What I Did on My Summer Vacation

The main purpose of my trip to Japan this summer was to attend the Tokyo Wonder Festival (ワンダーフェスティバル).

A few days before the event, the catalogs (which double as entry tickets) go on sale at various hobby shops around the city. I picked up my copy at the Kaiyodo store in the Radio Kaikan Building.

You'll often hear of people lining up early in the morning to get into the convention hall, but I think that's a little excessive. I rolled in just a little before 10:00 a.m. (when the halls were supposed to open), and I didn't think the wait to get in was particularly bad. Then again, I'm not the type to get impatient over waiting in line for events, so take that as you will.

Eventually the line started moving in fits and spurts, and after rounding the side of the building you could see the ranks of event staff flanking the crowd. To gain entrance, you just hold up your catalog and follow the flow into the venue.

For Wonfes, Makuhari Messe is divided into three sections. The first section (Halls 1-4) is devoted to industry booths, while the two sections toward the east are for artist circles and independent sellers.

In the days before, I had gone over the catalog to find the booths that I wanted to visit, but I should have planned out my route as well. There is so much to see that you really need to budget your time if you want to see all the booths, chat with artists, and make purchases.

Since I am more interested in garage kits, my overall plan was to bypass the industry section, and headed straight for the east end of the hall, and then work my way westward.

My strategy was to just move methodically through the aisles, but the better plan would have been to visit all the booths selling the popular items I wanted to buy first, then go through at a more leisurely pace to take photos.

The majority of booths I wanted to visit were in Halls 7 and 8. I'll cover the 1/72 scale and wargaming type stuff some other time in my main blog, but here are some pictures of various other figures that I saw.

Fortunately, I was able to buy most of the 1/72 scale garage kits I wanted, but many of the petit figures I was interested in were completely sold out by the time I made it to the artist booths.

There was also an R-18 section in this area.

I've included pictures of some of the tamer figures, but photos of the majority of items were not suitable for my blog.

There was also quite a few "normal" figures in the section as well, since the artists sold both ero-figures and regular figures.

By the time I was ready to head to the next section of the venue, I was already pretty worn out. The corridor between the two sections was where cosplay photography was going on. Photoshoots were taken along the sides of the corridor to avoid obstructing traffic.

Halls 5-6 were quite similar to the previous section, but there also seemed to be many booths for people who were just selling new, used, or vintage goods, and crafty stuff as opposed to just garage kits. I would have liked to stop and browse some of the second hand booths, because there seemed to have been some good deals to be had, but I didn't have the time so I skipped by with no more than a cursory look.

Hall 5-6

Here are pictures of figures from this section.

The last hall I visited was probably the one that had the most traffic since it was where the major figure companies set up their displays.

The ArcLight booth was displaying their upcoming Cthulhu Evolution line, featuring models from Takayuki Takeya who happens to be one of my favorite sculptors.

There were a couple of 1:1 scale display versions of Hatsune Miku to go with the 1/7 scale versions.

Booths were advertising upcoming shows like the Thunderbolt Fantasy prequel on the backstory of Làng Wū Yáo (浪巫謠).

A display of real swords popularized by the otome game Touken Ranbu for the katana joshi (カタナ女子).

Military vehicles belonging to the members of a re-enactment group.

I caught the end part of a live idol performance, and I'm sure I missed a lot of other things that were going on in the industry section, but I it's just impossible to see everything since it is only a one day event.

Here are some more pictures of things from the industry section.

At 5 p.m. they began closing down the booths, and people began leaving the venue.

Halls 1-4 at the end of the day

Attendees piled up their catalogs outside the hall for recycling, since they probably didn't want to carry the extra weight on their trip home. I picked up a copy of the catalog with a green cover from the stack for the sake of completeness. You'll see the old catalogs on sale at YJA for about ¥1200, but I'm not sure how many people actually buy used catalogs.

The experience of attending Wonfes was great, but it can be extremely tiring.  My current plan is to attend the event again in February of 2021 if possible.

In closing, I'll mention that I spent less than half of the money I budgeted for purchases, but that's because a lot of the kits that I wanted to buy were sold out.

That being said, my advice is to not overthink your purchases, and just buy the model if you really like it (taking your budget into account of course). The fact is that unless you can attend Wonfes on a regular basis, the next time you see the model, it will probably be on an auction site, and will be selling for at least double the price it was being sold at during the event.