{"id":28249,"date":"2014-10-14T15:06:22","date_gmt":"2014-10-14T19:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28249"},"modified":"2014-10-14T15:06:22","modified_gmt":"2014-10-14T19:06:22","slug":"a-new-view-on-cosplay-as-a-symptom-of-a-seriously-weakened-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/10\/14\/a-new-view-on-cosplay-as-a-symptom-of-a-seriously-weakened-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"A new view on cosplay – as a symptom of a seriously weakened economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A certain amount of this rings true<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Imagine you’re a college graduate stuck in a perpetually lousy economy. That’s a problem Japanese twenty-somethings have faced for more than 20 years. Two decades of stagnation after the collapse of the 1980s real-estate and stock bubbles \u2014 combined with labor laws making it tough to fire older workers \u2014 have relegated vast numbers of Japanese young adults to low-paying, temporary contract jobs. Many find themselves living with their parents well into their twenties and beyond, unmarried and childless.<\/p>\n

Then again, they do have plenty of time to dress up like wand-wielding sailor girls and cybernetic alchemist soldiers from the colorful world of anime cartoons and manga comics. Indeed, Japan’s Lost Decades have coincided with a major spike in “people escaping to virtual worlds of games, animation, and costume play,” Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, recently told the Financial Times<\/em>. “Here, even the young and poor can feel as though they are a hero.”<\/p>\n

It’s hard to blame them. After all, it’s not that these young adults in Japan are resisting becoming productive members of the economy \u2014 it’s that there just aren’t enough opportunities for them. So an increasingly large number of them spend an increasingly large amount of time living in make-believe fantasy worlds, pretending they are someone else, somewhere else. This is a very bad thing for the Japanese economy.<\/p>\n

And guess what: America has a growing number of make-believe “cosplay” heroes, too. Many of the 130,000 people who attend the San Diego Comic Con every year invest big bucks in elaborate outfits as a way of showing off their favorite Japanese characters, as well as those from American superhero movies, comics, and “genre” televisions shows such as Game of Thrones<\/em>. And this trend is growing \u2014 the crowd at Comic Con was one-third this size in 2000. In 2013, the SyFy channel even created a reality show about the trend, Heroes of Cosplay<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Ghost of a Flea<\/em><\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A certain amount of this rings true: Imagine you’re a college graduate stuck in a perpetually lousy economy. That’s a problem Japanese twenty-somethings have faced for more than 20 years. Two decades of stagnation after the collapse of the 1980s real-estate and stock bubbles \u2014 combined with labor laws making it tough to fire older […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,24,28],"tags":[618,336,95,718,85],"class_list":["post-28249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-japan","category-media","tag-clothing","tag-fashion","tag-jobs","tag-recession","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7lD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28249"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28250,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28249\/revisions\/28250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}