After I was done with that, I went into the buildings where the clubs were having their displays, one club per classroom, with 55 of them spread out over 14 floors in 3 different buildings, plus some random one-off locations. I walked across all 14 floors, looking at what the various clubs had set up, though I skipped all the performances (largely by the musical groups, though there were a few other groups doing things like comedy skits too, I think). I could still by and large hear the performances from outside while I was passing by though, but they only started at certain times, and the doors were usually closed while the performances were taking place, preventing people from entering or leaving, so that would have been a time commitment that I didn’t have, to wait around until a performance was starting and then committing to the full length of the show. Some were free and some were not.

Other clubs had displays, from things like books and art to posters to elaborate structures made out of I’m not even sure what. There were also cafés, easily a dozen of them, a couple where the stuff were dressed up in traditional costume, or cosplay of some kind. I went into one, run by the Kinomaru(?) Literature Research Club:

Where one of the nice girls in pretty costume explained to me what the menu items were (mostly cookies, sweets, and tea), and offered me a small book that they had published (I think.. not like I can actually read it without a dictionary and poring over words very closely) to read while I ate/drank. I had a cookie themed after Natsume Soseki’s famous “Tsuki ga Kirei desu ne” quote, plus a small bottle of tea, which came to 300 yen in all, and also came with a little free bookmark with his famous quote printed upon it. The quote literally translates to “the moon is beautiful, isn’t it?” but in the context of the work, has transcended into an intertextuality that everyone knows is also a declaration of love. Anyway it literally was just two cookies shaped like the moon, but it was extremely cute. I ended up buying their book for 300 more yen as well.

There were many other clubs as well, and I ended up picking up a bunch of periodicals, journals, and little books from various clubs to bring home and eventually scan and archive. I was very happy about this (as this sort of media greatly appeals to my archivist side) but it did get a little expensive and heavy after a bit, so bringing it all back home will be a bit of an ongoing challenge in terms of bag space. So far so good though. I also picked up some stuff from clubs that I wanted to support, like pride stickers from the Gender Equality for Sophia club, and a banana chocolate chip cookie from the Green Sophia club (I hope the plastic wrapper was renewable though):

As a sister gallery to the one above, here are some indoor pictures of the festival: