There are conventions....

and then there are conventions!

This afternoon the missus asked me to drive her to "J-Town" (aka Japan Town - one of the more than one hundred neighborhoods in the City) to pick up some ingredients from Nijiya Market, the best Japanese grocery store in town, for the sukiyaki I will have for dinner tonight.

San Francisco is very much economically reliant on the tourist trade and conventions. It wasn't always this way, but it is now and we are playing the cards we are dealt - and it isn't necessarily bad.

According to the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, which by the way is a good resource for out of town companies that want to open up in San Francisco, in 2008 the City hosted 16.4 million visitors who spent $8.52 billion during their stay.

Today was the wrap for Anime-on-Display convention now in its 8th year. According to the young lady in the photo above with her finger pointed in the air there were about 1,000 attendees at this two day event.

The focal point of Japan Town is Post Street between Webster and Buchanan, one block east of the better known Fillmore Street and is the site of three Japanese-oriented shopping centers and home to a large number of Japanese (and some Korean and Chinese) restaurants, supermarkets, indoor shopping malls, hotels, banks and other shops.

While I can't profess to know a great deal about the Anime sub-culture, my limited research into it has led me to a Japanese jazz-rock-fusion artist, Yoko Kanno, who has scored many a soundtrack for video games, TV series, movies and ads, I can profess to liking this song from her Seatbelts Live concert.


Sukiyaki's ready. Sayonara!