Anime Expo 2007

This shirt was from Moke and is kinda rare.

He got it by visiting Anime Expo in 2007 and buying it from their merch booth. They sell a new shirt style every year –very collectable-. You may have also been able to get one by buying a 4 day pass –sometimes they do that too-. He brought this shirt over with a whole bunch of other new/used shirts to try and keep the blog going for as long as possible; maybe we can stretch it to E3.

Most of these donated shirts are fresh and new but this one came with a “used” warning. Normally you can’t tell if something has been used other than like crease marks, faded/cracked ink, and stretching. I can only assume that it’s new because of all these key elements are pristine. But in the like one day that he wore this he managed to get a big fat stain in the dead center of the shirt. If it had hit the printed area it probably would have just washed out, even after a full rinse and dry cycle it remains. It’s a medium and probably fits both of us fine; he was dumping it to make room for other shirts.

On the front are the Anime Expo logos and the year that it was from: “Anime Expo 2007 - AX”. Along the bottom it has the dates and location really small: “June 29 – July 2 Long Beach, California”. They used to hold the Expo at the Long Beach convention center, the same place that the Long Beach Comic Con is now. AX now uses the Anaheim convention center because the Long Beach one is much smaller and has less parking and stuff. The back is a whole mishmash of logos, sponsors and Japanese. Along the left are some of the sponsors of the event: “ADV, Anime Network, Imaginasian TV, Newtype, SPJA”. The top and the right are the “Anime Expo 2007” logos as well as the same thing in Japanese “アニメエキスポ二〇〇七年” a really rough, phonetic translation. The center of the design is from an anime and manga –comic- called “Mushi-shi 蟲師”. It had recently been translated into English and its licensor was pushing it that year. Below the title are the studios and producers: “Kodansha, MMV, and Funimation”. The very last thing on here is their website:

http://www.anime-expo.org

Even though most otakus and AX attendees are dirt poor, quite a few wind up with these shirts. Since you can’t wear your exhibit badge around all the time this is the next best thing.  An AX shirt is a nice way of saying “I was there. I was witness to all the craziness and insanity.” There is a lot of weird nerdy stuff that goes on those 4 days and owning up to any part of that is a brave thing to do. Maybe someone you met at a hotel party or the masquerade will recognize the shirt, and then you’re in for a potentially charged conversation.

The con is something that I used to always want to go to. It was an event that you would save all your money for so that you could just buy up every little crazy Japanese thing you could find. But see, this was back in the day when you would go to Little Tokyo on the weekends to get an anime fix, or pine for just one afternoon in Akiba. Nowadays the entire “character goods” industry has been revolutionized from websites like Hobby Link Japan and Flutterscape to real life locations like Marukai and Frank & Son’s where you can just get all the stuff you want at competitive prices. This has made cons like AX and Fanime turn into fan meet and greets where you can put faces to forum posters and internet alias. Also geeking right the fuck out about anime and Japan.