Yesterday was the K-ON concert at Yokohama Arena! Sadly, by the time we got there all of the merchandise had gone, lol. So, straight to our seats.

An arena like that really has a different sound to it than other concert venues i’ve been to. Crowd cheering sounded great!

First of all they went through all of the girl’s character songs, with the crowd changing glowstick colour based on which girl was singing. I do have to admit though that with the exception of Sawako-sensei’s crazy metal band (she even came out wearing the mask, lol), that the rest of the character songs are kinda boring.

Eventually the character songs were over and there was an MC in the middle with some crowd participation… girl on stage shouts something out, crowd shout the next part back. Rittsu is still the best, lol…

キャベツ　うめぇ！！

Then all of their main songs. The crowd were really pumped for these. ^_^ Lots of ultra orange going off everywhere. They’d even learnt their respective instruments to play on stage.

The encore calling in that place was really loud. We got a double encore too. And then the end with lots of crying from the seiyuu. I do remember thinking back when Umisho came out that Toyosaki Aki is a voice actress that would be going places sometime in the future… and here we are… singing to a sell out crowd at Yokohama Arena. I’ll still remember her best for Amuro though.

Got back to Tokyo and spent the rest of the evening in the maid bar, mmm, yes. I seem to be part of some sort of iphone users club going on in there, lol.

Ok, and onto today’s comiket! No lining up stupidly early this time, got there for 10.30am and walked straight in. I was on a mission to find any shoujo stuff I could, but ended up being somewhat disappointed, lol (would have been so much easier if the comiket cd had been working). But I was very happy at finding one table: “Alice Alliance“, Kirarin Revolution illustrations, yay~ Ended up buying all three of his books, lol.

Once done in the east halls, headed off to the commercial booths again to see Momoi at the aisp@ce booth, and then went to the Danceroid booth again to say thanks for the live the other day, they remembered me. ^_^

Anyway yes this today’s loot (only one of them is nsfw, the rest are all non-pron, can you guess which it is?):

Top Row (left to right): 3 misc original things bought purely because the art was appealing (Nekoose). Shokotan fanbook.

Middle Row (left to right): Kirarin revolution illustration book from alice alliance, followed by his 2 other illustration books. Baby Doll Biscuit full colour illustration book. Pixiv-tan illustration book.

Bottom Row (left to right): Habanero-tan stuff from Junk-Castle. Touhou illustration book from Pixiv.

And there we go, comiket over.

Currently too tired to go out anywhere for new years eve (not to mention everywhere’s too expensive tonight) so just watching Kohaku on TV, go red team! Tomorrow though we’ll be off to battle crowds at washinomiya shrine!

Ok, first some background info: I’m sure most people know about or have at least seen some of those masked dancing girls on nico video/youtube. Well 3 of them got together and made DANCEROID, they are:

• Kozue (Nico Video Mylist):
  

• Ikura (Nico Video Mylist):
  

• Minka Lee (Nico Video Mylist):
  

So yes, that’s them. Found out they were having a live performance for their DVD release, and well we had to go. I do remember saying back in summer “it’d be great if they all got together and had some sort of live performance somewhere” (this was before “danceroid” existed). So yeah, who’d have thought we’d be seeing them live in the flesh minus mask.

Saw them at comiket earlier that day and picked up glowsticks and towels and stuff in preperation for the live. ^_^

Then after leaving comiket and dumping stuff at the hotel we went to Astro Hall in the Harajuku area. I was wondering what the crowd was going to be like, and it seemed to have quite a large portion of women. At that point we were thinking “There’s gotta be some of the other dancing girls in the crowd here”, followed by “I wonder if that spinning girl with the cat is here.” And funnily enough i’m 99.99% sure she walked past us a few mins later, distinctive hair gave it away lol. So there we go, the crowd was made up of a wide range of guys, girls, and other dancing girls, lol.

And so the show started, all three of them looked *VERY* nervous on stage at first. Their first time doing it in front of a big crowd (whats kinda funny is that there were only about 100 people there, but with the amount of views they get on youtube/nicovideo they could easily fill out budokan several times over). They basically lip sync’d and danced, no singing (wasn’t expecting any singing anyway).

