Otaku from across the nation pack the halls of Tokyo Big Sight for Japan’s biggest independent manga/anime art festival.

It’s been an incredibly hot summer this year in Japan, with record-setting temperatures making staying at home under your living room air conditioner seem like a pretty good plan a lot of the time. However, anime and manga fans had a very compelling reason to head out last weekend, as Comiket, Japan’s largest dojinshi (self-published manga) convention, returned to the Tokyo Big Sight convention center.

This year’s Summer Comiket took place over two days, August 16 and 17. Though The convention started with a humbly sized beginning in 1975, 50 years later it’s become one of the biggest pop culture events in the country, commanding a huge amount of floorspace, as you can see in one of this year’s pre-setup photos.

But even with that much space to work with, once the exhibitor’s booths were in place and the guests were let in, things got incredibly crowded.

Seeing the masses in motion has an almost hypnotic effect.

Instead of trying to count all the otaku heads in the videos, we’ll refer to Comiket’s official attendance statement, which says that on Day 1, approximately 120,000 people showed up for the event. Sunday’s attendance was even bigger, with 130,000 guests, for a total two-day tally of roughly a quarter-million.

Tokyo Big Sight is located in the Odaiba district, on an island in Tokyo Bay that’s generally less crowded than the city center, especially on weekends. That makes the size of the Comoiket Crowds all the more surreal, such as the near-solid river of people flowing from the nearby rail station to the venue entrance.

As a testament to how well-planned and organized the event is, as well as its “Hey, we’re all here to have fun, right?” vibe, the crowds look to have been polite and orderly, even when being directed to follow a winding path that snaked through one of the parking lots to prevent excessive bottlenecking at the entrance.

Still, there’s got to be just a little tension mixed into the excitement if you’re a staff member manning the gates and see sights like this.

Since the very first Comiket was held in December of 1975, technically the event’s 50th birthday won’t be until a dew months from now. Still, with it now being 50 calendar years later, the organizers were understandably in a reflective mood, with the official Comiket Twitter account musing:

Even though the 700 people who took part in [the original Comiket in the] Toranomon [neighborhood] would have dreamed of a 50th anniversary event, it wasn’t a concrete goal. This is just the natural result of 106 iterations of being so enthralled with unprecedented artwork and meeting new people that even though we feel a little wistful each time a Comiket ends, we’re always looking forward to the next.

Amazingly, even with as huge as this year’s crowds were, there were actually down about 10,000 attendees over the two-day period compared to last year’s Summer Comiket. Part of this might be due to renovation work at Tokyo Big Sight leaving less space for exhibitors this year, and also, with the brutally hot weather, even Tokyo Disneyland is seeing a dip in attendance this summer. Still, 250,000 guests is something for Comiket to be very proud of, especially when you consider that it’s a 35,614-percent increase over Comiket 1’s attendance.

Source: Twitter/@comiketofficial via Hachima Kiko
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