A Blurring of the Foreign and the Familiar: Cosplay as the “Japanization” of Halloween
Living in Japan, it is difficult to escape the omnipresence of uniforms. Whether it is the high school uniforms that titillate the salarymen, or the various uniforms of working people, from the train conductors and supermarket cashiers to the street cleaners and, who can forget the salarymen’s dark suits. Aside from introducing uniformity, the uniforms also become what people aspire to, as a symbol of their professional identity separate from their private lives as individuals.
Perhaps the idea of uniforms as a display of alternative identity is so powerful that many people use fake uniforms to create alternative identities for themselves. Thus, the culture of cosplay, where people seek to escape reality by pretending to be their favorite characters from anime and video games. Uniquely Japanese may such a behavior sound, it is also constantly evolving as Japanese popular culture comes into contact with and then shaped by various foreign cultural norms. The rise in popularity of Halloween in Japan in recent years is a good example.
The weekend before Halloween, annual street performance descends upon the streets of a Kawasaki, a city of just over one million people south of Tokyo. The main street in front of the city’s main train is cordoned off to vehicle traffic, only to be populated by hundreds of people dressed up in the image of various characters, and thousands of eager spectators, some enthusiastically snapping away at the truly meticulous costumes donned by the performers.
Nominally called “Halloween Kawasaki,” the event nonetheless gives off an air that is not Halloween as it is celebrated in the U.S., where the tradition originates. For one thing, scary elements often completely are missing. Performers are seen dressed as anime characters, heroes from American comic books, with a few too many Marios in the crowd. While the obligatory vampires, fake blood, and satanic horns are represented, the costume designs are meant to be cute and sexy, not abnormal and fear-inducing. If anything, the parade of dressed-up characters in Halloween Kawasaki reminds more of Comic Conventions in the U.S., when fans of comics and movies come out dressed as their favorite characters.
The event in Kawasaki is certainly not the only one taking the venerable American tradition to a whole new direction in the Japanese environment. Bigger, more well-known Halloween events in Tokyo, including the yearly gathering in the center of the youth-frequented Shibuya area, sees much bigger crowds and a similar proportion of non-scary elements, displayed not for good laughs but an almost unspoken serious competition on who looks the best among many that are dressed similarly. Gone are American children in their makeshift garbs going around the neighborhood asking for candy from strangers, and in are Japanese grown adults letting their inner anime fanatic out for the whole world to see and take pictures of.
To put simply, Halloween in Japan, at least in the sense that it is celebrated by organized events, has become just another occasion for the venerable Japanese tradition of cosplay. Cosplay, or “costume play” in which fans dress up as specific characters as a performance art, grew up together with the country’s famed anime industry as part of fan participation. Alongside other forms such as fan fictions, comic convention, and organized fan gatherings, cosplay has become a stable of what it means to indulge in what the Japanese calls the nijigen, the “2-D” world of printed, televised, and the digitized world of drawn-out characters in fictional storylines.
As American comics found popularity among the Japanese audience, cosplay targets became more varied and diverse. In Halloween Kawasaki, for instance, plenty of Deadpool, Batman, and even Venom, supplement the more “orthodox” cosplays of pink hairs and massive swords. Yet, even when incorporating American comic characters, cosplay did not fundamentally change. The idea of the performance art for all to see and share is still the same, only the content became more diverse. Halloween, almost as a matter of fact, became “hijacked” as a venue of cosplay, much like a large-scale fan gathering.
The Halloween gatherings seen on the streets of Kawasaki and Shibuya is one instance of the Japanese taking something entirely foreign and put it into a local context that is much more fitting for the local popular interests and limitations of local conditions. Just as the underlying Christian religious element is entirely missing in largely non-Christian Japan’s celebration of Christmas, “trick-or-treating” as a Halloween fixture cannot exist in urban Japan where neighborly relations tend to be extremely distant and being unnecessarily bothersome to strangers considered a social taboo. Moreover, because Halloween is, after all, of foreign nature, not all Japanese are expected to know, much less partake, in the tradition.
Indeed, when seeing the specific segment of the Japanese population celebrate Halloween and other foreign tradition like Christmas, often the celebration is not about embracing the exotic but reaffirming the Japan-created ideas in the veneer of foreignness. But putting Japanese cultural institutions like cosplay in a foreign context, the foreign becomes more palatable, more acceptable, and for the organizers of events, more crowd-pleasing and thus more profitable. Ultimately, what can be more important for celebrating something in Japan when the vast majority of people who can attend are Japanese?
