Sunday aug 4
Wonder festival
Up at 7 after 5 hours sleep. Drag my half-dead ass all across the city to TOKYO BIG SITE. It's in a section of town where EVERY SINGLE BUILDING is a convention center or something. It looks like a city made for 200 foot tall people.
(yes, that's a ferris wheel on the left. . . .)
this is the fucking entrance to the convention center. . .
There's a line of people stretching for I swear over a kilometer, like an attempt to answer the question 'how many nerds can you fit in a city of 47.000,000 people? Answer : a lot. A lot of nerds.
I just cut in line because I'm from fucking America and we do that.
Inside is nine hundred booths full of people selling plastic models. Some come pre-assembled, most you build and paint yourself. It's impossible to over-state the importance of gender in this subculture. Anything boyish has to have full battle armor with more spikes than a death metal logo, and jets, and guns dripping off it.
and anything feminine has to be naked, with huge tits. I mean, hair. I mean, tits.
Some of the 'dirty statues' are placed on revolving mechanical platforms so everyone can get a chance to look up their dress. And the other thing is, you actually buy the dirty dolls in pieces and assemble them like you'd assemble a model car kit or something.
Clusters of nerds surround the dirty statues and take pictures.
and then there's this one. . .
some of the designs are 'original,' meaning not based on animation or games. like these big-boobed crab-armed schoolgirls.
. .. and just in case you were wondering what kind of guy makes big-boobed , crab-armed schoolgirl statues. . .
but probably the most fucking scary thing at this convention (or in japan period!) was the life-size anime girl dolls that you can dress up, and ,uh, play with.
. . .and here's the guy who makes them. they're about $3,800 apiece.
and, oh yeah, impaled dolls too
.
. . . they slide up and down the toothpick . and in case you were wondering what kind of guy makes impaled naked lady dolls
for fun..
.
guten tag, mein herr!!
these robots are hand-made, no-two-alike clay sculptures.
and this guy is amazing. . . he built a mechanical marionette that controls a videogame character on the computer. if you move the doll, the videogame character moves, too!
but then again, maybe you'd prefer a pregnant marionette with moving joints and blood oozing out the vagina.
and here's the guy who makes this doll
it's easy to condemn these porno-nerds. but think about it-- suppose they stopped making or buying porno-dolls. would women suddenly flock to them, saying, 'oh, we applaud your sensitivity to the depiction of womyn, it's so brave of you to give up your male-centric fantasy lives! please, take me out to dinner!' of course not. women won't give these guys the time of day even if they're really nice, so what do they have to lose by making weird vagina-headed, limbless creatures out of polyurethane?
but perhaps the most surreal aspect of this
doll-model-mania is this: 
. . . they take Polaroids of the naked dolls and sell them. Not the dolls themselves, but the damn Polariods. Just as if it was. . . REAL PORNOGRAPHY. This was what made my head spin. Are you going to find this in Uraguay? In Belarus? In Haiti or Cuba or Montana?? nope, only Japan.
THESE guys create their own robots. They aren't based on any anime or manga. Not only do they make them up, but they also sculpt them in INCREDIBLE detail and run their own factory. How hardcore is that?