The Finnish sauna is like Tuxedo Kamen's kiss
Behold my new userpic for the occasion!
Yes, Desucon is over and it was a huge success! I had the time of my life mostly because we finally got to meet our idol and my little sister hanagoke's long-time penpal, Furuya Tooru. Now we're officially his friends! I could die of happiness! \o/
Anyway, on to the con report. I will first give you some details of our first meeting with Tooru and his manager, Ikeda Katsuaki (who is also a wonderful guy), on Thursday. Then I'll talk about Saturday, specifically about Furuya and Fujimoto's stuff (since my CLAMP-loving friends will want some details of that) and finally Sunday.
Okay, that cut text is a bit overdramatic. Anyway, since we got Tooru to come to Desucon we also got to meet him in private before the con at Manga Café in Helsinki. (I didn't get a chance to taste their products or read their manga, but Myy liked their tea and it's the only manga café in the Nordic countries so check it out if you're around there!) Tooru, Ikeda-san the manager, a man from the embassy of Japan and Phoo were there besides some other Desu-staff. All kinds of stuff happened there - we asked them questions, they asked us about our family, hometown and other things, we asked Tooru to play some lines from his roles (he did Seiya, Amuro, Yamcha and Toppii), we asked him to sign our stuff: I got a signature on my Kyougoku Natsuhiko Kousetsu Hyakumonogatari box leaflet, Myy got her Heroes ~to my treasure~ album (you know, Tooru's album) and her Pegasus Box signed and we got signatures to Ruusu and Vilja, as well, on a couple of postcards! Aaand we took some pictures.
By the way, that necklace he's wearing, T from Tooru? We got it for him! (We also got his wife and daughter matching necklaces with their initials, I hope they loved them!) And it looks so good on him! He wore it on Saturday as well and according to Phoo wanted to wear it in the sauna as well...
We stayed there about an hour and a half before all of us had to move on, but we had a great time, got to talk about things and Tooru filmed us with their video camera as well. And that was only our first meeting - we would see each other on Saturday, as well!
On Friday we got to Lahti to stay at meablie's place. I was busy the whole evening making videos for my seiyuu presentation with hanagoke - huge thanks to her for helping me out! We stayed up almost the whole night making them... So the next morning was pretty interesting. We got to Sibeliustalo, the con place, and meablie and I got in through the staff entrance since I had a lecture and she was staff at Desudisko. We would've watched the cosplay event but we wanted to hang out a bit and check out Café Ichigo along with all the other stuff before my presentation. (I'm watching it from Youtube right now...) I was a bit spaced out before my lecture since I had barely slept the night before, but when I actually got to the stage and prepared the technical stuff and everything, I started feeling excited and all in all everything went quite well. (Imai Ryuusuke's students were there at one point watching my videos... I was sort of embarrassed...) Next time I'll have more time to prepare my lecture, hopefully without all the problems we had!
After that it was time for the Main Event of the con: Furuya Tooru's panel.
Tooru completely owned us (of course)! He told us all kinds of stuff about his early career and his time in Mobile Suit Gundam and Sailor Moon, and he would've told us about Saint Seiya and other stuff too but he had to answer questions from the audience and we ran out of time! There was so much more we wanted to know about... He got to do the Gundam line again and he also gave samples of Casshern, Ribbons, Tuxedo Kamen and Martti, too! He was telling jokes all the time and being especially excited about the sauna, he must have really liked it. We understood pretty much everything he said so we laughed at the jokes before the interpreter had translated them! He also spoke a few lines of Finnish here and there. Tooru did spot us during the panel and so did Ikeda-san from the side during the break - that was when he first pointed us out to Fujimoto Kiyokazu.
At the end of his panel Tooru showed us a promotion film of the upcoming Kamen Rider game for which he made a song, and it was the world premiere of that video! The song was really cool, I'm looking forward to playing the game and everything! And after that... he sang two songs to us. He sang Only One Shining Star and Lalah no yasoukyoku ~Nocturne~ from his album and oh my god it was fantastic. The necklace we got him suited him so well. hanagoke said she sat on the best place, right in front of him, so that every gesture he made was like directed at her - which I'm certain was no coincidence, since Tooru later told us that he sang for her ("Myuu no tame ni utatta")! I wonder if we gave him the idea of singing at the con...?
