Ginger Root, Vtubers, Akiko Higashimura: I did Anime NYC weekend without actually doing Anime NYC

(I have an Otakon 2026 writeup coming, but I did a lot that weekend and it got kind of massive. However, on Anime NYC weekend I only did a couple of things because I wasn’t actually at the con. So I’m going to write up those things relatively quick and get the Otakon post out later.)

Sometimes when a fan event is big enough, there’ll be kind of a bleed-out phenomenon where similar events spring up in the area because of the critical mass of people in town who are interested in the same stuff. Consider how independent wrestling events spring up all over a city on the weekend it hosts a Wrestlemania. It's not competition, it's complementary.

Anime NYC is already packing the Javits Center, and aside from its usual big guest gets, I really have no reason to go. ANYC is just a couple of weeks after Otakon, features pretty much the same exhibitors and attractions as you’d find at the average East Coast con, takes place in a congested labyrinth of a venue, and is quite expensive to attend. Even though I can commute there, and even though every anime nerd I know goes, I tend to skip the event and get drinks with my friends who are in town instead.

But those side events are another matter. I actually wound up buying tickets for events running from Thursday to Saturday of ANYC weekend, realizing as the weekend drew closer that I’d booked myself for three straight nights.

As such I pretty much had another convention experience this past weekend, except I got to sleep in. Even so, I was still pretty beat by the time I got home on Saturday night. And that was supposed to be the easy one.

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Ginger Root Thursday

Earlier that week a friend let me know Ginger Root (Cameron Lew) was playing a tiny show Thursday night on top of his Anime NYC appearance, and I jumped to grab a ticket; they were gone within about half an hour of my hearing about it.

Ginger Root’s music and aesthetic are heavily built on old-time 80s Japanese pop, and he’s probably the single best out there at turning out fresh new material that still rings with genuine retro vibes. But also never mind all that, because this was an anisong show. The event description warns the prospective buyer “no Ginger Root songs, just anime songs”, and Cameron held to it.

(By the way, Thursday was an afternoon of apocalyptic rainfall in NYC. After holing up in a coffee shop for as long as I could, I eventually went around the corner and waited out in a clump of umbrellas at the door with a bunch of hyped up ota who reminded me of myself 20 years ago. Ginger Root himself walked into the venue from the back somewhere in there: he glanced out at us through the door with an “oof” on his face.)

“This is my convention panel,” he said to us in full costume as Haruko Haruhara (FLCL), before starting on a playlist that took me back to the little red Sandisk MP3 player I used to carry around in the early 2000s. The crowd was split between the kids in the front dancing and the uncs in the back singing along: Cameron’s 30, which was the minimum age you needed to be to know most of his choices. Think Ouran High School Host Club, Chobits, and Haruhi Suzumiya with some total curveballs, like Bobobobo Bobobo. It looked to me like Cameron had cut his own anime music videos for the background visuals; they were really well-timed and deliberately cut to his own interpretations of the songs he was singing. The entire crowd fully popped for Duvet from Serial Experiments Lain, which in true Lain style has taken on a sort of afterlife in internet video. I think Cameron expected a singalong of Komm, Susser Tod from Evangelion without any onscreen lyrics to just work, but it actually tested the true oldies in the room.

(I felt a “why’s this guy know the words” glance from people around me a couple times.)

Cameron has this kinda desperate, yearning wail that matches really well with anisongs. It’s kind of chuuni, you know? He really puts that twist hard on Sakura Kiss from Ouran, and it works. That wail made me think of my 2000s, and us otaku, and how we project that same kind of yearning onto the objects of our affection. Like 抱きしめたいのに～

After that he came out and did a full DJ set of 70s and 80s disco and soul from Japan and the rest of the world (completely on vinyl!). That’s right: I got to hear Komm, Susser Tod and Bad Girls at the same show. One of the reasons I love the citypop wave is this revival of 70s and 80s pop which was dismissed, and mocked, and set on fire at baseball stadiums. It was impossible to start listening to Tatsuro Yamashita years ago without realizing I also loved 70s AOR, or to Toshiki Kadomatsu without rediscovering 80s roller-rink boogie. My record collection is all over the place because of those guys.

This $20 show set a high bar; I thought to myself “Nothing I do this weekend will be as cool as this”, and in retrospect I was probably right. (sorry akiko)

Vtubers Friday

Fans of Vtubers and idols had their pick of events: the convention proper had a concert with major stars from king promotion Hololive, and up at the Beacon Theater was Skyline Serenade, an indie VTuber concert featuring quite a few other big names.

Yeah, Virtual Youtuber concerts. Big VTubers are pretty much required to be able to sing and dance. Though you might not at first think of online live-streamers as concert acts, the international VTuber business model is strongly based on Japan’s planned and produced system of pop idols. The multitude of performers for every imaginable taste, the way they debut as “generations” and get split into complementary “units”, the deliberate reliance on direct fan support via donations and goods sales. The live concert, then, is the center of the culture and peak of the experience. It’s free to watch, but it’s expensive to lifestyle.

