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Sakura Con Author's Notes 2005 The most interesting development of the weekend came from the National Weather Service, a normally reliable organization that missed the weekend weather forecast - fortunately. In the days before the convention, the forecasters predicted a weekend of rain in Seattle, which would be no surprise for an area with a phone book of companies named "Rain." But Friday was clear, cool, dry and partly sunny, preventing no one from going outside. Saturday saw temperatures in the middle 50's and no rain. Wet weather was forecast on Sunday and skies turned cloudy, but not a drop fell during the convention's final day until after the closing ceremonies. The second most interesting development was the most intense costume contest reaction this writer has seen in more than seven years of convention travels. One of the Saturday afternoon presentations featured two male costumers in J-rock regalia, one in a great replica of a Gackt outfit. At the end of the skit the men kissed and the crowd went wild. It was a long kiss, and the cheers went on even longer, seemingly unending screams of delight, overwhelmingly female. Some of those screams called for - no, insisted and demanded - that the men kiss again. So they did, and again the ballroom audience erupted into screams. Afterward, the young men who locked lips on stage admitted they never had expected the wild audience reaction they got. Another costumer, who made an Alphone Elric suit of metal out of leather plates, got the contest's top prize, but there was no doubt that the kissing men were the day's most popular entry. Guess that explains what all that "yaoi" talk has been about. Reaction to the Angela and Kumiko Kato concerts was nearly as intense, and more prolonged. The convention set up an autograph session for the three performers on Saturday night after the concerts, and it seemed as if half of the people who cheered in the ballroom stormed into the autograph line. We were told that a planned half-hour session stretched to two hours. When we chatted with Hiroaki Yabunaka and Ippongi Bang from Studio Do-Do, they said that the Cosplex magazine didn't sell as well as they had hoped, so there would be no second edition. However, they're talking about another cosplay project, this time online. so we'll stand by for that. In 2004, this site attended both Sakura Con and Tekkoshocon in Pennsylvania, but both events were on the same weekend in 2005. Why go to Sakura Con? It wasn't for the money, since this writer could have driven to Tekkoshocon and made some cash selling cosplay pictures, instead of paying for a plane ticket. Even with $2.30-per-gallon gasoline, the Pennsylvania road trip would have cost less than airline travel to Seattle. Instead, Sakura Con had a more interesting guest list than Tekkoshocon. The Pacific Northwest event has several artists and musicians from Japan, including the people who produced the Cosplex magazine for which this writer coordinated U.S. cosplay pictures and entries. Over the years, Sakura Con's organizers have excelled in attracting some impressive guests from Japan. So we booked a long flight to Seattle, hoping to make up some of the travel expense by booking a room at a cheap motel next door to the convention hotel. Among the visitors from Japan were costumers who weren't guests of honor, but they were part of the largest Japanese cosplay delegation to an U.S. convention other than Anime Expo. They all were wonderfully attractive, and all seemed to have their own supply of business cards to promote their web sites. This site got lots of costume pictures, but we missed more than a few good costumers because we couldn't chase them down, or because we took breaks to upload material on the web site during the weekend. We skipped the closing ceremonies (and missed a big musical show, something we now regret) to sit in the hotel lobby and write some material on Sunday afternoon. Looking at the hotel TV sets, it dawned that this was the second time in as many years that we had watched the closing holes of the Masters golf tournament on a TV away from home; in 2004 we were at Logan airport in Boston, heading home from the second Anime Boston. Sakura Con once was an isolated outpost on the anime convention calendar, but it's joined in 2005 by Anime Evolution in British Columbia and Kumoricon in Oregon. It was easy to spot Oregon license plates on the cars in the hotel parking lots...and it was even easier to spot cars, period. That was part of one of the weekend's oddities and frustrations for convention fans. Sakura Con is right across the street from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, so close that hotels make extra money selling airport parking. The hotel lots were nearly full when anime fans arrived for the convention, and they filled every other space by Friday morning of the convention weekend. It was far worse than the previous weekend's overstuffed lot for the Nashville convention. That won't be a problem for 2006, because Sakura Con is moving to downtown Seattle and a convention center there. The heart of Seattle's business district is crowded with skyscrapers, with the Space Needle to the north and expensive football and baseball palaces to the south. Hopefully, downtown dwellers will be ready for the oddities of young anime fans. In the meantime, Sakura Con had to live with capacity limits. They hit their limit for single-day passes on Saturday before noon. The at-event registration line was the longest and most persistent we've seen at a convention in some time; often that sort of line eases off in mid-morning on a Saturday, but at this event the line stayed long well into the afternoon. We're told that there won't be any problem at the downtown convention center unless the crowd reaches something like 12,000 or so. Sakura Con got about 5,000 people in 2005. Sakura Con Main Page