Anyway, after the most awesome private concert ever people had a chance to get a signature from him, and we went to the line as well, mostly because we wanted to give him and Ikeda the chocolate we had gotten them - we were so embarrassed that we had nothing for Ikeda-san and he was so nice! So we fixed that and then we thanked Tooru for the songs and we agreed to go to the CLAMP lecture together once he was done with the signing. Ikeda-san introduced us to Fujimoto-sensei, so I told him we were fans of CLAMP and he was quite happy.
Afterwards we had Tooru quickly pose for a picture together with meablie and dies_dandles so we were a bit late to the lecture. The lack of sleep was getting to me again and I spaced out a bit in the beginning, but I got better after a while, which was good since I had promised chibiyuuto to tell him about the lecture.
Fujimoto-sensei gave us some basic info about CLAMP and showed us some pictures, I remember one from CLAMP's office where each member has their own cubicle where they can work in peace. I also remember him saying that CLAMP works whenever they feel like it, so they have even drawn on an airplane giving originals back and forth over the benches. He said that unlike other artists whose style changes during the work, CLAMP always controls the style of a particular work so that it stays the same during the whole thing. When asked about the cessation of Gouhou Drug and X, he explained that it was because the magazines that published them stopped, and in the case of X there was also a big earthquake in Osaka which apparently was too similar to whatever was taking place in the manga. He promised that X will be continued, I can't remember if he said that about Gouhou Drug, hopefully it will go on too.
He answered a lot of audience questions, so I got to ask one for chibiyuuto. He had given me three questions to choose from, and although they were all interesting I decided to ask the third one because he said he was really curious about it: How often Fujimoto and the other Pyrotechnist members meet with CLAMP. I felt the question was a bit simple so I also asked what kind of things they discuss in those meetings. The answer was: Someone from Pyrotechnist meets with CLAMP once a week, but usually not Fujimoto-sensei, he gets invited to karaoke evenings and other parties more often. CLAMP is in complete control over the actual content of their works so they never talk about it, but things such as merchandising and advertising are discussed.
I probably would've had a chance to ask the other questions, too, but I wanted to let others ask their questions as well. They were quite interesting - Fujimoto told us that perhaps his visit will make Finnish publishers translate CLAMP manga and that then we'd have a chance to get CLAMP themselves to visit Finland, that they understood the importance of letting their fans see them live and that 3/4 of them were excited about traveling abroad. Soon Tooru, too, decided to ask a couple of questions, they went something like this:
Tooru: I have three questions. Which one of them doesn't like traveling abroad?
Fujimoto: Ookawa.
Tooru: Which one of them is the best singer?
Fujimoto: They are all quite good.
Tooru: When are they going to make their first record?
Fujimoto: There are no plans for that right now.
Tooru: I can recommend them to my record company! Which one of them is the best drinker?
Fujimoto: Ookawa likes sparkling beverages like champagne, the others will drink anything.
And everybody was laughing all the time since the questions were so funny. Say, have you noticed how awesome Tooru is? (Yes, he asked more than three questions!)
One girl asked if she could send her regards to CLAMP - she wanted to tell them "Thanks for all the ambiguous relationships between men" ("And women! They need more between women!" yelled hunajasieni) and everybody burst into laughter so Tooru was all confused! hanagoke tried to translate to him but the interpreter got to it first and after Tooru got it he just said "Aaaa! Naruhodou. Yaoi."