I had no intention of going to either of these shows— they’re quite expensive, and though I enjoy these characters, I’m not a ride-or-die superfan of any of them like the average glowstick-wielding attendee— but a friend offered me a VIP ticket at about half of the $200 cover price (some Super VIP tickets had freed up for $300, you see). For that price, I said to myself, I was simply doing a friend a favor. Yes. We’ll go with that.

The Vtuber performers were Nimi Nightmare and noted Kawaiikochans fan Mint Fantome, performing via a pre-recorded video made with their 3D models and presumably some sophisticated motion capture tech, playing on a screen about the size of the Beacon stage. The idols present in person were Keeki-hime (yes, Cake Princess) and Phoebe-chan, both of whom are also VTubers. (There is a web of convoluted circumstance and alternate identities here that I am going to totally skip.)

The performers toyed with format: some songs had the Vtubers or idols performing solo, and other times the live idol would interact with the pre-recorded Vtuber for a duet ala Roger Rabbit. There were even a few guest appearances from other Vtubers. The whole affair was strictly timed, down to the chat between songs: Keeki-hime talked over time at one point and she had to run off stage when the video indicated a song was about to begin, for example.

(This format also meant no encore, and the girls had to come out and say so after a long and thunderous “EN-COO-RU” chant from the crowd as the staff opened up all doors, eager for this high-energy crowd to get the hell out.)

The performers were as endearing as intended, and the fans were on fire as always. I certainly had a good time, but I remember thinking really early in this show that I guess I wasn’t an idol guy after all. I felt a little out of place in a house of worship, to be honest. Like, when idols sing about how they love me specifically... I just get kinda embarrassed. I can’t adore them like I’m supposed to. Your love is too unconditional, idols!! How can I just… trust someone like that?!

Eventually the mood took over, the virtual/real idols won me over, and I had a good time. I certainly didn’t expect to hear Wonderwall that night.

Higashimura Saturday

The last event of my weekend was Akiko Higashimura’s (Princess Jellyfish, Tokyo Tarareba Girls; this woman is an actual superstar) appearance at the Japan Society on Saturday night. This was also a premiere of the film adaptation of her hit manga Kakukaku Shikajika (Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist’s Journey, a re-title Higashimura told us very politely that she didn’t like). It’s a story about her art school youth re-imagined as a tearjerker comedy-drama, centering on the strict but soft-hearted art teacher of her teenage years.

I haven’t yet read the manga, so this was my first exposure to this story. A lot of people I talked to at the event told me the film was extremely accurate to the manga, but I can’t personally speak to it. I will say that the type of extreme rubber-faced overacting you typically see in Japanese live-action comedy somehow really fits this story and these characters. The fictionalized Akiko is overconfident, selfish, and she's charming specifically because she never learns. (Pretty close to the image the actual person cultivates.) Her art teacher Hidaka is a cartoon parody of a strict, scary patriarch, bamboo sword and tracksuit included. And yet the character’s straight-shooting purity and innocence makes you genuinely feel for him.

It’s because these characters and their performances are so much that they can be moving when the moment for it comes. Higashimura’s wryness undercuts the sap in a straightforward tearjerker narrative, though the movie feels perhaps 15 minutes too long in its final act.

The author came out for a moderated Q&A at the end, and if you’d come to this unaware that Akiko Higashimura is a personality, you sure found out by this point. Showy in full kimono and makeup, Higashimura came out asking "so, did you cry?" with a self-satisfied smile. She was clearly genuinely delighted to be in New York— she spent the weekend in vintage stores— and quite outspoken and unfiltered: she openly complained about the film not getting international streaming and said “this is New York! One of you guys in the crowd must know somebody!” She made the crowd laugh about as much as the movie did, and roasted the anime convention audience when she observed that despite her expectations of boisterous, excited New York nerds, otaku here seemed just as quiet and polite as their Japanese counterparts. I think I burst into flames.

After the Q&A, we stood in line for two hours waiting for Higashimura’s autograph. It wasn’t that the line was so gigantic; it was that she really took her time with her fans, above and beyond what anybody would have expected of her. Not only was her sketch beautiful, she gave her fans about a minute and a half to chat with her; you could tell she really wanted to hear from and engage with you. I told her, because she had mentioned “American Amars” (the Amars being the women's social-recluse society from Princess Jellyfish), that I’d known a couple of American Amars in my life and learned a lot from them. She was happy to hear there were more out there. We all got out around midnight with big smiles on our faces, and I’m pretty sure Higashimura was there until 1. In short, this was a woman so delightful that she can get away with selling stickers of herself for a dollar. Of course I bought one.

You can't see the film version of Kakukaku Shikajika in English anywhere right now, but you can read the Blank Canvas manga. If I may plug on Higashimura’s behalf, her newly directed drama “The Vacation Principle” went up on Netflix the same day as this event.

There was talk in our group about meeting up on Sunday, but I was totally exhausted and spent the next day alternating between being conked out and playing mahjong (I was jonesing after being away from it for so long.) So, you know, a complete weekend.

(An end note: I think that people stick with anime/manga and J-pop culture because it resonates with them personally, and that when you’ve been at this hobby for a really long time, it starts to feel not exotic, but like a second home. So for me, it’s not too much of a surprise that foreign otaku can be a lot like Japanese otaku: we’re on the same wavelength.)