I just loved this shot and this team. The picture was taken during mid-day when the temperature was at its hottest and they were waiting for their turn to go up on stage. I had to encourage a couple time before a few of them gave me a half pose while others just wished I would disappear. I included a larger picture this time, click on it and you can see the great attention to detail they put into their costumes. The 2 blue guys in the back were zombies and seeing them on stage was like they were out of a Day of the Dead flick. The girl on the bottom right holds a black skull prop which she wielded convincingly on stage. You can also see a person walking in the background wearing a blond wig...oh no wait that is a wig hanging on a tree... The team was passionate in their performance and some of the scenes gave me the shivers from the thrill. Really a sight to see.

I ran into Chao Shi a couple times over the past few days at the cosplay preliminaries. He was one of the members of the China team in 2007 so he was in Japan last summer, you can see his profile here! He is not from the Hangzhou area but is going to university here so he has been able to come by once in a while. He was not performing but he has a lot of friends here so we enjoyed watching the show together.

I met up with Chun Bai a few times during the past few days at the cosplay event. He was a member of the China team for WCS 2006, you can see information on the team here! (scroll to the bottom of the page, click on the report image, scroll to bottom of that page and click on page 6 for the profile) It had been a couple years since we had met and he was looking just fine. He is a good dancer, a great performer and a funny guy on top of that. He is still actively cosplaying and amongst the 82 performances in Hangzhou he was in a couple of them. How can this be you may ask? Well its OK in China. The largest cosplay team has 50 members and they actually broke up into smaller teams to perform separately as well.

Today there were rehersals for the TV broadcast tomorrow so we had a free day and had a chance to walk around the event site. There were booths for anime and manga companies, play areas for kids, stuffed animals shops, gachapon machine areas and Gundam dolls on display. One thing that I was surprised by was a little Qoo hut tucked along the edge of the main arena. Qoo is a popular drink in Japan, the name comes from an anomatopaic noise made someone drinks something delicious in Japan, "glug, glug, glug.....qoooo". The guy working in there looked so poor I had to take a picture of him.

We moved through the massive event complex with its hundreds of shops methodically, setting up a meeting point if anyone got lost in the crowd. To be safe I kept a close eye out for the others. There were so many different kinds of shops with anything you could imagine that was anime and comic related. Some shops that caught my attention were the cosplay shops. I have been to a number of them in Japan but I hadn't been to one abroad yet.
For those who do cosplay there is always the ethics concern of buying or making your own costume. The true layer will make their own and frown upon the purchased versions. Now there are many differing views about what cosplay is but if we think about the word itself "costume play", the range of forms that this hobby could take are very wide. Regardless of how you view things, picking up a costume, throwing it on and becoming a different character isn't really hurting anyone. They seemed to be doing some brisk business.

Katharina and Anna were the WCS 2007 representatives for Germany and they were invited out to the CICAF event in Hangzhou. You can check out their profiles here! It was a 20 hour flight from Germany and they were pretty exhausted when they arrived. It was their first time to China so there was a lot that was new. Some of the food was tough to get used to and they were fascinated with the beef candy and chicken feet. They participated in the event in a similar way to how Mariko and Choko did, they presented awards, judged and got up on stage to do a performance as well. In the picture above you can see Anna in the top row second from the right and Katharina is sitting below. (Katharina's gonna be pissed for the sucky picture, sorry) The other cosplayers were some of the international participants; the 3 on the top left are from Korea and the cosplayer on the top right is from Japan.

This is another interesting image from the convention. It is a booth for a college for study in animation. There are many colleges, universities and institutes teaching animation in China now and many students at these schools carry their interests over into cosplay. This is a phenomenon not seen in any other country that I know of and is one of the reasons that China has such large cosplay teams.

The cosplay event in Hangzhou finished off today with a 50 minute live TV performance. It was a compilation of the 5 best teams who did abbreviated presentations of their longer performances. The groups entrance and exits were cleverly intertwined to make what was essentially a longer "best of" version of the presentations. This was punctuated with kids coming out and dancing or dressed up as little monkeys and doing fantastic martial arts performances. Of course the MCs and others did present awards and there were speeches but all in all a very unique way of going about cosplay. I was used to the WCS championship which is a 3 hour performance but being a live show of less than an hour the presentation - as well as my time in China - seemed to fly by.

