Outside of the livestreaming stages that I described earlier, there were mascots, pachinko machines, table booths selling CDs and acrylic stands and postcards and other merch, plenty of photo op places, official game and anime studio booths selling food and merchandise as well, cars with fancy anime deisgns on them, a cosplay photo area between the convention halls, a ton of mascot characters that I did not recognize, and a lot more. A lot of people were photographing or livestreaming the event, though there were a small but decent number of concert booths and such that prohibited photography and video, especially during performances.

There was a Gift store too, which is a store that sells Touhou related plushies, but the only ones they had here were plushies that were just character heads, or plushies that cost over 10,000 yen, no mid-range ones like the Patchouli one that I got from the last Touhou Reitaisai that I visited. I’m going to visit one of those next week again though and hopefully they have a better selection there, as I have come to really like the one that I have.

There were also weird sights, even by the standards of this sort of convention, to be seen as I wandered around, like a girl being hoisted up and carried around by bare-chested men in tight pants and butler collars:

There was also a sizable food section, taking up about half a hall, and this curry rice line in particular was really long:

Here’s a mascot standing in front of an instant noodle purchase-and-immediately-cook-it store:

And there was a row of snack booths along one wall:

There were food and drink vans too, several with tie-ins to games or shows or other multimedia franchises. In the end, all I got from the food section was this:

It was a cup of kezuri ichigo, which I think meant strawberry shavings, but it was basically frozen strawberry cut up into many little chunks and, I believe, with a little bit of some sort of cream on it. It was great and I wonder if I could make something like that by myself back home.

There were also a fair number of booths and people giving away free stuff — I saw people walking by with an armful of different bags that different stores were giving out. I ended up with two bags myself, one of them specific to the event and the other one with some characters printed on it from some company that I didn’t recognize. I also picked up a free umaibo snack (I am fond of and have mentioned this snack in previous blog posts, like this one) from a store in return for scanning their QR code, and picked up five free CDs from an underground idol group that was giving away their music in between song and dance performances. I picked up a couple other CDs that seemed to be linked to an event named Mag Fes 2024 as well, plus a random CD from some creator table that I was passing by, so my CD haul for the day (half of which was free) looked like this:

I didn’t get any CDs from the Vocaloid Master part of the convention because I don’t know much about Vocaloid music at all, though I ran the event by Mart to ask if he wanted anything from there, and after checking some XFDs (crossfades) for the CDs being sold there, he said no.

It was pretty dizzying and tiring, all in all, but quite fun. I do enjoy experiencing conventions in general and I like looking at people and their costumes. There were resting areas up and above the convention centres, away from the noise, but by the time I found those my social and convention energy was down to near zero and my feet were mutinying as always so I was on my way out the hall already. I retraced my steps and took the exact same sequence of trains in reverse, and headed right back home, never to move again.