The 6th annual World Cosplay Summit was held in Nagoya, Japan last weekend.
WSC is getting bigger every year with thousands of cosplayers from around the world joining the party; it’s becoming so popular that the Japanese government is officially endorsing it.
A cosplay contest was held in conjunction with the event since 2004. 14 teams from 13 countries participated in the 2008 contest; two teams from Japan and one each from Brazil, China, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, South Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Thailand and USA.
The Brazilians won the contest this year.
Korean pop group Girls’ Generation (SNSD) is appointed the product ambassador for Nexon, the Korean company which operates MapleStory, a popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
Some Maple-Style promotional photos released by Nexon, pretty cute…
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Cosplay, or costume play, is a popular trend where people dressing up mimicking fictional characters from anime, manga (comics), video games and movies etc.
Japan is generally credited as the origin of cosplay, but there are no actual facts of when the cosplay culture started. The credit for coining the word ‘cosplay’ seems more apparent though… although there are a few versions on how it was created, the credit goes to Nobuyuki Takahashi when he first used the word in some Japanese magazines in 1983/1984.
Akibanana has some scanned image of the My Anime magazine released in June 1983, which is said to be where the word first appeared, written in Japanese - コスプレ (kosupure)…
Superman was spotted on Shanghai Metro. I guess he was too lazy to fly…
Superman boarding the train
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Passengers dressed in ninja costumes are given free travel along the Iga Tetsudo line from April 1 to May 6 to mark the Japanese city’s popular ninja festival.
A ‘ninja’ enjoying the free ride (Image from
Reuters)
Iga is a city 450 kilometres from Tokyo and known to many Japanese as one of the traditional home towns of the ninjas.
It should be quite a scene when the festival reached its peak, with all the ninjas wandering around.
