There's a hint in the schedules. No one seemed to be sure of the convention's starting time in 2000, so it began on a Thursday - although no one seemed to know why. In 2001, the convention started early on Friday morning, so early that the author nearly missed the opening ceremonies, which happened around the time the author's flight connections (first one of the day that he could find) arrived at the San Jose airport. (Thanks to United Airlines for swiftly rebooking the author after a flight cancellation so that he got to his destination at the original time.)

And when the author arrived, he found a far improved event. The convention was far more comfortable to attend in 2001, with a stronger guest list and more enthusiastic fans. Even the cat-calling at the costume contest was less objectionable than the previous year.

One measure of the convention's growth was the length of the line to get into the dealers' room on Saturday. That line was never shorter than a couple of hundred feet all day, showing the demand for the merchandise. The line was needed because, as before, the convention had to limit the number of people inside the room. This time, the video games were taken out of the dealers' room and given two separate locations. One room provided one of the hits of the weekend, the Dance Dance Revolution Fourth Mix game, which was never left alone. An earlier version of the same game also stayed busy in the same room.

Fortunately for con goers, there was a steady supply of electricity to power the games and the event. Barely two weeks before Fanime Con, rolling power blackouts resumed because warm weather caused an increase in electricity consumption. Anime conventions depend on electricity to run all of those projectors (and the author's laptop and battery charger). Fanime Con was lucky to avoid the blackouts - although the cost included what seemed like diminished air conditioning on two warm days and an extra "energy" surcharge on the hotel rooms for the convention.

And Fanime Con showed the sense of ethnic diversity that the San Jose and San Francisco newspapers wrote about over the convention weekend, with a large Asian and Hispanic fan turnout. That also extended to the entire Santa Clara Convention Center, which saw Fanime Con share space with a pair of Islamic gatherings and a Christian home schooling group. Lest you think those groups were on the opposite side of some sort of cultural gulf from anime conventions, it should be known that one of Fanime Con's leaders is a church musician who spent Sunday morning at services before he went to the conventions on Sunday afternoon.

Fans with a sense of nostalgia had to look on Fanime Con with a special feeling. The first attempt at a West Coast anime convention was the first AnimeCon, held on the 1991 Labor Day weekend in San Jose, Calif. - a few miles and a few months away from ten years earlier. 

The author isn't trying to leverage this web site with stories of disaster. Really. But what is the author to do when he walks past a TV set and sees CNN coverage of an earthquake in Seattle, two months before Sakura Con? Just when the author was feeling proud of himself for buying a plane ticket to Seattle way ahead of the convention, he sees a TV report on how the airport has been closed by the quake.

The airport control tower was smashed, walls knocked down, the state capitol dome cracked - and the author worried about anime convention friends in the Seattle area. Word was quick to come that all of them were okay - actor Pam Lauer, actor Tiffany Grant's family, the staff of Sakura Con. One of those convention staff members wrote, "When I got home, some stuff was shaken up, but luckily nothing fell off the shelves."

And with any luck, the Seattle airport should be in operating order a long time before the author heads there for Sakura Con.

Less than a week after the earthquake came the school shooting in Santee, Calif. Since it came less than a year after the massacre in Littleton, Colo., it raised a host of questions about teenaged angst, violence and weapons - and anime conventions may not be immune from those concerns.

There was a hint of that new attitude at the previous convention covered by this site. In February, Katsucon officials warned fans that Virginia law did not discourage police from drawing on and shooting people with replica guns, and fans shouldn't carry their prop guns in the halls. After the California shooting, Mike Tatsugawa, the man in charge of Anime Expo, cautioned fans that they should keep their replica firearms away from that conventions.

Fanime Con is in northern California, hundreds of miles from the Santee shooting. But it's not far from DeAnza College, where a 19-year-old student would have launched his own armed assault on the school - but he was arrested before he got a chance.

It should have come as no surprise that there was a tougher stance on prop weapons at Fanime Con. Some costumers had their toys taken away by the hotel staff, and that generated a wave of complaints from costumers at the "constructive complaint" session on Saturday afternoon. But with the weapons trouble in the U.S., that tighter attitude may become a regular part of conventions.

There are too many sad stories around real firearms for that issue not to pop up at conventions. A couple of days after the southern California shooting, there was a school shooting in Pennsylvania. And in the town where the author lives, a six-year-old girl found the family gun and took it to school. The girl's parents were arrested and charged with neglecting their daughter by leaving the gun where she could reach it.

The author worries that all of the concern about guns and schools could turn into a backlash against anime, which can be a violent and intense form on entertainment. Already there are complaints that the video games linked to anime are too bloody and gruesome.

But if the games and the anime are so horrible, why aren't there similar school shootings in Japan? Is the difference that violence entertainment is seen as a catharsis and a release in Japan, rather than a way for youth to learn to kill? Or are adults so irresponsible with guns in the U.S. that children have too little difficulty getting firearms?

The author believes that anime is no more violent than the half-hour Westerns that littered American television in the 1960's. Anime might take the Grand Guignol approach to violence with exploding heads, but that's more honest than the TV approach of large-caliber weapons leaving a small spot of blood on a shirt. Anime is also more honest in showing the consequences of violence; when anime characters die, the deaths rock the lives of the survivors and leave some very human suffering behind.

If you're going to get youth to reject gunplay, you have to show them that the romance is tempered by responsibility.

Another sad note, this time from the world of animation: one week before Fanime Con, William Hanna died in Los Angeles. Hanna was the animation partner of Joseph Barbera; both started with MGM's animation studio, developing the classic Tom and Jerry cartoons. When the major movie studios shut down their animation lines in the 1950's Hanna and Barbera turned to the new world of television, creating Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear before making a major prime-time mark with The Flintstones. What does this have to do with anime fandom? It's said that the Hanna-Barbera cartoons made it to Japan in the late 1950's and were seen on TV there by the legendary Osamu Tezuka, who saw those shows and decided to start his own animation studio. So there may be a link between Ruff and Reddy and Astro Boy, after all.