Sakura Con 2025

These images were originally published on a now-defunct Telegram channel and this blogpost has been backdated to be at the correct time in history. I've taken this opportunity to better select the images to share for telling the story and conveying the experience, and I've written much more explanation than I originally did when it was a late-night post to a Telegram channel after a long day.

In May of 2025, I went to Sakura Con in Seattle with my girlfriend. This was my second year attending and her first. To attend the conference, you have to have a badge and (if you're an adult) a wristband. You can purchase your badge up to a year in advance, but the earliest that you can get it is the night before the conference kicks off, Thursday night. So, after my workday ended on Thursday, we moseyed on over to the Seattle Convention Center and stood in line.

Line World

The line was a trainwreck. By my watch, we stood in line for 3 hours and 30 minutes (and 7 seconds). There was some funky line-juggling going on and some people who got in line 2 hours after us were getting their badges 30 minutes before us. I'm happy for them: I don't want anyone to stand in line for that long, but seeing this happen did breed some resentment in the people around me who had waited for longer. By the time we got our wristbands and badges at the front of the line, the line had grown even longer than it was when we entered it. I did some rough math using paces as a unit of measurement, and by my estimate the line had grown by another hour.

My understanding from talking with other attendees for the duration of the conference is that these badge-line issues did not let up, and similar experiences were had by all until the final day of the conference, when there were relatively few people still needing to get their badges. The badge is printed off as-needed when you get to the front of the line, so it's not like they had to dig around in boxes to find stuff. I think that the line issue could be alleviated in the future with a few changes:

I do wonder what kind of self-service options could be available, like how you can print out your boarding pass at the airport without talking to a clerk.

What To Do @ The Con

The next day, Sakura Con properly started. At this conference, there are a few different groups of things to do:

Within the last few years, I've surpassed the point where partying is a lot of fun and I have begun to metamorphasize permaturely into someone with an early bedtime who doesn't like loud places. Perhaps by the end of my 30's I will emerge from this cocoon as a crotchety old man. As a result, I didn't attend the crazy rave that goes until the wee hours of the morning.

Come Spend Your Money

The vendor hall and artist alley are the two main places at Sakura Con where you can find yourself parted from your precious dollars and cents in exchange for a wide variety of cute and cool things. Despite these rooms being absolutely massive, they were packed with people. In many cases the aisles were impassable and you had to either go around or force your way through. Additionally, the artist alley (where the smaller businesses sell their wares) had a delayed opening because The Cheesecake Factory next door caught on fire and filled the whole area with smoke.

Art, both man-made and AI generated, was available for purchase in as many forms as you can image. There were post cards, stickers, posters, tapestries, patches, enamel pins, and so on to infinity. All sporting designs both original and copied from any popular culture franchise. There was obviously a strong Japan-leaning tendency among what you could find, though it wasn't exclusive. Some francises were decidedly American, and some stuff only had a passing "oh I guess cuteness as a concept is Japanese".

If 2 dimensional art isn't your jam, you can also find the largest assortment that I have personally evrer seen (admittedly I don't go looking) of action figures. From popular anime to video games to gundam to...honestly I don't know what some of this is. If it goes into a plexiglass case or a mason jar on an image board, you can buy it at Sakura Con.

You'll find plenty of stuffed animals and other soft things if you are the most cozy-core person that you know. All of it can be had for much cheaper online on sites like AliExpress or Temu. But if you find the Squishmallow section of your supermarket lacking and you are allergic to waiting 2 weeks for shipping, Sakura Con has you covered.

If all the walking around and looking at stuff works up your appetite, you can find some snacks or a nice refreshment, some of which is clearly Japan-inspired or Japan-sourced (pictured below). There's a food court that serves standard American fare and I recall one vendor booth selling locally-made meat sticks. These weren't even pretending to be on-theme, but they were pretty good as far as meat sticks go.

You could also find various (toy, unsharpened) video game weapons, one booth that actually sold real sharpened blades, video game accessories, and DnD supplies. I don't think that DnD has anything to do with Japan, but the overlap of the populations is pretty sizeable.

And if you get tired of all of the lifeless junk completely boxing you in from every angle, slowly eating away at your wallet and your ability to enjoy things that aren't part of a Brand(TM), you can find an island of life and youth by purchasing a real live kitten.

Looking back at these pictures, I am astonished by the fact that everything seems to contain plastic.

Conference Talks

A conference isn't much of a conference without some talks to go to, and Sakura Con (even though the Con is short for Convention) is no exception. However, in the spirit of Comic Con, Sakura Con calls them "panels". I go to technical conferences to network, talk shop, and see (and give) talks, so I was excited to see talks at Sakura Con. My experience the year prior taught me to be careful about what to attend here, as the bar for entry isn't particularly high. This year was much better and I mostly just went to talks that I actually enjoyed. You can find a full schedule of the available talks (and more) here.

