Daikaiju Trump

The summer "Wonder Festival," Japan's second-largest gathering of nerds amateur and pro, went down like that giant-ass freight elevator in "Akira" this Sunday. Only the minute details differ from previous years -- this time around there was decidedly more mini-sofubi, like the ones sculpted by my pal "license to" Ilanena, he of the awesome Kenner-style logo, a die-hard Flatwoods Monster fetishist and director of short films with titles like "Violence Farmer." (Seriously, check these things out: he sculpted them based on tiny illustrations from an obscure set of monster playing cards packaged with bottles of mayonnaise in the '70s. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.)

The stage was set a full twenty-four hours before the show even began, when my pal Roger, half out of his mind on jetlag and ni-chome tonkatsu (a euphemism if ever there was one, but I mean it with no pun intended) insisted on a tour of Kabukicho. I took us to Golden-Gai, but my favorite hole in the wall was closed, and we didn't feel much like drinking anyway.

So I took him into the heart of darkness, where the following exchange was had in front of restaurant displaying a tank filled with murky water and several lethargic poison blowfish (another touch that seems like fiction but is, I assure you, as real as bottles of Ultraseven merlot.) That was when it happened: a porty African burst from the entryway to cathouse next door, insinuating himself between Roger and I like the long-lost pimp we never knew we had. Rotund, jocular, and clad in an aloha shirt, the effect was akin to that of Kool-Aid man with a pitcher full of hiropon instead of sugarwater. We'd let our guard down. Now, deliriously quickly, far quicker than either of us had time to react, we were treated to the following impassioned soliloquy:

Sirs! Do not tell me you came all the way to Kabukicho to look at fish! No! Tell me, my friend: what does a fish know of love? Can a fish fuck you? Sir! Sir? Do you know the Palace Athene? Our girls are the cleanest. You came all the way to Japan to look at some fish? What the fuck do you want with fish? A fish can't love you. A woman can love you. What are you going to do, fuck a fish?

Roger (looking at me): Does he mean the "Palace Athene" from Zeta Gundam?

Me: Let's go look at Gun-Pla.

And so we left, the plaintive wail of a pimp denied in our ears, a fitting appetizer to the main course to follow the next day: Wonder Festival 2007. More than forty thousand otaku. One thousand, eight hundred dealers. You can get a feel for the insanity here. Or here. Or, in Japanese, here.

Evangelion and Votoms trailers blaring on massive screens. Sweaty masses filing in from the oppressive heat and sun outside, where they've been camped out since six in the morning, patiently waiting for the stroke of ten A.M., funneling through crowd-barriers into the narrow doorways of Big Sight's convention halls like molecules of some exotic drug being forced down a syringe. All of them holding up the floor guide magazines handed out in lieu of tickets over their faces, as if caught doing something dirty by mommy.

Then again, some them of kind of were. Amidst the guys selling expensive resin kits of obscure craft from Space Cruiser Yamato, small companies selling endless variations of Macross and Mospeda mecha, or dudes putting their health on the line to build obsessively detailed, smoke-spitting Godzilla puppets out of cancerous-smelling latex, there's always a freak or two who goes too far.

A couple of 'Fests back, it was the guy dressed in full Nazi regalia selling ultra-detailed figurines of German flying saucers from World War II. This time, the Freak o' the Show award goes to a dude selling ultra-detailed vacuum-formed representations of women's buttocks, chests, and torsos. I think he called himself, imaginatively enough, "Real Cast." I don't know who was buying these things, but I felt kinda bad for the woman with the misfortune to have been assigned the table space abutting (huh, huh) the rear (haw!) of Real Cast's table. (This photo of her spending a forlorn afternoon under a pair of enormous plastic asses pretty much sums up the WonderFest experience.)

Walking by the crowd gathered in front of the Real Cast table, it was all I could do to keep myself from crying: Sirs! Do not tell me you came all the way to WonderFest to look at vacuum-formed behinds...

Comments

[Roger]

"I thought he was dead!"

"No, remember when I told you he 'sleeps with the fishes...'?"

Ilanena-san hit the big time! His mayo kaiju are featured in Kaiju-Taro's web log:

http://www.kaiju-taro.com/kaiju-yaro-JPN/blog/2007/08/2007.html

[drifand]

Nothing like a good dose of outré to bring back the 'wonder'! The different breeds of otaku never cease to amaze (and horrify).

[Roger]

Check it out, we 're famous! Yaco mentioned us:

http://wildcats.pupui.jp/mt/archives/2007/08/post_116.html

Can you translate?

[Matt]

Meeting Yaco was one of the highlights of the show. His blog is, to borrow a phrase, a diamond bullet in the brain of robot-toy collectors. It says, "I realized that grown men who get as excited as little kids when they see toys can be found all over the world."

All I know is, I get as excited as a little kid when I see his customs:

http://wildcats.pupui.jp/mt/archives/2005/02/_11_1.html

[hillsy]

Yo Matt....now that you're all famous 'n shit, you want to swirl my Baltan around in your drink, too? I bet I'd get a fortune on eBay for it..."sucked on by Matt Alt..."

Ok...that was a little weird...