So Japan Expo USA was held this weekend in Santa Clara, CA and despite being its first year, there were some fantastic guests so I managed to get some great autographs.
First up, my press group got to interview Noriyuki Iwadare, who is a rather famous composer as having worked on the Ace Attorney series as well as both Grandia and Lunar. We also got to interview Tatsuro Iwamoto, who is the character designer for the Ace Attorney series. Both were kind enough to sign my Ace Attorney artbook that I had gotten ages ago... Iwamoto also did little sketches aside from just his autograph.
Book:
Sigs:
Next, although I wasn't there for the interview (needed lunch), my manager had interviewed the famous Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and was able to secure an autograph for me as well. Funny enough, it's my copy of the first run of the Evangelion manga that Viz did before they reprinted them and when came to sign the book, no one knew who to make the autograph out to. Luckily enough, when I had bought the book, I had enough foresight enough to label it with my name so that when I lent it out to friends, they knew who the book belonged to so thus, the label helped with the signature.
Book:
Sig:
Third, I picked up the Fire Emblem Awakening artbook prior to Japan Expo USA as one of the guests of honor was the artist Yusuke Kozaki, who has also drawn the characters for No More Heroes as well as the Japan Expo USA marketing. Although we did interview him and he was kind enough to draw a picture for us after the interview, I had to get his signature during his autograph session due to time constraints. One of his popular characters at the moment is Donyatsu, which is basically a cat in the shape of a donut, and so, when I got his autograph I received this:
which is currently inside of this:
Finally, there was a pretty cool exhibit of Japanese made goods that was on display as well as for sale in the dealer's hall. A lot of the goods were actually from small start-up companies and one of them was a company that specialized in making bags and pouches from used seatbelts, vinyl flooring & even a firefighter jacket. I ended up picking up a little camera bag-sized pouch made from an old firefighter jacket.
Bonus pickup was from today, which was when one of the booths was giving away food... Now, throughout the weekend, they were handing out samples but when the con was closing, they gave out
everything so thus...
Probably my best unintentional pickup ever.
Oh and I also got a new CD over the weekend from Amazon...
