The stall, a single plastic fold-out table, wedged in a dimly lit corner of the convention center between a jutting support column and an out-of-order vending machine, was perhaps in the worst spot in the entirety of Tokyo Comic Con 2026. It wasn’t even listed on the map; the only clue that it even should officially exist was a single line in Comic Con’s online food-vendor addendum, where it clearly didn’t belong.
The person sitting behind the little table was a middle-aged Japanese man with a comb-over and thick glasses. He idly shuffled a pile of notecards beside a stack of posters. Even from a distance he had the vacant look of someone who was tired, sad, or just didn’t want to be there. Perhaps all three.
Taped haphazardly to the edge of the table were five faded posters, the bottom edges curling upward as if they had only recently been unrolled. They nearly blocked one’s view of underneath the table, but Emily could still see one of the man’s feet, a scuffed black shoe, tapping a nervous rhythm.
On each of the posters was the same group of five Japanese teenagers, three girls and two boys, who posed in a combination of smiling confidence, brooding mystery, or cocky nonchalance. Each had a different uniform: blue, red, green, white, and pink, and behind each of them was a giant mech—a typically campy tokusatsu suit that, if you squinted, looked like a garish Mecha Godzilla—which predictably corresponded to each person’s attitude: the angular blue mech for the thinly smiling boy with slicked back hair, the fast looking red one for the cocksure red-vested girl, and so on. Across each poster were the same characters in katakana: スペースドラゴンス.
Emily pulled out her phone, awkwardly delaying her approach to the stall. The whole thing felt a bit weird, and she was self-consciously awkward at the best of times, especially with her halting Japanese. She wished her friends were here.
She typed in a search and clicked on the link, bringing her to a Wikipedia page that she had, in fact, helped edit. She had the sensation of nervously scanning a study guide one last time before a final exam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Dragons
Space Dragons (Japanese: スペースドラゴンス, Hepburn: Supēsudoragosu) is a 1991-1996 Japanese show produced by Heiden Entertainment. The series follows the adventures of the Space Dragons, five young pilots who operate five respective mechanized “dragons” to fight various threats to Earth, most notably Queen Nebulon and her invading Space Goblins.
Emily scrolled past the plot, a strange mix of cheesy high school friendship dynamics and high-stakes space battles, and down to the final section.
Finale Controversy and Cast Deaths: The series was canceled after its controversial 1996 finale, in which four of the five main cast members were killed off during a battle with Queen Nebulon, causing blowback from the fan base. The episode garnered considerable media attention both inside Japan and internationally after the same four cast members died in a car accident. The surviving cast member, Michiko Akiyama, has since refused all interviews and public appearances.
Emily shoved her phone in her pocket. The show had ended almost exactly thirty years ago, but it had developed a cult following in the interim, its ultimate tragedy giving the series an eerie, weighty afterglow. Of course, Emily hadn’t known about all that when she had started watching it at the age of eight. A used DVD set had managed to find its way into her older brother’s possession, and then into her own, and the rest was history. It had been her gateway drug to Japanese pop culture, the perfect blend of teenager melodrama and giant mech fights for a bored kid in suburban California.
The man looked up at her as she approached, a brief flicker of excitement fading as he took stock of the twenty-year-old American.
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“Um, hi,” Emily stammered, pulling her phone back out from her pocket and bringing up Google Translate rather than relying on her bad Japanese. “I’d like to buy a poster, please” she said, typing the words into the app.
“I speak English,” the man replied. He sighed, muttering something under his breath in Japanese, and then began shuffling through the stack of what Emily had mistaken for notecards, but were in fact mini booklets. “If you want to buy a poster, you have to take a quiz. I have an English version here somewhere—ah, here we go— but some of the multiple-choice answers are in Japanese. Here,” he said, thrusting a booklet and stubby pencil toward her.
Emily took the offering, baffled. Buying a poster requires a quiz? Despite the man’s attitude, a mix of reserved hostility and melancholy, Emily was intrigued. She opened the booklet, flipping through the pages.
Of course. It was a quiz on Space Dragons. It wasn’t that short, either; the ten pages were packed with dense questions in almost microscopic font. No wonder no one was lined up.
Still, without hesitation, Emily got to work. Some of the questions were obscure to the point of being ridiculous, such as Which order sequence corresponds to Black Dragon’s plasma cannon overload? and What formation did the Space Dragons use against Marlock’s invasion force in season two, episode four? but Emily found herself relishing the challenge. Just like the man had said, some of the answers were in Japanese kanji, but it didn’t matter. Emily moved through the book with the mechanical force of a true otaku, handing it back to the man in under four minutes and twenty seconds.
The man began grading it immediately, a red pen hovering over each question in turn as he forcefully turned one page after another, as if he was annoyed at the whole exercise, even though he was the one who had made her take the quiz. However, his annoyance seemed to fade as he drew closer to the end, replaced by some secret excitement, or perhaps trepidation. Was it Emily’s imagination, or did his pen start to quiver, as if it longed to find some excuse to mark up the page with a scrawling X? She suppressed a smile of self-satisfaction. The pen would find no use. She knew she had gotten every question right.
The man turned the last page slowly, almost tenderly, and after the last question went unmarked he leaned back in his squeaky chair. He glanced between the booklet and Emily and then back to the booklet. “Perfect score,” he whispered, sounding shellshocked. He fumbled in the front pocket of his shirt and pulled out a business card, lurched to his feet, and handed it across to Emily with two hands and a bow. “Here is your prize.”
Emily tentatively took the card, feeling disappointed. She had hoped for one of the posters for free. She turned the card over, seeing only a series of numbers. “What is this?” she asked, turning the card over again, thinking it was some kind of joke.
“Miss Akiyama’s number.”
“You mean… Michiko Akiyama? The Pink Dragon?” Emily said, a thrill of electricity running up her arms.
The man shrugged, and then sagged back into his seat. “It’s almost certainly too late now, of course, but who knows. She might talk to you. A true fan, even an American one, does not come so often.”
Emily squinted at the man in confusion. Why was he giving her the phone number to Michiko Akiyama? A hundred questions bubbled up, but instead Emily grasped at what the man had said. “What do you mean ‘too late’? Too late for what?”
The man just sighed, looking wholly deflated, his initial excitement at Emily acing the score gone. “Oh. You know.”
Emily definitely did not know, but she nodded, trying to affect some understanding of what was going on. “Well, thanks. I guess.” She put the card in her pocket. “Can I still buy a poster?”
“Oh. Of course,” the man said, his voice flat and despondent. “Thirty thousand yen, please.”
It was an outrageous price, especially for a foreign exchange student on a budget. Ten lingering seconds later, Emily was sadly walking away, poster-less, the business card her only souvenir of her favorite childhood show.
She did not see the man crying as he watched her go.
