This was my second costume this year. At work, I was The Headless Horseman, but while that was a great costume for an office Halloween party (where I didn't put it on until shortly before the party started in the afternoon), it was too cumbersome and had too limited visibility to wear to a dance club / concert, L.A.'s Halloween Masquerade Ball. Therefore, I planned a second costume for this year, Onizamurai.
Onizamurai means "demon samurai" in Japanese. In kanji compounds like this one:
(GIFs stolen from Jeffrey's Japanese <-> English Dictionary Server), initial 'S'es become 'Z's.
The freaky halo around my head in the above picture was not created in post-production — it was a live lighting effect. Because I still hadn't bought the flash attachment for my DCR-PC5 camcorder / digital camera, I had to use the flashlight trick I first used in my self-portrait session earlier in the month, in order get a bright enough picture and minimize CCD noise. The flashlight beam was aimed to glance just off of my head, and the halo is actually the bulk of the beam hitting the wall behind me.
I found the horns at The Wicked Chamber, an "alternative boutique" in Costa Mesa. They definitely look their best on the top of a bald-cap-covered head. Used on a forehead, as I used them in 2002, they don't look as good. Speaking of the bald cap, my slicked-down hair is unfortunately a little visible under it and the red latex, but it sort of looks like a Buddhist-style shaved head, so that's okay. Originally I was planning to use a white fright wig, to go for more of a traditional oni look, but I waited too long to order the wig I had my eye on at The Chamber Of Horrors, and none of the local stores carried it, so I went with the bald cap approach, which probably was for the best in the long run.
The White-Out contact lenses were new this year, bought from my eye doctor, Dr. Kamkar at Newport Harbor Optometry, who I can recommend highly. I didn't want to get liquid latex stuck in my eyebrows, so I used black greasepaint around my entire eye sockets, creating a kind of neat stylized skull/devil look:
(BTW, if that's not a sick and evil-looking face, I don't know what is. Of course the slight fisheye effect from the wide-angle lens I was using helps with the off-kilter look.) I put translucent powder on top of the greasepaint and lipstick, which did a good job of preventing them from smearing / coming off (though it lightened the shade of the lipstick a bit more than I would have liked). I would have used pointy ear tips, but I put this costume together pretty last-minute and didn't find any of the good brands at my local stores.
The gi top and hakama were used once before, in my more basic Samurai costume. See that page for how I came
by the hakama. This time I appropriately used a red belt rather than a white
one, obtained from a local martial arts store. If you've taken martial arts
classes, it makes you feel a little uncomfortable to buy a belt rank you
haven't earned. 
"It'sforacostume!" was pre-loaded on my tongue in case I got any
funny looks at my non-red-belt-level musculature.
After my (expected) troublesome experiences with making up my hands in 1998, and my (unexpected) troublesome experiences with cloth elbow-length gloves in 2000, this year I went with vinyl elbow-length gloves, which I got at The Wicked Chamber along with the horns. The color was a good match for my red liquid latex "skin", and they fit and stayed on very well, so you could definitely buy them as my real red-skinned hands.
The tabi were much more trouble than I expected. Okay, yeah, samurai traditionally wore zouri sandals, not tabi boots, but I don't like the look of sandals, and thought the tabi would be better for an evil demonic samurai and could suggest a "cloven hoof" look.
I first ordered typical Ninja Hi-Top Tabi Boots from Tigerstrike Martial Arts. They were unusable. The rubber-reinforced canvas incursion between the big and second toes acted like a knife sawing away at the web of skin (no, I don't have webbed feet — just the usual minimal web of skin) between the toes every time I took a step. It also acted as a very hard surface causing pain to the sides of the two surrounding toes. I couldn't stand to walk in these boots, much less dance at a club all night in them. I tried to see if I could do some padding with cotton balls, but it didn't really help.
I was running out of time before the date of the Masquerade Ball, but luckily gungfu.com had a couple of different models of tabi that I could drive up to their warehouse in Santa Fe Springs and try on. When I got there, I tried their high top tabi boots. They had exactly the same problem as the ones from Tigerstrike. I tried going up and down a few sizes, to see if, for instance, a smaller size would cause my toes to press up against the front of the boot and prevent the canvas "knife blade" from moving backwards, but while this worked to some extent, it didn't work well enough, and the smaller-sized boots were uncomfortably tight and the tops wouldn't close completely around my ankles.
Luckily, they also had some short-top tabi shoes:
These weren't entirely comfortable either — the between-toes incursion was still uncomfortable, but definitely better, since the canvas was softer and not reinforced with heavy rubber. They were worse in one way — the soles were an incredibly thin sliver of rubber, much thinner than the tabi boots, and with my flat feet this did mean taking some care while walking, especially outside. Also, the short tops opened up the possibility of the non-red-colored flesh on my legs showing beneath my hakama pantlegs. Luckily the tabi socks I got from Tigerstrike went high enough and the hakama went low enough that this wasn't a problem in practice.
In any case, I'm really stumped as to how Japanese construction workers (and ninja...) wear the normal tabi boots. Perhaps they get tabi custom-made for their feet? Plus I suppose the skin in between their toes just toughens up over time. Ouch.
Another benefit of going to the gungfu.com warehouse was that I also found there a well-made wakizashi with a non-sharpened blade:
Previously I'd been planning on using a black Ninja Bokken I'd gotten from Tigerstrike. As I recall, gungfu only had the wakizashi size, not the katana size. This was fine, though, since it was lighter, less likely for the wooden sheath to be banging into other clubgoers' legs, and more manageable were I to pull it out in a crowd. Anyway, they say size doesn't matter.
"Shing!!"
The Halloween Masquerade Ball was great as usual, and I got lots of compliments on my costume, including more than one person saying I was their favorite devil there. This is high praise, as devil costumes are quite ubiquitous at this event.
I also discovered in October 2003 that this picture taken of me as I entered the club:
was among the featured costumes in the 2001 gallery on Coven 13's website (this was at http://www.clubcoven13.net/gallery/09Halloween2001/, but as of October 2008, Coven 13's site is gone, and there isn't even a copy on archive.org due to their unfortunate policy of deleting archived sites if the new domain owner — one of those idiotic search portals in this case — sets up their current robots.txt to disallow new archiving). Actually, I made a small edit to the above version as compared to the original — I removed a distractingly reflective Wheelchair-Accessible placard from the background.
If you like, additional self-portraits I took in my kitchen are also available. A high percentage of the photos turned out well, actually (if you ignore all the clutter in the background and some peeling latex).
Dan Harkless
Page created: October 15, 2003
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