(Coser Magazine)
The picture above shows which parts of China have active cosplay groups and events. The legend on the bottom left shows the areas in order of which is the most established regions for cosplay. The first is the green region in the south Guangdong which is near Hong Kong. Next is Zhejiang province and Shanghai in blue followed by the purple region on the upper right near Beijing. The orange, yellow and violet areas are next and generally follow traditional regional boundaries. The light orange and light blue areas follow from there and the white regions do not have many cosplayers beyond the main city centers in red. With the language barrier there is not much information on how vast the cosplay scene has become in China over the last few years.

(Prize for the winning teams of each Japan preliminary round) (Grand Prize) (Brother Home Lock Sewing Machine III df4)

Things are speeding up as there are a number of important dates coming up. The entrance deadline for the Tokyo event has come and gone as of May 11th and the event will be held this weekend on Sunday, May 18th at Cosfesta, Tokyo Dome City Attractions.

The date for the Osaka event has been announced. The event will be a part of the Cosplayers Jam Revolution on July 13th at Kyocera Dome, Osaka. Entries for this event are still open until July 4th so those who have the means to get down there sign up to perform or just be there to watch the show! More information on the event can be found here.

The winning teams for both events this year will receive a Brother Lock Sewing Machine III df4.

I took the bullet train into Tokyo Saturday night and met up with a few old faces. On the far right in the picture is Oyama-san, he was instrumental in introducing the first China team in 2005. He is now working for an online magazine in Akihabara. Igor is the second from the left, he is still working for "Tudo Bem", the largest magazine publication for the Brazilian community in Japan. It sounds like the regional rounds in Brazil are coming along, he is getting a lot of feedback which is keeping him busy, keep an eye out for updates on each round in the news section of the WCS web page! I am second from the right and we have a couple friends along with us. Enjoyable evening before taking in the main event on Sunday!

On Sunday at the Cosfesta event there was a things started off around 10am with a cosplay dance party and the WCS preliminaries started at 6. I took a bunch of pictures of the performances and I added a few of them below.

This is the team DB-East doing a great performance of Dragonball Z. Good costumes, action and they put a lot of energy into their fight scenes. Innovatively the did not include and "kamehameha" screaming. Just lots of loud grunting.

This is the team Chiru Chiru doing a song and dance performance interspersed with action and dialog. Their voice projection was great and their voices cute, a breath of fresh air between fight scenes. In fact for true representation of cosplay in Japan today, their performance may be one of the closest as teams more often do dance and sing than do stage performances.

This is Dark Night and Takasou doing a great Evangelion performance. This team was actually at WCS 2007 and Dark Night usually performs as a robot. This year he has put together a very mobile yet still impressively massive outfit. It is made of a soft light plastic and even the mouth on the helmet moves. They packed their 3 minute performance time with action, a storyline, fantastic weapons and even a diamond object that exploded golden streamers at the end. Very impressive!

This is the team that won the competition and will be the representatives for Tokyo at WCS 2008. They are Kikiwan and Naoki Shigure with a performance of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. The Ohmu costume that they put together was fantastic and they event had the little squirrel in it. The music they used worked great and seeing a Ghibli Studio production was very innovative.

Here are all the award winners with the Tokyo Representatives for WCS 2008 Kikiwan and Naoki Shigure, holding the large plaques in the middle. There were a number of awards given out this year from the Jog Paper award which was for professional name cards and The Contents Works award which was for a photo shoot. The Dragonball Z team is holding up a simple paper file but it has the signature of the Voice Actor Masakazu Morita who can be seen in the very middle. He was a big hit with the crowd and when he presented the file the crowd reacted with screams and squeals. The biggest response was for the grand prize winners who got the Brother Lock Sewing Machine. When that was presented many yelled "hoshi, hoshi!" (I want one!) and the interest from the crowd was tangible.

