Tokyo college kid is ahead of the merchandising curve as he goes beyond itasha to show his love for this season’s hit camping anime.


While itasha get their name from being “painful” (itai) to look at, it also takes a certain level of courage to be the one driving a car covered in anime character graphics. Still, the potential for embarrassment is only temporary, since being in a moving vehicle means you’ll soon be out of sight of any individual hater.

But what really takes guts is to broadcast your love of anime in a non-mobile way, like with an ita-tent.

The latest hit in the “cute girls repandly partaking in a real-life hobby” anime genre is Laid-Back Camp, also known as Yuru Camp. As the title implies, it’s about camping, so it was only fitting that fan and Japanese Twitter user @makkun_denden decorate a camping tent with jumbo-sized images of Rin Shima and Nadeshiko Kagamihara, two of his favorite characters from the show.

To complete his vision, @makkun_denden, a student at Tokyo Institute of Technology, turned to a print shop that specializes in making banners. After supplying them with the anime artwork, he asked the print shop’s technicians to put the images onto large, waterproof tarpaulin sheets, and then to add a series of eyelets for ropes to be passed through.

While he hasn’t stayed in the tent overnight yet, @makkun_denden did take it out for its first test at the Kamioshima Camping Area in Sagamihara in Kanagawa Prefecture, Tokyo’s neighbor to the south, where it drew appreciative comments from other anime fans who happened to be spending the day in the great outdoors. During his afternoon there, @makkun_denden also decided to get in a little wotagei/otaku dance practice.

And since glowsticks are a critical element of wotagei, that meant @makkun_denden also had interior lighting for his ita-tent.

Unfortunately for the many online commenters who’ve said they’d like to buy an ita-tent, @makkun_denden hasn’t licensed the artwork used, and therefore can’t sell it. But that doesn’t mean he’s done making them for his personal use, and he says that next up he plans to make a tent out of lighter material (the one pictured here is on the heavy side, he says) and featuring other characters from Laid-Back Camp’s ensemble cast, so hopefully we can look forward to more photos as the weather warms up enough for him to try an overnight stay in his anime tent.

Source: Twitter/@makkun_denden via Jin

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s always happy to see what Tokyo Institute of Technology’s mad scientists are up to.