Event goers will be unhappy to note that the next Wonder Festival, one of the top anime hobby events, has had its next opening cancelled completely. This means there will be no Wonder Festival 2009 Winter at all, though it is thought that future events will go ahead normally.
The event had already been postponed, so it is not a complete surprise. As you might guess, the events of the latest Disaster Festival are the main cause.
Investigations into the escalator accident which severely injured a number of event goers are apparently ongoing, and these disrupted the application and preparation period to such an extent that the organisers were no longer capable of scheduling the event properly for the Winter timeframe.
With luck the next scheduled event will go ahead as planned. For their part, the organisers apologise deeply to all affected.
From their official announcement, via Gigazine.
It seems other Big Sight users are completely unaffected by this.
Are other Big Site events also affected? or the authorities isolated WonFes ‘coz the incident happened during the said event?
Nobody else is affected. It’s not actually clear if this is forced on them by the authorities or not.
Sad thing is: Accidents like that is easily avoidable.
A matter of logistics.
But I think the real problems goes deeper than that.
THIS IS TERRIBLE!
they should just have the event at a hotel or something, even an open field with canopies would be better than a cancel 🙁
Good luck finding a hotel space to fit tens of thousands of visitors, or an open field in the middle of Tokyo…
Maybe they could take advantage of the Russian’s offers to lend an aircraft carrier for extra Comiket space a couple years ago.
A fleet of pirate Otakus on the high seas pillaging and sacking cities for their PVC figures and limited-edition DVD sets sounds fun ^_^