The Foundation for the promotion of Japanese popular culture, also known as Stichting J-Pop, presents: Anime 2014, the annual festival devoted to Japanese films, animation, games, music, fashion and culture. Anime 2014 is the festival’s sixteenth edition since the establishment of the foundation in 1998 and the second edition to be held at the World Forum Convention Centre in The Hague.

Anime 2014 is a 52-hour non-stop festival featuring Japanese movies (animation and cinematic), video games, competitions, concerts, theatre performances, workshops, presentations and the selling of art and merchandise. Our doors will be opening from Friday afternoon on June 13th, until Sunday afternoon on the 15th of June.

In recent years the number of visitors attending our festival has been growing quickly, but 2013 topped them all! In our first year at the World Forum we almost doubled our visitor numbers: 2.600 visitors on Friday, 3.500 on Saturday and 2.700 on Sunday, in total more than 8.800 festival visitors. To compare: in 2013 in Almelo we had “only” 4.900 festival visitors. In 2014 we expect to reach at least 12.000 visitors in total, but we will prepare for more.

The festival offers an abundant, non-stop choice of entertainment. Enjoy the continuous video programme in multiple High Definition video rooms. Play a diverse selection of games; ranging from typical Japanese to Western and from retro to recently released and even games by our partner Namco Bandai that yet have to be released. See performances by Japanese artists, enter competitions, visit one of the numerous workouts, workshops or lectures covering many aspects of the Japanese culture. Pay a visit to our large sales space, attend one of the food or drink tastings or participate in the always popular karaoke event.

Most of our visitors come dressed as their favourite game, movie or manga character: the phenomenon known as cosplay. Anime 2014 shows the most amazing collection of costumes you’ll find anywhere in the Netherlands. Dutch cosplayers compete for the two European finals

in London and Paris and for the team World Championship in Nagoya, Japan. Cosplayers from all Benelux countries can compete in the world championship for singles in Brazil or the new team event at the largest cartoon and animation festival in the world: CICAF at Hang Zhou, China. The jury for these preliminaries consists of top international cosplayers dressed in style.

What makes this festival the event of the year for most visitors, is the atmosphere. It is a festival that brings people with similar interests together, giving them the opportunity to share their passion with each other… when our rich festival program doesn’t keep them to busy.

CosplayCosplay, ‘costume play’ for short, is a hobby that has increased in popularity over the last few years. Creative individuals make their own costume based on an existing movie, cartoon, game or comic. The materials used in these costumes range from textile to completely mechanised construction with added light and sound effects.

Cosplay may be just a hobby for most participants, but a large group plans to make a living using costumes, either performing in them on stage or creating costumes and props for theatres and movie studios. One of our 2011 representatives at the World Cosplay Summit is now making props for Games of Thrones, Doctor Who and other popular TV shows.

Our visitors will be wearing their costumes during most of the festival and can also participate in several cosplay competitions, a fashion show and other cosplay related events. During a cosplay competition, the cosplayer will perform an act in front of an audience, portraying as the character they represent, either solo or in a group.

International competitionsThere are five renowned international competitions in the cosplay scene. Anime 2014 is the only festival in the world hosting preliminaries for all of them. For the two European competitions based in London and Paris and the World Championship for teams in Japan the candidate has to be the best cosplayer in the Netherlands. For the World Championship for individuals in Sao Paulo, Brazil and the new CICAF championship for teams in Hang Zhou, China the participant has to be the best cosplayer in the Benelux.

To win they have to convince the jury and every jury member has been a finalist in one of the above events or has international recognition as a master in the field. This concentration of international cosplay power has led to the introduction of BorderCos on Anime 2013: an event where only international teams can participate, encouraging the rest of the cosplay community in Europe to come our event in droves to win our Golden Marieke Award.

But you don’t have to look to the foreigners for the best in cosplay! In 2011 the team from the Netherlands won the award for best wig during the World Championship in Japan. Two years ago, our representative, Ronald, reached second place at the Euro Cosplay Championship in London, while last year, our representative Alana was named European Champion!

Video ProgrammeOur festival offers a diverse video programme guaranteed to keep anyone from getting bored. There are several air-conditioned video rooms featuring large high definition movie screens and surround sound. From the start of the festival until the finish, yes every minute of the night, our visitors can choose to see one of the many series and movies showing in multiple rooms. As the name of our festival already reveals, Anime

– the Japanese term for animation – will be the dominant factor in our video

programme, but we will, also show some of the best movies and TV-shows Japan has to offer.

