During the freezing cold winter month of February 2000, I went on a class
trip with Professor Hester’s Youth Culture and Consumption class.
Professor Hester was a lecturer at Kansai Gaidai and he had the best field
trips. There was a huge convention devoted to amateur manga or Doujinshi.
From all over Japan, different artists and writers would self-publish and
mass-produced their own manga stories.
On the big day of the convention, I was sitting there, next to a thousands of
Japanese people, with two of my classmates, Trevor, the most hardcore otaku in
the class who started up his own anime club at WSU, and Casim, the casual
fan who just wanted to go out and see a con, close by. I remembered
talking to Trevor about anime when I first arrived at Kansai Gaidai. and when I
brought up how popular Dragon Ball Z was, he didn’t take to that idea very
well. He told me his anime club prohibited watching Dragon Ball Z.
That seemed like a strange idea to me. I was planning on finding some Dragon
Ball Z stuff to bother him with. Just for fun, but I think Trevor
took it all extremely serious, which wasn’t really my true intention at all.
Sitting around and waiting for the convention to open, Professor Hester walked
by gave us each a big thick book with a cute boy and girl anime picture across
the colorful cover. Trevor looked through it like a nuclear scientist
studying the blueprints of a nuclear reactor. I never saw him so taken
with anything so intensely. So I decided to look through my own guide.
The first few pages were sample manga stories followed by a layout of the many
different rooms, and then all the titles were listed alphabetically in
Japanese. If you couldn’t read the Japanese the book showed the same
listings with pictures. There must have been over 5000 booths set
up.
I think that these artists and writers captured the true spirit of manga.
They were free to create their own storylines and they could use or disregard
known characters at will. They have much more freedom then their
professional counterparts who had to work within a certain framework and who
had to publish by set standards. Here, everything was laid out, exactly
as the artist had envisioned it.
As the Con started, we all got up and people went running around to get to
different areas. I wasn’t really sure about what I wanted to look for so I just
stuck with Trevor and Casim.
The
fun for me was walking around and speaking to different people. I took several
flyers from people selling their manga or just on the verge of putting their
own manga together so all they had were one sheets and small flyers for free.
Some manga were printed and sold on expensive paper and others were just drawn
onto construction paper.
Always on the search for the unusual, I bought my first yaoi manga that was
based on Konami’s Castlevania, and featured Simon, Dracula, and female
bisexual vampires called, Dracula X: Sweet Angel. Simon was in it
but he had a minor role. The artwork was excellent.
Other strange manga included a hentai version of Cardcaptor Sakura,
that I passed up. I saw a homosexual version of Dracula, from the
Castlevania series, called Alucrad that I did buy just because it was so
different.
Video gamers have grown up playing Castlevania but how many of them have
seen the Count get it on with Simon in a rare expression of man-to-man loving.
On my buying spree, I bought another one called X-Day that depicted those
wonderful sexual events associated with the Christmas season. Inside,
there was an ultra-cute anime girl in sexy Santa attire.
Also, Easter is a nice holiday but it’s not really a great holiday unless
you have a happy, voluptuous bunny, playing with a huge carrot that I saw on a cover of Cardcaptor Sakura. The
artwork was incredible. The lines were drawn lightly and had a dreamlike
quality that I really admired.
Overall, the biggest sells at the manga convention were yaoi comics, based on
popular characters like Cased Closed, Final Fantasy, and even Dragonball
Z. I remembered Dragonball Z because Trevor seemed so mad when he said:
“There’s
your Dragonball Z!”
And
there it was, showing Goku as a homosexual. Japanese females in their
20’s, were buying tons of yaoi manga. Most of the yaoi was man to
man and I wanted to see more lesbians but that’s not want the paying customer
wanted. There were so many lesbian possibilities, such as the women
living together at the onsen in Love Hina. That would have made an
interesting spin.
Browsing around, I met someone ever nerdier than me. His level of
geekness was astounding. He was in his early 20’s and he was with his
young Japanese wife. She had on glasses and she told me that she met her
husband at a Star Trek Convention back in America. Trevor, Casim, and I
hang out with them for a while. They took us around showing us different
cool stuff. His wife told me, during one of the many conversations, that
she liked to dress up in a Star Trek uniform with her husband.
As the day ended, it was very sad to leave the convention. There were
still so many booths that went unseen. You could have spent a good week,
just going through all those manga books.
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