I decided to write about the swag, purchases, and other tangible spoils from AX 2009 separately from the standard report because I figured I would be including many pictures, which you may gaze at below.

Assorted Things From The Exhibit Hall #

Vertically from top left:
- BlazBlue clear file from AKSYS
- flyer for Katayanagi Institute
- DVD of 2006 Creative Works Collection from Manga Animation Dept. (Nippon Engineering College of Hachioji)
- MangaGamer trial DVD (I have two other ones…)
- Gundemonium Collection flyer
- Tenshinma postcard from www.ouranimelife.com
- DS stylus shell/extender, bought from NIS America booth for $1
- Neo Steam postcard flyer with promo code on back (found in Atlus bag?)
- JTVA flyer

Vertically from top left:
- MangaGamer flyer
- ShoDojo postcard from FUNimation
- Gaia Online with code for item (found in registration bag)
- Marble Pop free shipping from Amazon (2DVV2CZZ until Aug 31st)
- Crispin Freeman & JTVA flyer for panel
- FUNimation “Stay Connected” bookmark

Disc 1 of Tylor for asking a question during Nozomi’s panel & a Pangya foam golf ball from TOMY

Every once in a while, we’d get approached by these electronic music promoters. I read a little bit of the edm magazine.

The registration bag and the comparatively larger bag I got from Atlus’ booth.

Not pictured: a KIRAKIRA poster bought for $3 from the MangaGamer booth.

Three Exhibit Hall Fans #

Front side: Otakushoptokyo.com, Shuffle! (MangaGamer), and Prinny (NIS America)

Back side: Otakushoptokyo.com info, Suika A.S+ (MangaGamer), Rosenqueen.com

Eva Magazines From Kinokuniya #

I bought the August Newtype ($12) and Evangelion Special ($6) from the Kinokuniya booth.

The summer Eva special consists of chapter 13 through 26 of Sadamoto’s manga, five EVANGELION@SCHOOL strips, three “Anthology” short tales (including one where Keroro shows up!), and a 20-page teaser for the Summer Wars manga that is set to start running in Kadokawa’s new Young Ace monthly magazine. Vol. 1 of Young Ace came out in Japan on July 4th and there were many reminders of that throughout the issue including a full-page color Summer Wars image with the slogan “Magazine for people who never give up reading Comic!”.

Part of the Summer Wars section. (I’m digging Natsuki and the movie hasn’t even come out yet.)

The Newtype issue came with an Eva 2.0 T-shirt with Asuka on it (with dominant flash…).

The other side of the wrapping.

The shirt folded out. This one seems to be an adult small, like another shirt I’ve gotten from a Japanese magazine.

Autographs #

Booklet from Madlax volume 1, signed by producer Yosuke Kuroda

Inside of Trigun manga vol. 1: Yasuhiro Nightow on top, Satoshi Nishimura on the bottom

Seiji Mizushima’s autograph on Shaman King vol. 1. Yes, he did direct this.

I also had Mizushima sign the inside booklet of the FMA movie special edition.

A closeup on that page. He drew a quick Al sketch after starting to do a Gundam one.

Book-Off Purchases #
After leaving the Convention Center but before heading home to northern California, I went down I-110 and stopped by the Book-Off in Gardena. I’d never been in one before but it was nice to saunter down the aisles and pick up some manga I had planned to look for as well as discovering ones I hadn’t.

Book-Off bag with the manga stacked up within it.

The manga laid out.

Vols. 1 & 2 of Natsu no Arashi and vols. 1 & 2 of Shikabane Hime

Interior pages from Natsu no Arashi vol. 1

Interior pages from Shikabane Hime vol. 1

Now I have the first 4 volumes of Mahoraba – I already owned vol. 2.

Interior pages from Mahoraba vol. 1

First two volumes of The D.E.D. Trick!

Interior pages of The D.E.D. Trick! vol. 1

Sutekina Ai no Monogatari (すてきな愛の物語), WORKING!! v.1, and Shibuya Guardian Girls v.1

Interior pages from Sutekina Ai no Monogatari.

Interior pages from WORKING!! v.1

Interior pages from Shibuya Guardian Girls v.1

I forgot to venture into the other half of the store since I wanted to start my journey home and already spent too much time in there so I don’t think I came across the artbook section like Alex did. Maybe next time…

Anyway, my plan for each Book-Off item is to try slowly reading through them (some will be slower than others) and writing a post for most of them. My in-store buying strategy was to not get a volume of something I’d already read or was already available in English, meaning I had to leave the Ghost in the Shell manga, Hayate no Gotoku! vol. 6, Manabi Straight, and a few others behind. That was partly from wanting to support those works with retail purchases but it was more motivated by the desire for discovery. I hope that decision pays off once I manage to get through these.

