Event Chara Fes 2004 Spring Tokyo Location Big Sight East Date 2004.04.25 Time 11:00 - 17:00 Cost 1000 yen Guests Ohno Marina Mizuno Saya (水野沙耶) Naruse Mia Cosplay Unit Sai Oda Yumiko many others

• Event report version 0.8 by Hitoshi Doi, 2004.04.30

The Chara Fes 2004 Spring took place on April 25, 2004 at Big Sight. It took up just one of the East halls. This was the first Chara Fes that I went to, and I was surprised that it was so small. It was broken up into the "general" section and the "18 and over" section. The general section included the main stage, Creamy Cafe, and a few booths. The 18 and over section was much bigger, and had many booths, showing off their new adult games.

The crowd was much smaller (density wise) than the Tokyo Game Show, Tokyo Character Show, and other events like this. There were basically three types of people: 1) seiyuu fans who went for the seiyuu events, 2) adult game fans who went to get the game goods, 3) cosplay photographers. I guess I fell in category 3 this time. (^_^;

Since I had a baseball game in the morning, I went to the Chara Fes in the afternoon. I arrived a little before 14:00, and immediately went to the Creamy Cafe (a cosplay cafe done by the cosplayers in the cosplay unit Sai). I wanted to see if Andou Akari was working (there were supposed to be 6 out of the 11 girls working this day). Luckily I spotted Akari right away.

The Creamy Cafe had a system where those who bought drinks (400 yen each) were able to get a "photo ticket". This ticket allowed you to take pictures of the waitress of your choice. During the afternoon, I went to the Creamy Cafe three times, and took pictures of Andou Akari three times. (^_^; All of the Creamy Cafe waitresses wore waitress outfits that matched the image character of the Chara Fes. There were around 20 tables in the Creamy Cafe, and I never saw it completely full. It was around half full most of the time.

After taking pictures of Akari at Creamy Cafe the first time, I went around to look at the booths, as Oda Yumiko was supposed to be working as a companion at one of the booths. I couldn't find her in the "general" section, so I went into the "18 and over" section. They had ID checks for those going into the "18 and over" section.

I saw many companions (cosplayers) at the booths, wearing the cute clothes of the game characters, but I couldn't find Yumiko when I checked out all of the booths. Then I decided to go around one more time, and I eventually found her at the Milky booth. She was passing out flyers for the game Famires Senshi Purin. The four seiyuu [Mizuno Saya, Minami Chiharu, Mizuki Sanae, Tachibana Rena] for the game (wearing their colorful waitress outfits) were also inside the booth, selling CDs and such. A couple hours earlier, they sang a few songs on the main stage.

I also saw three of the seiyuu who sing songs on the Doll CD doing an event at their booth. One of the seiyuu was Ohno Marina, but I didn't recognize the other two. I took some pics at this event. (I found out that their names were Kikouden Misa and Naruse Mia.)

Since I wasn't really interested in the games or the other cosplayers, I didn't take any pictures of the other girls.

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