I sit in a Tully's in the Washington State Convention center after standing in line for three hours to get in. What would I stand in line that long for? Nothing! But since my daughter an I pre-registered last year for the yearly event called Sakuracon I was stuck. Yes you read that right, I pre-registered AND waited for 3 hours in line. There was a slight extenuating circumstance in that my daughter's friends came too and they could not wait in the same line and I needed to be with them because Sakuracon won't allow underage participants to attend without an adult, but that doesn't completely explain the wait. Even the pre-registration line took 2 hours. So, we saved ourselves an hour by signing up last year, but that was completely unacceptable.
What is Sakuracon? Well, you can't get much out of the name other than it is Japanese. Sakura is Cherry Blossom, and “con” is a Japanese contraction of the word "convention". (They do that with a lot of English words. For example, aircon is Air Conditioner) The event is mainly intended as a celebration of Japanese comics and animation (shortened to “anime” in Japanese). I am not going to try to be the expert on the history of this event, but what it seems to have turned in to is a conflation of a Japanese anime and manga (comics) convention with a lot of computer game characters mixed in as well. The attendees of this event use it as a sort of Star Trek Convention-ish event for everyone to dress up like their favorite characters. But this year they are not limiting it to just games and anime. I had lunch sitting next to the Joker (Heath Ledger version, not Jack Nicholson), stood in the pre-registrations line behind the bad guy from Silent Hills, and I swear to gawd I just saw Jesus carry his cross down the escalator.
The other thing that this place is for is exhibitionism. A lot of anime characters are very scantily clad or sexy in other ways. There are quite a few teenage and 20 something ladies dressed as Japanese schoolgirls but with cleavage and legs up to here. There is so much exhibitionism going on here that it is quite reasonable for the promoters to insist that adults accompany the underage. It's also not a bad idea for me to find a nice low traffic corner and put my nose in my laptop to keep from feeling like a dirty old man every time I turn around.
We will be back tomorrow and maybe I will have a chance to blog some more about it.
