Nisei Week Anime Festa August 7-8  Los Angeles, CA

As part of the annual Nisei Week festival in Little Tokyo, a small event known as the Anime Festa was held.  Although is wasn't as highly attended as last year's Anime-Gaming Mixer, this event certainly offered a lot more in terms of variety.  Screenings of the movie "Tracing the Gray Summer" were shown throughout the weekend.  Saturday featured a manga drawing workshop.  Sunday featured a stage show, stamp rally, and a cosplay gathering.  The cosplayers were also included in the Nisei Week Grand Parade.  I finished the stamp rally fairly early in the day and earned a very loud keychain alarm for my efforts.  I arrived back in Weller Court for lunch just before the stage show was about to begin.  The show included various singers including Little Tokyo regular, Ken Koshio.   Mascots Kikkoro and Morizo made an appearance as well as a cosplay group performing to music.

Other cosplayers started to filter in closer to parade time.  I decided to use this as a learning experience by having a lot of them stand in the worst possible location, just to see if I could salvage the photos through editing.  I discovered that not all shade is created equal.  There were more cosplayers, but I put my stuff away to get ready for the parade.

I didn't take any photos of the actual parade, because I actually participated in the parade by helping to carry the mikoshi, the portable shrine at the end of the parade.  I had a pretty bad shoulder bruise at the end of the day.  Despite the lack of publicity, the Anime Festa was a fairly successful event.   There were actually quite a few attendees for every event.  Hopefully, the Anime Festa will be an annual event and will continue to grow.