Event: Comic Market 66

Date: 2004.08.14

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Written: 2005.03.23

During the summer of 2004 I was in Japan from July 8th to August 23rd on a summer transfer student program through Waseda University. I learned a lot and had a great time during those six weeks (especially when I found out about the charmingly named chain Book Off! that sold used manga....Detective Conan for 105 yen each? Hell yeah! No wonder I could barely pack when I left, since I bought all 46 volumes that were available at the time....good thing my roommate had room in her luggage :P). One day near the end of my stay, I went out to karaoke with two other girls from the program, and I learned that Comiket had started that day and was continuing through the weekend. I was envious that I hadn't heard about it sooner, and lamented the fact that I probably wouldn't get to go, since those two said they probably weren't going back the next day and I had no idea how to get there on my own. Besides, the next morning I was supposed to be going on an all day trip to Odaiba for a fireworks festival....

Well, the next morning came. Me and my roommate Lily got up to get ready to go off to Odaiba. When no one else seemed to be around at the designated meeting time down by the dorm entrance, Kouta (one of the two Japanese RAs) went to go see whether the other people who had signed up to go still wanted to come along. It seemed a lot of people had stayed out late the night before (and a few people were sick, there was a bug going around the dorm at the time, which Kouta himself had appeared to have caught), because no one else wanted to get up and go. A couple of guys who were up and about had gone to Comiket the day before and were planning to go again, so Lily and I decided to join them. Lucky! It was a pretty long trip from the dorm to the place where Comiket was being held; we even had to take a special train separate from the usual lines. I think the trip took nearly an hour, but then we finally arrived at the building known as Tokyo Big Sight. The few hours I spent there resulted in a very different experience from any con I'd ever been to before.

I had been in Japan a few weeks so I had grown used to big crowds, but the sight that met me when we reached the outdoor cosplay area was truly amazing (you can see just what it looked like in Pic 2 at the bottom of the page). Comiket was different from American cons in that you couldn't just take pictures of cosplayers wherever you wanted; it all had to be done in the specified fenced off outdoor area. I have to hand it to the people who stand out there all day and have their pictures taken....the oppressive heat and humidity of a Tokyo summer day was only amplified by standing in a huge crowd of people, and I could hardly imagine staying there any longer than the time I took to snap some random pictures and get out as soon as possible (you can see the pics I took at the bottom with my brand new digital camera....most of them weren't characters I recognized, I just thought they had pretty costumes, and all of them were taken while or slightly after other people took pictures of them, since I was too shy to go up and ask them myself -_-;;) Some of the more popular cosplayers (i.e., those with barely any clothes on :P) even appeared to have handlers who would only let people take pictures of the girls for a specified amount of time before giving them a break (I caught one of them mere seconds before her posing time was over!)

After taking some pics, Lily and I tried to find where the doujinshi were being sold. We weren't really sure where to go, but decided that following the massive blob of people moving into the building would be the best course of action. This turned out to be correct, and we soon found ourselves in one of the three gigantic rooms where thousands of tables were set up for doujinshi circles to sell their works. We really had no idea where to start, so we bought one of the massive 1400 page catalogs that cost 1800 yen. We still didn't really know what to do, so we went to one end of the room called East 1~3 (which, as the name implies, was actually three rooms with all of the partitions removed) and just started browsing through....not a good idea, since before we even got a third of the way through that one room, our eyes were going loopy. We decided to go get some food at the convenience store inside the building and formulate a plan. When we had been wandering through the first room, I had realized from the huge section of Lord of the Rings doujinshi that many of the circles were organized by series, so as I ate my conbini sandwich filled with egg salad and fried pork and who knows what other ingredients that are found only in the unique Japanese take on American sandwiches I looked through the catalog to see if I could find series I would like to get doujinshi for. I didn't really find anything in the part of East 1~3 we hadn't yet searched through (in fact, a full third of the room was devoted to Full Metal Alchemist, which I hadn't yet seen at the time), but East 4~6 had Sailormoon and Gundam stuff, so we made our way over there. I didn't find any yaoi in the Sailormoon stuff (I guess I was holding out hope that I could find some KunzitexZoisite stuff after all these years), so I quickly made my way over to the Gundam area, specifically looking for Gundam Wing. By this time it was after 3PM, and since the doujinshi selling areas close at 4PM, we found that a lot of people were packing up to leave already. Still, I did manage to find some interesting circles that were still set up to sell things, and I ended up buying two Gundam Wing yaoi doujinshi from the circle Mitsuki-C. After that, we were off to the last of the massive rooms, West 1&2, where I looked for Trigun and Detective Conan doujinshi. The Trigun circles had pretty much all left by this point, and when I went to look for Detective Conan, I couldn't decide whether I wanted to read het or yaoi books....I think Shinichi and Ran are a cute couple, but the idea of Heiji and Shinichi is also very tempting ^_^ In the end, I didn't buy either type, deciding I should really know which pairings I liked before buying doujinshi dedicated to them.

