Cosplay did not suddenly appear,' says Nobuyuki Takahashi. He should know: Takahashi helped invent the word itself.
The following is an excerpt from Cosplay World, a new book written by Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft and, well, me. It's available now on Amazon and other online (and physical) book stores.
In the 1970s, Japanese college students began dressing up as manga and anime characters. These young people had grown up on a steady diet of comics and cartoons, and when they attended manga and anime conventions (as well as school and university festivals), going in character was, as in the West, a way to express fandom.
Sci-fi conventions had existed in Japan since the 1960s, but in 1975 Comic Market (aka Comiket) launched, creating a venue for self-published comics. It was a fan convention and, in this environment, what would become cosplay in Japan started to flourish. There was already a Japanese term to express the concept of dressing up: kasou (仮想).
However, the word carried a nuance of disguise and didn't quite capture the spirit of what cosplay had become. In the West the word 'masquerade' could be used to refer to costuming, but when Takahashi and some university friends tried to translate 'masquerade' into Japanese for a magazine article they were writing, it sounded 'too noble and old fashioned'. According to Takahashi, 'We needed to find another way to express the concept.'
Various terms were floating around. 'We had heard the English word "costume" and seen events with names like "Costume Show", "Kasou Show", "Hero Play" and whanot,' says Takahashi. In Japanese, English and other foreign words are often combined and/or shortened, for brevity's sake. For example, the Japanese for 'remote control' – rimooto kontorooru – is shortened to rimokon. 'So we started to think of different combinations,' Takahashi says. 'Finally, we came up with "cosplay".' The term was a portmanteau of 'costume' and 'play'. It was perfect.