About a month ago, my coworker Nick told me that he wanted to check out a manga convention in Tokyo. It sounded like a good idea considering I've never gone to one before in Japan. I was expecting all sorts of weirdos, and I was a little disappointed when I saw that everyone seemed to be pretty normal when we arrived.

The place was in the Tokyo big site, and was incredibly crowded, we pretty much had no idea what the hell was going on. Nick had almost no information about the event besides the fact that it was a manga convention. We eventually figured out that it was a convention for independent artists to display and sell their work. What amazed me was that most of the artists were women.

What I didn't expect to see was all the ridiculous amounts of gay manga porn that the women artists drew. I would pick up a manga fan fiction about star wars, look at the pictures, and realize that Obi-Wan Kanobi was having sex with Darth Vader. Or I would pick up a Spiderman fan fiction and see pictures of Dr. Octopus raping Spiderman with one of his mechanical tentacles. I guess guys aren't the only weirdos in Japan.

I originally started looking at the Star Wars fan fiction because I know Haruka loves Star Wars. After I got over my initial revoltion of seeing Yoda get raped by a light saber, I thought about getting one of the comics for Haruka just for amusement factor, but I just couldn't get myself to buy one with a straight face.

But where were all the cosplay people?? (the people that dress up as Japanese characters) I had been to Fanime con once in San Jose, and there were plenty of people dressed up in weird costumes. We saw a few inside the exhibition hall, and Nick and Adam asked to get pictures with them, only to be turned down. What was up??

We later learned that there was an area outside where people could freely take pictures of all the people in costumes. The biggest line in the whole exhibit hall was going to this place. I can never get away with this, but because I was with two white guys, we did the "gaijin cut" where we pretended like we didn't know where the friont or end of the line was.

This place was pretty much what we were hoping for. People in all sorts of costumes, and even stranger people taking pictures of them. I took a decent amount of pictures of the people in costumes, but I mostly regret not taking any pictures of the people taking pictures of the girls in costumes. I seriously saw some of the sweatiest, greasiest, people with the most expensive cameras just completely swarming the girls.

Keep in mind the day was pretty hot, and some of these people were wearing pretty extravagant costumes. As we were walking up, we saw some kids being taken out of the area in wheel chairs because they passed out from heat exhaustion. I have a video of one guy passing out and getting dragged off, I'm still debating whether to put it on youtube or not.

I'm still trying to update this journal more often, all this happened over a month ago so I still have a lot of catching up to do. Also, recently Mike started a new band with Max and Morgan called "Hard Girls." I've been listening to them a lot, and they just put some songs up at www.myspace.com/hardgirls