東京アニメフェア Tokyo Anime Fair

Welcome to this years Anime Fair in Tokyo / Odaiba Big Sight.



You don't even have to enter to start marveling, since the Big Sight is itself a "big sight" ^^. The area for the fair consists out of four inverted pyramids (i.e. standing on their peaks) uniting to one huge area on top. It looks really impressive, and accordingly you have to take stairs to get to the main area.



Big Sight

Another big sight was the line of people queuing up for being let in. It started way outside the building itself and continued outside almost to the station U11 in Odaiba. However entering the building you still have a 10-15 min walk until you reach the real entrance to the fair. Adding 10 minutes on the outside, you can calculate a 20-25 minutes straight walk to the entrance. Now if you imagine standing this distance in a slowly always stagnating line, you can guess that it would take at least 4 hours to get in.
By then the fair would have almost been closed. So we did not stand in line but "only to see how far the line went", went inside next to the line and checked its end. When we thought to have found the end, we of course had to check if it was really the end, so we just joined the line at the very end and waited maybe 4 minutes until we were let in (4 hours / 4 minutes) .Once we were inside the fair, we were assured that the line does indeed lead inside, but now that we are already inside, we thought we can as well stay inside and have a look around and postponed the standing in line for after the show, when there are less people ;)

The inside was pretty huge and, as you can image from the line of people outside, pretty crowded. In spite of that there was disappointingly few cosplay to be seen. Basically the only cosplay was performed from Boothgirls distributing there flyers. Accordingly the number of perverted men was also way smaller than at the Game Convention.



Hired "Boothgirl" cosplayers







and some cool full costume mascots



one real cosplayer and he was foreigner ^^

Very interesting was the corner for the art schools and newcomer Animes:



their movie looked really good





we got two Manga and the postcards from this art school





pretty cool decoration fitting their Anime

We got a lot of cool stuff for free, including three DVD with Award Winning independent Anime, three lores of Manga, a poster of Motoko from Ghost in the Shell, some stickers including a Sasuke sticker (yuli-san was very happy) and some very cool free postcards.

We recognized some familiar Anime like Death Note, One Piece, Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist and got interested in some new Anime like 図書館戦争 (Library War), Yuli will investigate in that one. Studio Ghibli also was present and seems to have remastered a very old movie called パンダ子パンダ (Panda Panda) and we found some merchandising stores, were Yuli plundered all they had with Sasuke on it ^_^.



Studio Ghibli Corner



and the remake of Panda Panda



Al from Full Metal Alchemist



One Piece





Naruto



Death Note



Ghost In The Shell Table

Some other more or less interesting new Anime to come:



an Anime based on the Game Dragon Quest



and one based on Highlander


this one didn't seem very interesting



Yuli also agreed that Baseball is boring



However this one did

There were surprisingly many attractions for little children to be found around the fair. I wanted to jump into the bird, but they told me it was only allowed for little children. I must find a way to transform myself between the shape of a child and adult for and back. Any ideas?







We even found a little space which hosted the German animation: Die Sendung Mit Der Maus, which I loved as child and still love to see it from time to time :) Yet I am surprised it made it as far as Japan ^^





Sendung Mit Der Maus

Of course where there are Anime there is merchandise. The merchandise ranged from



standard figures to



very interesting artistic puppets.



Trading Cards are also a must concerning Anime, as are



stuffed puppets.



Yuli fell over the Naruto merchandise ^_^

Ryan expected a little more, and Yuli and me also found the Comic Salon in Erlangen, the town we are studying in in Germany also more interesting. But then again the Anime Fair was just what it was, a means to present some new Anime and Anime ideas and a representation of some studios and colleges involved in Anime and Manga.

We enjoyed it nonetheless and got a lot of loot, which we eagerly searched through when coming home ^^



our loot

mika

お台場 Odaiba

Woohoo spring is coming! And to celebrate the coming of spring, today is a holiday and we do not need to work. Yay!

So what shall we do? This night Ryan and me are invited to a Live House concert of Psydoll, which we had already seen once before. But before that
we decided to pay a visit to お台場 Odaiba, which none of us had seen before.

