Advertised with the subtitle slogan of "Con Meets Festival," Hanami 2006 in Ludwigshafen was scheduled as mixture of traditional Japanese cherry blossom and anime/manga/J-culture festivals. Admittedly, the idea sounded great, and with the participation of the Japanese vice-consul in Germany, two authentic Japanese manga-ka on the guest list and free food for visitors in kimonos or yukatas, what could go wrong?

But when I got there, I was met by a terrible sight: the entire yard in front of the convention center was still under construction! Construction vehicles, fences and heaps of sand littered a place that hardly looked fit for people meeting, let alone a cherry blossom festival. At least the construction vehicles were of a Japanese brand, but that hardly set the mood for a Hanami. It wasn't the fault of the people who planned Hanami that the place looked like this, though. As a member of the organizing staff told me later, the city officials had assured them all the construction work would be finished by early March. Yeah, right.

Fortunately, the crowd of visitors more than made up for the initially bad look. At least every third person was a cosplayer, and most of the costumes were really impressive. The number of people in kimonos and yukatas was slightly lower, but what they lacked in numbers they made up with beautiful outfits.

Once I was inside, the staff quickly pointed me to the people in charge of the Guests of Honor. I had already given them my interview requests in advance, but seeing how the people I wanted to talk to weren't there yet, I decided to stroll around and have a look at the sales desks beforehand. Imagine my surprise when I found one of my favorite webcomics featured in printed form: MegaTokyo... in German.

Spontaneously, I decided to conduct an interview with them, and Lemmy, one of their translators, was prepared, in every sense of the word.

MT: And so you're going to ask me a whole bunch of questions I'm not going to answer without my attorney?

AA: Actually, I'm planning to ask you a few questions about your personal attitude towards MegaTokyo; the webmanga is legendary in the US and has been around even before the big manga boom. You're neither a native English speaker nor a native Japanese speaker... how did you get to translating MegaTokyo?

MT: We've answered all of these questions in the foreword of the first volume, but well, it was like this: I once found MegaTokyo, I believe, via a link on Slashdot.org and thought, "hey, that's not bad, I'm going to read this regularly now." Then there was something written about an IRC channel, and all of the guys there are really wonderfully nuts, so I stayed there. One day, our Maho, his real name is Florian from Vienna, talked to me about a German-language IRC channel about MegaTokyo on the same server. The channel was totally crowded: me, and no one else. Anyway, Maho showed up and said, "hey, what if we just made a German translation?" I didn't know what I was doing and said yes.

AA: And how did you get the idea to Fred Gallagher? How were you able to contact him?

AA: Seriously?!

MT: We're doing this very much as though we were making an anime fan sub, free of charge. Eidalon is paying Fred Gallagher for the publishing rights, and they must use our translation, or they're not allowed to publish it.

Lemmy then proceeded to explain how he and the others had set up www.megatokyo.de as the main meeting point of MegaTokyo translators on the Internet, and that they had even created a computer tool for easier picture processing. German, by the way, is not the only other language MegaTokyo has been translated into, and the megatokyo.de team has contact with many other translation groups.

That raised an interesting question, which I went into next:

AA: Fan subs and scanlations are rather widespread nowadays, even though the legal problems raise a few issues. At first, they were seen as the saviors of international anime when little, if any, quality animation was available outside of Japan. I mean, it normally took a series five to six years to arrive overseas, and only the commercially successful titles made it at all. Fan subbers were heroes of the people back then, yet now, where even we in Germany have access to most good material rather quickly...

MT: (interrupts) Skip the "quickly." Skip it at all. Think Mahou Sensei Negima, released in Germany by EMA. I once asked them why there were only three releases a year, and can you imagine what they answered? They said they were "adapting to the publishing speed in Japan." If that were true, they'd publish four episodes a month via a weekly magazine and not a pocket book every four months. So I went thinking, "okay, so much for you, go away and die."

MT: I'm really impressed with some of the work fan subbers do. During some episodes, they didn't stick to subtitles when it came to translating Japanese text that could be seen on screen. Like, there is a test during class, and the camera is looking over the shoulder of one student and you can see his test page before him. And right on that page, going frame by frame in the anime, they translated the text so that you can now read it in English right where it's supposed to be. That's really quality work.

AA: And the quality of commercial releases is lacking in comparison to that.

MT: Yes. What I personally do is this: when a series I'm interested in is released in Germany, I'm buying the first DVD to check whether it's trash or worth the money. If it is good, I'm flushing my fan subs down the toilet and buying the DVDs. But if it isn't, if I see publishers who publish trash, I have no qualms about keeping the fan subs.

After the interview, I was almost late for my planned behind-the-scenes report on the anime/manga show group Ashura, and just in time: I caught one of them on her way to the dressing rooms:

AA: So you're Jeanette of Ashura. Is Jeanette also your nickname?

Joy: My friends at Ashura usually call me Jeanette, but my nickname at Animexx is "JoyToy" or simply "Joy."

AA: You're an anime/manga show group. What are your acts for today?

Joy: We're doing an RG Veda preview, a few singing acts like MiniMoni, some dances. We also have Sailor Moon, but, well, more as a comedic piece.

AA: So nothing like the infamous Sailor Moon musical?

Joy: Nah, that's what Yume (one of Germany's most well-known show groups - Editor) are for.

AA: Since when have you been around?

Joy: Um... since... around two years, right? Two years. Yes.

AA: And you're touring the cons?

Joy: Well, big cons. This is our third appearance as a group, but I, for instance, have already perfomed at ten cons.

AA: So you've all probably got together from different show groups, right?

Joy: Just like that.

I followed her backstage to where Ashura prepared for their act, and to my surprise, there was hardly any of the fuss and hustle normally associated with backstage preparations. Everybody was a little nervous, yes (as one of them put it: "the stagefright never stops"), but the mood was surprisingly calm and relaxed. "It's no use if we rush it," they told me. "We take all the time we need for dressing, and then we do our acts. If we hurried through the preparations, you'd see it during the show."

Then they were off to the stage, and they gave a beautiful performance consisting of several dance choreographies, a few short comedy acts (one of them featuring a gripping battle of Sailor Mars vs. Sailor Snickers) and live music, including an absolutely brilliant version of "A Whole New World" from Disney's Aladdin, sung in English, German and Japanese by Jeanette and one of Ashura's guest stars, Tama. That was definitely the highlight of their show. They will appear on several other German conventions in the next few months, and you can find them on www.ashura-verein.de.

Continue to Hanami 2006: Part II...