Damn. Place clears out fast.

Nothing left for the author to do but finish the notes page, then catch a cab for the airport where he'll catch a ride to another airport where he'll catch a plane to another airport where he'll catch a second plane to go home. 24 hours earlier, the author was taking pictures of Fanime Con costumers. 48 hours earlier, the author was taking pictures of Sakura Con cosplayers in Seattle.

Why got to the trouble and exhaustion of attending two conventions in different states on the same weekend? The author likes to say that this site is an exercise in the possible and not the impossible, and it's possible to get to two events. The author didn't want to play favorites, and he just wanted to be able to claim he's been in both places...although he's not unique this time. Photographer Lionel Lum started his weekend in Santa Clara at Fanime Con, headed north to Seattle for Sakura Con on Saturday, then returned to Fanime Con on Sunday.

Yeah, it was tiring, but it was worth the experience. Too many friends at both events to stay home and not spend the money to get to both places. 

The author doesn't object to date conflicts for conventions, because there are enough fans to go around in the real world...but it's going to get interesting in June of 2003 when there will be three conventions in one mid-month weekend. And there are going to be three or four conventions on the 2002 Memorial Day weekend.

Which one was better? Sakura Con seemed better organized and Fanime Con had the largest crowd. Which one had the cutest costumers? The author can't make up his mind...but he got a few more hugs in California. And the most intense display of beauty this weekend happened when Crispin Freeman and Kunihiko Ikuhara met in a Fanime Con hall.

Sakura Con moved into a Hilton hotel near the Seattle airport. They had nearly as many fans on their first day as attended the entire first Baka! Con. Fanime Con stayed in Santa Clara and took up more of the adjacent convention center, moving the dealers' room to a convention hall. There were lines to get into that room until the final hours of Sunday.

Sakura Con fans swarmed into their new location in such numbers that they broke the elevators leading to the convention center's main level. Some of Seattle's rain followed the author south to California on Saturday morning, but the downpour ended on Saturday afternoon.

This year's "other" event at the Santa Clara Convention Center was a high school volleyball tournament. Yes, it often was hard to tell the anime costumes from the volleyball uniforms.

On the planned cosplay book: more cosplayers came forward to participate, and the publishing deal is nearly finished. Fans who want to appear in the book will have another chance to pose for pictures at a couple of conventions in May...we'll let you know.

Notes extended a couple of hours later in a very quiet San Francisco International Airport: Two front-page stories in the San Jose Mercury News put the weekend's activities in perspective, and stand far stronger in the author's mind than the one-hour delay in starting the Fanime Con costume contest:

"Guilty verdict in massacre plot." The author mentioned this story in the 2001 Fanime Con note, on the arrest of a man said to have planned to kill as many people as possible at De Anza College, only a few miles from Fanime Con's location. The man was found guilty of possessing a small arsenal of pipe bombs and weapons that would have been used for murder. When costumers wonder why they're facing strict limits on prop weapons, they need to refer to this story for an explanation.

"Japanese internment revisited." In a stunning coincidence, the Fanime Con weekend also was the 60th anniversary of the arrest and internment of every person of Japanese descent in the Santa Clara area. That anniversary, according to the Mercury News, was marked with a detailed re-enactment of the arrests, where people were hauled from their homes and bused to a county fairgrounds to wait their placement in camps for the duration of World War II.

There's no doubt that, at Fanime Con, the offspring of those people who were interned for being more than 1/16th Japanese - and of the people who ran the roundup - spent the weekend celebrating the kind of culture that was openly hated after the start of the war. Side by side, the grandchildren of the people who lost the war are welcome guests of the winners' grandchildren.

It's a show of the resilience of youth and the strength of American diversity that Japanese and Americans hold no wartime grudges. After the great tragedies caused by those who let hatred fester for centuries, events such as Fanime Con and Sakura Con are not to be taken for granted.