Summer Wonderfest 2007

Sorry about the delay in getting these up, I’ve been pretty slack. Yes, I made the trek back to Tokyo for the Summer Wonder Festival on the 12th of August. It’s a big figure and garage kit event at the Tokyo Big Sight (same venue as Comiket) but it only uses up East Halls 2-6. Warning, this thread uses a lot of pics - thanks again to Sphere for hosting my photos, I think I’d use up my flickr bandwidth pretty quickly if he didn’t help out.

Without much further ado, let’s begin. As with the tradition of any large scale event at Tokyo Big Sight, one has to start queuing up early - like real early. The mad rush to get goods the moment you step foot inside the venue so it is of crucial importance that you get there early. As I did for Comiket 71 last year, and would do for Comiket 73 the week after, I stayed at the K’s hostel in Asakusa Tokyo. The first train from the nearest station is the 5:04am train bound for Ryogoku. I have to catch this train and transfer at Tsukishima to the Yurakucho line and then head towards Toyosu. From there I take the Yurikamome monorail to either Ariake (for east entrance line up) or Tenmon-somethingorother…. for the west entrance line up. If you are utterly confused, please take a look at this map.

I get to Tokyo Big Sight at around 5:50am and this is where I was in the queue:

As there is no daylight savings in Japan, in the Summer, the mornings are unusually bright.

To give you an idea how long the queue was here’s a pic of the line behind me:

Which goes on further

And to infinity and beyond…?

You seriously have not been in a queue until you go to one of these events. The queue for wonderfest was a long narrow line. For comiket, due to the large numbers, they actually break the queue up in sections and then reform the line just before opening. Times like this I really think that the Japanese wrote the book on crowd control.

At around 9am we finally started moving. The movement was slow and it was very hot. I think it was hovering around 33 or something, and worse in direct sunlight.

Hooray, Tokyo Big sight in sight!

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