They’re very funny too, lol. MC’s included grabbing each other’s bags and pulling random things out of them and showing them to the crowd… one of them had been nicking packs of tea from the hotel, lol. This was followed by signing a random thing in their bag (Kozue couldn’t find anything, so signed a random receipt and a stick of gum, lol), and then a mass janken competition to win them. I really suck at these… went out in the first round. >_< Other MC’s were having the crowd ask them questions, the first of which was “what are your 3 sizes?”… the funny part being that it was a girl that asked, lol. And another MC where they asked the crowd questions: “Who came the farthest to see us?”… I think I won with shouting out England, lol, though they said coming from that far was cheating, lol.

Final song: Luka Luka Night Fever (Kozue was wearing that outfit for it too), that really is a mental song to be in the crowd for (and the 2nd time being in the crowd for it this holiday… first being Momoi’s version at her concert).

Then huge calls for an encore and they came back on, they all ended up crying during their final MC, say thankyou to everyone for everything, and how they never thought they’d ever be able to perform live like this. I think the crowd were all equally happy to have been able to see them live too… almost teared up myself. *_*

Then they said they wanted to shake hands with everyone on the way out, and thus they rushed over to the exit, and as we all left we got handshakes off of all of them. Ahhh, who’d have thought I’d be able to shake hands with the mysterious masked dancing girls that clearly originally wanted to hide their identity! Such is the power of the internet, with that many fans it was only a matter of time before they’d be doing stuff like this. ^_^

Ahh, that was a great live. And it went on for like 2 and a half hours too! Ahhh… want them to do another one now. >_<

Ahhhhhh… <3

<3 <3

My first comiket~

Left the hotel and headed off to Ariake station to meet Silli at around 11pm, then we walked off to the big sight place.

There were *lots* of people just milling around… buying things from convienience stores etc. However I was already prepared with a fold up seat, lots of layers/hood/hat/scarf/gloves…. and a pack of 30 of those hot pocket things (what are they actually called in English? “カイロ”… I keep calling them “hot pockets” but i’m sure that’s some sort of food), they really are a life saver as I learnt from lining up for AKB48 at 5am in the snow, lol.

At about 2am the comiket staff came out with loud speakers and organized everyone into a huge line… huge huge line… a good couple of thousand is my guess. We were then escorted what felt like miles away down the street so they could then organize us into separate lines based on which hall everyone was headed to (at this point seemingly all of the women went off into their own line, i assume they were wanting all the BL in the east halls that day). After some more standing around waiting we were then moved back to in front of the big sight building, the line was then organized into pens of people, and the lady with the loud speaker said we could all sit down and sleep as this would be our final spot until 8.40am.

Get out folding chair, stick hot pockets all over the place (one on the cheek makes for a really warm pillow like feeling when sleeping), head down and sleep. I managed to get some sort of sleep and ended up waking up around 7am. Went to find a toilet… which ended up basically being a huge ditch in the ground with like 50 portaloo’s on top of it… nice. >_<

The line with the women in it started moving up to the top of the stairs at about 8am… and it was endless… 8.40 came and went and there were still thousands upon thousands of women going in, lol. Eventually they’d all gone and our groups started moving, first in front of the stairs:

(yeah, lining up at midnight, there were still that many people in front)

Then the barriers went up and everyone was slowly (emphasis on slowly… running was absolutely forbidden) moved up the stairs to the top, then up another set of stairs to the outside of the west hall 3 & 4 for all of the commercial booths.

And finally we got in!!!

Rush (without running of course) to the Gee!Store booth and get in the line for the K-ON jackets… the line was already outside, took me an hour waiting in the line, lol, but I got one!! They were almost certainly sold out shortly after that, most people were buying more than one.

Wanted to line up for the Nanoha movie stuff, but that line was impossible… looked several hours long and took up a large area outside, lol. >_<

At that point I realised I didn’t have a huge bag, so just went to the first shop I saw without a queue and bought theirs… the Front Wing booth. Actually has some nice stuff in it, collection of A3 illustrations, and a bath set with bath salts and stuff, lol.