At the end Fujimoto showed us pics from Code Geass and Mouryou no Hako - at first we didn't quite recognise the latter with hanagoke and we couldn't read the kanji so she confirmed from Tooru that it was Mouryou no Hako. He also said he was in it, so now I have to watch it. (Kyougoku Natsuhiko + CLAMP + Furuya Tooru = must see!) Fujimoto-sensei also told us about CLAMP's future plans, that Tsubasa and Holic will end before the end of the year, that CLAMP will appear in Japan Expo in Paris and that they're designing a function that allows simultaneous publications of their works in different countries, so that foreign fans don't have to wait months or even years to read the new mangas! (He mentioned some countries that were already in such as Taiwan, and he wondered if they could make it work in Finland, too.)He also said his favourite CLAMP work is Kobato. I wanted to ask if it was because it's got a Fujimoto Kiyokazu in it, but in the end I didn't.
After that we took last pictures with Tooru and said goodbye to him and Ikeda-san.
This pic is now my desktop image.
We told them to come back sometime and that we'd send them our pictures. We heard afterwards that they went to sauna and to the K-18 party. On Sunday morning, they left for Japan - just before the weather turned nice!
We didn't do much else on Saturday, got something to eat and I went home with hanagoke and hamppari so that we'd get some sleep that night, after watching the videos we recorded at Tooru's panel, of course. chilichibi stayed for the yaoi panel so that she could come back together with tubbsen who stayed the night at our place.
On Sunday we took things quite easy, so we were a bit late to Imai Ryuusuke's lecture... It was very interesting, I knew we'd like it since he talked about the relationship of voice and animated characters, saying that they get a personality and depth only after they get a voice, since people tend to imagine a person to go together with a voice. He also made a very good point saying that when the character becomes stylized, so does the voice, like with Hello Kitty who has an extremely girly and cute voice. hanagoke asked him who his favourite seiyuu is and he said it was Yamadera Kouichi! I thanked him afterwards for the lecture and he gave me his business card to accompany Tooru's!
We also visited Café Ichigo again and I played some games with the others and went to see the yuri lecture and the shoujo lecture, both of which were interesting. Sadly I had no time to try karaoke because they had to put it away already by then... In the end the con was declared closed and we left to stay at meablie's and dies_dandles' folks to bathe in sauna and drink lots of coke.
So: best time of my life? Hell yes. Again please? Yessss. Want to see Tooru again? I hope next time we will travel to Yokohama and he'll show us around! Until next time!
Yes, Desucon is over and it was a huge success! I had the time of my life mostly because we finally got to meet our idol and my little sister hanagoke's long-time penpal, Furuya Tooru. Now we're officially his friends! I could die of happiness! \o/
Anyway, on to the con report. I will first give you some details of our first meeting with Tooru and his manager, Ikeda Katsuaki (who is also a wonderful guy), on Thursday. Then I'll talk about Saturday, specifically about Furuya and Fujimoto's stuff (since my CLAMP-loving friends will want some details of that) and finally Sunday.
Okay, that cut text is a bit overdramatic. Anyway, since we got Tooru to come to Desucon we also got to meet him in private before the con at Manga Café in Helsinki. (I didn't get a chance to taste their products or read their manga, but Myy liked their tea and it's the only manga café in the Nordic countries so check it out if you're around there!) Tooru, Ikeda-san the manager, a man from the embassy of Japan and Phoo were there besides some other Desu-staff. All kinds of stuff happened there - we asked them questions, they asked us about our family, hometown and other things, we asked Tooru to play some lines from his roles (he did Seiya, Amuro, Yamcha and Toppii), we asked him to sign our stuff: I got a signature on my Kyougoku Natsuhiko Kousetsu Hyakumonogatari box leaflet, Myy got her Heroes ~to my treasure~ album (you know, Tooru's album) and her Pegasus Box signed and we got signatures to Ruusu and Vilja, as well, on a couple of postcards! Aaand we took some pictures.
By the way, that necklace he's wearing, T from Tooru? We got it for him! (We also got his wife and daughter matching necklaces with their initials, I hope they loved them!) And it looks so good on him! He wore it on Saturday as well and according to Phoo wanted to wear it in the sauna as well...
We stayed there about an hour and a half before all of us had to move on, but we had a great time, got to talk about things and Tooru filmed us with their video camera as well. And that was only our first meeting - we would see each other on Saturday, as well!
