Sakura Con festival excites Americans

Seattle, May 9: On most days, Javin Mather is a 21-year-old developmental psychology major at Boise State University. But today he is a 2.13-metre robot.

''We spent about 200 hours making this costume,'' said Mather, wearing a bright white and yellow suit made of a thermoplastic substance called Wonderflex. He leans against a trash can, wobbly from the large platform boots on his feet.

Yet Mather, who is also donning a mask with long feathers, barely draws a sideways glance from the throngs of French maids, masked warriors and ninjas gathered in Seattle in April to shop for comic books, DVDs, music and trinkets from Japan.

Seattle's Sakura Con festival (http://www.sakuracon.org/), attended this year by more than 11,000 people, is one of many festivals drawing young Americans by the thousand to cities from Anchorage, Alaska, to Miami to celebrate Japanese pop culture.

It's a movement that encompasses everything from video games, film and music to elaborate costumes and accessories. Animated films from Japan, known as anime, and the comic books, or manga, that often inspire those films are the driving forces.

Many young American fans are drawn to these comic books and films because the storylines are complex, darker and often more honest than standard Hollywood fare.

''You get stuff you can't find in the US media like concepts of family, honour, and things that are important to people, treating people with respect,'' said Cody Bowie, organizer of an anime convention in Anchorage, which drew over 600 people.

Anime films and manga appeal to a wide audience with genres ranging from innocent tales for young girls to hardcore porn.

(To see a clip from ''Black Lagoon,'' an anime TV series, go to http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=51129) US sales of manga, or Japanese comic books, in 2005 totaled a modest 0 million, according to ICv2, a trade news organization specializing in pop culture products. Yet when manga and anime are combined with video games, toys and movie or television deals, the US market balloons to 10 billion dollars.

In a sign of anime's creep into the American mainstream, last year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade featured a giant balloon of Pikachu, the central character of Nintendo Co Ltd's Pokemon franchise.

Reuters>