The month before last, my husband and I attended our 15^th Katsucon. Katsucon is usually the only convention we’re able to make these days, our time and money being spoken for by car payments, utilities, and our daughter’s preschool tuition. We had a great time at Katsu 15. The best part, as always, was the catching up with old friends. We also purchased a smattering of items from the dealers’ room, mostly presents for family members left back home.

I lost count of how many times one of us said “Can you believe this is the 15^th Katsucon?”. Many of our friends said the same thing. Time has flown! As we mixed and mingled with the younger anime fans, who don’t remember when cartoons from Japan couldn’t be bought at every store in town, I wondered how many of them knew something about how anime fandom used to be. Let’s go back, just for a few minutes, to the pre-Naruto, pre-Pokemon days. Let me tell you about my first anime convention:

The first convention I ever attended was Anime Expo 1992, in San Jose, California. I was sixteen years old at the time, and lived in Maryland. Why did I travel three thousand miles to go to an anime convention? Well, because at the time, there were no anime cons on the east coast. There were some general conventions with anime programming tracks, but no dedicated cons. I’d seen the ad for AnimeCon 1991 in the back of an Adam Warren Dirty Pair comic, the year before. At that time, my parents made the half-hearted promise that if the event was held again, and if I still wanted to go, we’d talk about it. In 1992, my persistence won out. My mother flew to San Jose with me, and we called it a summer vacation.

The primary thing that would surprise young fans of today about the cons of yore, would be how small they were. Upon arriving at the hotel the day before the con, there was no evidence of an impending otaku invasion. I walked around the lobby and hallways, wondering if I’d made some huge mistake. I wondered if there wasn’t going to be any anime convention after all. I finally found a group of three young men, sitting in a corner, talking. One of them was wearing a vaguely geeky tee shirt, so I took a chance and approached them, relieved to find that they were indeed there for the con. If you compare that to these days, when you see herds of costumed fans wandering the sidewalks en masse, miles before you reach the hotel, you can see how much this fandom has grown.

I hadn’t pre-registered for Expo ‘92. I woke up at the crack of dark dawn on Friday morning, worried that if I didn’t hit the registration area as soon as possible, I might be turned away. In a quiet hallway on one of the lower levels, I found the same handful of guys I’d seen the previous day. They’d had the same worry I did. Within a couple of hours, our group had grown to perhaps 40 or so, which to me seemed like a stadium’s worth of people. I’d never seen more than a couple of other anime fans in one place prior to this. I was ecstatic to be part of such a huge throng of otaku! Convention staffers passed around a mixing bowl full of candy to keep us busy, while they set up their registration supplies (registration supplies = clipboards and ballpoint pens). Consider the registration lines for Otakon last year, and think about how many candy bowls would have been needed. It’s worth mentioning that the crowd was a markedly different demographic, as well. The vast majority of con attendees back then were male, and most were eighteen and up. As a sixteen-year-old girl, I was an oddity. That first con, I didn’t meet a single other teenage girl. I’m sure there must have been one or two others, but I never crossed paths with them. I don’t recall seeing anyone, boy or girl, who was younger than about fourteen. Three years later, I assisted with a children’s programming track at Anime East 1995. We had one child attend, and he was the son of a senior staffer. You just didn’t see kids at cons.

One long gone tradition of yesterday’s conventions, was convention programming on your hotel room television. That’s right, con programming, right in your room! In those pre-boom days, only a scant handful on Japanese titles had been licensed to US companies, or distributed over here in an form at all. The rest of it, most of what everyone watched, existed under Japanese copyright only. Without getting into legal technicalities, conventions were so small, and anime fandom so relatively insular, no one much cared if titles were copied from one place to the other, and distributed amongst fans. It simply wasn’t a large enough market for anyone to bother. This slack atmosphere allowed fans on convention staff to compile hours of anime. With the permission of the hotel, they ran it on one or two TV channels all weekend long. Some of the programming was taken from laserdisc, but much had been taped directly from Japanese television, commercials and all. Of course, nothing was translated, but much of the anime we gobbled up back then hadn’t been translated. We watched OAVs with friends, passing dot-matrix print-outs of English scripts back and forth. Just as often, we’d watch with nothing to go on, trying our damnedest to piece together what the @#%^& was happening.

A most dramatic differences between conventions in the early 1990s, and cons today, can be seen in cosplay. I cosplayed back at that first con in 1992. I was Minky Momo, from the magical girl series of the same name. I believe there were approximately 16 of us total, in the cosplay for Expo 1992. the procedure for cosplay back then (and for a few years to follow) was to have each person do their walk on, or individual skit, and then assemble everyone together for a second-act “group skit”. We’d meet on Friday evening or Saturday morning, assess what different characters we had, and try to come up with a skit that could utilize all of them. At Expo 1992, our group skit was a sort of an anime academy awards send-up. Myself as Minky Momo, and Tavisha Wolfgarth as Madoka from Kimegure Orange Road, competed for the “most kawaii” trophy. I continued to cosplay for quite a few years following that first convention, and participated in several all-inclusive skits. As the years went on however, cosplay participant numbers increased exponentially. It soon became an impossibility for almost any con to organize one skit which could include everyone.

While not as dramatically changed as cosplay, the dealers’ room was also a different affair back in the day. Yes, there was internet in 1992, but it hadn’t reached anything close to the level of integration into daily life that it has today. These days, one can walk into even the largest dealers’ room, and see wonderful things. Wonderful things, that you can probably find online in a few weeks, when you’re not also trying to pay for a hotel room. The exception is when you luck into a rare vintage piece or collectible, or some other hard to find treasure. Back then, as an east coast kid from the suburbs, I had never before seen anime toys for sale. I’d seen photos in coveted issues of NewType and Hobby Japan, but actual action figures, playsets, dolls, model kits and plushies? I almost started to hyperventilate. I recall a fleeting moment of sheer freak-out, where I wondered if there was anything in my hotel room that I could sell for more spending money. And spending money you needed, because if someone went to the trouble of carting those Urusei Yatsura keychains over from Japan, they weren’t going to let them go for just the yen conversion price. You ponied up, because at least if you didn’t live in an area with a sizable Asian populace, when on earth would you ever see this stuff again? It’s a wonder many of us ever made it home. Plane tickets can fetch a decent price on the secondary market.

It’s crazy stuff, and I’ve geezered out for far too long here. It would be great to hear of similar (or different!) experiences from other old school fans who remember a far different con-scape than that which we’ve come to know since Anime became a household word. I will confess that though I’ve attended cons on both coasts, having started nearly seventeen years ago, the one con I’ve never made it to is A-Kon in Texas. I’d love to hear if the scene in that part of the country was much the same, or maybe A-kon was where all the girls and kids were hiding out in the early 90s!

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 11:42 pm and is filed under -Authors-, Fandom, Misa1, anime. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.