Because Japanese are completely asinine about getting their photos taken, and because the Comiket committee has my URL and I don’t want to get blacklisted, I went through the trouble of mosaicking all the faces.

The Queues

Queuing is Japan’s national pastime. In fact, you can say that going to Disneyland in Japan is about the same as going to Comiket. It all boils down to about two hours of queuing for a few seconds of gratification. Unless you go for the rides that no one wants to touch with a 10-metre pole, like “It’s a Small World”.

End of the line for T2 Art Works

Almost there!

The queues for popular booths are so long that the end of the line is generally in a totally different part of Japan from the actual location of the booth. This makes it a huge challenge for people who are rushing to queue for goods that are limited in numbers. Finding the booth itself is easy if you follow the maps, but by the time you get there the queue is already in Hokkaido. You have to anticipate where the queue will be by the time you arrive and head for the queue instead of the booth.

It’s like that Space Invaders episode in Futurama: shoot where he is going to be instead of where he was.

At the end of every queue is a guy holding a sign with the booth number that says 最後尾 to tell you that it’s the end of the line for that circle. Usually the guy holding it is the last person in the queue, so it’s common courtesy for you to take over by saying “mochimasu” if you join the queue.

The Booths

Did I mention how asinine Japanese are about photos? I did? Well I’m going to say it again: Japanese are completely asinine about photos. Despite having a press pass, I have to ask permission from every single booth that I want to take pictures of. This quickly bored me, so I ended up taking very few pictures. I don’t even know why they bother to give out press passes.

Interestingly, most people are more willing to have their pictures taken if you tell them that you are from overseas. According to the two cosplayers above, it’s because they don’t want to be recognized by their friends.

This appears to be some 3D game with characters from CLANNAD, D.C. and SHUFFLE!

Nice boat.

The 0verflow guys asked me for my website before letting me take a picture. I gave them my name card. Woot. 0verflow has my name card now! Anyway their C73 stuff wasn’t very interesting so I didn’t buy anything.

You can find more pictures of the commercial booths over at Danny Choo’s C73 coverage.

The Crowd

For some reason, I took a ton of picture of random crowds. I guess it’s because I was always rushing to my next destination and there wasn’t much else to take on the way.

The Location

See the orange cones? That’s where the Type-Moon queue was

The Cosplay

Canon 400D’s internal flash can only sync at a maximum shutter speed of 1/200, making it way too slow to take anything in direct sunlight without serious overexposure, so I had to make do without flash. The resulting pictures are terrible due to the shadows casted by the the setting sun. Oh well.

Thanks to the uneven lighting, everything is either overexposed or underexposed. I really need to get a proper flash.

You can find much better cosplay pictures from C73 on Moeyo!.

The Misc

The press gets a pink armband; Comiket staff gets a red one

Please rise for the Welsh anthem

It’s Shingo!

A bunch of Australians who were holding Shingo’s book

There were fewer Caucasian foreigners at Comiket than I had expected. I counted three or four groups in total after wandering around for the entire day. I bumped into a group from a Canadian radio station and talked to them for a bit. I think they were quite freaked out by a random Asian boy walking up to them and interrogating them in English. Ops.

There were plenty of Chinese around, in fact, quite a number of doujin circles were Chinese. But since we Asians pretty much look the same it’s kind of hard to keep count.

The Conclusion

Comiket was pretty fun, but I think all that queuing took a few years off my life span. I think I’m going to need a long rest…

This Comiket coverage was made possible by Danny Choo and Akihabara News.

I spent less than expected at Comiket, probably because I already bought a ton of random doujinshi from specialty stores. Some pictures are NSFW. (Basically the T2 Art Works stuff.)

T2 Art Works, the famous Tony Taka’s (aka Takayuki Tanaka) doujin circle, was selling goodie bags for ï¿¥3000. It contains a clear file, a calendar and a pencil board.

I also bought four copies of his latest release, Kiteru yo! Takeuchi-kun. (Based on Bamboo Blade.)

Kyoto Animation was selling some goodie bags from their current flagship titles. I will be reselling one Haruhi bag (I have extra) and one Clannad bag (I don’t like it that much).

They both come with a 2008 calendar and a phone card each. In addition, the Haruhi one comes with a A3 clear poster and the Clannad one comes with three bookmarks that are kind of lame when compared to Haruhi’s terrific poster. I will probably be selling them through KKnM, so you will need to be in Singapore to buy them.

This is a bag made by some booth that was selling Miku doujinshi. The doujinshi is pretty bad but the bag is cool. I think it was the only reason why so many people were queuing for that booth.

I got this for ï¿¥3500. It’s a 100% hand-drawn fan art of Yuki. It’s quite awesome, but I would’ve preferred Haruhi. The artist also drew Tomoyo and Kotomi (from Clannad) and Tsukasa and Kagami (from Lucky Star) in the same style, but I decided to pass.

I also bought Arisa Mizuhara’s latest cosplay collection CD-ROM. If you have never heard of her before, you need to check out her gallery. She’s basically my all-time favourite cosplayer.

The best part is that I met her in person at her booth! I managed to get a picture too by waving my press pass around. Huge thanks to Danny Choo and Akihabara News for the pass.

The CD-ROM is somewhat expensive at ï¿¥2000 for eight galleries of photos, but it’s extremely awesome. You can find a list of all her past releases on her website. There was actually a Singaporean trading company selling her photo collections at Cosfest, but I forgot its name.

On hindsight, I should have gotten her to autograph my copy of the CD-ROM… Damn.

