it when you show up, and that line is fairly efficient. With this in mind, unless you are trying to save time from having to buy it at the event, there's no real advantage to buying it earlier. In fact, if you like saving ticket stubs, you should purchase it on-site, which will give you a better looking ticket for your scrapbook.

Although the line was pretty long, it steadily moved forward on continual intervals. But each interval was just an indication of how many people needed to be processed.

Stage 1 - First "line" that I found myself in