Japan Expo 21st Impact postponed to Summer 2022

Hello everyone,

Considering the current sanitary conditions and the uncertainty of the months to come, we must admit that we cannot serenely prepare for the great come-back we have all hoped for since last year.

Indeed, it has already been a year since we had to postpone Japan Expo Paris 2020 to July 2021. And today, it is with a burdened heart that we must decide to postpone again the 21st edition of Japan Expo Paris to the summer of 2022.

We have created Japan Expo with the intent to share our passion for Japanese pop culture, with the wish that we could meet as a community and with the goal to have you meet your favorite artists as well as your pen pals from the other side of France or even Europe. As far as we are concerned, this is the DNA of Japan Expo.

All the solutions that are proposed now would create a failsoft festival this summer, which isn’t compatible with these values we bear at Japan Expo, which make you come more and more every year, happy and excited, for a 4-day party in Paris, France.

We believe that keeping the show at these costs, limiting the number of attendees, asking you to stay away from one another and have no physical contact, would mean to lose the soul of the festival, its atmosphere and therefore the very point of organizing such a show.

Some ask us to create an online show instead.

Besides the technical issues we would face organizing such an experience, we do not see our added value to you. You meet online by yourselves already, all year long. Japan Expo is the place where online communities meet in real life.

We haven’t seen any conclusive experiences for the moment. Therefore, we would rather save our strengths and our means to set up a smashing come-back for 2022, rather than giving our swan song in 2021.

It is necessary to face the painful truth. This situation has taken a heavy toll on the festival, on many aspects, namely economically.

Behind the show, you have a company named SEFA EVENT, which is lucky enough to get help from the government (salaries partly covered, solidarity funding) and got some funds from a government-backed mortgage.

But, even if we have reduced our operations to the minimum, these supporting funds can’t cover all the cost of it. The overheads have absorbed all our savings and keep grinding month by month the money we got from the government-backed mortgage. Mortgage that we will have to pay back after the crisis or even before, if we believe the mails we get from the bank.

Since the end of Japan Expo Sud (South France) in March 2020, the company hasn’t been able to work. All the means we have explained above just allow us to go to sleep mode until the end of the storm. However, sleep doesn’t mean idle. We are preparing for the come-back, and we continuously update ourselves with the latest sanitary or cultural news from France and Japan. It is just that these economic hardships make it impossible for us to update our social networks and talk with you as much as we would like to. Our primary goal is to survive this to reunite with you again.

And this is a fair point for us: we did not anticipate we would have to keep this sleep mode for such a long time, not being able to offer a show to you for 2 years.

Same as last year, we hope we can count on you to go through these hard times. You helped us a lot, keeping your tickets from 2020 to 2021. You also helped us buying the Support Christmas boxes.

Today we would like to ask you to help us one more time by keeping your 2020 and 2021 tickets for 2022. They will automatically be available for next year.

Times are tough for everybody. We understand that not everybody can afford this. Therefore, we will also set up a refund process.

We will give you more details shortly, such as 2022 dates and ticketing information. We will also share a specific information for the exhibitors and partners.

Despite all the difficulties, we keep our hopes up about the future. Japan Expo will come back, and thanks to everyone, it will come back stronger. We will be able to meet physically again and we will have such a good time that it will erase 2 years of absence and frustrations. We are eager to being there.

To finish this message, we would like to have a thought for our employees, the artists, the associations, the service providers, the exhibitors, the part-time workers, … all these people who make Japan Expo happen every year and who are in dire situations already and who will suffer through this turmoil for one more year.

Until then, please take care of yourselves and your kin.

We will come back in 2022, from February 18th to 20th for Japan Expo Sud in Marseilles, south France, and in July for Japan Expo in Paris.

Ganbarimashô!*

Japan Expo’s team.

*Let’s hang on!