There were some pictures I had specific comments on and wanted to highlight, though. Firstly, like in Touhou Reitaisai, the “bigger” artists were given a specific numbering scheme and placed along the side walls, and some of the specific queues were really long. The first exhibition hall had table labels from A to R, and the second exhibition hall had table labels from あ to お on the bottom floor and カ to サ on the top floor. I only briefly went into the second hall to check it out the first time, but as far as I know, the “big” groups, some of which had massive queues, were placed on the P letter in the first hall along the outer side walls.

Anyway, that’s only passingly important because I joined two of those queues, and even got to hold up the “end of line is here” sign for a couple minutes for one of them! For example, this was the queue for La prière, which stretched out the door and round a corner and down a ramp and then turned again:

Their table was right next to that door, so to alleviate space issues inside, this queue was allowed to grow and mature outside in the sun instead. Thankfully it wasn’t hot at all. But even the bugs had to wait in line.

And this one was for Natsume Itsuki (the queue was split into a part one down the middle of the room and a part two to the side that people joined after waiting through the part one line):

Both lines moved really quickly though, relative to how slowly the Touhou Reitaisai lines moved, the organizers or the circles or just the people in general were far more organized here, it seems. Or a combination of the three.

To get back from the second hall to the first hall, we had to follow signs taking us out of the exhibition hall area and Tokyo Ryutsu Center altogether, past the area where I had bought the event booklet and then back in the front door again. Along the way, we passed a queue of people at an ATM. This event, like Reitaisai, was cash-only, and a *lot* of cash changed hands at the event, which was obvious just by seeing the prices on the CDs and the sheer volume of them that still found new owners. Mind-boggling numbers. This also reminded me that I needed to go figure out the best way to withdraw actual cash now, as I am low. I have two different cards from two different banks and I think my Scotiabank one has lower or nonexistent (local) fees overall, whereas my Royal Bank one doesn’t, but I have to research this.

There was a music sample room, where many if not most of the artists sent their CDs so people could browse and listen to them on the go. This is different from XFDs, or crossfades, which many artists also made and uploaded on Youtube, Soundcloud, Twitter, and other places around the web prior to the event — those (generally) were samples of each track in their new albums that they were trying to sell, combined into the length of one sample track, whereas in these rooms the full CDs were available.

How the room worked is that one could bring their own CD player along and listen to the music that way, by popping sample CDs from the table into their CD player, and then returning them when they were done. Or, one could line up and wait for a CD player from the maybe 25-30 or so of the ones the organizers had brought along to free up, and then use those. The rate of return was about one every three minutes or so, so this line (of about 10-12 people in front of me) took about half an hour:

The room itself was only open from 11:00 am (30 minutes after the event started) to 3:00 pm (30 minutes before the event ended). I spent about an hour in here and still felt like I only barely scratched the surface of what was here, even though I had also already listened to a large number of XFDs before the event. I did discover and end up purchasing three or four CDs due to this sample room though, so kudos to them for setting it up. That being said, I would highly recommend that interested people bring their own CD player. Not only to skip the queue, but because some of the CD players weren’t the best. I’m not sure if it was defective or running low on battery or something, but even though the battery indicator seemed to be over half full, my CD player eventually got into a state where it would shut off after every few seconds, basically rendering the entire exercise of listening to CDs pointless.

Anyway, the room looked like this. There were maybe 40-50 long tables, roughly sorted by letter of the alphabet, and each table with anything from 20-50 or so CDs on them. There were a lot of CDs!

When I returned to the main hall near the end of the event with about half an hour to go, I noticed one of the random circle members I walked by giving out free CDs, of something or other that they couldn’t sell, I suppose. She waved me over and gave me one, so I took it. I remembered seeing this CD in the sample room earlier, but hadn’t looked at it then (at that point, with no other way to sort through hundreds of CDs, I was basically choosing CDs to listen to based on cover art, album title, or occasionally circle name).

These are a couple of the circles that I did end up buying a CD from due to listening to them in the sample room, and that were not on my radar at all before I entered the room:

And finally, at the end of the day, this was my stash:

Everything in the rightmost four columns (besides the book) were Mart‘s and cost about 16000 yen or so, everything on the left was mine and cost 5900 yen (and another 1500 for the book and entrance fee). I’m going to be reimbursed for his portion plus shipping once I send it over to him, we have not decided yet if I’ll be sending it from Japan or from Canada once I get back though (since he’s in Europe, it’s not necessarily better from Canada).