What does it take to make a grown man dress like this on his day off? Once upon a time you’d need a steadfast belief in a supposedly superior race of people claiming to be the descendants of Atlantis, a psychotic drive to form a pan-Germanic super-state governed by the most brutal and murderous means possible, a sickeningly evil disregard for your fellow man, and to shout so loudly from podiums that 50 years later students will still think it’s clever to talk about what a great orator you were. But, if this chap milling around Tokyo is anything to go by, times have changed. He’s dressing up as a Nazi purely for the fun of it. “Chotto asobi!” he says, literally meaning “a little play” (although more probably interpreted in English as “gross cultural insensitivity bred through untranslatable naïvety”).
OK, to give a little context, we’re not just hanging out at Tower Records in Shibuya or somewhere similarly incongruous when we meet Hitler-san, we’re at Dream Party 2009 at the futuristic Tokyo Big Sight. It’s Japan’s annual cosplay event. Cosplay is short for “costume play”, which means dressing up as your favourite fictional character (or Nazi) because pixelated chicks turn you on more than real ones. It’s one of those utopias of the under-sexed that have for so many years been giving Japan a bad name.
“Umm… Is this OK? Because, er… American?” offers Hitler-san by way of apology, indicating that somewhere, once, he might have heard something about the Third Reich not being so cool. Yeah, actually, now you mention it, wasn’t there something in a movie about some big ol’ war in the 20th century? Oh wait, weren’t Japan in that one? He may be thick, but he seemed pretty harmless. However, when I tried to take a photo of him before he’s ready he bellowed in Japanese, “Wait a minute, goddamn it!” in a scary manner that he could only have learnt from watching The Beast of Berlin more than twice.
Round the corner we spotted Goebbels-san doing a great job acting out his role of Minister for Propaganda by apparently overseeing this little photo shoot and giving it a chirpy “A-OK!” If only all the Nazis had been as upbeat as him maybe Europe would never have got itself into such a mess.
The event was basically split into three sections, each chipping away at the façade of playfulness, gradually revealing widening layers of perversion, kind of like pulling apart an onion made of vaginas. First, people hung about outside dressed up as Manga characters, waiting for people to take pictures of them, which may be totally self-assuming, but it works, because I was all over them, flashing away like I know how to work my camera.
Not having dedicated my life to reading crappy fantasy comics, I didn’t have a clue who 99 percent of the characters were supposed to be. And when I asked people they laughed in my face as if I’d just told them I’m 23 and don’t know what a vegetable is and can they try and explain it to me please.
That’s right, a man with a giant plastic shotgun-knife was laughing at me.
There were a few characters I did recognise, like these guys dressed as a Transformer and E.Honda from Street Fighter II. Sadly though, getting the cultural reference points didn’t give the activity any more meaning.
The second section was the little bit for aspiring freaks still under 20, where they had things like Manga cars for you to froth over and a little stage where J-pop stars were singing high-pitched songs about Pikachu banging Chung-Li with Liono’s sword or something. It was all pretty tame and censored but they wouldn’t let me take pictures in there so you’ll have to make do with the car.
But get past the over-20s barrier to the final section and suddenly the show’s true purpose revealed itself.
It was all a quagmire of cartoon filth for the benefit of middle-aged men chasing a fantasy of pre-pubescent abandon with imaginary pencil-drawn Lolitas.
Japanese hentai (cartoon porn) has become such a myth that actually seeing the extent to which Japanese men dig it was kind of shocking. There were queues of literally hundreds of guys (spiralling out of the venue and into the rain), all just waiting to get their hands on a towel with a picture of a naked cartoon schoolgirl on it. You can’t even have sex with a towel!
You also can’t have sex with a mouse mat, even if the wrist rest is shaped like boobs. Do these people not realise??!
You actually could have sex with this thing. I’m guessing it is what a cartoon character’s sexual organs are supposed to look like. If I was going to have sex with a cartoon character, I’d choose the duck with four arms from Bucky O’Hare because the post-coital hug would feel so intimate.
At one point, things got a little overheated (I guess the queue for the gents’ toilets was refusing to budge and there was nowhere else to let off all that pent-up excitement) and all these guys mobbed a stall with their hands up in the air shouting, “Me! Me! Me!” as the last few posters of a cartoon girl doing a wee went up for grabs. These men all look like dads to me. Gross.
Round the corner, though, the salaryman creche was being well looked after by these girls, who kept all the horny boys in check by telling them a little story and asking them to be good little pumpkins.