Then off to visit the DANCEROID booth (they’re a group of 3 of those nico video dancing girls… more on that in the next post), almost no-one at their booth at all. I bought everything from their booth, DVD get!! Yay!

(sadly they said no to a photo of them, so the booth is as good as it gets, lol)

Then off to the aisp@ce booth where Momoi would be broadcasting for all of comiket. Met up with chibi-tech there and we all went off to wander around as we’d finished getting everything we wanted.

Off to the east halls~

(note: we did go to the cosplay area, didn’t get any photo’s though… sorry)

Arrived fairly quickly in the east halls, wasn’t as hard as I was imagining to get there from the west side, must not have been as busy then. But anyway, got there and just walked around admiring everything (whilst avoiding the 2/3rd’s of both halls filled with man love >_<). Didn’t see any Kirarin Revolution stuff there though. Would have been far better if the comiket CD worked.

At that point I could barely walk anymore, it was 3pm and I hadn’t eaten or drunk since 10pm the day before. Needed food, ate food, then split up with everyone and went back to the hotel. A relatively successful day I think (minus missing out on Nanoha stuff):

First stop yesterday, the Tokyo Takarazuka Theatre to pick up shopping for people……… never before have I seen a place filled with that many middle aged women all wearing the same jacket, lol. Managed to somehow make it out alive, which was a bonus. Then off to Akiba to recover…

Walking around and we accidentally found a mini-event going on in that Belle Salle building. New eroge being sold, and a couple of mini-live performances. And just by chance guess who turned out to be there…

Aniki~~!!!!!!

…the other half of UNDER17, now playing in a group called Ultra-Prism.

After that we were off to Chiba to watch a street performance from a kinda crazy band… Puffy Shoes. Their website said they’d be performing on the street outside the station first, before going to some kind of bar later. When we arrived after a little walk around it wasn’t too hard to find them……. follow the loud drums/guitar, lol.

After they’d finished up the street live everyone was given a copy of their CD and name tags and asked to follow them to a recording studio type place. There was then a mini-live performance in the studio… gotta say fitting 15 or so people into one of those tiny rooms was a challenge, lol, but funny nontheless. It all felt very Beatles-like.

Then off to the bar! The sort of place that has lots of local bands playing there. Very packed, but everyone managed to squeeze in for their final performance of the day (I should point out that the drummer had been swigging from a bottle of whiskey all afternoon, lol).

Grabbed a few more beers, and fish and chips + onion rings before everyone left and we went home. (at which point we managed to get on the wrong train 3 times… each time going in the opposite direction to tokyo, before eventually finding the correct one, lol, drunk much?)

Not much excitement the past day or so… yesterday we basically spent some time in an arcade (THEY RESET THE DAMN OTOMEDIUS PLAYER DATA AGAIN!!!). Then found somewhere to have christmas dinner, which I have to say was bloody good, far better than most “christmas dinners” in restaurants in England… had turkey which was moist and perfectly cooked, and all the trimmings (though the stuffing was more of a paste than stuffing)! …the only thing missing was brussel sprouts, but hey, no big loss there, lol.

After that spent the entire night in the maid bar, last day of the christmas event with cheap photo’s~ (the other customers were making full use of the cheap photo’s by getting as many pervy poses as possible, lol, normally you’d need to fill up a point card to get a photo).

Left there at 5am, exciting taxi journey to the hotel which somehow managed to get lost with sat nav, lol, ended up getting a 50% discount on the price, bonus!

Today was Korean BBQ for lunch, delicious~

Then shopping in Akiba. There is honestly absolutely no Yumeiro Patissiere stuff *AT ALL*!!! And the Vocaloid Generation CD was sold out in Toranoana Akiba. Did on the other hand go through all the doujin software places finding those Nanoha fighting games (or games featuring Nanoha), along with some (non-ero)full colour doujinshi. ^__^

Didn’t do much else after that, spent some time in the arcade and then found another great cafe all the way on the edge of Akiba, making full use of their cheap photo’s too, lol.

Oh btw… I have been uploading photos here as I’ve been posting (in-case anyone hadn’t noticed).