Hello from “the land of kawaii and sugoi,” Japan! J-List is in full Christmas mode, packing and shipping hundreds of packages per day. Note that we recommend you order by Friday the 13th in order to ensure you get your packages in time for Christmas. What awesome products can J-List send you today during our big EMS shipping sale?One of my favorite aspects of fandom is cosplay, the act of transforming yourself into your favorite anime character through costume and make-up skills, something that started to get popular in the 1970s as a result of Japan’s contact with the costuming culture of Worldcon. The word is an example of 和製英語 wasei eigo or “made-in-Japan English,” and it was coined in the June 1983 issue of My Anime magazine, which included a special feature on “hero costume play” that had to be shortened to “cosplay” on one page to fit into the layout. The first anime cosplay is said to have taken place at a science fiction convention in Yokohama in 1978, when a judge mistook a fan cosplaying a character from the cover of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel as being from an anime called Triton of the Sea; the error was never corrected, and suddenly fans got the idea of bringing 2D characters from anime into the 3D world. These days it’s not hard to find “cosplay idols” like Kipi or Necoco who create the most amazing costumes for us to enjoy, capturing every minute detail of the characters with remarkable skill. If you like random pictures of cosplay, I recommend J-List’s popular Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter feeds, since I’ve always got something interesting being posted there for fans to check out and comment on.
Some background on the history of cosplay.
