The Road Less Traveled

Tokyo, Comic Market, and New Years – Day 2: That’s a lot of people…

Friday, January 30th, 2009 by Rintaun | Uncategorized

The first night we were in Tokyo was odd. It’s like it was hitting us all over again that we were in Japan. But then it wasn’t just that, it was also that we were in Tokyo, the biggest city not only in Japan, but in the world. After reveling in that fact for a while, we were finally able to get some sleep to prepare for our early start on the second day of our trip. One day was done, four more to go. The next three would be spent at Comic Market, the biggest comic convention in the world. We were going to need all the rest we could get.

Note: To anybody who saw this early, congratulations. I meant for this to publish itself on the 30th (for me, anyway), so that it would seem like I write more often than I actually do… so if you saw it, and then it was gone, this is why.

The doors to Comic Market were scheduled to open at 10am, so we got up early around 7:00am and planned to leave by 8:00am. We actually kept to that schedule surprisingly well — and got a free breakfast that we didn’t know our hotel served, to boot. We were out of the hotel and on our way to the subway station by 8:05. We had to switch lines twice, and it was a little bit expensive each way (about 700 yen), but we got to our final stop with little trouble. When we got off the train at the Kokusai-tenjijou station (the name of the stop means International Exhibition Center), there were hundreds of people lined up just to get up the escalators to the exit of the station. It took us probably 10 minutes just to get out of there.

When we finally did get out of the station itself, we were greeted with the sight of more people than we’d ever seen in one place before — and we weren’t even there yet. It was a lot of people, just coming out of the train station. We made our way to the convention center, directed at every turn by convention staff, and we finally got to the end of the line — which was many thousands of people long by this point. In the eyes of the hardcore Japanese fans, who would’ve gotten there on the first train at around 5:00 or 6:00am, we were pretty late — and still thousands of people were streaming in behind us.

Then, we waited. We ended up getting into the convention center, rather surprisingly, around 10:20, if I remember correctly. Normally if you got there when we did, you would have to wait significantly longer than that. But the hour and a half that we were there was rather uneventful as it was, and as such was pretty boring.

Honestly, I can’t think of much to say about the convention itself. It was huge. And I actually mean that in many different ways. Physically, it took up the space of at least three or four football fields. But it was bigger than that in other ways — like the number of people crammed into it. If past figures are any indication (and a year in which the convention gets smaller hasn’t happened yet), then there were over 500,000 people in that space. That is a lot of people. There were so many people there, in fact, that getting a cellphone connection was really, really difficult to do simply because the network was so busy handling so many different people — way more than it was designed to handle.

Also, you probably have certain concepts associated with “conventions” (I know I do)… this was a bit different. When I hear “convention”, I normally think of sure, a dealers room and such, but also panels, and movie showings, and contests, and lots of different things to do. Well, Comic Market is basically exactly what its name implies — a giant sale. Over 30,000 different independent groups sold materials at Comic Market this year — I only saw a fraction of them. Thinking back on it now, I’m still marveled by just how MUCH was crammed into what really seemed like such a small space.

Other than that, I don’t really know what to say. I didn’t spend a whole lot of money on the first day — I only bought a calendar from a group that I’d never heard of before, but which caught my eye as I wandered past. Most of the stuff that I was looking forward to was going to be on the second day of the convention.

We ended up leaving at around 12:30pm. Pretty early, I know, but once you’ve gotten what you came for, there’s not really anything to stick around for anymore. And there is no entry fee, so it’s not like you feel like you’re wasting money on that, either. Once we left, we went back to the hotel and napped for a while. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. We were still too disoriented about being in Tokyo and just having gone to Comic Market (something both me and Mike were hoping to do even before we came to Japan) that we weren’t really comfortable going and wandering around the city, seeing the sights, etc. So we basically just stayed in the hotel all day, though we did go out for dinner.

Anyway, that pretty much sums up day two of our trip, and day one of Comic Market. The next day was the most fun I had at Comic Market, definitely… but again, that’s a story for another post.

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