On Friday we got to Lahti to stay at meablie's place. I was busy the whole evening making videos for my seiyuu presentation with hanagoke - huge thanks to her for helping me out! We stayed up almost the whole night making them... So the next morning was pretty interesting. We got to Sibeliustalo, the con place, and meablie and I got in through the staff entrance since I had a lecture and she was staff at Desudisko. We would've watched the cosplay event but we wanted to hang out a bit and check out Café Ichigo along with all the other stuff before my presentation. (I'm watching it from Youtube right now...) I was a bit spaced out before my lecture since I had barely slept the night before, but when I actually got to the stage and prepared the technical stuff and everything, I started feeling excited and all in all everything went quite well. (Imai Ryuusuke's students were there at one point watching my videos... I was sort of embarrassed...) Next time I'll have more time to prepare my lecture, hopefully without all the problems we had!
After that it was time for the Main Event of the con: Furuya Tooru's panel.
Tooru completely owned us (of course)! He told us all kinds of stuff about his early career and his time in Mobile Suit Gundam and Sailor Moon, and he would've told us about Saint Seiya and other stuff too but he had to answer questions from the audience and we ran out of time! There was so much more we wanted to know about... He got to do the Gundam line again and he also gave samples of Casshern, Ribbons, Tuxedo Kamen and Martti, too! He was telling jokes all the time and being especially excited about the sauna, he must have really liked it. We understood pretty much everything he said so we laughed at the jokes before the interpreter had translated them! He also spoke a few lines of Finnish here and there. Tooru did spot us during the panel and so did Ikeda-san from the side during the break - that was when he first pointed us out to Fujimoto Kiyokazu.
At the end of his panel Tooru showed us a promotion film of the upcoming Kamen Rider game for which he made a song, and it was the world premiere of that video! The song was really cool, I'm looking forward to playing the game and everything! And after that... he sang two songs to us. He sang Only One Shining Star and Lalah no yasoukyoku ~Nocturne~ from his album and oh my god it was fantastic. The necklace we got him suited him so well. hanagoke said she sat on the best place, right in front of him, so that every gesture he made was like directed at her - which I'm certain was no coincidence, since Tooru later told us that he sang for her ("Myuu no tame ni utatta")! I wonder if we gave him the idea of singing at the con...?
Anyway, after the most awesome private concert ever people had a chance to get a signature from him, and we went to the line as well, mostly because we wanted to give him and Ikeda the chocolate we had gotten them - we were so embarrassed that we had nothing for Ikeda-san and he was so nice! So we fixed that and then we thanked Tooru for the songs and we agreed to go to the CLAMP lecture together once he was done with the signing. Ikeda-san introduced us to Fujimoto-sensei, so I told him we were fans of CLAMP and he was quite happy.
Afterwards we had Tooru quickly pose for a picture together with meablie and dies_dandles so we were a bit late to the lecture. The lack of sleep was getting to me again and I spaced out a bit in the beginning, but I got better after a while, which was good since I had promised chibiyuuto to tell him about the lecture.
Fujimoto-sensei gave us some basic info about CLAMP and showed us some pictures, I remember one from CLAMP's office where each member has their own cubicle where they can work in peace. I also remember him saying that CLAMP works whenever they feel like it, so they have even drawn on an airplane giving originals back and forth over the benches. He said that unlike other artists whose style changes during the work, CLAMP always controls the style of a particular work so that it stays the same during the whole thing. When asked about the cessation of Gouhou Drug and X, he explained that it was because the magazines that published them stopped, and in the case of X there was also a big earthquake in Osaka which apparently was too similar to whatever was taking place in the manga. He promised that X will be continued, I can't remember if he said that about Gouhou Drug, hopefully it will go on too.
He answered a lot of audience questions, so I got to ask one for chibiyuuto. He had given me three questions to choose from, and although they were all interesting I decided to ask the third one because he said he was really curious about it: How often Fujimoto and the other Pyrotechnist members meet with CLAMP. I felt the question was a bit simple so I also asked what kind of things they discuss in those meetings. The answer was: Someone from Pyrotechnist meets with CLAMP once a week, but usually not Fujimoto-sensei, he gets invited to karaoke evenings and other parties more often. CLAMP is in complete control over the actual content of their works so they never talk about it, but things such as merchandising and advertising are discussed.
