Obviously, this convention is a new fledging convention only in it's second year, but it's growing exponentially. Please PM me through or direct message on twitter.Īnime Conji was first founded last year as a Anime convention alternative to the much extremely bigger, more well-known and more expensive San Diego International Comic-Con. I will most likely not see any emails you send to me since I get more spam then a military kitchen. I'll get to talking about Photoshop later in this post - and why I posted even my own horrible mistake shots in the gallery. If you just want to see the gallery, the photobucket link is here.īefore I get started with the rest of this blog post - if you are one of the cosplayers in this blog post or in the my photobucket gallery - you are more then welcome to ask me to remove pictures from this post or the gallery, as well as ask for the original-sized photos (they're pretty big in resolution and file size, you have been warned!) if you want to do your own photoshop touch-ups. For now though, you got this blog post to check out some early preview photos as well as my thoughts and opinions on the convention and those who attended. I have taken roughly over 700 pictures over the weekend, which is a much higher volume of pictures that I was expecting to take entering the weekend - and it's going to take some amount of time to get them all up. And over the weekend, a up-and-coming anime convention called Anime Conji was held at the Town and Country hotel and resort in the Mission Valley area. Intriguingly, by being on the surface less expressive than English, the Japanese words actually have a hidden beauty that give them depth – much like true love itself.As the right side bar of this blog says, I live in the San Diego, California area. So whether 愛 or 恋 is closer to how you feel this Valentine’s Day, there is likely a word formed from these two fascinating kanji that you can use to translate your emotions into Japanese. A list of words that it translates to in English includes everything from feelings of adoration to uncritical attachment, and tender passion. Therefore it expresses a deep love (愛) that includes a longing for the other person (恋). Appropriately for a word made up of these two very different concepts, 恋愛 takes the nuances of both. 愛 and 恋 can be linked together to make the compound word, 恋愛（ renai ）. The two words don’t always have to be separated. The same can be done with other words, as in: 愛犬（ aiken ） (a beloved dog), 愛国（ aikoku ） (patriotism), 愛読（ aidoku ）(bibliophilia), and even 愛車（ aisha ） (one’s beloved car). Thus, adding it to words such as 人（ jin ） (person), we get: 愛人（ aijin ） (lover).

愛, on the other hand, is often added to words to show an affection for what’s being described. This sense of sorrow also explains the use of 恋 in words such as 失恋 shitsuren (disappointments of love) and the word 悲恋 hiren (tragic love).

恋 can also include negative emotions and a longing for something that can never be attained. A similar feeling of longing is found in the word for sending a love letter to someone where you pour out your heart to them 恋文（ koibumi ）.Īs anyone who has ever been a teenager knows, deep longing and desire isn’t always a positive emotion. We often feel a yearning for the carefree abandonment of our first loves, so you’ll of course see the word 恋 in the Japanese word for puppy love 初恋（ hatsukoi ）. Unsurprisingly, the words that contain 恋 often include this idea. It’s the kind of love where the object of your affection is making you yearn for it – that indefinable attraction that you feel for someone you simply cannot resist. In that sense, 恋 has become the closest Japanese word to what Western cultures might consider romantic love. When Japanese speakers use the word 恋, they’re talking about a love that includes a deep longing or desire for something. If we put the word “love” into most dictionaries, it usually yields two different words: 恋（ koi ） and 愛 ai . While at first they may seem indistinct, each of these characters actually have subtle differences in meaning that give them both a special identity.Īs I wrote in my Valentine’s Day article last year, 恋 has a number of very subtle, additional meanings that distinguish it from 愛. While no one would ever say that defining love in any language is simple, learners of Japanese have an extra problem.

Conji anthony