OC Japan Street Fair

November 26, 2009 by super-no1

I saw posters for this event in several areas around town. This was the first year for this event so I decided to give it a try and see what it was all about. The admission price was only $2 so there wasn’t much to lose. This event was organized by the the Orange Business Network. The posters that I saw advertised such things as traditional dances, food booths, fashion booths, a maid cafe live show, and fighting robots. The event was held in a tiny fenced off lot at the Orange County Fair Grounds. Once I entered the festival, the first obstacle that I had to pass through was the booth area. All of the booths seemed to be crammed together in the center of this lot with very little room to walk. It was nice to see such a large crowd come out to this event, but it made maneuvering through this booth area somewhat troublesome. You couldn’t really stop and look at everything because you would end up blocking the aisle and creating a traffic jam. However, there was plenty of open space on the side areas. The spacing of the booths seemed to be very poorly planned. It wasn’t laid out so that a large crowd can move around easily.

The entertainment was hit or miss. There was traditional Japanese dancing and taiko drums. The maid cafe show was reduced to one performer because the other maid was injured and couldn’t take part. There was also a rapper from East Los Angeles rapping about thug life. I don’t exactly know what he had to do with Japanese performing arts. There was also a health seminar, which was actually somewhat of an infomercial by one of the vendors. Does anybody really want to see somebody on stage try to sell them a vitamin drink? The fighting robots were alright, but they only fought once. For the rest of their allotted time, they lets kids from the audience come up on stage and play around with the robots. It wasn’t very interesting because the kids didn’t know how to control the robots.

There was certainly a good variety of food booths. Clearly, they weren’t expecting as big of a crowd that ended up coming. Some booths ran out of food by early afternoon. The wait for takoyaki was over one hour. There weren’t many tables for people to sit at to eat their meals, so a lot of people ended sitting on the dead grass and dirt that was available on the edges of the festival area. The crammed design of booth area didn’t help matters. It was difficult to find which line was for which food booth. All of the lines just seemed to melt together. I settled on a bowl of ramen, which was actually not too bad.

I suppose for the first year, it wasn’t too bad. In fact, the huge crowd probably made it a very successful event. However, there were lots of problems and hopefully, they can learn from this year and improve this event for the next time. This event has a lot of potential and it’s nice to have a large Japanese festival in Orange County. People will come to it, but they deserve a better festival.