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Anime Contents Expo 2012 to Run March 31-April 1 (Updated)
posted on by Egan Loo
The organizers of Anime Contents Expo (ACE) announced on Monday that the event will be held for the first time next year from March 31 to April 1. That weekend happens to be one week after next year's Tokyo International Anime Fair (March 22-25). The inaugural outing for the ACE event will be held at Makuhari Messe in Chiba east of Tokyo.
This year's Anime Contents Expo was cancelled six days after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai) disaster of March 11. If it had been held, it would have run during the same weekend as Tokyo International Anime Fair, which was also cancelled this year.
A group of anime and manga companies created ACE in response to the controversy surrounding the Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF) and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's amendment to Tokyo's Youth Healthy Development Ordinance. The amendment expands the number of manga and anime that fall under "harmful publications," the legal category of works that must not be sold or rented to people under the age of 18.
Among others, 10 major manga publishers were planning to boycott TAF 2011 because of the amended ordinance, although not all of them would have formally exhibited at TAF or ACE.
Update: A controversy arose earlier this month when online posters noted that four of the manga publishers are still listed on TAF's website, and those posters then mistakenly assumed that the publishers are actively participating in TAF. However, Kadokawa Shoten President Shinichiro Inoue confirmed that his company is not part of TAF's executive committee. He explained that TAF simply had not updated that page since before their boycott.
Update 2: The Yomiuri Shimbun paper reports that along with Kadokawa Shoten, Aniplex plans to display at ACE, and not at TAF.
this article has been modified since it was originally posted; see change history