Summer Wonder Festival 2015

Tokyo Hobby Festival Features Godzilla, Ultraman, Gamera, Anime, Cosplayers and More Author: Ed Godziszewski Official Site: wf.kaiyodo.net Date: Sunday, July 26, 2015. Conditions: Another day of 95/95 Japanese summer weather (i.e. sunny and 95?F/95% humidity). Location: Makuhari Messe convention center, 40 minutes outside of Tokyo Event: Summer Wonder Festival (typically lower attended than its winter counterpart) Admission fee: ¥2000 (up from the usual ¥1000)

When you think about the inconvenient location, blistering heat, and doubling of the entrance fee, what do you think would happen to the level of attendance for the bi-annual festival of garage kits and cosplay that is known as Wonderfest? Well of course, attendance would far surpass all previous Wonder Festivals. Indeed, this year’s Summer Wonderfest taught me to never underestimate the power of garage kit greed and cosplay interaction as crowds reached record levels and navigating the aisles was even more difficult than usual. With brisk business being done by all, at least the stagnant Japanese economy is receiving a healthy stimulus from one portion of the population. As my perspective on Wonderfest is slanted towards all things related to Japanese sf/monster films, especially giant monsters, I was looking forward to Wonderfest, expecting a bit of a surge in giant monster interest due to last year’s American Godzilla film. As had been evident from my previous two business trips to Japan, the film went a long way towards reawakening interest in Godzilla in his homeland. There were a lot of ads and displays that were Godzilla related, the Godzilla head perched atop a hotel in Shinjuku was drawing a lot of attention, a new Japanese film would be forthcoming next year... people were actually talking about Godzilla again. Unfortunately, not much of this carried over into Wonder Festival as the amount of monster kits continued the slow decline that I have observed over the last few years. What was new was quite interesting, as I hope you can see from my photos, but the erosion of the monster kit market seems to have continued, with several major players sitting out this summer’s show. Most surprising was the almost complete absence of anything related to the live action ATTACK ON TITAN movie that was due to be released in Japan the following week. While cosplay is always an amusing if not slightly disturbing diversion at Wonderfest, it has never included something of interest to the giant monster fan until this year. At pretty much the last moment as we were escaping the broiling sun and heading back inside, we noticed not one, not two, but three Toho movie monsters... Mothra, Gigan, and King Ghidorah. Three young ladies had taken it upon themselves to fashion cleverly realized costumes of these three monsters. As it turned out, these weren’t just randomly created costumes... these three also appeared to be genuinely interested in giant monsters as later in the afternoon they could be seen walking the convention floor, stopping only to study the tables of those dealers with giant monster kits.

For more information on Wonder Festival and Super Festival, please see the earlier coverage here on SciFi Japan: