Crossplay / Cosplay

Cosplayers at a Cherry Blossom festival

Japanese Comics (Manga) and Animation (Anime) cover very board areas. But some of the most popular have interesting and strong female characters and much higher ratio of crossdressing than western fiction, just check out TG Anime Weblist. Just put "I My Me! Strawberry Eggs" into a search engine.

It seems to me that Anime/Manga conventions have popularized costume play (Cosplay) to mostly female characters, although maybe my reading of Maddybell.com Anime days has exaggerated this phenomenon. But I noticed that cosplay.com has a FAQ question How do you convert a man’s shoes size to a woman’s shoes size?. By no meaning, I am implying the majority Cosplayers are crossdressing. For example I don't think any of the Cosplayers in the picture (to the left) taken at a Cherry Blossom festival are. Crossplay is actually the term for crossdressing cosplay. 

In Japan Cosplay is very popular, check out Metropolis's article on crossplayer Jienotsu Nagashima. He is unusual and trailblazing for calling his professional kick boxing career a hobby to support his crossplaying. I like translated quote "A Dutch opponent called me gay for wearing my dresses, saying it disgusted him. I'm not gay. But I thought, "What would it matter if I was?" which came from this Australian Broadcasting Corp's Lateline video report. 

Thanks to the recent piece on femulate.org for inspiring to write this.