The answers can be found on a calendar and a map. In previous years, the Seattle-area convention was on the same date as Anime Central, which is near Chicago and about, oh, 1,500 miles closer to the author's home. The shorter trip was the easier trip, and that's where the author went - but always hoping there would be no date conflicts.

In 2000, that finally happened, which is why this page attended Sakura Con (and FanimeCon) for the first time.

Fans who say conventions are getting too large would have liked Sakura Con. It was held in a two-story Doubletree Inn that was more like a large roadside inn than a major hotel (no elevators and lots of wood). The facility was small to the point of being cramped. That required the convention to limit the number of fans who attended. Each morning at 9, hopeful fans lined up to get the 100 one-day passes. Each morning, a few didn't get in. Convention officials never publicized this, but they decided not to turn back anyone who drove a long distance to the convention.

Those fans who showed up and got in were very enthusiastic, as measured by the number of costumers (lots of them before 10 a.m. every day). The family attraction of anime convention also was shown by the number of parents who brought their babies to Sakura Con for the day.

Sakura Con promised a larger hotel for 2001 and a later date (the last weekend in April).

The author always makes a note of how pleasant anime conventions are when compared to the depressing things that happen in the real world. He'd planned to work in a comment about the explosive demolition of the big Kingdome sports stadium one week before the convention (how many parents who complain about violence on television took their children downtown to witness the ultimate violent act?).

However, other things happened that were jaw-droppingly strange (other than the sun coming out in Seattle for the convention weekend) and weirdly linked to the author's trip.

On Sunday afternoon, the author took a rare stroll out of the hotel and found Tukwila police cars surrounding the jewelry store down the street. Yellow crime scene tape blocked the parking lot and the store's front door had its glass blown out.

All police would say was something about a "dissatisfied customer." Buzz at the convention was that a gunshot had blown out the glass at the jewelry store and the person with the gun had run away - but, fortunately, not into the convention hotel.

According to the Post-Intelligencer's web site, it was more than a dissatisfied customer: it was an attempted armed robbery by three men, two of them armed with handguns. One shot was fired, one of the holdup men was injured, and all three suspects were arrested after a chase by police. All of this happened around the same time as Sakura Con's closing ceremonies.

Beyond that: the author's connecting flight was on Northwest Airlines from Memphis to Seattle. Around the same time that Airbus A320 airliner left Memphis, a Northwest Boeing 757 left Seattle for Memphis.

When that flight arrived in Memphis, a man jumped out of the pressurized and heated section of the cargo hold used for pets and ran away. No one caught him. Back in Seattle, no one could figure out how that man broke through airport security to get to the ramp and climb into the cargo hold (something routinely done by ramp workers to pack baggage).

Another odd coincidence (and this one's a bit of a stretch):

Anime conventions are linked to Japanese culture, of course, and Sakura Con had delightful displays of that culture with the YushinDaiko and Taka Koto concerts. Another part of Japanese culture is the (literally) volcanic nature of the terrain, and during the convention, Mount Usu erupted several times.

The only part of the continental United States to have a volcano erupt in recent years was - you guessed it, the Pacific Northwest, where Mount St. Helens blew up in 1980, seven weeks short of twenty years before Sakura Con was held. Mount St. Helens is just south of Mount Rainier, the mountain that dominates the southern Seattle skyline. The gap left by the eruption in St. Helens' southern face was clearly visible when the author's airline flight approached Seattle.

A couple of weeks before Sakura Con, the author went to a high school basketball game, curious to see if things had changed in the years since the author was of high school age.

It was a striking experience.

The crowd was a lot smaller than the author remembered. Also, most of the people in the crowd were adults. High school kids were a minority at their own event.

In its own way, the basketball game was much like the science fiction convention that the author attended last year, where most of the fans had grey, thinning hair. 

Some people in the author's home are worried about the declining crowds at high school basketball games, but that just goes to show that things have changed. In an era of 75 channels on cable TV, 200 channels from a small satellite dish, a half-dozen video game systems, shopping centers that resemble theme parks and a dozen movies in one theater, old-fashioned basketball can't match up.

Anime conventions are part of that change. The mainstream mundanes can't understand the appeal of that cartoon subculture, but the youth of American certainly understand - enough that conventions have popped up from coast to coast in the last few years.

Sakura Con serves as a good example of what young people really want - and how they'll achieve it no matter what the old folks think.