By the time this newspaper reaches your hands, Anime Expo will already be underway.
When Los Angeles officials talk about wanting to make sure that the convention center is large enough and modern enough to attract and retain large events, Anime Expo is one of those events that they are talking about. It is North America’s largest convention dedicated to Japanese animation, after all.
Thousands of people and dozens of costumed cosplayers take part.
By the time this newspaper reaches your hands, Anime Expo will already be underway.
When Los Angeles officials talk about wanting to make sure that the convention center is large enough and modern enough to attract and retain large events, Anime Expo is one of those events that they are talking about. It is North America’s largest convention dedicated to Japanese animation, after all.
Thousands of people and dozens of costumed cosplayers take part.
Although I wasn’t able to get time off from work for three of the four days that the convention is running — newspapers must get printed, even on holidays — I do intend to attend on Saturday.
After working Friday evening, I will get up early on Saturday morning and head over to the nearest train station (which is in the next town over). I will catch an Amtrak “connector bus” there and ride down to Union Station (and hopefully catch up on my sleep along the way).
From there, I have two choices: I can take the Gold Line to Little Tokyo, where my hotel is — the former New Otani, more recently Kyoto Grand and currently Doubletree. Or I could take the Red Line and transfer to the Blue Line to go directly (so to speak) to Anime Expo. If I drop off my luggage at my hotel, I would still need to use the Red and Blue lines to get to the convention center.
Note that in a few years, the downtown portion of this trip will become a little easier. Right now, the MTA is beginning construction on the Regional Connector, which will fix a gap and link Union Station, Little Tokyo and the Convention Center — one train to do what involves three trains today.
The return trip on Sunday morning is a little different from Saturday’s long bus ride — the Amtrak bus links to a train, which is how the train/ bus combination is usually supposed to operate.
There are a couple of parts to this journey which are really only necessary because this is the United States, and not Japan.
For example, take that early morning bus. There is a three-hour gap in the timetable between the early bus and the first mid-morning train — in fact, I would prefer to take a train in that gap if one existed. This two-to-three hour schedule gap between trains continues throughout the day.
I’ve taken the train enough times to know that the trains are busy and often crowded. Every so often, Amtrak publishes statistics showing ridership is going up on all of the train routes in California. Whether this is because of high gas prices, changing attitudes or trying to avoid traffic is hard to say.
But the demand is there. Ridership would likely increase if more trains were added, because more convenient times would attract more people. The state’s rail budget has failed to catch up with demand.
Remember, every highway that we currently have is only there because of federal or state funding. If America’s transportation budget was more evenly divided between highways and rail — say a 50-50 split — we could have hourly trains between the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
For that matter, if we had followed Japan’s lead, we would already have the high-speed rail line that we are just now planning to build.
If attendance at Anime Expo is any indication, people love the way they do things in Japan. No reason why that can’t apply to their transportation as well.
James Fujita is a former GVN news editor. He works as a copy editor for the Visalia Times-Delta in California’s Central Valley. Fujita can be contacted at jim61773@yahoo.com
