I have a friend who works for a Japan-America nonprofit. She recently organized its annual conference. Everything was going smoothly until one of the event’s college student volunteers approached her about a potential partnership.
“So ummm… I represent a very unorthodox organization,” he began nervously. When she asked him to elaborate, he continued, “It’s a very unconventional group.”
At this point, my friend was 90% sure it was going to be a sex thing if not something weirder! With a little more back and forth, she was able to tease out the name of his group.
Reader, it was Otakon.
I’m keeping the details vague to protect this poor kid’s anonymity. We all make mistakes, after all, and in this case, the volunteer’s mistake was in not understanding his audience. He saw my friend rightly as his supervisor, a professional working adult. But what he didn’t see was that after hours, she is an anime fan, gamer, and Otakon attendee just like him.
There was a time when anime was “unconventional,” but it isn’t now. Luffy is in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Goku is on the Reeses’ Puffs cereal box. Not only do people of all ages know about anime now, they’re potentially anime fans, themselves.
But often, the majority of anime fans are invisible. Even though I’ve interviewed anime fans in their 50s and 60s for my Anime Origin Stories journalism project, the median age at fan conventions like Otakon remains firmly in the 18-25 range. For example, I would consider myself a pretty hardcore anime fan, but I stopped attending cons after my kids were born and only just recently returned. I no longer look like a typical fan, but I still know how the latest Jujutsu Kaisen arc ended.
My friend’s organization won’t be tabling at Otakon due to unrelated reasons—though she’ll certainly be attending as a fan. In the meantime, she helped the kid work on a less sketchy pitch. After all, there’s no reason to be shy about the third-largest convention in the country, and anyone who works in a Japan- or pop culture-adjacent field is sure to have heard of it.
