Let's see - today. I had a panel at 12, so I sat in on another panel earlier in the morning (one called "Gibberish", on "alien" and other odd languages, and it was a very lively panel indeed with lots of discussion on languages from Klingon to the hundreds of newly discovered and mostly unrelated languages in Papua New Guinea (with a side order of Japanese and its peculiar writing systems). I meandered down to the noon panel only to discover that the panelists outnumbered the audience and thus everyone there (who was obviously interested in the subject) repaired to lunch instead to discuss it amongst ourselves. In all fairness it was the kind of panel that should have attracted a much larger audience but it was stuck in a bad room in the back of everything, and hard to find, and less than ideally signposted - and it was a Sunday panel at lunchtime and the convention was starting to fragment as people began to pursue other interests and peeled off to do stuff in, you know, JAPAN. We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant, and then I detoured down to the waterfront, took some nice pics of our wonderful futuristic hotel, missed taking a photograph of half a dozen young women wearing Sailor Moon school uniform type outfits who sailed past me into the crowds, and returned to the convention centre around 2-ish to see if anyone had signed up for my Kaffeeklatsch at 4. My faithful companions
I brought in a heap of my little Worldweavers promotional post-its and they all went sometime between the beginning of the Hugo awards ceremony and the end of the Kaffeeklatsch, as did most of my bookmarks - all to the good. I met some interesting people and made some potentially good contacts and learned a few things that might be of interest in the days to come - but I was now free to roam Japan.
We came back via the waterfront again, took pictures of the magnificent Intercontinental glowing like a jewelled spaceship against the night, sat talking of cats and dogs and horses and people in the foyer for a while, and then went our separate ways. Tomorrow morning the plan is to meet at Yokohama station and go visit the Kamakura Buddha.
Breakfast at 8 AM. Tourist hat on. Report and pictures to come.
Over and out.