Uchimizukko 2008 just isn't what it used to be

07.08.2008 by Adrian A. Lozano

Saturday August 2nd was the return of Akihabara's 5th Uchimizukko ceremony, only this year it wasn’t actually held in Akihabara. Event coordinators tried a more in your face sponsored commercial approach and even moved the main event far away from the Akihabara Electric Town Exit. The new location was relocated to the neighboring Kanda Myoujin Shinto shrine. The Kanda Myoujin shrine is a bit of a hike away from all the activity that would normally be taking place on a Saturday in Akihabara, holding the event at the Kanda Myoujin shrine would seem like a good idea but the overall event ended up seeming rather tame and unexciting compared to previous years.

The theme to this year’s ceremony was "let's connect at Uchimizukko", and just like previous years there were local maid café maids participating in the festivities. Unfortunately the number of participating maid cafes declined by more than half since last year's event, @ Home Café, Coscha, Nagomi, just about all of the most established Maid Cafés were missing from the line up. Maid cafés that did make the line up were from Akiba San Chome Theater, JAM Akihabara, Honey Sheep, Mai Cure, Mai Foot, Misty Heaven, Moe Sham, O-bu, Royal Milk, Little PSX, BSD, and TGV. Daletto the developers of the new Street Fighter Online game used the event to promote their new online PC version of Street Fighter 2. Chun-Li and Ryu cosplayers leaded the ceremony and also handled the MC duties of announcing event proceedings. Daletto’s corporate branding was plastered all over the place with promotional signs even all maids were wearing Daletto buttons. Perhaps a better promotional strategy would to have given these promotional items to the people coming to see the ceremony, since it was unclear to the average person why Street Fighter characters would be taking part in the ceremony like this.

Usually once the media coverage of the maids doing the Uchimizukko ground cooling is finished the maids would go around getting people to participate and interact with onlookers. Unfortunately the maids rushed off to three separated smaller location in Akihabara. The smaller Uchimizukkos took place in front of Akihabara Station, Fuji Soft Building, and Yodobashi Camera. The over all event attendance was very low; the majority of people there were mostly Akihabara bloggers and a hand full of press. Compared to the previous Uchimizukkos held in front of Dai Build this year just didn’t have any kind of Akiba community connection and it was missing the most important ingredient of all …… 萌 (Mo'e).

Compare Uchimizukko 2008 to Uchimizukko 2006, what a difference.... ne?