The rise of cosplay = The fall of the economy

[Taro Toporific]

Why the rise of cosplay is a bad sign for the economy
---Dressing up like a [Nazi Furry...] is probably more fun than scouring the classifieds for menial jobs---
The Week | October 9, 2014
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 — combined with labor laws making it tough to fire older workers — 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.
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. "Here, even the young and poor can feel as though they are a hero."
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 — 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...more...

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[JAVGOD]

Some days it just doesn't pay to put down the occulus...o_O
The good news is that Japanese cosplay girls are open minded.

[Taro Toporific]

Deep in the woods…Ghibli cosplay of the Kodama spirits of the film Princess Mononoke

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