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Tsubasacon - Author's Notes Notes finished in a motel room in Dry Ridge, Kentucky: This was one of those exceptional weekends in anime fandom that shows how far conventions have come. Nine years ago, this site blurted that it was the busiest month in fandom history because there had been conventions on three consecutive weekends. On this first weekend of October, there were five conventions, held in widely separated parts of the country. The closest conventions probably were Tsubasacon, visited by this site, and Manga Next. Those locations, in West Virginia and New Jersey, were in areas so radically different that they might as well have been in different nations, yet the idea of having a convention appealed to fans in those diverse areas. If only we'd had more than a few hours to spend at Tsubasacon. We had only Sunday for travel, and used our standard split trip highway strategy of stopping at the halfway point, which is how we ended up at the Dry Ridge interchange. It's a tiny Kentucky town north of Lexington, but it still has a Chinese buffet restaurant next to Kentucky Fried Chicken - maybe Asian culture is taking over. We saw a good example of that about 90 minutes up the road when we passed the construction site for the Honda factory on I-74 at Greensburg, Ind. In the days when we first drove on that interstate to watch Joe Morgan and George Foster play for the Cincinnati Reds, no one took Japanese cars seriously. Now, state governors try to outbid each other for Japanese factories. Some things haven't changed, like the big Valvoline oil refinery outside Ashland, Ky. which sees more and more of its products go into Japanese cars, whether they're built in Japan or the U.S. And the Ohio River still sees barges headed downstream, a short distance from the small convention center where Tsubasacon was held. The Huntington convention was the sort of small, laid-back event that many fans say they prefer. The Sunday on which we got to the convention was as quiet as any day we've seen at an event. To get to the convention center, you exit I-64 onto Hal Greer Avenue. This writer remembers watching TV when Greer played guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, teaming with Wilt Chamberlain when they battled the Boston Celtics. (Should we be admitting our age?) Greer was a native of Huntington who played for his hometown Marshall University. It's been less than a year since the "We Are Marshall" film, dramatizing the 1970 plane crash that killed the university football team, was released. Marshall football is bigger in Huntington than a SEC or Big Ten team's games are in their home towns because Huntington is a small town, anong the smallest town and metro area to hold an anime convention. Good thing for Tsubasacon that Marshall's football game on convention weekend was a mid-week game on the road; it might have been impossible to hold the event in Huntington on the weekend of a home game. In the week before Tsubasacon, we started assembing the overall convention schedule for 2008. With four months left in 2007, already there are nearly 50 U.S. conventions scheduled for 2008, and at least three of them are new events, including the first attempt to mix Star Trek and Naruto fandom at one event in March in Fort Lauderdale. We recall that the first attempt to hold a Naruto-only convention fell apart, but we've also seen the declining and aging attendance at Star Trek events. This site's author is old enough to have seen the original Star Trek series when it first aired on NBC, an era when most cities had only four or five channels and color TV was still an expensive novelty. (A 21-inch color set then was far more expensive than a HD unit is now.) Star Trek nearly died in the 1960's, but it made a comeback in the 1980's with the Next Generation series, then ran out of steam in the 21st century. Years ago, Star Trek exhausted the youthful enthusiasm needed to grow, and Japanese animation grabbed that enthusiasm, and ran with it to its position of prominence among young fans across the nation. It's interesting to note that the World Cosplay Summit has resurfaced in the U.S, after being absent for two years. This time, it's going to be part of the New York Anime Fest, the first-time event in Manhattan in December. That's about as far as you can get in the continental U.S. from Anaheim, which may be good for the event's credibility. Two years after the summit had its last U.S. preliminary contest at Anime Expo, there are still hard feelings because of the talk that the entrants that should have won the trip to Japan were turned down. That impression hasn't faded much over the last two years, and the organizers of the New York contest face the challenge of re-establishing the event's legitimacy. Tsubasacon Main Page