The Oedipal regression came full circle with the gang of old birds getting sexy with their cosplaying out the back. Dream Party is a chance for middle-aged women usually ignored by the opposite sex to show their baps off and have greasy men line up in their droves to willfully objectify them by taking a few candid pictures.
I mean, would you?
I have to admit that when this lady squeezed her wares in my face, my brain forgot to invite itself to a meeting in my dick.
However, this was the last thing I saw before leaving Dream Party and catching the train back to reality – someone with a real life Manga head. It left me feeling pretty ill and I suddenly understood why Japanese people have the best horror films. The most creepy thing is, judging by the size of the hand, it’s probably a man.
ALEX HOBAN
May 12th, 2009 @ 16:39
Reader Comments
May 12th, 2009
Is it snobbish of me to point out the discrepancy in young Hitler-San’s uniform? And the Japanese pride them selves on accuracy.
May 13th, 2009
insanely funny!
May 13th, 2009
Yeah, East asia just doesn’t really get what the big deal with Nazis is.
http://rokdrop.com/2007/10/11/israel-upset-about-nazi-bar-in-seoul/
Then again, we’re happy to name a chinese restaurant “Mao’s” or fill a trendy bar with Soviet kitsch so I guess we can’t really judge.
May 13th, 2009
Japanese people are perverts.
May 13th, 2009
True, but the Chinese and Russian’s don’t have a massive resentment towards Mao and the Soviet era. You get LOADS of Mao paintings in Chinese houses, can buy Mao watches from most marketplaces and Putin recently ordered the re-writing of Stalin based history to make him seem like the fluffiest bunny ever made .. But maybe it’s just the small group of people, like the Western guys who wear Mao t-shirts
May 13th, 2009
The mcm expo in London is soon which is pretty much identical to this. I’m going as sailor mars from the sailor moon series!
The japanese seem to be far more open about sexuality than most countries. It seems to work for them so, good on them.
Cosplay is about playing a character…acting…not about showing off or whatever, thus the Nazi thing.
May 15th, 2009
The scary thing is this country could probably force us all to dress like this 24/7/365 if they wanted.
May 15th, 2009
This was an entertaining article. I’m sure a similar article about creepy sexual fetishes could have been done pretty much anywhere, like Germany or America.
May 15th, 2009
that was the power ranger robot not a transformer, what did you do when the rest of us were being kids?
May 15th, 2009
i wanna marry the girl in b+w
May 15th, 2009
the japs are showing it’s fun to dress up while our lot are still living in the past believing everything that the zionst drones tell us about the past. who gives a fuck about Belsen did they give a fuck about the communists do they give a fuck about the kids of Gaza. if someone wants to dress like a nazi so fuckin what
May 16th, 2009
SCUMNATION SPEAK DA TRUTH!! SCUMNATION FOR PRESIDENT!!!
fucking retard
May 17th, 2009
Hey Jew don’t feel bad take a sad song and make it better na na na na
May 19th, 2009
dressing up as nazis is fucking funny fact!plus hugo boss designed most of the officers uniforms so you can look fucking awesome AND piss people off……..winner!
May 19th, 2009
even jews dress up as nazis just look at mel brooks ‘the producers’ say what you will but the nazis had style.
May 26th, 2009
[...] lot of my colleagues at VICE have been getting obsessed with geeks dressing up recently, be they Japanese or Brazilian, so, when I went to MCM at the weekend, I looked for something which, rather than [...]
May 26th, 2009
Does anyone know where I can get that mousepad? I can’t find it.
Thanks!
June 3rd, 2009
Most people knows that black people are superior to all other races. that’s why black men got the rhytm and big dicks. I’d assume japenese got the smallest on earth. It’s all melanin. Melanin!
June 5th, 2009
this actually ends up making you (and vice) look more lame for not understanding japanese culture better. do you not understand that they’re fucking superior in every way? they’re art and fashion is way better.. maybe you should try learning about something rather than making fun of it just because you don’t understand it. it just makes you seem pathetic.
GREAT ARTICLE ;D
June 5th, 2009
jlist for the mousepad if you live in the us
June 5th, 2009
oh, and nazis are fucking hot. that’s why they do it.
June 7th, 2009
Your ignorance is the cancer of Vice.
Please quit the fuck out of being a wannabe vice writer and sell hot-dogs
at least you won’t waste people’s time.
June 11th, 2009
[...] Vice Land [...]
February 24th, 2010
Terrible, sorry to say.