Early on Saturday morning we found our way to the Japanese Harp talk. I had neither seen nor heard Japanese Harp before, and it is an intriguing looking and sounding instrument. Being culturally isolated form the West, Japan long ago developed its own unique sound. In some ways, this sound can only be properly represented with these unique instruments. The speaker's presentation style was a bit dulll, but what really shocked me was that they encouraged members of the audience to come up and play on these extremely expensive and difficult-to-obtain instruments. Everyone who did showed the appropriate amount of care and respect. I'm not sure why that surprised me, but it did. When all was said and done, the harps were wrapped up in giant cloths (I had expected hard carrying cases) as if foreshadowing what we would experience later.

When I took the picture of the cloth-wrapped harp, we didn't know what the wrapping technique was called. But we soon learned all about the Japanese art of furoshiki. A woman from the Japanese consulate gave a panel on gift-wrapping and bag-making using just a single piece of cloth. That's a bit of a reductive explanation, she showed us hands-on how to use single pieces of square fabric for a wide assortment of tasks that I never would have imagined using them for. If this sounds interesting to you, I cannot encourage enough checking out her YouTube video which is nearly beat-for-beat identical to the hands-on instruction at the panel.

Since learning about furoshiki, we have used them to augment or supplant backpacks, shopping bags, packing cubes, and more around the house. I am overjoyed that I went to this panel, it had a measurable positive impact on my life. Immediately after Sakura Con was over, we went to a Daiso and found the same furoshikis that we used in the class. If you're looking, they're labeled as "bandana" instead. I would love to someday own real Japanese furoshiki cloths, but they're a bit expensive from overseas. I prefer carrying these Daiso bandanas instead of canvas bags to the grocery store because they fold up smaller and they are a lot of fun.

In a similar hands-on vein to the furoshiki panel, we found ourselves at an origami panel. Here we learned a bit about the history of origami, the etymology of the term, and got some hands-on practice folding paper. In the panel, they taught the whole class how to fold this dragon and alien, walking through step by step slowly. For the stragglers (like myself) who couldn't figure some parts out even after seeing it directly in front of me, the panel team even had people walking around the room to give hands-on help to the students. The whole event was really well-done.

We had such a good time folding origami at the origami panel that we intentionally spend all of the rest of our unscheduled time for the remainder of the conference at the origami zone. There was a whole section of a room dedicated to origami whenever there were people there who wanted to fold. We made friends with the people from PAPER (Puget Area Paperfolding Enthusiasts Roundtable) and they showed us techniques for folding various other things, including:

The last of which (apparently) had no instructions recorded anywhere online, it has just been passed around from one folder to another and somehow made its way to us. It was a lot of fun. The helpers pointed us towards some origami books and I am happy to now count origami among my hobbies that I greatly enjoy.

Part of the origami exhibit was showing off some of the things that PAPER members have folded. These include quite elaborate original designs and beautiful executions of known patterns.

High on the fumes of hobbies and tools that you can pick up from the Japanese dollar store (Daiso), we found our way to a panel specifically dedicated to Daiso crafts. Here we were regaled with the infinitude of ways that you can spend an endless amount of time making stuff from supplies that you can get for relatively cheap. As a form of recreation and entertainment, this makes some sense, but I wasn't nearly as enchanted here as I was by the origami and furoshiki panels.

There is an item on the Sakura Con schedule that I saw last year and didn't get to attend. It repeats every single day in the same room. I am talking about the Tea Ceremony panel. I fancy myself a bit of a tea snob, and appreciating fine teas is a bit of an "us thing" for me and my gf, so I was excited to be able to attend this year. I only got a few pictures before the woman acting as the narrator asked the audience to please not take pictures or video of the performance itself. While I was hoping for tea, instead we were shown the etiquette and mannerisms common in Japanese tea ceremonies, along with the meaning behind them.

This was educational, but I left feeling slightly disappointed that there was no tea. If you see this panel on the schedule and just want some tea, you can safely skip it.

The final memorable talk that we attended was one about ROM hacking to translate a Japanese videogame. I'm used to seeing technical talks at technical conferences, but this was not something that I had at all expected to see at Sakura Con. Fundamentally, this talk was about passion driving a community to reverse engineer an entire Nintendo DS videogame in order to make it accessible to English-speakers.

