October 23rd, 2005
Update
- Jay Navok
Sailor Moon Doujinshi
Event
I went yesterday with
Yosenex (who
took the pictures for WoL), Brad (who runs the excellent
MoonKitty website), and
Yosenex's friend Nicola to a doujinshi event in Kawasaki called "Halloween
2."
For 300 yen we were given badges to be let into the event,
which consisted of one room of primarily doujinshi dealers, as well as a
bag of some sort of foodstuff. I didn't open it until I got home, at
which point it looked like this and it turned out to be "cookies." After
trying one I have put the word cookies in quotation marks
intentionally.
There were a good number of cosplayers in attendance,
including the people who let us in, one dressed as Haruka and another as
a starlight. Music blared in one corner of the room, switching around
between anime, live action, and musical songs.
Although I tried to take video, a woman came up to me
and tried to explain in broken English that I wasn't allowed to
film. (I had intentionally not spoken any Japanese because sometimes you
can get away with things if they think you won't understand.) These 20
seconds were as much as I got:
Click the picture to view the movie
Yosenex took a number of photographs of cosplayers which
he's letting me use here. Click the pictures for larger versions.
Hey I know that book
There are two things scary in this
picture, but I don't know which is more, creepy Mercury or creepy staring guy.
Is it Neptune? Is it Jupiter? No, it's
Neptupiter! Brad suggested Jeptune.
We had two shots of these two but I took the less flattering one for the
comedic value. Although, Tomoe is actually smiling in this shot; for the most part he
was walking around with an uncharacteristic serious face.
There were a good deal of people who
came as one of the starlights or three lights, I have to wonder if it's
coincidence. Notice another one peeking out from the right.
Although I didn't intend to spent any money I did end up
getting some of the stuff I saw for sale.
As I was waiting to purchase that doujinshi you see in
the bottom middle, another woman took a copy. As she did so, she chatted
up the writer, telling him how powerful his stories were and how the
previous installment made her cry. She inquired as to when the next
would be available, and he said not until the spring. I got it because
the cover looked interesting, but it's actually not so much a fan-comic
as a text story with occasional images. The flyer in the top middle was
a freebie with the purchase of the astrology book to the left of it.
On the bottom left is a puzzle sheet that was given out
when we entered, I may scan it once I get a scanner. There was a 22
question quiz (actually part of a longer one that was in a booklet you
can purchase, Brad got it) as well as different wordsearch games and
such. We spent a good half hour trying to answer the quiz and I'm pretty
sure we got most questions right, but we weren't around to hear who won.
There was some sort of tea and cakes service at 4:30 for
500 yen but the food seemed to be the same stuff they were giving out
for free earlier, and it didn't make much sense for us to stay. While
some of the people, like those you see holding up the books, were
talkative (and excited to meet foreign Sailor Moon fans, we were the
only ones there and I think they were very surprised to see us)
others shied away. I think many of them knew each other through various
internet or doujinshi circles and we were kind of the odd-men-out in
more ways than one. Incidentally, we did find one English-language good
there, an official subtitled S or SuperS (I forget) video tape.
I'm happy to see that Japanese Sailor Moon fandom is
still strong enough to support an event like this; and I was surprised
at how heavily anime-focused it was. While there was a live action
presence, it seemed overwhelmed by anime-style and musical-style
cosplayers and doujinshi; that's just my opinion, though, and Brad/Yosenex's
may differ.
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