The Road Less Traveled

Tokyo, Comic Market, and New Years – Day 3: That’s a long line…

Saturday, January 31st, 2009 by Rintaun | Uncategorized

Three days, three posts (kind of…)! I think I’m on a roll! Unfortunately, you shouldn’t get your hopes up, because if I continue at this pace then I’m going to run out of material in oh, another three or four days or so. XD Anyway, continuing the story from where we left our heroes…

The second night in Tokyo we slept better. Combining the lack of sleep the first night and the exhaustion of traveling in a city you’ve never been to before, full of people you’ve never met, speaking a language you can speak, and understand, but have to work pretty hard mentally to do either… well, and you get surprisingly tired surprisingly quickly. XD

The next morning we woke up early again and made it out of the hotel at 7:55am. We’d improved our time! We also got to the subway station more quickly, got out tickets, found, and boarded the correct subway line more quickly, made both of our transfers more quickly, and all in all were tons more efficient on the second day than on the first. However, today we would get into the convention center significantly later than we did the first.

To explain why requires a small explanation of the setup of Comic Market. The convention is held in the Tokyo Big Sight convention center, which if you didn’t catch from the name, is rather big. Total there were 10 halls, each rather big. There were six East halls and four West halls. East halls 1, 3, and 5 were all connected together one one side, and halls 2, 4, and 6 were all connected together on the other. West halls 1 and 2 were connected together. So far all of these halls were to house the independent, fan-comprised groups that were selling goods, packed pretty tightly together all things considered. West halls 3 and 4 were a bit different, they were the only industry presence at the convention, and there were maybe 50 or 60 dealers there.

Now, the first day of the convention, we started off going to the East halls. I mentioned previously that I didn’t really go that day looking for anything specific, but Mike did. And well, most of the groups he wanted to visit were in the East halls. The second day, however, was pretty much reversed. Mike had nothing specific in mind to get, but I had quite a bit — and they were all in the West halls. So today we got in the line for the West halls instead.

It was basically the same routine as the day before, but once we got off at the final train station, we took the route to the West halls instead of East. The first day we had to walk a bit to get to the line, simply because the convention center is so huge, but the second, we actually questioned whether we were going the right way several times, because we walked for nearly a mile to get to the end of the line. And we weren’t wrong. The line was just that long. It was maybe 15 or 20 people across, and back for a mile. If each person is 2 feet deep (and may not have been — the staff in charge of the line made sure everybody was packed as closely together as possible), then how many people is that? You do the math…

In any case, we didn’t get in the convention center until about 11:45 that day. My guess is that day 2 is just that much bigger than day 1. The reason being, likely, that the content is aimed at a much wider range of audiences, age-wise. While I saw children there, and even familes, on each day of the convention, only day 2 were these types of groups very common. To put it bluntly, a ton of the stuff sold at Comic Market is pornography, and day 2 had the least of it.

Before we left for the trip, I went through the Comic Market catalog and found a large number of groups that I knew, most of them on day 2. They were pretty much all musical groups, so I went to Comic Market, ironically, not searching for comics, but for CDs. So when we finally got into the convention center on day 2, I headed straight for the booths where my favorite groups were located. The first I went to was titled COOL&CREATE. They were supposed to have released their new CD, but unfortunately, they didn’t end up doing so. However, I did get a DVD of a concert they had in October, which was a lot of fun to watch, and very informative on what to expect, too, since I’m planning to go to another of their concerts on March 6th.

I waited in line probably 15 minutes for COOL&CREATE. After that I went to the other groups, which were significantly smaller, so I had to wait usually 5 minutes at most for them. My favorite group, C.H.S released two new CDs, which made me really happy. The last group I went to is called Silver Forest. They are the most mainstream of the groups that I went to, so I ended up waiting nearly an hour in line to get the two new CDs that I didn’t have. But it was definitely, definitely, definitely worth it, because they’re good CDs. In retrospect, I should’ve also visited the booth of a group called IOSYS, another pretty mainstream group like Silver Forest — but I completely forgot, which makes me sad.

Anyway, after that I had spent probably well over $200, so I pretty much called it a day. It was getting on to 12:30pm, so I gave Mike a call (we didn’t spend very much time together at the convention, because neither of us was really interested in what the other was going to see), we met up, and made our way home again.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something — and I’m a little to lazy to go back and edit my story to include these details. For Christmas I got a book called The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson. I started reading it, a little bit, on the trip to Tokyo, but I wasn’t very far in by day 2 of the convention. I didn’t think to bring it to day 1, though it would’ve been nice with all the lines we ended up waiting in. On day 2, I did think to bring it, and I got about 75% of the way through it. It was rather nice to have something to do in those lines.

I’m having trouble remembering what else we did that night. If I’m not mistaken, we attempted to go to Akihabara (the famous electronics and anime town). We did actually succeed, but by the time we got there everything was basically closed (Japan basically closes at 7pm). So it was pretty annoying. We ended up going home empty-handed, except for a guide to Akihabara that Mike purchased at a bookstore near the subway station. That would come in handy the next day when we retried that trip.

Day 3 of Comic Market wasn’t nearly as much fun for me; I didn’t get anything, because the large majority of what was being sold that day was porn. But, well, that’s another post waiting to happen.

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