Kemin mangapäivä 2026 – Buttons, butts and bubble teas

 Hello there!

Kemin mangapäivä (aka Kemi's manga day in Finnish) was held this past Saturday, on 7th March, for the second time since its revival from a decade of hibernation. Of course I was dragged went there to show my support for a local anime event and yeah, I was kinda needed as manpower too.

Let's get on with the report!

Event poster. Mascot by Nette Nikula.

I woke up early as heck on Saturday morning and mom drove me to Kemi, where I arrived roughly around 9:30. I didn't post any cosplay plans prior to the con because I wasn't set on what to cosplay and yeah, decided to just go with whatever mood I had on the actual day. I ended up choosing the comfiest, most low effort cosplay I had and packed my jedi robes with me.

When I arrived at Kulttuurikeskus, aka the con building, Firith let me in as the doors were still locked. I almost immediately went upstairs to put on my costume and after that I prepared our items for the Matsukirppis (second-hand shop hosted my Matsucon's crew), which mainly meant putting on pre-printed price tags. There were some small chats here and there to make sure all the volunteer crew what to do and before we knew it the doors were open to the public!

Entrance view feat. Artist Alley.

Some more artist tables and a hoers~

Even though I was a worker I didn't have a specific job schedule or anything, I was mostly a stand-in to help Sanna with the pin workshop, which was a drop-in activity where anyone could make button pins – it was really popular last year and yeah, a helper was requested for this year and that helper was me. :'D Some people might remember that I hosted the drawing room last year and well, due to our immense shortage of staff it had to be one or the other and yeah, that's the reason why the drawing room was reduced to a drawing corner and also why there was no drawing contest this year. Simply not enough crew you can count all of us on one hand pretty much and we had to prioritize.

Entrance to Kohtaamo, aka where the pin workshop and other activities were.

Sanna did the first hour or so of the pin workshop while I was free to explore, which mainly meant checking the Artist Alley. It was fun and giving to talk to all the different artists, everyone was so lovely! The clock was roughly 11:00 at this point and while I was browsing the artist tables the first colorful visitors had started to show up, which is always so nice to see. Me and Firith ran around taping Mangapäivä advertisement posters all over Kemi and Tornio and even all the way to Seskarö island in Sweden just a couple weeks before so yeah, it's always a relief to see that people actually knew about the event and we didn't do a lot of work for nothing. xD 

One thing that I couldn't help but notice was the boba tea stand! I had heard from my friends that there's a freshly opened bubble tea shop in Kemi centrum and it was so nice to see them having a booth at the event to promote their new shop! The actual shop is located at the market square area and I heard it was very popular during the Mangapäivä hours, they had to redirect customers to the shop because they kept running out of boba and also because they didn't have all the different flavors available on-site. There was this dude who had to run between the two locations to resupply the Mangapäivä boba booth with more drinks whenever the stash emptied!

MiSu boba's flavors. Yum!

I talked quite a bit with the owners and they were so friendly and genuinely passionate about what they were doing. Seems like it's a small-scale family business run by two young siblings and their mom and dad for support. Honestly a super wholesome bunch, I really hope they succeed! Can't tell y'all how happy I am to finally have a bubble tea shop closer than fucking 100 kilometers away. xD Especially now that the quality has dropped in the boba shop in Oulu since they changed names...

I had time to drink my strawberry boba in peace before it was time to set Sanna free and take over the workshop so she could go explore. But before I could roll in I had to get acquainted with the pin machine, which meant I had to make a prototype pin myself so that I could handle the machine and do pins for all the kids and visitors later. You see, the pin workshop was always supervised by an adult and that meant that either I or Sanna took care of the machine – to keep the workshop running smoothly and to avoid anyone hurting themselves. The machine is entirely manual and works by pulling some levers and turning a metallic part around that you put the pin's upper and lower parts onto, including the artwork and a plastic sheet. It's hard to explain but it was quite easy to use once you got the hang of it, just had to be careful to memorize all steps (aka make sure you do them in the right way and in the right order) or you'd mess up and that would suck because you'd then ruin something that someone put time and effort into drawing and/or coloring and I'd hate myself for making a child sad. :'( I had to keep my anxiety at bay because yeah, I was so scared of ruining someone's artwork but luckily only one mistake happened and it was entirely the machine's fault, not mine. It's an old machine and sometimes it will have a hiccup even if the user does everything correctly...

