Volleyball Nations League

Welcome to my blog! I can’t promise to post often while I work on Matagi Gunner and have 3 monthly 20-page deadlines but I will try to post as much as I can.

To start things off, I thought I could talk about what I did a few days ago during my half day off of the week. The Volleyball Nations League came to town and I bought tickets to watch the Japan vs USA game, I miss watching live sports or music events sometimes so I thought the VNL would be fun. And it was! The place was packed with a few thousands loud Japanese fans, which made for a great atmosphere, and both Japan and the US teams are among the world’s Top 10 teams so it was amazing to see world class athletes do their thing.

The tournament was held at the same venue where I did my two first Japan comic/manga events, Kaigai Manga Festa, back in 2018 and 2019. It’s hard to believe that the same venue where a comic and pop culture event was held was now full of stands and a volleyball court. Go to the media page of my site and check the venue from the Kitaq AiR video. It is the same venue as this one below.

It was also interesting to see how the event was promoted, the city was full of posters and banners showing some of the most famous players but there were two different versions of the poster. One showed only players while the other showed some players along with a couple of Haikyuu characters. In case you don’t know, Haikyuu is an insanely popular manga published by Weekly Shonen Jump a few years ago that still remains popular today even though it already ended. The game was so much fun that I decided to start reading the manga right away, which I knew I would sooner or later because I watched some of the anime on Netflix years ago and loved it.

This was yet another reminder of how big and popular manga and anime are here in Japan, they will use them even to promote world class sports events like the Volleyball Nations League. Gotta love that!