Live MusicMany of our visitors are great fans of Japanese Pop- and

Rock music. Previous years we had the privilege

to have top Japanese bands performing live

at our festival. In 2011 Aural Vampire

was our guest, when they were up and coming instead of the established band they are now. In 2012 we were hosts to the band M.O.V.E., a band that has released over 30 albums, including many top hits in Japan. We also had the Japanese DJ Remo-con as a guest in 2012. He performed with Dutch DJ-talent at our disco night. Lastly at Anime 2013 our guest was the band ALTIMA; a key band in the Japanese animation industry consisting of members of three different famous music acts.

The musical act for 2014 is still to be determined, as we are in the process of negotiating with several interested parties.

ActivitiesEach year our festival delights our visitors with an ever broader variety of activities that give them the opportunity to learn something new about the unique Japanese culture while having fun at the same time.

One unique characteristic of our festival is the unusually high audience participation by our visitors and not just by putting on costumes or playing games.

Visitors with both a technical and a creative mind can put their talents to good use by creating an ‘Anime Music Video’ to compete in the AMV-Competition. During this video mixing competition contestants show the audience a video clip accompanied by their favourite music, using anime and manga as a source for their video.

Those with drawing skills can improve their technique at diverse drawing workshops. There are workshops for basic drawing, colouring, but also e.g. for learning to draw professionally with a tablet. The best of them compete for the prestigious Dutch Manga Awards.

Visitors with a strong stomach try the whisky tasting; those with lesser stomach linings go for the sake tasting or for making their own sushi under the tutelage of Taji the chef.

Anime 2014 also provides the opportunity for other organisations to perform or promote their activities. For example, the MangaKissa-Foundation runs a manga library where people can enjoy reading their favourite comics in peace. The people from Ani-Nation allow visitors to enjoy the games that one can find at a typical Japanese market or outdoor festival. The Kinjin students demonstrate that you do not need to have electronics to play games, though don’t be fooled by the word “game”, they frankly admit that they are evil. In the combat dojo too many

organisations to mention help our visitors to find the form of martial arts best suited to them, but you can also to relax at yoga to find other Asian

forms of wisdom.

GamesJapan’s most successful cultural export product is not anime, manga, or even tea ceremonies, music or sake. The single largest cultural export category of Japan consists of videogames. Brands like Sony’s PlayStation, Nintendo and Namco Bandai ensures Japan’s position as one of the top players in the videogame industry. Consoles like the PlayStation 3 and 4, Nintendo DS and the Wii U are found in almost all Dutch households.

This shows in our huge game room filled with large screens and arcade cabinets that offer visitors the opportunity to play a great variety of games. Both newly released games as well as the retro games we grew up with can be played for free. The game room has games from many different genres including some rare games and ones that have never been released in Europe. There is even a selection of arcade games available, including a Japanese pachinko-machine (a kind of vertical pinball table). At Anime 2013 Tales of Xillia and the new Naruto game could be played for the first time in the Netherlands. Due to our partnership with Bandai Namco we expect Anime 2014 will again feature some great and awesome un-released games for our visitors to try out.

Visitors can also bring their own portable consoles in order to play against fellow visitors. A lot of competitions are held in the game room; varying from small matches between two players, to pools of more than a hundred players, or even national championships with a great deal of prizes to be won. But the top competition in 2013 was the Dutch StarCraft II Championship organized by the Dutch StarCraft League and the E-Sports foundation with 400 viewers in a separate theater room and thousands of people following the live web-broadcast.

Dealer RoomSome visitors come to the festival to participate in activities, others come for the game room or the video programme, but everyone comes for the dealer room. Dealers from across the world come over to sell their art and merchandise at our festival. There is a lot of anime on DVD or Blu-ray, but also a lot of manga to be bought. The merchandise is not limited to those items however. Dealers also offer dolls, figurines, plush toys in all shapes and sizes, swords, posters, paintings, drawings, T-shirts and a selection of Japanese food and drinks. Thanks to the abundance of cosplayers at the festival, you can even find accessories and clothing for cosplayers. There are so many things on sale that the dealer room

is a joy to visit, even when there is nothing you want to buy.

LocationOur choice for the World Forum in The Hague has been proven the right one to take. We found everything we were looking for and more: accessibility, atmosphere, facilities, halls and capacity. Moving to a new location always represents a challenge, but both our large team of volunteers and a great many visitors expressed their enthusiasm, so this obviously was the right choice. The people at the World Forum also had a great time and as a result they offered us a contract for the next three years that we could not resist.