I managed to obtain one of the forty copies of Cradle’s Re:frain that were on sale. The press has a seperate queue that is super short and located right beside the entrance to East Hall 1, so I got in quite early. I met and spoke with the duo behind Cradle, but unfortunately they were camera shy and declined my request for a picture. :(

KEI is the artist behind the official art for Crypton’s VOCALOID2 software series. I bought four copies of his new VOCALOID illustration compilation and one copy of his second artwork collection (which I sold to my friend).

I didn’t really bother to queue for any commercial booths, but HOOK’s HoneyComing merchandises looked pretty, so I spent about one hour queuing to get Asahi’s phone card set and Clarissa’s microfibre towel set (not pictured above). I seem to be the only person that I personally know who actually liked this game, but oh well.

My personal favourite purchase is Hiro Suzuhira’s latest HEART-WORK release. She is one of my favourite illustrators ever because of her works in the SHUFFLE! bishoujo game franchise (SHUFFLE!, Tick! Tack! and Really? Really!), specifically Nerine, Asa and Sage.

It has Hiro’s trademark design and Miku. What more can one ask for?

HEART-WORK’s booth was also selling a very beautiful Hatsune Miku and Kagamine Lin phone card set and a HEART-WORK collaboration calendar.

I queued over two hours for HEART-WORK’s booth. It was worth it. T_T <– Tears of joy.

I’ll talk more about the entire event itself in a later post. Really tired now. And, uh, an early Happy New Year! 明けましておめでとうございまãï¼ I’m watching Kouhaku on NHK right now.

I will be posting a more detailed report only after I return from Japan, mainly because I don’t have a lot of photos yet and I will only be able to take more tomorrow. (Photography is technically prohibited in all areas except the designated cosplay zone.)

Toyosu (豊洲) Station on the Yurikamome Line.

Comiket is held at the Tokyo International Exhibition Center, more commonly known as the Big Sight, or “that pyramid thing”. The nearest train station is Kokusai-tenjij-seimon (国際展示場正門) on the Yurikamome monorail that goes around Odaiba.

On the night before Comiket Day 1, we took the last train to Ariake to camp overnight. According to various online sources, overnight queuing for Comiket is prohibited by the organizers. From Wikipedia:

Lining up for hours before the convention is forbidden, as pre-convention “parties” have drawn complaints from local residents in previous years.

We found out that this is all a huge lie perpetuated to fool the naive. By the time we arrived at Ariake, the queue had already reached there, stretching about 500m from the steps leading up to the Big Sight.

It was frigging cold. The temperature was close to zero, it was windy and on top of that it started to rain too. Many people took shelter in the nearby Family Mart and those guys probably make a ton of money selling gloves and hot food stuff.

People arriving by cars and taxis (after the last train)

Tents set up by the police for logistics

There were already hundreds, if not thousands, of people queuing up at 1am in the morning. The event officially starts at 10am.

After a long wait, the organizers slowly directed the queue onto the clear elevated area in front of the trademark inverted pyramid. This formed the front of the main line for the regular participants.

20-minute queues to buy things from Family Mart or visit the washroom

The people at the start of the queue came well-prepared

This is madness

That’s LianYL standing there in white

It rained through the night

I managed to get some sleep (about 2-3 hours) in a sheltered area under the inverted pyramid. We were not prepared for this at all and didn’t bring any foldable stools or picnic sheets, so I made do with a 500-yen poncho from 7-Eleven. Did I mention that it was fricking cold and the ground was all wet?

The initial rush is crazy, especially for the commercial booths. How crazy? Let’s just say that if you happen to drop your camera, you’ll never see it again.

The main queue is divided into two separate queues, one for the doujinshi halls and one for the cosplay area and the commercial hall. The doujinshi queue is then split into three queues, one for West Halls, one for East Halls 1-3 and one for East Halls 4-6.

Comiket can be basically summed up as one huge queuing event. Popular commercial booths, such as Key and Type-Moon, can stretch to over 3-hours long.

The Japanese have basically perfected the art of queue management. Instead of forming long and chaotic queues inside the convention area, blocking everyone’s paths and encouraging queue-cutting, the queues are divided into more manageable segments. Only the front-most segment queues in front of the booth itself. The rest queue outside, where there are additional signboards to indicate where the end of the queue is and what the queue is for. One (or more) staff member will regularly come to bring the first ten or so people in the queue outside to join the small queue inside the convention hall. Popular booths have external queues that are so long that they have to be subdivided into even smaller mini queues.

This is why you’ll often see signs that tell you that it’s not the end of the line, even though it looks like one. Kyo-ani’s line actually stretched one entire round around the commercial booth. Type-Moon and a few other popular studios have special queuing zones in a parking lot nearby.

Popular doujinshi groups can be almost just as bad. I queued two hours for Hiro Suzuhira’s latest releases (pictures when I get home and finish unpacking). I also queued one hour for ５年目の放課後, the artist who drew the blushing Haruhi on my old banner, only to have stocks run out with just seven people left in the queue in front of me. :(

I took a few cosplay shots today, but it started to rain (again) and the cosplayers all left. It’s crazy what these girls wear in near-zero temperature…

Comiket has over half a million participants in three days. I estimate that about 5% of them (including circle participants and event organizers) cosplay while they are there. That’s a lot of cosplayers to take pictures of, and not much time to do so due to all the queuing that needs to be done.

Anyway, I should have some better pictures to show for my next Comiket post. I’m getting a press pass tomorrow that allows me to take pictures anywhere (and enter the venue early via a special express queue to boot). I don’t have to try to hide my DSLR anymore! Yay!