In less than a year, Star Wars fans will descend on the Makuhari Messe Convention Center in Tokyo, Japan for the sixteenth Star Wars Celebration. The dates and location were announced in April of 2023 as Celebration London came to a close. It has become tradition for the next event to be announced at the closing ceremonies, and the anticipation leading to the big moment is always a little bit tense on top of the excitement. Where will Celebration be going next? How long will we have to save up for the travel and tickets and the inevitable mountains of merch? What will the timing mean for possible panels, anniversaries, new releases? Rumors tend to spread around the exhibit floor as the moment approaches. And then, before you know it, the news has arrived.
As the closing ceremonies started to wrap up in the ExCeL Center, the main stage was filled with staff and volunteers that helped make the weekend possible. From where I was situated in the crowd surrounding the streaming stage on the show floor, the screen was filled with smiling faces. I held my breath as panel host and author Amy Ratcliffe announced from the main stage, “We will gather again…in 2025…in JAPAN!” The crowd roared as the brand new logo appeared on the larger-than-life screen. With a Zam Wesell-ish purple detail, the words marked the dates. “April 18-20, 2025. JAPAN.” I had heard whispers of Japan throughout the weekend but chose to ignore them because I knew that a Celebration there would instantly mean that I couldn’t attend. The London trip had been enough of a financial reach, and a Tokyo convention would mean a year of watching from the couch. When the word officially came, I cried a little, I’ll be honest. But quickly, I made peace with it, already busy in my head planning a weekend of livestreams and at-home Star Wars themed partying for April 2025.
I also felt such excitement for what I know is a huge fan community in Japan. Celebration hasn’t come to that area of the world since 2008, nearly sixteen years ago. That event, situated between CIV and CV, honored the thirtieth anniversary of Star Wars first arriving in Japan in 1978. The animated Clone Wars film had all the buzz that year, along with appearances from Mark Hamill and several other original trilogy stars, not to mention a thriving line up of panels from the Collecting Track, live sculpting by Lawrence Noble, and much more. There have been nine Celebrations since then, and so much has happened in the world of Star Wars, it seems to me that Japan is well overdue for a Star Wars party. This helped me even further to make peace with personally missing out in 2025.
Only a month or two after Celebration London, my research into the very first Celebration event began. I started at the heart of all online Star Wars resources…Wookieepedia. There wasn’t much to see about CI on the site, but there was something very helpful on the bottom of the entry. There were links to several postings from the official website, preserved through the Wayback Machine. It’s no longer online now, but I was able to dig through the articles posted that weekend in 1999 using the blessed Internet Archive. There’s a summary of the opening ceremonies titled “First Strike”, written by an uncredited author, breaking down that first presentation on the larger Stage A. It started with a video featuring the teaser trailer and welcome messages from a few stars of The Phantom Menace (and George Lucas himself). Then, Fan Club president and founder of Insider Dan Madsen came on stage, asking for a moment of silence to honor the victims of the Columbine tragedy that happened barely a week before. The crowd was still for a silent minute.
This was followed by the director of marketing at Lucasfilm, Jim Ward, who was there to introduce the premiere of the “Duel of the Fates” music video. But he introduced something else to the crowd first that made my heart skip a beat. The following is an excerpt from the article:
“(…) Lucasfilm Director of Marketing Jim Ward walked on stage to present a unique greeting recorded in Tokyo a few weeks earlier. Over there, fans attending a big convention had insisted on sending a videotaped “hello” to their North American brothers and sisters. And so, on the cinema screen of Stage A appeared five thousand Japanese fans who waved and cheered at their Denver counterparts. The American crowd automatically cheered back at the screen, and there, for an instant, was the perfect illustration of a passion shared around the globe, melting frontiers on its path.”
How cool is that? 25 years ago, the first Celebration, and Japan was connected to the event even then! As a rule of thumb, I don’t consider anything from my research to be fact until I get at least two different sources. I reached out to a few friends that were in attendance in Denver, and they didn’t remember it. There isn’t much written evidence of the moment beyond that article. I finally got the guts and reached out to someone at Lucasfilm, and not only did they confirm that the moment happened, they also confirmed that the clip shown at Celebration I still exists! I was not able to see it myself but it was described to me as a 20 second clip featuring Ray Park and Rick McCallum standing with a group of Japanese fans, and they sent a “Rah Rah!” to the audience of fans in Denver.
So there you have it. At the opening ceremonies of the very first Star Wars Celebration, twenty-five years ago, Japan was a part of the event. The string connecting Celebration and Japan has been tied since day one, made stronger at the event in 2008 and through the constant presence of Japanese fan art and culture through panels, exhibitors, and beyond. As the community gathers next year in Tokyo, and the eyes of the fandom world turn to Japan once more, I’ll be thinking about that very first opening ceremony, when the rain pelted the tents overhead in Denver and Celebration history began.
the celebration database 
