Onna no ko Kurabu (Girls' Club) is where the action's at if you want an easy way to sample Japanese cross-dressing subculture. Man or woman, you can go to the club -- currently one in Tokyo, with a new club in Osaka's down-and-dirty Dotonbori district from December 1st -- to try on girls' clothing. The club keeps a wardrobe of rental clothes and wigs for joso (or josou) cosplay, dressing up as a girl. As we know, otoko no ko cross-dressing cosplay is big in Japan, though it is a hard-to-define point somewhere between "transvestite" and "cosplayer". Joso is the more conventional ...

Otoko no Ko "male daughter" cross-dressing cosplay is really getting big in Tokyo now. The fetish subculture has its only monthly event in Shinjuku called Propaganda. There are shops, maid cafes and even special photobooks. Even more intriguingly, there are many Otoko no Ko cosplay adult toys too, mostly created by Tama Toys -- from anus smell sprays to manicure sets, panties, bras, garter, wigs and more! Well, now there is a way to check the time online with a Otoko no Ko flavor! Keen-eyed readers may see a connection here to the successful Bijin Tokei series of digital clock ...

It's high time we talked about otoko no ko (also written otokonoko) (男の娘). The name of course is a play on the word for "boy" but whose characters mean "male daughter". As we know, the word for daughter (musume) is also employed a lot to mean "cute young girl", and that's the nuance here. The phrase has been used since the 2000's. A otoko no ko is a cross-dressing cosplayer, who dresses as a girl for certain occasions. It's an unusual combination of cosplay culture, sexuality, and (in a way) otaku culture (it's quite geeky as subcultures go). It took the world of men dressed as ...

These ladies look pretty hot, right? Well, actually these are otoko no ko (男の娘), crossdressing males, photographed by Naoko Tachibana. They feature nine crossdressers from the cafe and bar New Type, which opened in Akihabara in May 2009. Tachibana has put these together as a photo book, "Yuri Danshi", 10,000 copies of which have been printed -- that's quite a demand! We think you'll agree that these ladies look lovely. Otoko no ko culture -- a mixture of cosplay and crossdressing -- is huge in Japan, with its own magazines, shopping sites ...