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Ohayocon
Author's Notes
2004
Notes started in a Waffle House west of Columbus, Ohio, watching a driving snowstorm:

The author of this web site had his most embarrassing convention moment on Ohayocon's Saturday night, something so humiliating that it's bound to become an indelible part of convention legend. Other than that and the snowstorm that kept the author driving back home on Sunday night, it was a good weekend.

First to the embarrassment: one of the weekend's highlights was a performance by Blood, the Osaka J-rock visual kei band. The convention and the band led the author operate in front of the barrier that separated fans from the stage to get a clear view of the performance. In order to stay out of the view of the paying customers, the author stayed on the floor so that fans could see over him.

The author was on the floor, stage right, when guitarist Kiwamu made a rush off the stage and toward the leading edge of the audience. After taking a couple of pictures, the author was involved in what professional photographers call "chimping," checking his digital; camera's display screen to see if the pictures came out. At the same time, Kiwamu was backing along the front row of standing, delighted fans. The guitarist pivoted to move down the line, and fell flat on top of the bulky, fat, floored author.

It was the anime convention equivalent of the sports shooter who gets bowled over on a football sideline. Some photographers have said they're most worried about their equipment when they get hit, but the author's thoughts, with Kiwamu, on top of him, was that he had ruined the concert, injured the star of the show and gotten himself in deep, deep trouble by damaging some expensive musical equipment the guitarist was carrying. Fortunately - very fortunately - Kiwamu had the physical resilience of a defensive back. He rolled off the author (whose well-known fat may have cushioned the fall), got back to his feet and played on as if nothing had happened.

The relieved author could laugh about his mistake, check his camera and make sure it was still working, and keep taking pictures. Kiwamu wasn't bothered by the fall, the concert wasn't interrupted of affected, and the guitarist graciously accepted the author's post-concert apologies.

One advantage of the up-front and floor-bound position from which the author watched the Blood concert; it gave a great view of the band's power. While taking pictures in a more carefully chosen location, the author was amazed to notice that the concrete and steel-reinforced floor of the Columbus convention center was moving up and down, like a drumhead vibrating to the sound of thunder.

And it just happened that one of the squealing front row fans at the Blood concert also was the fan chosen for a J-rock makeover when the band held a panel discussion on the convention's final day. The panel got off to a rough start when the event's first-string interpreter didn't show, but no one minded - and the makeup demonstration was wildly popular.

Second most popular at Ohayocon had to be the appearance of the Inu-Yasha group of producer Toshifumi Yoshida and actors Richard Cox, Jillian Michaels and Scott McNeil. For once, McNeil had a wise-cracking, joke-dropping match in Cox, who matched McNeil comment-for-comment as they entertained the fans. For those interested in the way that the Cartoon Network presents Inu-Yasha and wonders why so many episodes have been repeated; Yoshida said that the cable channel had indicated they wanted to show Inu-Yasha once a week, but changed that to four showings a week in the Adult Swim program block. So all of the shows were used up before Viz had expected, and Yoshida had to go back to work to make more episodes for cable.

The third best Ohio show was the charity celebrity roast of actor Amanda Winn Lee. Her infamous convention exploits (even Amanda admits she's been "banned" from unnamed conventions) made for an evening of old-fashioned, risque humor. You can be certain that the version of the roast that appears in this site was radically cleaned up to protect tender minds and avoid lawsuits.

For a while, the author of this site was the intended victim of the roast, but the convention came to its senses when Winn Lee was invited and chose to roast her instead. You can be certain that the room where the roast was held wouldn't have been filled for the author, but it was packed for Winn Lee. And the best advantage of having the actor as the roast target was that her husband, Jaxon Lee, finally did a stand-up comedy routine in public. Previously, Jaxon has not wanted to give away his act for free, but the roast was an exception, and he made every one in the front of the room, including the author of this site, a target of his humor. (If you hear any rumors about the author and actor Greg Ayres, it's Jaxon's fault.)

Apologies to those who checked this site in the week before Ohayocon and noticed that some files were missing. The site's author took advantage of big changes from the site hosting company to switch the hosting setup, choosing a plan which offered more storage capacity and higher file transfer limits at two-thirds of the previous plan's cost. Unfortunately, the hosting company didn't get all of the site's files transferred from the old server to the new one, so the author had to replace the files on his own.

If you're wondering what there's nothing on this site from the Anime Expo Tokyo that was held a week before Ohayocon; money, as usual. At a minimum, the trip to the Japanese convention would have cost three times the price of the plane tickets the author purchased for both the Ushicon and Katsucon trips.

The trip to Japan would have been a great chance to meet large numbers of Japanese artists and storytellers, and to learn what Japanese fans thought of anime's popularity in the U.S. The "medium versus genre" question doesn't get much attention in the U.S., and Anime Expo Tokyo could have provided some answers.
 
During U.S. trips, producer and cosplay fan Nobuyuki Takahashi has mentioned that there haven't been any stage presentation costume contests at Japanese fandom events, mostly because it's hard to get Japanese fans to appear on stage. Reports said there were 13 costume contest entrants at Anime Expo Tokyo and a couple of thousand people showed up for each day of the three-day event. That sounds like a decent start, especially considering the time of year.