Cosfest is a monthly cosplay event that has been held since 2000 and has been hosting the WCS preliminary round in Tokyo since 2005. Almost all participants are cosplayers and sometimes there are up to 2000 people in attendance. When I arrived at the entrance I got my press pass and entered. It was held at Prism Hall at Tokyo Dome City Attractions. Prism Hall is a long rectangular facility with a hall running down the left side and 3 large seperate spaces on the right. The first is a large room which was used as a changing room. The second is a large opening that was used for luggage storage. The tables and tables of luggage used for bringing so many costumes were neatly organized on top of tables. I wish I took a picture of that, it was a sight to see. The final room opened up from the end of the hall and had a large stage on the near side. This is where the WCS preliminary and all other events were held.

Cosfesta is essentially what is called a "Danpa" or Dance Party. Beginning at 10am and going until 9pm or so with the WCS preliminary as the main event at 6pm. During the day cosplayers got together around the main stage and danced a "para para" style dance. From time to time more adept dancers would jump up on stage and sort of lead the crowd, as you can see in the picture above. Cosplayer groups and individuals were sitting, resting, sleeping taking pictures and talking along the walls on each side of the hall and the dance room at the end. Periodically the musically inspired would jump up and rush to the stage or just practice the moves with their friends where they lounged.

Throughout the Tokyo Dome City Attractions area during the day cosplayers interspersed the crowd. They congregated at more scenic spots hung out and took pictures while others coming out for the amusement park or the Giants baseball game looked on with expressions of surprise, interest or at times aversion. It was great to see kids pulling their parents and pointing when they saw their favorite characters. Cosplayers went about their cosplaying, below are some of the pictures I took.

This was a group cosplaying Rozen Maiden. They were lounging in the Prism Hall but jumped up when I asked if I could take a picture.

This group was outside of the hall in an open area in front of a glass and metallic pyramid that complimented their Saint Seiya costumes well. They did a good job with the costumes, the headgear in particular must have taken some time to put together.

This is actually a couple of groups who were relaxing just down from the Saint Seiya team and were dressed as The Gentlemen Alliance. They were quite concerned whether it was alright to have a picture taken when there were doubles of some characters. I said it would be no problem.

This was a group doing Lucky Star, a widely popular still sort of underground Manga/Anime. They had the shiny column behind them staked out and glided in front of it with a pose.

This was one of my favorite cosplays of the day, I thought it worked very well considering the Giants had a game at Tokyo Dome next door. They were doing cosplay of "Ookiku Furikabutte" which is a sports manga that has some popularity in Japan but is not as big abroad. It was funny to see Giants fans walking around wearing Giants uniforms and cosplayers walking around in their own uniforms.

Judging can be a tough job especially when competition is close. I was surprised at the popularity of the judges this year though. Okubo of TVA and columnist/critic Essai Ushijima were 2 of the 3 judges. Ushijima was in fact a judge at WCS 2007 last year, you can see a write up on him half way down the page here!
The 3rd judge, voice actor Masakazu Morita (seen above) received the greatest applause from the crowd however. He has gained great notoriety recently and has been very busy doing voices for Bleach to Gundam Seed Destiny and in games such as Final Fantasy X and X-2. There was in fact a Masakazu Morita award which the Dragonball Z team received. It was a plastic paper file with a character that he had done and his signature. I didn't think much of it initially but from the squeal and cries from the audience I knew that this was a treasured item. He also presented the final award, a "Home Lock Stitch Kagari III DF4 Sewing Machine" and the crowd really went wild. Cosplayers were calling "Hoshi! Hoshi!" (I want that! I would love to have that!) and there was a rush as people leaned and pushed forward.

Before the awards presentation he had a 15 minute interactive talk period with the crowd on stage. I think the most touching moment was when one girl got up to ask a question and before saying anything she stood there silent for a time. Morita asked her what her question was and realized she was crying. She finally got enough courage to ask her question and it was "How can I be a better fan?" To this touching question Morita responded "Well I think your doing pretty well right now". I realized how special Masakazu Morita was to the crowd at that moment.