Things go predictably off the rails as our boss tells us to dress up for Mafia Day.

As you may have noticed from incidental shots of the SoraNews24 office, we’ve got a pretty relaxed dress code on most days in the office. That said, we do dress up for special occasions, and one of them came up recently: Mafia Day.

This quasi-holiday falls on March 30, the start of the Sicilian Vespers rebellion of 1282 that’s sometimes referred to as being the historical start of the Italian mafia. This purported connection has been largely disproven by historians, but seeing an opportunity to do an office cosplay day, our team members who were scheduled to come in to SoraNews24 HQ on the Friday before March 30 were all instructed to dress in their best mafia outfits by our boss, Yoshio.

Let’s take a look at what they came up with.

● Takamichi Furusawa

Starting things off is Takamichi, one of the newest members of our staff. “For my theme, I decided to go with ‘cool assassin who gets hired by the mafia,’” he explains. If we were to create an even deeper backstory for his cosplay, it’d probably be “cool assassin who gets hired by the mafia but hasn’t gotten paid yet,” seeing as how he hides his gun in a paper bag instead of a briefcase, but we suppose this would also make for a quicker draw. As for the open collar and loose necktie, those are both tips of the proverbial hat to the charter Nicholas D. Wolfwood from anime/manga Trigun, also a nicely dressed professional killer.

● Go Hatori

Moving from proverbial hats to actual ones, we’ve got Go’s take on “member of the British mafia in the early 1900s.” The assault rifle is definitely an anachronism, but still contributes to the aura of quiet, gentlemanly danger that Go wanted to create.

● Mr. Sato

On the other hand, coming in loud and proud is Mr. Sato, whose mafioso muse was Goro Majima from the Like a Dragon/Yakuza video game series, seen most recently starring in its Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii spinoff. And if you’re wondering why he didn’t dress up as franchise protagonist Kiryu, it’s because he already did that for his investigative series on the real-world inspiration for the games’ Kamurocho neighborhood.

● P.K. Sanjun

P.K. was actually out in the field the day the rest of our squad did their Mafia Day cosplay, so he showed off his outfit a day earlier. Going with “officer in the Chinese mafia” as his theme, P.K.’s sunglasses and straight-collared shirt could also just be the outfit of a law-abiding fashionable dude.

● Takeshi Harada

Even more mundane-looking is the outfit Takeshi came up with, but this one has a twist of authenticity to it. In his travels, Takeshi actually once did have a run-in with a Chinese mobster, and one of the most memorably unsettling things about the incident is that the man wasn’t dressed in any kind of flashy attire. His clothes looked like the sort of stuff a regular middle-aged man would wear if he was sitting on his couch watching TV at home, which made it all the more intimidating when Takeshi found out who he was dealing with.

● Yuichiro Wasai

Along those same lines of organized crime offering some surprisingly comfortable fashion options, Yuichiro drew from the Russian mob’s well-known affinity for tracksuits and jewelry. Rather than a weapon of his own, Yuichiro figures the most dangerous thing a high-ranking mobster can carry is a phone, which he uses to call upon hordes of underlings to do his dirty work while he technically keeps his own hands clean.

● Ahiruneko

…huh? At first glance, you might mistake Ahiruneko for a mild-mannered mob lawyer or accountant, not an actual criminal mastermind himself. But then as his clothing’s color scheme and meal choice sink in, you realize that’s he’s dressed as none other than Breaking Bad’s Gus Fring, a fast food chicken chain mogul whose real wealth and power comes from much shadier business ventures.

● Seiji Nakazawa

Ahiruneko wasn’t the only one who drew inspiration from TV shows and movies. Seiji, for example, decided to expand the definition of mafia to include gangs, styling his look after the sort of thing Li’l Zé from City of God might wear.

● Masanuki Sunakoma

Masanuki also had a cinematic angle to his outfit…but it goes a couple of layers deep. Masanuki is a fan of Japanese filmmaker Beat Takeshi, who’s made several movies about the yakuza. Masanuki particularly likes Brother, and wanted to dress up like its Takeshi-portrayed protagonist, Yamamoto. However, when it came time to put his Mafia Day outfit together, Masanuki somehow mixed up the fashion sense of Yamamoto, who wears suits throughout the movie, with the real-world Takeshi, and so he actually ended up copying the style of the actor/director, not the character.

● Yoshio

Our boss wasn’t going to ask us to dress up for Mafia Day without also doing so himself, and his choice of clothing was the biggest headscratcher of all.

“Of course you all recognize these as the clothes of the world’s most powerful mafia member, right?” he asked

Met by blank stares, Yoshio summoned Ahiruneko to stand behind him and hold his hair as he squatted down…

…and that’s when it clicked: he was dressed as Dragon Ball’s Mercenary Tao/Tao Pai Pai, an assassin hired by the Red Ribbon Army during that particular arc of the anime/manga.

To commemorate this special occasion, we decided to take a group photo (and edit in Sanjun in kid-who-couldn’t-make-it-to-yearbook-picture-day-style).

Unfortunately, lining up everyone together like this, made it clear that, once again, everyone had just sort of gone off and done their own thing, without any guiding coordination.

Mr. Sato: “Dude, what are you guys thinking with those outfits?”

Go: “You’re one to talk, in that crazy getup!”

Masanuki: “You talking smack?”

Ahiruneko “Hey, home come P.K. doesn’t have to be here?”

Yuichiro: “Why does it ALWAYS end up like this?”

Seiji: “Can’t you get it together for just one time?”

Takeshi: “I’m the only one who has any real-world experience here!”

Yoshio: “…”

Takamichi: “The real issue here is how lame you all look.”

Mr. Sato: “Hey I’M cool!”

Go: “You got no sense of fashion!”

Yoshio: “Will you all, please…”

Yoshio: “KNOCK IT OFF!!!”

And so, as happens, ironically, both suddenly and yet with a pretty high degree of regularity for us, things descended into violent chaos…but isn’t that the real spirit of Mafia Day?

Reference: PR Times
Photos ©SoraNews24
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