お台場 Odaiba

Odaiba is an artificial island in the Tokyo bay. It was formed during the reign of the 徳川将軍 Tokugawa Shoguns and its last use in this time was as a maritime frontier defense station against Americas fearful 黒船 black ships, with whom Commodore Perry arrived 1853 near 江戸 Edo (former name of Tokyo). Therefore the name お台場 Odaiba (kind of stationary cannon).

Afterwards the island was rediscovered during the economical boom in the second half of the 20th century. It was supposed to host gigantic monuments of Japans wealth and power and be a symbol for Japan's status. The whole project would have cost several billion Euro. Yes would, it was never completed, since Japan's Bubble Economy burst in the early 1990s and the plans for the island were discarded leaving an island of mud and incomplete structures.



The Fuji Skyscaper

After the economy recovered, major industries like Fuji started building their own skyscraper on the island and forming it the way you find it today: An island of amazing futuristic structures like the Fuji building or the inverted pyramids.



Come into the real of SEGA









and drive in cars



on half pipes



or try to escape from prision



you can also stick your feet in this machine and let it tell you your future

A place for fun and recreation the like gigantic SEGA Amusement Game Canter "JoyPolis", which Ryan and I visited. But there are also a lot of things to see for little kids (we ran into many elementary school classes), for girls to go on shopping trips and for guys to go on shopping trips.
There are some interesting museums, like the maritime museum and for car nuts (Toyota MEGA WEB).






The statue of liberty is on Odaiba island, in case you didn't know and you can enjoy a nice walk on the artificial beach, in case it doesn't rain, like in our case. Actually in our case it was more a storm than rain, which effectively allowed us to watch people get their umbrellas destroyed by the wind. We even found an umbrella graveyard.



we found an umbrella graveyard



and a guy reporting in the middle of the rain and street







more impressions from Odaiba

Urga / Psydoll

Afterwards we went to the concert and enjoyed five special bands. Each of them were special in their own account. The topic of the day was 機械魔術 Machine Magic (But imo only PsyDoll met this topic).

First was a cool girl in a red witch dress and a black with hat called Yuka playing the piano. For later song a friend joined her for some vocals.



Second was a guy from Czech Republic, who actually lives close to my home town Passau and has been to Passau on several occasions. He played a didgeridoo and made some awesome music with it. Again later he was joined by a Japanese woman for some awesome traditional Japanese vocals fitting mysteriously the Australlian didgeridoo.





Third were a Goth lady and gentleman. She was covering the vocal part, the music was play back and he was dancing and giving roses to everyone. I got
the very first rose :). It was playback, but they made up for it with a cool performance.





Fourth were the Zombie Soldiers. Three guys dressed in military uniform having corpse paint and black paint to make them look like Zombies. Two of them covered the vocals and one was playing the guitar. The rest was playback again. There outfits were awesome, but the playback music average. Yet I let myself go and enjoyed it though!







Finally came the stars of the evening: PsyDoll.
They completely covered my senses this time and made me create a cyber punk story in my head, which went along with the music. The story was very close to Blade Runner. A special detective for dangerous cyborgs got a clue that one of the PsyDoll band members was such a cyborg. So he went to his bike and drove through the dreary futuristic city of Shinjuku to the concert. There he first orderer a drink and then watched the band perform. During the next song he scanned each band member slowly noticing the the guitarist is a fully armed bodyguard type with incredible weapons and armor. Of course the dangerous Cyborg was Nekoi on the keyboard and vocals. After the show he procured some weapons and confronted them. They made for the exit and a bike car chase through Shinjuku began. Eventually PsyDoll's car crashed and it came to a fire fight. After a heavy exchange the body guard went down however injuring the detective greatly. Just when the detective was looking for Nekoi, she appeared behind him and set him unconscious. At the last song he awoke numbed and tied up in Nekois apartment. Then the last song was over and thus the story ended.







Later I had a great time with some friends, which I already met at other concerts and got to new some new guys and some of the bands above. Later we went to a bar and slowly drew to the end of the day.