Tsukino-Con 2012 Special Guests

Kelly Clark was the founder and chairman of Kei-Kon, Victoria's first Anime convention, for the entirety of it's seven year run.

Kei-Kon was a damn good time and helped to grow the Anime fanbase on Vancouver Island into what it is today (in fact, with 1,168 attendees Kei-Kon 6 remains the largest Anime convention ever to have been held on the island--until this year, perhaps?).

In 2009, Kelly stepped down from his position and offered management of the convention to Adam Park and Jill Hughes with the request that they rebrand and reboot the convention into something new and unique to them. Tsukino-Con was the result.

Besides being a fixture of the local Anime and Role-Playing scenes, Kelly also a graduate of the University of Victoria who has worked as a writer, delivery boy, director, actor, professional goon, comic store guy, and has appeared on LoadingReadyRun and The Gamer's Forum.

You can find Kelly at Tsukino-Con this year where he will be involved in several events and panels, including defending his title in the return of "Win Kelly Clark's Box Set", teaching you how to rule the world (for others to play in) in The GM Panel, and as the Special Guest M.C. of Who's That Character? and Ultimate Mealtime: Epic Pocky Edition!

It’s rare for a band to be headlining shows with 5,000-15,000 fans in attendance and internationally touring in their first year as a band. Perla Cadena of Sony BMG Music Entertainment says "They are setting new records everyday for what an independent artist can accomplish."

What originated as a side project for Simon Young (of The Stivs) in 2007 proved to be one of the most energetic and contagious movements of music in our time. Incase you haven’t heard, The Slants are the first and only all Asian synth-pop band in the North America and they have been melting faces off all over the globe.

Kicking off the band’s career at a tiny dive bar in Portland, OR, The Slants soon found themselves on tour and in demand worldwide performing at music halls, colleges, and anime conventions. Within months, they released their debut album “Slanted Eyes, Slanted Hearts” winning multiple awards from the likes of Willamette Week, Rockwired, AsiaXpress, and the Portland Music Awards. Since that first iconic show in 2007, The Slants have been cited as the “Hardest Working Asian American Band” (slanteyefortheroundeye.com), toured North America ten times, rejected a million dollar recording contract, were the first and only Asian band to be a Fender Music artist, and according to U.S Congress, the first rock band to play inside a state library.

The Slants have shared the stage with acts such as Apl.de.Ap (Black Eyed Peas), Vampire Weekend, Girl Talk, Girugamesh, M.O.V.E and Boom Boom Satellites.

The band is currently touring nationwide while working on their fourth release.

Hiroko Noro, B.A., M.A., Ph.D is an Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria, as well as being the Chair of the Department. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, sociology of language, Japanese linguistics, intercultural communication and second-language pedagogy.

Although her academic interests are varied, her primary focus is the Japanese language and related matters. She has taught a wide variety of courses from beginner’s level Japanese language to advanced Japanese linguistics, demonstrating the complexity of the Japanese language in a way that is readily understood by her students. She presents language not as an isolated entity but in terms of how it is influenced by culture, society, and history.

Her passion to facilitate the student’s learning process won her the University of Victoria Alumni Association’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is an avid reader of Japanese manga since her childhood. In the next academic year (2012 Fall), she will teach a Japanese language course using Japanese pop culture.

Dr. Noro will be giving a presentation on Academic and Pedagogical Sides of Japanese Pop Culture alongside other Pacific and Asian Studies students, which focuses on on the pedagogical merits of the use of Japanese pop culture.

Timothy Iles has both a BA (completed very, very slowly) and an MA (completed at a moderate rate) from the University of British Columbia, where he focussed on the Japanese language and modern Japanese literature, writing his thesis on Akutagawa Ryunosuke. He holds a PhD (completed very, very quickly) from the University of Toronto, writing his dissertation on the avant-garde novelist, Abe Kobo. He later published his dissertation as Abe Kobo: An Exploration of his Prose, Drama, and Theatre (Fucheccio: European Press Academic Publishers, 2000).

He has taught Japanese literature (modern and premodern), culture (modern and premodern), theatre, cinema, and language (modern and classical) in both Canada and the United States, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Teaching is his forté and something for which he feels a tremendous responsibility in his role as guide for his many and diverse students. His teaching interests are firmly grounded in the traditions of the Humanities—the historical contextualisation of ideas and their textual expression.

His research interests are in narrative. This term accommodates many forms and intricacies. Of especial concern are the process and mechanism of narration in the medium of cinema—and the associated thematic issues which narrative presents. Timothy Iles has published numerous analtyical articles on various thematic problems in film, both Japanese and Asian, in general, as well as his most recent book, Crisis of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Film: Personal, Cultural, National (Leiden: Brill, 2008). He is also Associate Managing Editor of the online electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies, where he publishes film and book reviews, as well as other essays.

Dr. Iles will be joining Dr. Noro and will be giving his own presentation on Spirituality and the Nature of Consciousness in Japanese Anime, which will focus on the ideas of consciousness and community in Japanese animation and animated films, as well as their influences from Shinto, Japan's oldest religion.