[Ad- gifted experience] We go to quite a few video games events throughout the year, and Dann and I have gone to Hyper Japan in the past, but this year the dates lined up so we figured we would take the entire family along. Hyper Japan is the UK’s largest Japanese culture event. As we’ve got kids with sushi packed lunches and a big love of cutesy things, it just felt like they’d enjoy it.
When we arrived, we started by doing a bit of shopping! The bottom floor of Hyper Japan had a lot of free samples (with many of them being alcohol). We tried some different types of Kewpie Mayo (Kai absolutely loves this brand) getting some freebies in the form of dolls and stickers, before taking pictures with a giant cat anime, getting balloons, and waiting in the queue for some free Pikmin items. Dann and I had a few drinks samples, purchasing a drink each, and then settled into the first round of snacks.
Amelia is a lover of onigiri, so she tried some of those with tuna. Robin and Kai both had some mochi sticks, which they very much enjoyed. We then went to the upstairs area, which was sort of like MCM Comic Con. I say this as most of the stalls weren’t actually very themed around Japan, and instead were smaller creators selling various things they have made. We saw Sarah Graley, who’s books Robin has all of and we’ve visited at Comic Con. There were also a person who sold these little alien plushies, that Robin remember as well. I saw the person who created the frog bowl we purchased, selling smaller versions of the frog bowl. It was neat to see all of these creators! Unlike MCM Comic Con, there were far less drop shippers, though we did end up lured in by some scalpers who had Pokemon cards and pins clearly from a drop shipping site…
After we had exhausted our shipping abilities, we did check out the main stage which had a performer which was playing on a box guitar. This was neat to listen to – they did have other shows going on all day – before we walked over to the video game section. These video games were from Japan – there was a fantastic variety and we enjoyed spending quite a lot of time here playing games. We then went for round two of snacks, where Amelia declared she was trying all of the stands that sold onigiri (there were three in total) and we got some chicken sticks. It was enough to tie us over.
We did watch a few other performances; there was one that was teaching about various stick-based martial art and some more traditional dances as well. Hyper Japan is an interesting mix of culture, geek-fandom, and cool things to check out. There were plenty of cosplayers, lots of families, and many, many activities to check out.
You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!
I love going to cultural events like Hyper Japan, this is so so cool. I wish they had more of these events in my city.