John Scofield,
the chairman of Otakon, was worried about the attendance at the 1998 event.
With a new location and competition from the World Science Fiction Convention
in Baltimore, he wasn't certain how many people would show up for Otakon.
Scofield had no reason to worry. As many people were on hand for Otakon '98's opening day as for the entire 1997 event, he said. The total attendance for the weekend was around 2,500, making Otakon the second-largest anime convention in the U.S. Anime Expo remains the largest (and Mike Tatsugawa, president of the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation, AX's organizer, was on hand for Otakon).
Otakon found
a comfortable new home at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City. The hotel has
an unusual inverted design, with the ballrooms and meeting rooms in a sub-basement
two floors below the lobby. There's no feeling of being in a cave because
the middle of the convention area is an atrium designed to collect sunlight.
The facility had plenty of room for the fans to stretch out.
Those fans spent time in line for some video presentations, the costume contest and to get autographs from the guests of honor. They didn't spend much time in the registration line. When the author went to get his badge on Friday, he noticed that barely anyone was in the pre-registration line and hundreds were in the line to register on-site. The author got his badge, went back to his room to drop off his luggage and set up the laptop, returned to the main convention floor - and the on-site registration area was nearly empty. There were no more long registration lines for the rest of the weekend.
At most conventions,
the high point is the masquerade. At Otakon, the cosplay was nearly topped
by the "Mystery Anime Theater 3000" presentation on Friday night. This
fan-produced version of the cable TV favorite got off to a slow start,
but once the reproductions of Crow and Tom Servo were in place, the fans
put on a hilarious show. To the audience's delight, they ripped "Battle
Arena Toshinden" to shreds. Some fan parodies are hit-and-miss affairs,
but every joke in "Mystery Anime Theater 3000" struck home.
Yes, the cosplay started late and the stage lights were too dim for comfortable picture-taking and some of the video presentations were late and one of the Macross movies was delayed in shipping and wasn't shown. The author didn't care.
More important
than the things that go wrong at any con is the fact that the con exists.
It's a modern miracle that America has anime fandom and anime conventions.
Lewinsky versus Clinton versus Starr was playing out its electronic soap-opera
themes just across the Potomac, the front page of the Washington Post showed
the devastation of the embassy bombings in Africa - and Otakon just kept
on rolling.
Beyond that: Otakon was held on an important anniversary. 53 years earlier, atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one at the con noticed the anniversary.
To the author, that's an important point. Not because anime fans have
no sense of history, but because they've overcome history. One half-century
ago, during the bitter war in the Pacific, no one could have foreseen that
Americans and Japanese would be gathering to celebrate Japanese culture.
And, no one could have seen that anime, a special blend of Japanese and
American culture, would be so popular.
The bitterness left by the war has been replaced by the enthusiasm
of today's youth. In a world where some nations hate each other for generations,
the love and excitement between Americans and Japanese shown at anime conventions
is something remarkable - and it shouldn't be taken for granted.
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Otakon Day One |