Pictures courtesy of Akibablog

The August 2008 issue of Dengeki Daioh hit stores in Japan yesterday and the 900-page, 35-work copies are so thick that a stack inside the Akihabara Gamers reached the roof. (Those interested in what’s inside the issue can read this post on Akihabara Channel.)

There were even some attached to the side of a sidewalk kiosk.

Here is a comparison shot between the August issue (left) and July’s (right) from another Akibablog post.

In order to help customers carry their purchases, stores offered large bags branded with Yotsuba&’s Fuka Ayase, who also graces this month’s cover…

…a reminder that the manga Kemeko Deluxe! (that runs in Daioh) will have its anime adaptation air in October [flip side of Fuka design]…

…a different reminder that the first DVD of Library War comes out on August 6th…

…and a To Aru Majutsu no Index design bearing the phrase “We call her RAILGUN”.

Plentiful shrinkwrapped copies of Katamari Damacy at its original price of $20! (The game is also “in stock” on frys.com at the same price.) By comparison, Gamestop only has used copies priced at $29.99, ten dollars more. I didn’t have a PS2 back when it was released in the summer of 2004 but now that I own one, I instantly grabbed one off the shelf while wondering why this store still had a fair number of new copies three years after its release.

I then tried to find the anime DVD section and found this banner on one side of the aisle. (The girl on the upper left is from DNA^2, an anime that arrived on my doorstep Saturday from RightStuf’s sparse Xmas sale - I intend to watch it over the next couple weeks.) As I expected, there weren’t any deals to be found but…

I was similarly surprised by how many Haruhi vol. 1 LE boxes on the shelves. I unfortunately cut off a couple on the right when taking the picture so there were 16 there and probably some more in the storeroom.

Finally, something that I actually found while unlocking my car before I left home: the head of a Chopper figurine. I have no idea how that got onto the street near the driver’s side door since I don’t have many small figures and those I do own reside on my desk in my Davis apartment. Somehow, the “rocking hard” expression makes me want to string a chain through the hat and hang it around my rear-view mirror.

Last week I ordered two issues of Shonen Ace from Akadot Retail mainly for the pack-in extras (got the tip for December from Furu Anime Panikku) and received them in the mail Wednesday. The “appendix” for September’s issue was a Haruhi battery-operated fan while December had a medium size Evangelion T-shirt meant to celebrate the 13th anniversary of Shonen Ace. More pictures after the jump.

Here are the backs of the issues, where the bonus items were either rubberbanded to or put in a bag with the magazine.

The Evangelion T-shirt: it has a nice black-on-white color scheme with a chaotic collage of elements. And more importantly, the medium size fits me. *adds to tee rotation*

The box top for the Haruhi battery-powered handheld fan…

…the back…

…and a side that says “Portable Electric Fan ‘Sen-pu-ki’”.

Here’s the face of the fan itself. I’m wondering if there are fans with the other characters using the chibi designs seen on the front of the box.

The back of the fan features the Haruhi logo text outlined in red on the battery cover. It takes two AAA batteries.

Finally, an semi-artistic attempt to photograph the blades at the top of the fan.

As for the content of the issues, I’ll try to make a post about anything interesting I find in either of them over the next couple days. I’m not guaranteeing anything though because finals begin Monday and I have some studying to do this weekend.

Last Saturday, I went to a Bleach fan meeting in Nordpark in Düsseldorf where many people cosplayed and had fun talking, eating, and posing or taking pictures. I asked a couple people some general questions and I learned that dubbed German anime on TV sucks (the example given was Naruto), some Bleach fans read the English scanlations, and confirmation that there is very little, if any, German fansub action. I managed to make some friends and actually ate dinner at someone’s house. After the jump: a lot of pictures from the event, including some of the general Cosplay/Visu Treffen that was convening in a different part of the park (there was friendly interaction between the groups) as well as shots of the beautiful park itself.

Okay, those of you who are knowledgable with kanji, please tell me why there is a difference between Thomas and Tom when writing them in Chinese? I found these two cards on a rack near the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) in Düsseldorf and wanted to know what each says. It would also be appreciated if you could point out any inaccuracies.