The technical breadth of this talk was stupendous, an absolute tour de force on the speaker's part. It was interactive with the audience as well, with the crowd collectively choosing which topics to cover. The different aspects of the game were reverse-engineered independently of each other, and some of the most memorable aspects were:

If this topic interests you, I implore you to check out the talk of the same name but with slightly different content that the speaker gave at a previous conference. Or you can find his website here.

Every Girl's Crazy 'Bout A Sharp Dressed Man

Next (and last) on the list of attractions that started this blogpost is cosplay. Sakura Con (alongside other similar conventions) is known far and wide for being the place where people can dress up as their favorite characters or just generally wear whatever cool unorthodox clothing that they normally don't. This is a big draw for these events for me. I love to see the spins and the original twists, and of course I love to see characters that I recognize from the sreen walking around in real life.

Every cosplay-friendly event is bound to have your regular cast of well-known faces. Some of these (Gengar and Deku Link) are enormous, and I looked like a child standing next to them. I'm short which doesn't help but they are still enormous.

Among the well-known faces, there is one who reigns supreme at an anime convention. Hatsune Miku, the anime girl that even your grandparents can recognize, the #1 mover of anime merchandise in the world, the blue-haired vocaloid, was everywhere that you looked. Being the most popular, there were plenty of bad Miku cosplays. There were plenty of unimaginative Miku cosplays. What I really loved were the unique Mikus that I saw. Here I have photos of my two favorite Mikus from the event. First is a Chainsaw Man / Miku hybrid with leeks for weapons. And second that we have is a rare Bard Miku. I spoke with her a bit and she said that lots of people don't recognize her as a Miku at first, but I spotted it instantly. She asked me to hold my hands out in a cup (as if to hold water), then told me that there was a leak in it while giving me a hand-drawn leek sticker. These Mikus took the cake.

You'll also find group cosplays, where a whole group of friends will dress up together to match a theme. I think that this helps to identify groups of people and makes it harder to meet new friends, but it sure does look cool.

I'm not sure if these two were dressed up as established characters or if these were original costumes, but I thought that both looked so damn cool. I found them playing against each other in a Tetris tournament in the gaming zone and asked to take their pictures. As an aside, the girl absolutely obliterated the guy in Tetris. He didn't even stand a chance.

Not all cosplay is an established brand, however. Not everyone wants to dress up as a videogame or an anime. Some people just want to dress up really cool and don't often get an excuse to do it. I asked some of these people why they chose their theme costume and their answers were that they just really like strawberries/moths/mushrooms and think that they are cool. These costumes were completely hand-made and well done.

The fella with the sign, as far as I'm aware, just rides the escalators and walks around the conference to mess with people. I saw him last year as well.

Seeing cosplay is the largest draw to Sakura Con for me, but you don't even need to be a paying attendee (and wait in the super long badge line) to see cosplay. Just hanging out on the sidewalk outside the convention center is enough to see some of the coolest costumes that you've ever seen. I don't know what some of these are, but they look great.

The Rest

That's about it for the Con from me. I had a decent time, though I probably won't be going back again next year. It's a bit pricey and it takes a lot of time. There's a lot of standing around and waiting and walking. The goods for sale are too aggressively priced, and I feel like I've seen the talks that I care to see from this style of convention for the rest of my life. What remains in this blogpost are some additional pictures from the weekend.

Food

If you are in search of food in Seattle, you will inevitably find yourself a vendor on the street hawking hot dogs for what seem to outsiders like unimaginable prices. These prices are Washington standard, only slightly inflated due to being so close to major events. And these aren't any typical hot dogs, these are Seattle Dogs. A toasted bun slathered in cream cheese with a hot dog and the whole thing topped in grilled onions. This is a Seattle staple, and you can find them most anywhere you go. At Sakura Con I got a Seattle Dog from DeeZ Dogz, and I am not lying or overexaggerating when I say that it was one of the best Seattle Dogs I've had. I went back for a second one the following day.

For dinner one night, I took my girlfriend to a nice little establishment downtown named The Palace Kitchen. In a city widely known for not really having much good food, this restaurant is considered one of the "gems" of the city, and they didn't disappoint. We asked to split an entree since we were both working with shrunken stomachs at the time, and they very nicely plated both halves separately. I'm not sure why that stands out so much to me, but it does.

The last place worth mentioning where we got food was Tai Tung (usually called "Chop Suey"), Seattle's oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant. It is extremely hyped on review sites and in the press. It is a juggernaut in the local culture. I found it wholy unremarkable. This was disappointing, but oh well.

Photography

I am by no means a "good photographer" or an "artist", but I like to run around with my little point and shoot. Sometimes I even point it and things and shoot. Sometimes I even like the pictures that I take. The patio at the convention center gave me a good vantage point to get some architecture shots of nearby buildings. Some of these I took on the route between the venue and our lodging.