Hyper Japan July 2015

Written by A. H. on 15 Jul 2015

It might not feel like it, but it was five years ago that we were first introduced to Hyper Japan in the modest surroundings of the Old Truman Brewery. In the intervening time, the event has grown in size, length and scope to become one of the highlights of the calendar each year for anyone with any kind of love of Japanese culture, whether it's anime or food, music or beer, and its latest iteration saw this cornucopia of culture taking over parts of the O2 Arena for a warm and sunny July weekend. We, of course, were there to take in Saturday's morning session to see whether the event and location were a match made in heaven.

The event floor

Press privileges allowed us to avoid the substantial queue already forming for ticket holders to obtain their event wristbands (which, anecdotally, did seem to take a while to process) and head straight into the event, which presented us with a curious layout for the mainstay of the show born of the unique constraints of the O2 Arena.

Rather than the single, contiguous show floor you might be familiar with from previous events, this year's Hyper Japan was split out into a number of individual, gated areas - one for anime and video games, one for food and drink, one for "other stuff" primarily Japanese travel-related booths and some demonstration stages), and finally the arena's Building Six which houses a stage for music and a theatre for talks and panels.

Let's start by covering the massive positive of this approach, that being the dedicated stage and building for the show's various musical acts. In the past, musical guests have almost seemed like a side-show, having to make themselves held and noticed in the middle of a floor teeming with other distractions, but this time around they had a proper auditorium, proper acoustics, sound systems and lighting, and the difference was night and day for both the audience and (we imagine) the performers. The dedicated theatre for panels and talks was also advantageous in terms of keeping it away from the noisy crowds, although its close locality to the wall of sound taking place in the floor below did lessen that advantage somewhat when live shows were going on downstairs. Overall though, letting people put across their particular content in an environment purpose-built for that specific requirement is a vast improvement that we really can't praise enough.

For the rest of the show, the separation of show floor into several areas felt less successful - it made the show feel smaller and less compelling to browse around, and when things gone busy (and boy did they get busy come Saturday lunchtime) some areas had reached their capacity limits and were forcing attendees to join long queues to get into particular sections of the show. Queuing to get in only to have to queue again to take a look at, say, the video game segment of the show must have been hugely aggravating for those there during its peak time for traffic, and it was the sole black mark against the event that we ran into. Unfortunately, this seems to be an unavoidable, intrinsic part of the O2 Arena's layout and the space on offer, and on balance we'd say it was a worthwhile trade-off for the musical event space also available but others may disagree.