The author spent the Sakura Con weekend
bulling through the halls from one event to another, working too hard to
get stuff online fast. It was worth the effort to watch fans have the time
of their lives.
One incident demonstrated the kind of fans that Sakura Con attracted. In
the Saturday night costume contest, there was a big group of Sailor Moon
costumers - must have been at least a dozen. They had worked up a dance presentation
drawn from the Sailor Moon musicals. The group took the stage, started dancing...and
then their music CD skipped and stuck, again and again. The dancers stopped,
looked at each other, tried to restart then realized their music wasn't going
to heal itself. So they smiled, waved to the crowd and walked off to applause,
good sports despite their disappointment.
The author has seen what happens when costume contest skits go wrong, and
he remembers one case where a contest entrant argued with the contest coordinator
in front of the audience. The Seattle costumers' even demeanor in the face
of failure was impressive (and better than the author would have done if
it had happened to him), and it was part of the way that Sakura Con fans
acted all weekend.
That spirit was shown by the convention staff, which also had to make their
own comeback. In the days before the convention, three Japanese guests called
off their trips to Seattle. For a while it seemed as there would be only
three guests of honor for the entire event and none from Japan. Then the
grapevine started rolling, and by the time the convention had started there
were new Japanese guests to replace the ones who had canceled - and more
guests from Japan arrived on Saturday.
The weekend offered all of the weather that Seattle offers. It was cloudy
on Friday morning, drizzly on Friday night, rainy on Saturday, then turned
sunny on Sunday. The sun filled the convention area's main corridor just
as the sounds of the taiko drums died out and fans left the closing ceremonies.
That's another way that Sakura Con is different than other conventions: most
events have big crowds for the opening ceremonies, but Sakura Con filled
their main ballroom for the closing ceremonies. The convention staff had
to go into the concourse and loudly announce that the room was full.
Following the closing ceremonies, a group of boisterous fans gathered in
the hotel lobby for the final pictures, watched closely by some of the regulars
at the hotel bar. The contrast between the celebrating youth and the dour
man who was forcing himself to have a cell phone conversation was priceless.
Sakura Con came the weekend after the big Wrestlemania show at Safeco Field,
and a few anime fans made it to the wrestling performances. One fan said
he had gotten a picture with Chris Benoit, who had stayed over a few days.
Wrestlemania's souvenir stands provided a prop championship belt that was
used in one of the costume contest entries.
Hearing the talk about the upcoming Anime Expo Tokyo led to a couple of thoughts.
The Japanese promoters' comments made it seem as if the 2004 event is going
to be more of a Japanese production than first appeared. Also, it was amazing
that there were four anime conventions on the first weekend of April, stretching
from Washington to Wisconsin to Oklahoma to Florida. A few years ago, there
wouldn't have been four conventions - total - by the first weekend of April.
The Sakura Con weekend marked some important anniversaries.
The convention's opening day was the 35th anniversary of the assassination
of Rev. Martin Luther King. This generation of anime fans has been spared
the trauma of King's death, but they've benefited from his struggle, inheriting
a nation that where differences in race don't equal mindless fear and hate.
It's not a perfect nation, but no one would dare go back to the Jim Crow
days that King fought to end.
Monday, the day after the convention ended, was the fictional birthday of
Tetsuwan Atom, the character that started the anime boom when he was renamed
"Astro Boy" for U.S. TV broadcasts in the early 1960's. There was other anime
before that series, but for American fans it all started with Astro Boy.
After translation and a little reworking for the English-speaking audience,
Astro Boy didn't seem exotic or threatening. It took that sort of appeal
to prepare future generations for the more intense and imaginative animation
that would follow from Japan, in the same way that Japanese animators took
the lead of Osamu Tezuka's stories and shows to advance in their own storytelling.
Tezuka created Astro Boy as a hero to fight for peace, and it was ironic
that his birthday was celebrated during the war between the U.S. and Iraq.
As with the previous weekend's convention in Pennsylvania, the war was no
more than a show glimpsed on TV screens for convention fans. A trip of cosplayers
paraded through the halls in military uniforms that looked to the casual
fan as if they were taken from Operation Iraqi Freedom, but the colors were
wrong - green camouflage instead of the drab tan used for desert warfare.
