Taking over San Francisco's Japan Town for two days, the J-pop Summit Festival aims to bring Japan's music, art, and clothing to the streets of the U.S. What started as a meager street event three years ago, now manages to attract thousands of people. While it is still growing and trying to find its voice, the J-pop Festival has managed to figure some of it out and can only improve from here.
This year I had the chance to volunteer and get a rather first hand look at how things run. While there was not much to say overall, there definitely some hiccups when first setting up, but that can be expected at any event. On the same note, the only thing worth mentioning is that guard duty is probably the most boring job in the world. Sitting in front of a gate blocking road traffic for 4+ hours generally servers no real purpose once the festival is in full swing.
Booths:
Looking at the booths are what keep a festival such as this one afloat because the main acts are not there all day to keep new visitors interested. Compared to some of the other events that SF's Japan Town holds, this one has to be one of the more exciting events, although it is aimed more towards a young adult group. The J-pop Summit attracts various kinds of vendors from the small trinket shops to clothing and cosplay equipment, there is generally something for anyone interested in Japanese culture. Although there is the strange out of place booth such as the one selling candles or the one trying to sell wind chimes that have no real clear connection to the event. To all hopeful vendors: Please make sure that your product has some connection to the event, don't just sign up hoping to attract customers.
To all the other vendors make sure you have a well placed sign that shows off who you are. The main group that failed in this regard was one of the biggest sponsors of the event, Aniplex US. This was probably the first big event for Aniplex, yet they decided to share a tent with Bandai. Normally this would be a good idea except for the fact that Bandai was plastered all over the tent with no real mention of Aniplex. Trying to be a start up company to license anime in the States is hard enough, but failing to realize that your booth is missing your logo is a huge blunder.
People manning the booths were kind of a scatter shot at the festival because some were the friendliest people around, willing to go to great lengths to help customers out while others were colder than a crowd on the New York subway. If you are here to sell something, one would expect the sellers to be friendly to try and get sales.
Main event:
Unfortunately I did not get to see Danceroid or any of the other main acts, which was a shame since I heard they were great. This could in part be blamed on the timing of when the acts were to take the stage. Although the festival started at 11am, by 10 many people were already wandering around the booths and looking around. Despite such an early opening, the performers did not start until well after 4pm, perhaps too much time for people to stay if they showed up early. A thought I would have to improve this would be spread out the main acts have one around 2:30-3 because that way it can attract those that showed up early or interest passerby.
I hope that I am not the only one that when going to an event where musical performers are the main attraction that I want to pick up a CD of the group. For some reason those in charge of the event feel people are not interested in purchasing CDs because this year and last year, one could not find any way to buy a group's music. This really bummed me out because many of these groups are making their U.S. debut so there really is no other way to get the music (legally at least).
Food:
I give organizers props for how they handled the food situation, at other events they have booths with huge grills to try and serve food. This time they went local and got food trucks to serve the food. Four food trucks showed up to feed the massive crowds, although they probably could have gotten one more just for safety because towards 3pm many of the trucks were already selling out of food. There was a Japanese curry truck that was great, an onigiri truck (which just so happened to run out of rice right as it was my turn to order), a Chinese bao tuck, and an American mishmash truck. The American truck was by far the least popular, probably because everyone wanted either Japanese or Asian food. I also would have liked to have seen a Korean BBQ style truck and perhaps a specialty drink truck.
Other notes:
Although there was a lot of terrible cosplayers and those dressed in gothic-lollita style clothes there was actually relatively few dressed up. For such a young event, I suppose this is to be expected but I would like to see this grow and attract better cosplayers (I know a lot of photographers were also hoping this too). Oh and a side note, blondes do not look good in kimonos or yukatas, almost as bad as seeing a chunky person stuffed into tight clothes.
The biggest sponsor of the event was NicoNico, the English counterpart to the Japanese site. Giving away T-shirts for those that would sign up was probably the best thing given away at the Festival (I managed to get 4 from them).
Overall I would say this event has come a long way since its inception only three years ago but still has some work to be done. What this event could become is something that greatly excites me because it could be the place for many Japanese acts to make a debut here in the States and show themselves off. Here's to hoping they find and read this post and take some of my advice. I really want it to succeed.
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