And that was pretty much the end. We made our way back to the trains, and had a pretty hellish experience getting back to the dorm....the trains were so crowded with everyone leaving at the same time (and the rules in catalog encouraged participants to use public transportation to get to and from Comiket), and I was feeling pretty dizzy from all the walking around in the heat, but there were too many people aboard for me to be able to have a seat (and the extra heat from all the people wasn't helping the dizziness at all, either). It was also a bit dangerous when we got off the special train that had taken us to and from Big Sight, because there was an escalator down from the platform, and there were so many people trying to get out of the station that they couldn't really move from in front of the bottom of the escalator once they got off, meaning that the people coming down the escalator were pretty much crushing the peole who had reached the bottom but couldn't move forward. 'Twas a bit scary, but Lily and I made it back to the dorm alive.

That night I got a chance to look through the catalog more thoroughly as I debated whether I wanted to go back to Comiket the next day. Looking at the pictures that accompanied each circle's entry, it looked like Sunday was mostly going to be hentai (and not the type I'm interested in ^_-), so I decided not to go (plus, I was feeling a bit sick, and as the week went on I only got sicker each day, which was quite unfortunate since it happened to be the week of our final class presentations....but I digress). Looking back through the catalog, I was disappointed to discover that Death Powder, my favorite Trigun doujinshi circle, had been there on Friday. I probably wouldn't have bought anything since I already had all her Trigun doujinshi, but I still could have had the chance to babble in broken Japanese about how much I loved her stuff ^_^;; There had also been a group of Dragonball doujinshi circles, which I really would have loved to look through (better than getting into huge bidding wars on eBay for doujinshi that probably originally sold for only 500 yen or so :P). One of the most interesting things I found in the catalog, though, was the section on Comiket ettiquette (before you compliment my amazing Japanese skills, they had a page where they were written in English :P). It mentioned some of the rules I had figured out earlier, such as the rule that pictures could only be taken in the designated cosplay area, but there was one interesting item that said that cosplayers could only change into their costumes within designated areas on the event site, and they should never come to or leave Comiket wearing their costumes, as it's not something accepted by the Japanese population at large. This is quite different from the attitude at American cons where con-goers will proudly go out into the city in full cosplay regalia just to see the reactions of the confused patrons at the local Denny's. The divergent rules of each society only serve to highlight just how different Comiket was from any American con experience I've had, but I would say that both were alive with the spirit of otaku having fun doing something they truly enjoy, and in that way they were hardly different at all.

Pictures

Pic 1: Cover scan of the massive 1400 page catalog

Pic 2: A view of the mess that was the cosplaying area

Pic 3: Random cosplayer....

Pic 4: More random cosplayers....

Pic 5: Whee, look at them pose....

Pic 6: I wish I'd gotten this pic a few seconds earlier....she'd just been posing with those plates as someone took her picture

Pic 7: I have no clue who she is, but I thought her outfit was cool

Pic 8: Whee, matching outfits (once again, no idea who they are :P)

Pic 9: This is the girl I caught right at the end of her posing session, before her "handler" said time was up....

Pic 10: OK, so I've never played Final Fantasy before, but at least I know what series they're from, unlike most of my other pics ^_^;;

Pic 11: Detective Conan and Kaitou Kid! I just couldn't resist ^_^;;

Pic 12: Not a good pic, since it was taken from the side, but a cool outfit (though, once again, not one I recognize ^_^;;)