I probably would've had a chance to ask the other questions, too, but I wanted to let others ask their questions as well. They were quite interesting - Fujimoto told us that perhaps his visit will make Finnish publishers translate CLAMP manga and that then we'd have a chance to get CLAMP themselves to visit Finland, that they understood the importance of letting their fans see them live and that 3/4 of them were excited about traveling abroad. Soon Tooru, too, decided to ask a couple of questions, they went something like this:
Tooru: I have three questions. Which one of them doesn't like traveling abroad?
Fujimoto: Ookawa.
Tooru: Which one of them is the best singer?
Fujimoto: They are all quite good.
Tooru: When are they going to make their first record?
Fujimoto: There are no plans for that right now.
Tooru: I can recommend them to my record company! Which one of them is the best drinker?
Fujimoto: Ookawa likes sparkling beverages like champagne, the others will drink anything.
And everybody was laughing all the time since the questions were so funny. Say, have you noticed how awesome Tooru is? (Yes, he asked more than three questions!)
One girl asked if she could send her regards to CLAMP - she wanted to tell them "Thanks for all the ambiguous relationships between men" ("And women! They need more between women!" yelled hunajasieni) and everybody burst into laughter so Tooru was all confused! hanagoke tried to translate to him but the interpreter got to it first and after Tooru got it he just said "Aaaa! Naruhodou. Yaoi."
At the end Fujimoto showed us pics from Code Geass and Mouryou no Hako - at first we didn't quite recognise the latter with hanagoke and we couldn't read the kanji so she confirmed from Tooru that it was Mouryou no Hako. He also said he was in it, so now I have to watch it. (Kyougoku Natsuhiko + CLAMP + Furuya Tooru = must see!) Fujimoto-sensei also told us about CLAMP's future plans, that Tsubasa and Holic will end before the end of the year, that CLAMP will appear in Japan Expo in Paris and that they're designing a function that allows simultaneous publications of their works in different countries, so that foreign fans don't have to wait months or even years to read the new mangas! (He mentioned some countries that were already in such as Taiwan, and he wondered if they could make it work in Finland, too.)He also said his favourite CLAMP work is Kobato. I wanted to ask if it was because it's got a Fujimoto Kiyokazu in it, but in the end I didn't.
After that we took last pictures with Tooru and said goodbye to him and Ikeda-san.
This pic is now my desktop image.
We told them to come back sometime and that we'd send them our pictures. We heard afterwards that they went to sauna and to the K-18 party. On Sunday morning, they left for Japan - just before the weather turned nice!
We didn't do much else on Saturday, got something to eat and I went home with hanagoke and hamppari so that we'd get some sleep that night, after watching the videos we recorded at Tooru's panel, of course. chilichibi stayed for the yaoi panel so that she could come back together with tubbsen who stayed the night at our place.
On Sunday we took things quite easy, so we were a bit late to Imai Ryuusuke's lecture... It was very interesting, I knew we'd like it since he talked about the relationship of voice and animated characters, saying that they get a personality and depth only after they get a voice, since people tend to imagine a person to go together with a voice. He also made a very good point saying that when the character becomes stylized, so does the voice, like with Hello Kitty who has an extremely girly and cute voice. hanagoke asked him who his favourite seiyuu is and he said it was Yamadera Kouichi! I thanked him afterwards for the lecture and he gave me his business card to accompany Tooru's!
We also visited Café Ichigo again and I played some games with the others and went to see the yuri lecture and the shoujo lecture, both of which were interesting. Sadly I had no time to try karaoke because they had to put it away already by then... In the end the con was declared closed and we left to stay at meablie's and dies_dandles' folks to bathe in sauna and drink lots of coke.
So: best time of my life? Hell yes. Again please? Yessss. Want to see Tooru again? I hope next time we will travel to Yokohama and he'll show us around! Until next time!