COSMODE Online @ Anime Expo

For those of you who went to the Anime Expo, I hope you had a great time – I sure did.  I’m going to start posting on the blog for real – not just for announcements like I did before – so let me first introduce myself.

I’m Philip; I turned 23 during AX on July 3rd; I was born in New York and raised in Hawaii; it’s my 5th year living in Japan. At the moment, I work for OverDrive Inc. translating, digitizing, editing and marketing COSMODE Online – as well as update the website/blog. (Yes, I know it’s not a one man job)

Day -1
I arrived on July 1st in LA 2 days before the event; I needed a little time to assimilate back to American culture and brush up my driving skills.

It was pretty much an eventless day – except I was lost for about an hour after renting my car. ^_^;;

Day 0

This was the setup day. But first, I had to pick the OverDrive crew up from LAX. As I was waiting for them at the terminal, all of a sudden, airport police escorts everyone out – I find out later that a “terrorist” said he was carrying a “bomb”. The crew thought it was “very American”. -_-;

So we setup and that’s about it.

Day 1
Me (blue), the President of OverDrive Inc, Ted (red),  Mr. Tanaka (black) – I’m still not quite sure why he was here – and Takashi (taking the picture) are all waiting for the horde to come in.

It was the first time for me as an exhibitor at a con; I pretty much stayed at the booth handing out COSMODE Online stickers this day. What I found interesting was most of you said “thank you” when you got a sticker. In Japan, usually the person handing out promotional stuff says thank you.

Dinner was with the editor and photographer for COSMODE; it was also my birthday so I got to choose the restaurant, Morton’s Steak House.  They don’t make steaks that big in Japan!

Day 2
This day was fun! We took pictures of some of the cosplayers who came to our booth. Check them out here!

Jacky (who by the way does some of the overseas reports for COSMODE, made COSMODE USA, in charge of Cosplay.com for the Asia area, and is a judge for the AX Masquerade every year) had invited my boss and me to the Cosplay.com 4th of July dinner. There, I got to meet the Cosplay.com / Cosworx crew, as well as the director of Cure: Japan’s largest cosplay community website which recently started an English version. A lot of the top cosplayers and cosplay photographers were there, too!  I had a blast.

After the dinner, Jacky gave us the tour of AX at night – this is when the real fun starts! I didn’t know that AX was a 24-hour event.

Day 3
This was a busy day.

First, I acted as a translator for Jacky who was judging at the Cosplay.com Costume Contest. I asked Jacky what he was going to say, but he just said, “I’m gonna wing it”. This made me very nervous because I’ve never translated for someone on-the-fly on stage before! In the end, I was able to do a little COSMODE Online promotion and good preparation for what would happen tomorrow, so it’s all good. Cosplay.com said that they were going to have a much bigger cosplay contest next years.

Next, our booth was severely overstocked, and we had find some ways to get rid of our stuff fast; we planned not to bring anything back to Japan. So I ran around finding dealers that we could dump some of our stock to.

That night, I went to Anime Expo Masquerade – a first for me.  It was a great show!

Day 4
I was speaking at the COSMODE Panel in the morning. I met with Jacky and Mr. Tezuka, the president of Broccoli USA and producing COSMODE USA, to prepare; It turns out they at no translator for the panel and you guessed it, I was chosen. But this time I had it down; it was actually quite easy.

A lot more people came to the panel than I expected, and best of all, the questions and comments gave me a lot of new ideas to improve COSMODE Online! You’ll be seeing them soon.

The rest of the day I spent at the booth. We were having a fire sale! Since we didn’t want to bring anything back with us, towards the end of the day we were selling stuff that retailed for $30 in Japan for only $5! On top of that we were just giving away loads of stuff.

The last day of the Anime Expo was just crazy!

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