The great Japanese culture festival in Paris, Japan Expo, is reaching out this year to its South Korean neighbor, a guest who is attracting more and more fans between the surge of K-pop and the breakthrough of webtoons. Japan Expo, from Thursday July 13 to Sunday July 16, is 140,000 m² of exhibition space at the Paris Nord Villepinte exhibition center. After two consecutive cancellations due to the pandemic, this huge festival had attracted 254,000 visitors in 2022. It projects a slight increase in attendance, up to 258,000 people. Entrance can be 30 euros per day and 80 euros for the four days depending on the date of reservation. But neither the price nor the noise and heat that characterize the event put off the fans who come from all over France and beyond.
“For a visitor who comes every year, there are always new things. And Japan has reopened, which enriches our programming,” one of the festival’s founders, Thomas Sirdey, told AFP. Faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, manga authors were still reluctant to make the trip in 2022. There will be many this time around, with Tsukasa Hojo, the creator of Nicky Larson and Cat’s Eyes, as “guest of honor”. , which will soon be adapted on TF1. A reconstruction of the Cat’s Eyes café, over 400 m², is worth visiting. The other unofficial guest is Korea. After the global success of K-Pop, the breakthrough of Korean cinema and series, it is in comics that Korean culture is trying to establish itself. Korean webtoon vs. Japanese manga: The rivalry exists, but readers generally read both. The South Korean government agency for the promotion of culture abroad (Kocca) estimates that “more than two million” the number of French readers of webtoons, comic book formats born on mobile.
A festival within the festival, baptized Amazing, brings together in Villepinte everything that is not Japan. And Korea is a big part of it. The Korean giant Naver, with its Webtoon platform, is betting big, for example, with an imposing stand for the one who claims to be “world leader in digital comics platforms”. For this group born from an internet portal, it remains to be demonstrated that success on mobile can turn into sales in bookstores, where manga is king. He has just signed a partnership with the French publisher Michel Lafon. Amazing is not the main pole of attraction of Japan Expo, but “starts to take a little more space”, says one in the organization of the festival. Of the nearly 400 artists at Japan Expo (designers, musicians, actors, dancers, etc.), 42 will perform there. “For us, coming from Japan or elsewhere, they represent pop culture”, according to Thomas Sirdey.
“Originally we wanted to do manga and anime, and then promote all of traditional Japanese culture. Today we have the chance to be able to tackle all the subjects, with a young audience who comes from afar for that, ”he adds. More than half of the visitors live outside the Paris region. They spend around 140 euros on site on average. And that’s not counting the sums invested by cosplay enthusiasts for their outfits, which make the charm of the festival.