Pin workshop with Sanna sitting at the edge.

Matsukirppis and Matsucon's organization booth.

On the photo above to the far right you can see the drawing corner – despite its shrunken size it was well-used. Mangapäivä didn't have any panels or organized meetups this year so yeah, aside from the cosplay competition there wasn't any activities to keep track of. The activities that were available were the pin workshop, the drawing corner, a photo booth (what is 'kuvauspiste' called in English??) and there was also a Nintendo Switch one could use for free in the library's youth room, aka the same room in the back where the drawing room was last year.

Guest book. I continued the Buttman tradition huehuehue~

Working at the pin workshop was actually surprisingly enjoyable. It was fun to see all the different personal drawings and statements people did – I mean I saw everything ranging from Kemi's city hall to boobs so how can I even begin to complain about creativity? The youth will be fine. And there's a resurgence of yaoi and yuri fans omfg. Me vanhukset muistamme.

General view. Kyösti's cafe was open and you could even get ramune!

I ran into some familiar faces too like Joni and Sallukka of course but also my former study counsellor Kaisu from back when I studied at Lappia AMK! It was so nice to see her again because yeah, it's been ages and we used to play Ingress and Pokémon Go many years ago and eat kebab together haha, fun times. She's retired now and seemed to be in good spirits, here's to hoping I'll see her more often in the future!

Once the clock was nearing 14:00 I waddled my way to the auditorium upstairs to go watch the cosplay competition. I planted my ass on a chair relatively far away from the stage which, in hindsight, maybe wasn't the best idea because the music came from the back and it was quite loud, which made it a bit hard to hear what the hosts were saying in the front. It wasn't terribly overpowering or anything but yeah, just an idea for an improvement next time because it was distracting and my neurospicy brain can't focus when there's conflicting sounds.

Cosplay competition contestants on stage.

As one can expect from such a small event's cosplay competition there's not gonna be a lot of entries and it's also gonna be a very short and simple show consisting of a catwalk ('lavajuoksut' as we say in Finnish) and posing and then the winners were announced. No big spectacles, intermissions or acts. Of course all the contestants were pre-judged before the competition even started – Firith and Sallukka were the judges. I was asked if I wanted to judge before the con but it was later deemed I was better needed elsewhere because yeah, event's short on personnel and two judges were sufficient for this scope.

I think it's very important that we have these lower threshold competitions as well mixed in with the big ones, small competitions where the primary focus is to get experience and stage confidence and where it's not necessarily a must to have made all parts of your costume yourself to even be able to enter. Not every contest needs to lead to high-stakes qualifiers and global championships. We need to make sure there's still a place for shy beginners to dip their feet in without overwhelming performance pressure crushing them at the doorstep.

General view.

With the cosplay competition over we were down to the last minutes of the event. I was very happy with how the day had gone and yeah, it's so nice to know that our effort bore fruit once again and was appreciated. I might not have had the biggest hand in arranging this event but yeah, I've been there beneath the curtains helping with what I could and providing some much needed moral and emotional support to the main organizer. Huzzah!

Kääk! (inside the library, which was open normally during the event)

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that at some point, when I was inside the library, Olli (spoiler alert: he's the singer of local metal band Dethropia), who was manning the desk, suddenly asked me in Finnish if I'm Jesus while I was in my unspecified aka random jedi outfit. xD I assumed he was being cheeky and referencing to that one famous Star Wars photo meme that's been floating around the internet if you know, you know and I was like "naaaahh not exactly" lmfao! It was all just really silly fun even though it came out of left lane. Random moments are the best!

Random jedi patrolling. (photo: Firith)

Once the con day was over Firith went to grab our unsold items from the Matsukirppis and soon after I went back upstairs to the changing rooms and swapped back into my everyday clothes. Changing out of costume was extremely quick since I had no wig nor makeup or anything – I mean, the level of can't-be-arsedness I felt on the morning was high due to massive sleep deprivation lol. I got a ride back to mom's place where I then had the first grillikota grilled foods of the year and muurikka pancakes for dessert, heck yeah! A great ending to a great day.

Bonus pic: my beautiful button pin. 

With everything else pretty much already said I want to mention before I go that yes, the surprise announcement that was made during the end of the cosplay competition is true – there's a bigger event arriving in Kemi in 2027. ;) I might have something to do with it... *whistles innocently*

Thank you to everyone I interacted with! Thank you for reading!
~ Shiro Samurai out.