Due to the easy access with public transport, we have also tackled one of our environmental targets, as we want to run our enjoyable event as environmentally sustainable as possible.

Demography and VisitorsLast year, we had roughly 8.800 visitors over 3 days by more than 4.500 people. In other words: almost double the 4.900 festival visitors (by 2.450 people) we had in 2012. Of the 2013 visitors 2.100 were weekend visitors staying for three days, Saturday was the busiest with 3.500 visitors, 2.700 came on the Sunday and 2.600 visitors came on Friday.

Visitors come from everywhere in the Netherlands though they are clearly concentrated in urban areas. 11% of the visitors live nearby in The Hague or the neighbouring cities of Delft and Zoetermeer. This is comparable to the number of extra visitors we used to attract in the Almelo area when we were located there.

Anime 2013 marked the year we really became an international festival as the number of foreign visitors grew faster than the number of Dutch visitors. In 2012 we had about 70 foreign visitors while 170 travelled to us in 2013. I.e. 4% of our visitors came from abroad. Of course most came from neighbouring countries: 47% from Belgium, 17% from Germany, 12% from Denmark and 10% from the United Kingdom; but the remaining 14% come from all over the world. Mainly they came from European countries, but some of our visitors even came from United States and Japan. We do expect the percentage of foreign visitors to continue to increase in 2014 as this year we started promoting our festival at

foreign events.

Anime 2013 visitors were not concentrated in any education or

income group, but they are young. The average age of our visitors was just

over 22. Since 2009 we see a gradual climb of the average age of visitors of a couple of

months each year. This agrees with our impression that we remain able to attract new visitors every year while retaining our older audience at the same time. Of course

we must have been able to attract a lot of new “older” people this year as we grew so quickly. Even the spread between the average age of our female and our male visitors remained the

same: a little under 21 for the female visitors and almost 24 for our male visitors. For the first time since we started measuring the percentage of female visitors has declined: 46% instead of 48%. Males clearly buy their tickets at the last moment as up to two week before the festival we thought they would be in the minority.

PromotionOur main avenue of promotion has always been social media. We were born online and our public is young. Our website is continuously updated and is full of information on the festival and the design is changed every year. We monitor as many threads as concerning our festival as we can on all kinds of media. Our Facebook page has topics that scores view tens of thousands of views.

The city of The Hague actively promotes festivals like ours in a more traditional manner through The Hague Marketing. Anime 2014 is part of the line-up for “The Hague Festivals” campaign with big screens at stations and posters everywhere in the city. In 2013 this proved very effective as many at-the-door ticket buyers mentioned their promotion campaign as their reason to come and visit.

We have been actively promoting our festival in traditional Dutch media since 2010 and we usually manage to reach one or two national newspapers, but since 2013 we have also been reaching specialized periodicals world¬wide. Organizing preliminaries for five international Cosplay competitions already draws the attention to our festival, but being able to book the famous Japanese pop-band M.O.V.E. in 2012 has spiked international interests as well. Adding the

introduction of our own international Cosplay competition will increase that even further. The Dutch Manga Awards (Japanese comics, made and published by Dutch artists) got us noticed by Kink FM.

Of course, all of this does not mean we forgot our other trusted promotion methods, as we will still be spreading flyers and putting up posters. Our enthusiastic volunteers are also promoting our festival at other related festivals and events. For the last three years we have sold tickets and spread leaflets and programme booklets at other Anime fairs, but also at the comic fairs in Breda, Gorinchem and Haarlem, the Japan market in Leiden and other Japanese Pop culture festivals.

SponsorsAs a non-profit organisation, we are always interested in attracting new sponsors in order to increase the positive experience of our visitors at our festival. This sponsorship could be made in the form of supplying technical hardware for our video rooms or game room, prizes for competitions, furniture and decoration for the location, goodie bags for the visitors, donations or active participation. In exchange for such a sponsorship we can offer various advertisement formats in our festival guide, on our website, or incorporated in the video programme and elsewhere on the festival itself. It is also possible to advertise via leaflets or to be provided with a table in our dealer room. We are, of course, open to other solutions. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, we would be more than willing to discuss any options.

Not for publication/Note towards editors.

For more information please contact the J-POP Foundation. Niels Viveen or Matijs de Jong Telephone 010 8910902,Mobile phone 06 4600 6860 (Niels) 06 2154 3221 (Matijs)E-mail press@animecon.nl