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Tokyo Plans Temporary Locale for Tokyo Big Sight Events During Olympics Preparations
posted on by Rafael Antonio Pineda
Tokyo revealed plans to provide a temporary exhibition space from 2019 to 2020, when the Tokyo Big Sight convention center would be reserved for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. The plans will use an area near the Rinkai! LINE's Tokyo Teleport station, itself located in the same Odaiba area as Tokyo Big Sight.
The 37,000-square-meter (about 9.1-acre) space is currently a temporary parking lot that is on land owned by the Tokyo metropolitan government. The temporary exhibition space will use 24,000 square meters (5.9 acres) of this space, and will be available for a limit of one year starting in April 2019. Comparatively, Tokyo Big Sight's exhibition area is 80,000 square meters (19.7 acres) in size.
Tokyo Big Sight will begin construction this summer to expand the facility so it can serve as the main press center and international broadcasting center for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Due to the construction, industry booths at this summer's Comiket are scheduled to close after two days (instead of the usual three). In addition, the area for the booths has been changed from the West 3 and 4 Halls to the West 1 and 2 Halls. The decision was made in consideration of crowd control.
From April 2019, the expansion project will ramp up. As a result, the city government has prohibited Tokyo Big Sight from public use from then until October 2020. The bi-annual Comic Market (Comiket) event will therefore not be held at Tokyo Big Sight for three consecutive sessions. Aside from Comic Market, approximately 300 events use the facility yearly.
Comiket recently circulated questionnaires to dōjin circles and exhibitors that gauged whether people would attend the event if it was held in Osaka or Nagoya.
Comic Market 89, the latest event held last December 29-31, drew a total of 520,000 attendees over three days.
Source: The Asahi Shimbun Digital (Kenji Matsuzawa), Mantan Web via Otakomu
Update: Typo fixed. Thanks, Ali07, fencer_x.
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