When you’ve got a meeting with cosplayers from around the world on your schedule, a suit and tie just won’t due.
Every year, Japan’s Aichi Prefecture hosts the World Cosplay Summit, bringing together anime and video game costuming enthusiasts from around the globe. The event isn’t just a celebration, but a competition as well, with teams from various nations vying for the honor of being crowned the summit champions.
The event is a rare opportunity for often-overlooked Aichi to get some international attention, so it’s a big deal for the prefecture, as well as for governor Hideaki Omura. So with this year’s summit officially kicking off on July 28, Omura organized a meet-and-greet with the competitors so he could thank them in person for taking part in the festivities. But instead of wearing the drab suit and plain white dress shirt Japanese politicians are customarily seen in, he chose an outfit a little more appropriate for the occasion.
That’s Omura dressed as Kirito, the gamer/swordsman protagonist of anime and light novel sensation Sword Art Online. And no, this isn’t a snapshot that was leaked by paparazzi, but a photo Omura himself shared through his official Twitter account.
▼ Omura and this year’s World Cosplay Summit contestants
One fellow Sword Art Online fan decided to give the governor’s cosplay a digital upgrade by inserting Kirito’s girlfriend Asuna into the background…
…while another opted to replace the costume altogether by instead stamping Omura’s head onto Kirito’s anime body.
This isn’t the governor’s first time to dress up for the World Cosplay Summit, either, Last year, for example, he donned the uniform of Gintama’s Tohiro.
Other anime personas he’s taken on include Dragon Ball’s Goku, Detective Conan’s titular sleuth, and Space Battleship Yamato’s Dessler (a.k.a. Desslok).
Omura isn’t the only high-profile civil servant who cosplays as part of the World Cosplay Summit, though. Takashi Kawamura, mayor of the summit’s host city, Nagoya, also cosplays each year. Though photographic evidence of this year’s outfit has been harder to track down, he’s visible in the top left photo of the collage below, dressed as One Piece’s Law for 2018.
The World Cosplay Summit runs until August 5.
Source: Twitter/@ohmura_hideaki via Hachima Kiko
Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s currently cosplaying as One-Pound Gospel’s Hatanaka.