This morning dawned with the kind of weather I associate with March. Cold, raw, steady, drippy rain. It was absolutely blecch. A perfect day to head out to Big Sight and visit the Tokyo Anime Fair.

The Ariake station and approach to Big Sight was creepy and sodden, since every other time we had been there it was full of people, now it was just full of water. Where Comiket fills all 6 East Halls and all 4 West halls, TAF fills East Halls 1-3. It was exactly as I expected, a trade show for anime – many of which have been previously announced, so are not new news. We watched the trailer for the CGI Captain Harlock movie which was so good we wanted a cigarette after it, and I got a few Pixel Maritan character figurines among lots of pieces of paper announcing series available for licensing? Want a laugh? Rose of Versailles was listed as available for licensing. Hee. (If you don’t know why that is funny, don’t worry about it.)

We met up with some great folks, Ana and Mari and the Otakon folks and translator Bill Flanagan and some of us went to lunch and had a nice chat. I love industry gossip. :-)

After we had seen all that there was to be seen and gotten all the random items we wanted (we passed on the 4-foot tall Heroman bags) Bruce, the wife and I headed home, stopping for murasaki (purple) sweet potato treats at the station.

We flattened out a bit until we got a call from Mari – she and Ana wanted to have some tea with us, before they headed out to the TAF Gaijin Dinner (to which I was invited, but passed. If I had been by myself, I mighta gone, but with the wife, I felt it was unfair.)

We had tea and some okazu – mine was smoked daikon with cream cheese – and then we parted – my party went to Animate to do a little shopping for a few folks and they headed off to dinner.

Tomorrow, we’re going to hit Akihabara, finally, for a little surprise for Bruce. :-)

Today’s Random Junk Food Item: Pumpkin flavored Crunky. It wasn’t as pumpkin-y as the pumpkin seed bagel I had for breakfast (pumpkin bagel with corned beef, mayo, onion and lettuce.) And the sweet potato sweet, which was full of sweet potato-y goodness and was very purple. D’oh – forgot to take a picture. ^o^