Otaku UNITE!

I know you all have some burning questions to ask me (if it’s burning that bad, you should probably go to a doctor to check it out – HAHA!) and yes, the time will come to ask them. But I know all of you are dying to know (if it’s dying that bad…ah, never mind) where in the world can you find a place where nerdy men who live in their mother’s basement, have two or three clean shirts, and wear shorts three sizes too small can mingle with the most attractive of all Japanese women without having to pay them/go to a maid bar, I’ll tell you! That would be at the 2007 Tokyo Anime Convention at Tokyo Big Sight in Odaiba, Japan.

After an afternoon at the Anime Fair, even I was considering living the life of an otaku (what the Japanese call someone who watches anime and reads manga 23 hours a day (1 hour to sleep, eat, and buy more anime)). But do not fear, I was not converted to the dark side, but instead, merely lived the life of an otaku for just an afternoon.

The fair itself was pretty much unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The closest thing I can compare it with is the Auto Show in NYC at the Javits Center, but that really doesn’t do the TAF (Tokyo Anime Fair…duh) much justice. The entirety of three enormous exhibition halls was filled with hundreds and hundreds of vendors, movie studios, animation school, floating anime character balloons, food stands, and about 400 million people. The first thing I noticed when stepping into the main hall was SENSORY OVERLOAD. My brain shut off after about 13 minutes and I had to transfer to generator power, which meant that I sort of aimlessly wobbled around with my eyes glazed over like a sugary donut.

Every single anime title imaginable (I can only imagine like, 4) was represented in some way or form. For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, there’s an anime for everything. Some specific examples that I was introduced to yesterday include: baseball anime, robot anime, hentai (look it up for yourself, pervert), an anime where this girl changed into this crab thing and pinched people, cutesy girlie anime, mecha-anime (robots/droids fighting each other), samurai anime – pretty much everything you could dream of. And I’m not joking about that. You’re probably saying to yourself, “Yeah, well…there’s probably not an anime with talking parsnips in it, is there Dan” to which I would say “WRONG!” if I could read your mind and telepathically rub your naiveté in your face.

And of course, another one of the highlights were the cosplaying (people dressed as anime characters) anime girls. The people that organized the TAF are smart. Would you want to take a flier from a short, nerdy Japanese guy who certainly hasn’t showered in a fortnight and has the social skills of underarm hair? No. (Now, to be fair, I know people that are otaku and most of them are actually quite normal and nice. It just makes for a funnier story to exaggerate the small percentage of them that are actually crazy anime addicts.) So, every which way you are bombarded by young (20-30 years old, I’d reckon) women giving you fliers, pamphlets, tissues (they sell ads on tissue packets here), video cassettes (so 1993!), etc. And of course, even after I had collected about 423,000 sheets of useless gloss, I at couldn’t refuse the countless sheets of paper that were being thrust toward me. I ended up with so many freakin’ sheets of paper, I surely could experiment on enough of them to find some way to create trees from paper and solve this whole rainforest debacle myself.

The anime girls also love to take pictures (or at least, they look like they are enjoying it). Taking a picture with different anime girls is like reaching into a box that's filled with both good and bad stuff, eels, candy, oranges, apples with razors in them and the like, and not knowing what you’re going to pull out until after you’ve done so. This is because each anime girl has a certain pose and facial expression that they are known for. It could be a sad face. Or a pouty face (only at the TAF did I discover the difference). Most of the time you’ll get a huge smile with the “peace fingers” everyone in Japan does when they are being photographed (see pictures for examples).

The actual exhibits were pretty neat and had a bunch of merchandise scattered about for aspiring otaku to peruse and purchase. Many exhibits were also accompanied by sometimes frightening kigurumi, best translated at mascots, but they weren’t quite mascots in the sense that most of them didn’t make me want to hug them because they were so adorable. Some were just plain terrifying. There was this one that was basically a little girl that was morbidly overweight (poor thing) that sort of bounced around everywhere instead of walking. It was like both of her legs were pogo sticks and the concept of walking like a normal human being hadn’t crossed her mind in ages. The fact that there was a mascot of that sort was not the scariest part; it was that there was actually a real, living person inside of there who, if revealed, would have their life ruined and be exiled to the smallest of islands in the Pacific to live a life of mascot-haunted terror. Of course, there were normal mascots: Pikachu, Ninja Turtles, some robots, but most of them were far from cuddly and made me seriously reconsider my vision of Japan as a cute paradise.

There was also a girl dressed up as a rabbit with carrots as her breasts – just thought, you should know.

So was it an experience worth having, absolutely yes. Would I go again? Absolutely maybe. There were actually some cool looking anime that I would like to check out in the near future. A career as an otaku – meh, not for me. After the fair (and Bernadette getting interviewed by Swedish Television outside the main entrance hall) we went to dinner at an American (YES!) buffet on Odaiba. I was completely not surprised that we were the only Americans in the American buffest, but whenever you combine the words “eat” and “all you can”, all shame goes out the window.

Today we went to another baseball game at the Tokyo Dome between the Yomiuri Giants (Japan’s equivalent of the Yankees) and the Hiroshima Carp (yes, the fish). As I go to more and more Japanese baseball games, it becomes clearer and clearer how cool the fans are at these events. So passionate! So supportive! Not one bad word toward opposing team members or fans. Hopefully next weekend we will go to Chiba to see ex-Mets manager Bobby Valentine’s team, the Marines.

Three weeks from now, if all goes well, I’ll be in Thailand! Segoi!! (AWESOME!)

Jaa mata ne!