Japanese pop-culture in Israel : Israeli Cosplay at Haru-con 2009

So far, I’ve been to two major Cosplay events. The first was in NCKU-Tainan-Taiwan (1, 2, 3, 4), and the second in Comic World in Hong Kong SAR (1, 2, 3). I’ve always wondered what an Israeli Cosplay event would look like, and a few weeks ago I finally found out.  Scary scary stuff. I kind’o had the feeling it would have an extra twist to it in Israel.

This is disturbing in so many different ways.

Visiting the Asian Cosplay events, I was always told by the local Taiwanese and Hongkongese that those Cosplay players I’ve been watching with fascination are considered somewhat of social outcasts – living in their own little world of fantasy and being on the geeky edge of society. Being a foreigner, I couldn’t really tell, they seemed kind of magical to me. One thing about this Israeli event – I think I can safely say that this categorization holds true for those I see in the Israeli event photos. Geeks gone wild

Here are some more "special" ones :

There were a single few that I thought were actually quite nice…

Here’s a video on You-Tube to show you some of the atmosphere at the place.

The part I find most interesting is the mix of Cosplay and Israeli soldiers (kids, really) that came to the event in their army-airforce uniforms (see 7:00 for example). This is how surreal Israel gets.

You can see more of the horror at the Harucon 2009 photo website and the official Harucon 2009 website.