The hottest places in the Anime & Manga industry, brought to you by the SMAC! News Team… This is TOKYO MANGA DEEP WALKER! The clock strikes 12, midnight. We’re heading towards one of the biggest Otaku Events in Tokyo… Arriving on the scene, we’re greeted by a surprising sight!! Wha…? People are already lining up to get in!? We have to hurry!! Looks like we’re going to have to spend the night out here. But we anticipated this! So… good night! 8:00, the following morning. Look at all the people! It seems even more crowded in the daylight!! At 10:00, the line finally starts to move. If we can just get up these stairs… ! There it is! The entrance! Just a little farther! There are so many people and everyone is pushing, so it’s hard to get a decent photo!! I’ll leave the entrance introduction at this… Although we’re inside, there are so many people that it’s hard to move!! But we push through the crowd and head straight for the Cosplay Corner!!! This is from… Gintama, a popular anime in Japan!! Ah! It’s Alisa from Tsukasa’s favorite game, God Eater!! Heading to the outside cosplay area, what do we find…? Cosplayers from overseas! These two ladies are from France! These are characters from “Love Live”, one of the hottest anime on the Japanese Otaku scene. The cosplayers are (from the left), Maika Asahi and Rika!! Leafa and Asuna from Sword Art Online!! I love that anime!! This is from Kantai Collection! (lit. Fleet Collection) From the left, the characters are “Chikuma” and “Tone”. This is a manga where Japanese battleships are personified as cute girls! Japanese manga artists love to use personification in their work! One of the greatest charms of Japanese Otaku events are the cosplayers. They don’t come to the venue dressed like that of course. They bring their costumes in carry bags and then transform into their favorite characters at the venue! For this purpose, there are lockers and changing rooms available. The event organizers take great care in preparing this sort of thing, so that they can attract even more cosplayers and the event can grow even larger. Heading back to the main hall… Wow, look at all these figures!! This is a popular figure series in Japan called Nendoroid. There are an impressive 500 different kinds of figures displayed here!! While drooling over the figures, we get a call from DAI! He has arrived!   Oh, there were so many people that I forgot to properly introduce this event! This is “AnimeJapan 2015”! It was held over two days (3/21 – 3/22) at the holy land of Otaku events, “Tokyo Big Sight”. Oh, we’ve just spotted something else!!! Look at that! They’ve customized their own bikes with their favorite anime characters!! In Japanese, we call these “Ita Chari”. Not only a convenient mode of transportation, but also a display of the fan’s passionate feelings towards the characters that they love!! (Translator’s note: “Ita Chari” literally means “painful bike”, since non-fans consider them embarrassing and painful to look at) After a short break, we headed back into the hall, and met some visitors from overseas!!   There was just so much that we wanted to show you, it was hard to get around to everything this time! On the next TOKYO MANGA DEEP WALKER (4/9 Thurs), we’ll explain the booths of AnimeJapan 2015 in more detail!!   Please look forward to next week’s episode!!