Perhaps the idea of uniforms as a display of alternative identity is so powerful that many people use fake uniforms to create alternative identities for themselves. Thus, the culture of cosplay, where people seek to escape reality by pretending to be their favorite characters from anime and video games. Uniquely Japanese may such a behavior sound, it is also constantly evolving as Japanese popular culture comes into contact with and then shaped by various foreign cultural norms. The rise in popularity of Halloween in Japan in recent years is a good example.
The weekend before Halloween, annual street performance descends upon the streets of a Kawasaki, a city of just over one million people south of Tokyo. The main street in front of the city’s main train is cordoned off to vehicle traffic, only to be populated by hundreds of people dressed up in the image of various characters, and thousands of eager spectators, some enthusiastically snapping away at the truly meticulous costumes donned by the performers.
Nominally called “Halloween Kawasaki,” the event nonetheless gives off an air that is not Halloween as it is celebrated in the U.S., where the tradition originates. For one thing, scary elements often completely are missing. Performers are seen dressed as anime characters, heroes from American comic books, with a few too many Marios in the crowd. While the obligatory vampires, fake blood, and satanic horns are represented, the costume designs are meant to be cute and sexy, not abnormal and fear-inducing. If anything, the parade of dressed-up characters in Halloween Kawasaki reminds more of Comic Conventions in the U.S., when fans of comics and movies come out dressed as their favorite characters.
The event in Kawasaki is certainly not the only one taking the venerable American tradition to a whole new direction in the Japanese environment. Bigger, more well-known Halloween events in Tokyo, including the yearly gathering in the center of the youth-frequented Shibuya area, sees much bigger crowds and a similar proportion of non-scary elements, displayed not for good laughs but an almost unspoken serious competition on who looks the best among many that are dressed similarly. Gone are American children in their makeshift garbs going around the neighborhood asking for candy from strangers, and in are Japanese grown adults letting their inner anime fanatic out for the whole world to see and take pictures of.
To put simply, Halloween in Japan, at least in the sense that it is celebrated by organized events, has become just another occasion for the venerable Japanese tradition of cosplay. Cosplay, or “costume play” in which fans dress up as specific characters as a performance art, grew up together with the country’s famed anime industry as part of fan participation. Alongside other forms such as fan fictions, comic convention, and organized fan gatherings, cosplay has become a stable of what it means to indulge in what the Japanese calls the nijigen, the “2-D” world of printed, televised, and the digitized world of drawn-out characters in fictional storylines.
As American comics found popularity among the Japanese audience, cosplay targets became more varied and diverse. In Halloween Kawasaki, for instance, plenty of Deadpool, Batman, and even Venom, supplement the more “orthodox” cosplays of pink hairs and massive swords. Yet, even when incorporating American comic characters, cosplay did not fundamentally change. The idea of the performance art for all to see and share is still the same, only the content became more diverse. Halloween, almost as a matter of fact, became “hijacked” as a venue of cosplay, much like a large-scale fan gathering.
The Halloween gatherings seen on the streets of Kawasaki and Shibuya is one instance of the Japanese taking something entirely foreign and put it into a local context that is much more fitting for the local popular interests and limitations of local conditions. Just as the underlying Christian religious element is entirely missing in largely non-Christian Japan’s celebration of Christmas, “trick-or-treating” as a Halloween fixture cannot exist in urban Japan where neighborly relations tend to be extremely distant and being unnecessarily bothersome to strangers considered a social taboo. Moreover, because Halloween is, after all, of foreign nature, not all Japanese are expected to know, much less partake, in the tradition.
Indeed, when seeing the specific segment of the Japanese population celebrate Halloween and other foreign tradition like Christmas, often the celebration is not about embracing the exotic but reaffirming the Japan-created ideas in the veneer of foreignness. But putting Japanese cultural institutions like cosplay in a foreign context, the foreign becomes more palatable, more acceptable, and for the organizers of events, more crowd-pleasing and thus more profitable. Ultimately, what can be more important for celebrating something in Japan when the vast majority of people who can attend are Japanese?
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