Our booth at the Japan EXPO was sponsored by Shikoku Muchujin in Paris, who are also sponsoring a contest to invite 5 French pro-bloggers to Japan, all expenses paid, in October of this year, to spend 2 weeks in Shikoku, learning about sides and depths of Japanese culture which they will write about, photograph, and draw from their experience.
Before the Japan EXPO we had 77 applicants for these 5 positions. After the EXPO we had over 150 applicants! The booth had plenty of visual and video interest about Shikoku, but with 150,000 people at the Japan EXPO, and probably 150,000,000 things to see, it is a challenge to get anyone to stop, much less stay at your booth for more than a few minutes in passing.
One thing which turned out to be one of the biggest draws for our booth was something that was both unplanned and unexpected. While I had counted on doing a demonstration of brush calligraphy, it turned out that people were willing to line up and pay for fans (uchiwa) with their name painted on it in kanji.
Thanks to the collaboration of members of our booth, we set up a system whereby visitors to the booth could give us their name in French, we would find a set of characters to match the sound, and if they liked the meaning, then I would paint the characters on a fan, which they would buy for 7 Euros. This proved so popular that we had lines of up to 15 people waiting as long as 30 minutes to get their name painted, or the name of a friend or family member. I was told that it is almost impossible to get people to wait this long for something at a booth at a show like this, so they must have really wanted it.
I made two samples shown here, showing the sound in hiragana and the meaning in kanji, for the name Marie (まり、Mari, or 真理, Truth).
Lines formed immediately, and never abated as long as I was willing to keep painting, which was for several hours each day! Some even came back to get another fan made, after theirs was stolen!
It was a challenge coming up with characters that not only sounded like the person's name, but also had an attractive meaning. French names are sometimes hyphenated and quite long. Some examples we came up with included:
Guillaume 祇園夢 (Dream in Gion-Kyoto)
Marie 真理 (Truth)
Adrienne 亜鳥縁 (Fortunate Bird of Asia)
One man's request was for a woman's name. The meaning it turned out was close to, Loved by many men, or Loved many times. He cried out, C'est pour ma femme! (It's for my wife!). He wanted it anyway.
We had no idea that something as simple as personalizing a name would prove so popular. I literally could have spend the entire time every day doing nothing but this, and the line would never go down. I actually enjoyed this almost the most, because it gave me a chance to engage with so many people on a personal one to one basis, to see their expressions of interest and delight, and to listen to their comments as they watched. These would have been great to capture on film, but they happened so spontaneously, that they were impossible to capture.
Here a a few photos that give you a general idea. The close ups show the character for dragon (龍) in the process of emerging.
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