I really liked Macross Plus and I’m wondering how Sharon Apple sounds when she “sings” since she’s an AI with a computer generated voice. The character interaction within conversations seemed natural and there was always something interesting whether it was the test piloting action, Isamu hitting on Lucy and later Myung, or Myung dealing with her past and talking with Guld. Definitely going to be watching for the next three weeks. Also, the planet Eden looks a lot like Earth, doesn’t it?

Scott was right when he criticized the commercial breaks and the interstitials. Ad breaks happened less frequently during Macross Plus than it did during Tokko but they are still a little too close together. The interstitial jokes were kind of funny but the high-pitched girl’s voice was annoying.

Like any other Sci-Fi Channel show, the credits were squished down for about 30 seconds to allow for a promo to take up most of the screen before expanding back to full size. Besides that, I thought it was a pretty good programming block (they kept Tokko widescreen!) and it’s nice to have another option for watching dramatic anime on basic cable besides Adult Swim.

P.S. The Twilight Zone episode that aired after the block was one I hadn’t seen before and pretty interesting so if you’re still up at 1am and don’t want to watch Inuyasha (they’re still running reruns of that?!?), you can fall asleep to old-school scifi. Then again, I guess you don’t have that problem if you record the block on your PVR!

Funimation shipped the package through UPS using a nice padded envelope.

The above spread includes a survey sheet, the return envelope for the surveys, a lot of promo cards, a booklet from the second Trinity Blood volume, and the requested DVD (Moon Phase 1). Extras in the past have varied from Basilisk cards to Baki the Grappler cardboard punchouts to Negima stickers.

The promo cards that come with the DVD usually total 20 (five each of four designs). Shown above is how they stack up next to a DVD case.

The case is basically the same as if one had bought it at retail. That means there is no holepunch or slash through the barcode, for those of you who care about such things.

The club may be getting the show free of cost but it is not entirely free from obligation. Funimation asks that questionnaires be filled out after the DVD is screened and sent back to them using the provided postage-paid envelope. I wonder how many people would honestly answer “MiniDVD” to question 10…

Now, usually the officers filled out the questionnaires themselves, although we once polled those in attendance and put those numbers down. Well, I guess the club isn’t supposed to do that anymore according to the letter that was included. The bad part is that I’ll have to make copies but the good part is that I won’t have to do it until a month from now.

For the past couple months, I’ve been considering trying out a similar program that ADV offers called Anime ADVocates. However, I have this fear that some of the episodes on their monthly samplers might be dub-only and that would not be looked upon favorably in our sub-only crowd. Besides I like being able to pick a DVD of the same series that allows an audience to get a good handle on an anime’s flow and story and can also be auctioned off at the end of the year to supplement club funds.

Two weeks into the new year and I’ve already checked off one of my resolutions for 2007 – attending a convention. This past weekend I went to Sac-Anime and decided to interview some of the vendors and artists, using my MP3 player’s built-in microphone. So over the rest of this week, I’ll be posting audio from those interviews along with transcriptions because it might hard to hear what’s being said when there are hundreds of people in the same building.

I had never been to the Scottish Rite Center before so I didn’t have a good sense of space before I arrived. I had pre-registered and intended to be there before 9:30 so I could but I woke up a hour later than I had planned to and got there a little after ten. There were four main rooms to explore: the vendors/artists hall, the anime room, the panel room, and the video game room. The vendors’ hall had a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament going on during the morning and afternoon and the gaming room had the usual of Mario Kart, Halo, and DDR along with the PS2 import Bleach: Blade Battlers, which I played with some stranger and we had to get used to the idea that Circle meant “Confirm”.

Goods:

A lot of the tables inside the main hall were vendors. I tried to keep myself to a $60 budget and I did except that I wish I had brought a little more to get some cool bookmarks… Anyway, among my purchases were New Cutey Honey, Genshiken Vol. 1, Nodame Cantabile Vol. 2, Haibane Renmei 1 + Artbox, and the new Gumby issues #1 & #2.

I also got free in my registration bag a program book, a wall scroll calendar featuring characters from NecrOphelia, and a mini-figure of Sango and Kirara from Inuyasha.

Random Pictures:

This was one of the sample iron-on designs laid out on a table and too strange not to take a picture of.

As I was walking out for lunch, I saw a car that was all white except for the Japanese on the driver’s side door. After translating some of it, I think it’s the “personal use” car of a shop owner.

David I-forget-his-last-name (sorry, dude!) had some VERY nice prints at his table and you could have him draw something for you and pick it up a little later.

The screening room was almost barren in the morning and then filled up gradually until it was flush by mid-afternoon. This picture was taken during one of the Haruhi episodes; I’m sorry you can’t see much of the screen, I used a flash.

