Heroes, Dragons, and the Whole Beautiful Mess
The Tokyo International Anime Fair at Big Sight is one of those events that exists at the precise intersection of pure joy and total sensory overwhelm—a weekend every year where the characters you grew up with share exhibition space with whatever the current season has produced, and cosplayers move between booths in varying degrees of commitment while the air smells faintly of plastic merchandise and convention-center carpet.
Walking past a Dragon Ball display still did something to me I couldn’t entirely rationalize. The show is decades old. I’ve seen every frame. And yet there was Goku on a four-meter banner and something in my chest responded like Pavlov’s dog. Chibi Maruko-chan nearby—that strange cozy slice-of-life show from the late eighties that somehow never stops airing in Japan—a different kind of nostalgia, softer, more domestic, like finding an old photograph in a jacket pocket. Then five minutes later, the full machinery of the Hatsune Miku industrial complex: the Vocaloid idol, the holographic concert star, the character who technically doesn’t exist but whose merchandise footprint suggests otherwise. The younger otaku treated her section like a pilgrimage site, and honestly they weren’t wrong to.
Cosplay at an event like this ranges from the deeply committed to the barely started, and all of it is worth watching. Someone in full Pirate King costume standing next to a girl who’s added cat ears to jeans and a T-shirt and called it a day. Both entirely correct. In one corner, a J-Pop DJ was gamely building energy for the tourists clustered around the stage, and doing reasonably well. The whole space had that quality that big fan gatherings always carry—the social contract temporarily suspended, everyone tacitly agreeing to be briefly, vulnerably enthusiastic about something they love without irony.
I left with a bag of things I didn’t need and the specific pleasant exhaustion of a day spent in unapologetic enthusiasm. The Pokémon keychain was probably unnecessary. I bought two.