Last weekend Kodansha House opened their pop up in LA, and while I was in the area for Anime Expo I was able to stop in a few times. Currently the pop up is only open until the end of today. It is scheduled to run from July 2nd through 12th, and I recommend checking the hours for the different parts of the pop up to make sure you are able to get in and see/experience everything.
The pop up has three different parts to it, there are two entrances for these different spaces. On the side of the building, the entrance leads to all the interactive parts of the pop up. Things like Attack on Titan, Witch Hat Atelier, Blue Lock, and Akira, are all things you can interact with and get fun memories with. They also have cut outs for people to take photos with for Fairy Tail and a beautifully graffitied wall for Gachiakuta.
For the Attack on Titan activity, you get to make a little video of you being a titan and attacking the city (super fun and everyone looks silly). Then moving on to Witch Hat Atelier, you get to draw sigils, following the dotted line for three different ones, and seeing their effect through a window to a room full of goodies from the series. You can see video projected onto items within the room, and see how fire, water and light come from what you have drawn (closed the circle on). As you move further into the space you end up in the Blue Lock locker room, super cool by the way and filled with some of the special merch from the retail store they have, with a huge screen showing player stats. Once past that you can sign up for your own turn to be in Blue Lock, which you get in a cage (very fitting for this series too) and an instructor will guide and help you out. You will get some time to play against one of the Blue Lock men (seen in the series as a digital goalie), and you will try to score by kicking the soccer balls at the screen and trying to get the most points (leading up to the hardest challenge of trying to score a 100 point goal). This too is recorded and you can get it sent to you by one of the little stands they have (they have this for the Attack on Titan feature as well). Lastly, there is a photo op set up as well. Where you can get on the bike from the famous Akira series (most know it from the cover of the movie), and get a really cool photo of yourself on the iconic red motorcycle.
Next, once you have made your way through the interactive zone. You can exit and walk to the corner of the building to enter their clubhouse and retail store, again I highly recommend triple checking their hours of operation for all of these parts (it’s confusing and contradicting and they seem to close the club house/retail a half hour before it actually closes). I myself, was only able to (on the third try) make it into the clubhouse right before heading to the airport and still was not able make it into their retail store. This really sucks because I am a huge fan of multiple of their series and would have loved to purchase some of their exclusive merch for Blue Lock (literally a top favorite of mine). Unfortunately, the hours of operation are wonky and that part of the clubhouse was not open for a while yet on my last day (my friend and I were turned away many other times so more popular guests could make their way into the store, content creators, and also before the clubhouse even closed for the day). This was upsetting as a fan of the publisher and series, but I guess at least I got to play around in the interactive area and see the clubhouse very briefly. The clubhouse was kind of cool, a very relaxed space for people to come and read any of the books that were provided and published by them. It also doubled as a mini art gallery for their most popular series, artwork and notes from the authors/artists for Blue Lock, Witch Hat Atelier, Gachiakuta, Vinland Saga, that Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Fairy Tail, and Ghost in a Shell.
In the end, yes this was a really cool pop up with a great idea on how to get people to interact with their series. But, the hours of operation and staff for the different parts could have been better for the average fan and not just prioritizing the content creators. I hope they bring this type of pop up back again for next year, because it was fun, with just some downfalls for the average fan.
