World Cosplay Summit (WCS) Executive Committee has announced on Friday that they will move their 2020 activities online this August.
The online event, which will be called World Cosplay Summit 2020 Online, is scheduled to be held on August 1-2, which was the original date for this year’s WCS weekend in Nagoya, Japan.
The full details of the online event will be announced in a special presentation on Wednesday, July 1, at 07:00pm JST (06:00pm PHT).
In a statement on their website, the committee has decided to cancel World Cosplay Summit 2020 live activities “as a result of a careful consideration of the multiple aspects” that will affect the celebration of the annual cosplay event.
“We are extremely sorry to have to make this announcement, and request the kind understanding of all the participants that were eagerly awaiting the celebration of the event,” the statement adds.
The decision comes after the committee had announced last April that they will cancel the annual regional and championship competition for 2020 due to “recent circumstances” regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Japanese government had imposed a state of emergency in Tokyo and the prefectures of Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, Osaka, Hyogo and Fukuoka due to rising cases of COVID-19 last April, which was expanded nationwide a couple of days later. The state of emergency was eventually lifted nationwide at the end of May.
World Cosplay Summit is an annual international cosplay event, which is being held in Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture, Japan since 2003. WCS was initially held during the weekends, but has since evolved into a week of activities for cosplayer participants and its guests from all around the world.
The event’s global cosplay competition started in 2005 with seven countries, which has since grown to 40 countries as of last year.
The Philippines became a part of the WCS as an observer nation in 2013, and became a full-participant two years later.
Anime Alliance Philippines, which handles management of several pop-culture events, is the organizational partner in the country and the lead organizer of the cosplay meet’s preliminary competitions.
