Yesterday I went to "comiket 78", which is now being held in Tokyo Big Sight. At this event amateur people sell their own original manga. If you have seen an anime called "Lucky Star", you should know it has an episode where Konata and Kagami go to "Ariake", where this Tokyo Big sight is, to buy some "Doujin" manga, or manga drawn by amateur people.
If you want to come to this Tokyo Big Sight, you have to take this Rinkai Line that is available at Shinkiba Station on the Keiyo Line.
This is Kokusai Tenjijyou Station, from which you should go to the Tokyo Big Sight, and when I was going up this stairs I saw some anime posters on the walls.
As you can see this station was very crowded around at noon, when I came here. I had saw on the official website of this comiket that the least crowded time period began at 12:00am, but nonetheless I was shoved several times at the station.
A currently very popular anime called "K-ON!!" is broadcast on Tuesday on TV, and its first Blue-ray DVD was released on July 30. The series is so popular but its manga and anime are going to end in September.
I was expecting to see so many Moe cars, or "Itasha", but I just saw two cars that had anime characters printed on. I didn't recognize what anime those characters were from.
And this is the outside look of the "Tokyo Big Sight". You have to walk for about 10 minutes from the station to reach here, and this complex is one of the places in Tokyo where lots of events are held like ones for business purposes.
And this character was the poster girl for this comiket 78 this year.
When I going down stairs of this complex, I was overwhelmed by so many people going about here. It was forecast more than half a million people would come to this event.
And this is how they were selling their Doujin manga. I was walking around in sections where girls selling their manga, and most of the stuff they were selling was about "boys' love" or a relationship between guys. It is already known some girls who like manga so much prefer stories on gay relationships over hetero ones. I don't know why.
I picked up some manga, and the qualities of the contents were so high that I could have mistaken them for professionals'. And that made me realize how hard it must be for amateurs to debut as manga writers when they could draw so well.
I came here to buy some parody manga, but what they were selling was almost all original. By seeing so many people buying their manga, I guessed those people had already known which manga circles were going to sell what kind of manga. The prices of those manga ranged from 300 to 500 yen. I should say the prices were reasonable.
You are not supposed to sit on the floor of this complex, but walking about for hours would make you feel like sitting. Some were sleeping leaning against the walls.
Some people were selling "Itacha", or painful tea. You know it would be "painful" to see anime characters printed on tea bottles. "Ita" means painful, "cha" is green tea.
When I was on my way back to home, the station was again packed with so many people. More people took the train for Saitama area than Tokyo, the former area is where the hometown of the characters of Lucky Star is. The posters say, "Oreno Imouto" anime is going to be broadcast come October. The meaning of the Japanese title should be "My incredibly pretty younger sister".
As an additional note, I didn't see so many foreign people at this event. I guess this is because not so many foreign people can read the Kanji written in the manga.