I only took one cosplay picture — this Domo-kun box person — because (1) I felt uncomfortable asking people to pose for me and (2) there wasn’t much space inside. There was this guy who looked like Koizumi but he walked away before I could get my camera out.

Interviews:
This was my first time interviewing people in a public space so please excuse me if I accidentally held the microphone close to my mouth early during the first two or three or if there are awkward silences. I have about 2 1/2 hours to sift through and chop stuff out but hopefully they will all be posted (with transcripts) by the end of the week. The people I talked to include, but are not limited to:
Bay Area Artists Unite (BAAU) [site]
Ayame Sakuma (Yaoimakestheworldgoround.com) [site]
someone from Gumby Comics [site]
Che Gilson [site]
Manga contestant Megan Lawton (Tale of an Emo) [entry]
Yoko Molotov & Amanda (Demented Dragon) [site]
Fat Rabbit Farm T-Shirts [site]
J-Rock Connection [site]

Yesterday I went with the anime club to visit Japantown and had a pretty good time. The announced departure time was 9 o’clock but that was actually to get people to leave by 9:30. Three cars left from campus and one of them (mine) stopped in Vacaville to pick up someone who was a little late.

My group was the first to arrive after a little bit of trouble locating the Japan Center. I tried to give directions that unfortunately ended up being slightly wrong but it was okay because we got there in one piece. We kicked around Kinokuniya and waited for the others to get there. Everyone grouped together in the store and agreed to let people wander and meet back in front of Kino a hour from then for lunch. I ended up buying Mahoraba volume 2 and Nodame Contabile volume 1 and then left to walk around by myself.

I went downstairs to look around Taiyodo Record, a small music store, and the owner struck a conversation with me. It started out with general discussion of how Gackt is popular with chicks contrasted with the male-leaning fanbase of the pillows. (Yes, it is uncapitalized.) Then it shifted to him mostly telling me how things like gas and coffee are more costly in Japan compared to America. Apparently, it is not unusual to encounter a $50 toll when crossing a bridge by car! An old Japanese woman came in and asked about the different 2007 calendars while pointing at the ones with idols on the poster attached to the store’s front door. I just stood there and laughed along with them, understanding some things through context but not everything that was said. Before I left, he asked about my schooling and other stuff.

Next, I walked down to Mikado Music (a slightly bigger store) and stumbled upon “Xbox the Best”, a compliation of music from 20 . It struck me as a little odd to appear in a Japanese import store so I took a picture of it. A couple minutes later, I bought a used CD single of little by little’s “Love & Peace” for 8 dollars since I felt I needed to purchase something to make up for the picture I snapped. I listened to the single when I got home and it was okay but not great.

After that, I walked out of the main mall and went along the northern perimeter of Japantown when I came upon a Buddhist shrine at the corner of Sutter and Laguna. I stopped and looked at it for a minute or so before moving on because I had to get back for lunch.

We ate lunch at May’s Coffee Shop and I had the chicken curry. It tasted good but had less of a punch that I’d expect when eating curry. The shop did sell taiyaki for $1.50 but I must have made the mistake of pointing to the chocolate ones the cook was making instead of the three that had already been made. I don’t remember exactly what he said but I think it was that a lady had already ordered the ones he was in process of creating? Oh well, maybe next time.

The theme of me being a bad backseat navigator resurfaced when I accompanied the latecomer when he was dropped off near his car in Vacaville. We got back onto the freeway going west when we actually needed to go east. So we turned off at the next exit (Mason Street) and it took us about 10 minutes to figure out how to get back on the freeway the correct way. After that it was smooth sailing and had a good back-and-forth the rest of the way. To add insult to injury, the driver of the first car I rode in nicknamed me “TomTom” after the popular GPS navigation device. Too bad I’m not as accurate.

Each time I visit Japantown, I have to find new ways to keep my interest. The next club trip will likely be in winter quarter so I will try then to obtain cheap anime-related items for the end-of-year auction to raise funds. Another thing that helps keep it fresh for me is the fact the club eats lunch at different places each time. I suppose my intention to blog about this weekend’s journey also staving off weariness but, despite all those positive things, I still got somewhat bored because the same stores are still there.

Now to close out, here are some pictures that I couldn’t smoothly weave in:

The restaurant Izumiya had a tall Christmas display along its storefront…

…you can buy decorative plastic food from Sanko Cooking Supplies…

… and the final of the Japanese Sake Cocktail Competition takes place this Monday the 4th. One of the more obvious rules is that at least 50% of an entered drink’s alcohol content must be sake.