Hachisu – rentaBLog

Back in early January, I met up with two industry friends for New Years coffee at Akha Ama near Waseda, and suddenly one of them asked “have you heard of this BLT thing??” Of course, we have to get the joke out of the way: “Like, the sandwich?” I asked, and she was like “nooo it’s this massive BL event they’re supposedly planning…” while showing me their website. At the time, there wasn’t much info aside from a homepage with a bunch of “coming soon” markers. I was interested, but skeptical.

A week or two later, they announced a massive list of extremely popular artists who they said would be participating. “But, participating how?”

Then they announced a list of book signing events. “Okay, so it’s just a really big book signing thing?” I thought to myself. But, all the participating artists weren’t doing book signings, so there had to be more.

Then they announced a bunch of talk events, but still not all the participating artists were included.

“Just what the heck is this god damn event!?”

Well, on June 27th, I went to BLT 2026 Day 1! So I’ll tell you a little bit about my experience.

Disclaimer: I went as a fan first and foremost (as in, I did not get paid to go, so I didn’t take extensive notes or photographs and just enjoyed my time attending), so this is going to be a more casual report just using my memory and the photos I took for my own personal enjoyment. So apologies if none of your favorite artists or series are represented here!

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J.GARDEN didn’t start until 11AM, but the thing you learn fast with attending events is that you have to get there early. While the staff try to make it fair by holding lottos and raffles to randomize how and when people enter the venue regardless of when you actually show up, etc. you still get there early. There are more than 13 million people living in Tokyo, and even if just a small fraction of them care enough about original BL to want to attend J.GARDEN, you want to up the odds of getting in and getting the books you want as much as you humanly can.

There’s a reason many otaku refer to event days as “war”—you need to go in with a game plan, or you’re going to lose. And Sou and I were already at a rough start, because we’d missed the chance to pick up a pamphlet on pre-order. They’d sold out within the first four days of release, and we hadn’t been given the okay to attend until the fifth day. So we were kind of screwed. Nonetheless, we did what we could with what we had—which was Twitter’s #J庭54 hashtag, the official J.GARDEN site, and tons of passion for BL—and decided we’d torture ourselves getting up at 5AM day-of, come down early, get a pamphlet, and do our best to plan in the time between obtaining it and when doors opened.