Japanese man pays nearly $16,000 for life-size dog costume to fulfill his dream of transforming into an animal

• A man in Japan forked out $15,700 to transform himself into a dog.
• He enlisted a company that makes costumes for TV to create a fur suit resembling a rough collie.

A Japanese man has spent more than $15,000 to fulfill his dream of transforming into a four-legged animal.

The man, known only by his Twitter username, Toco, spent 2 million Japanese yen, or about $15,700, to create a lifelike rough-collie costume that he could inhabit.

Toco shared a video on Twitter in April 2022 that showed himself rolling around on the ground in his rough-collie suit, and gesturing at the camera with his "paw."

Toco also has a YouTube channel through which he documents snippets of his life in the fur costume. In the channel's description, he wrote: "I wanted to be an animal, so I became a collie!"

Videos on the channel include Toco's "self-introduction."

There are also videos of Toco, clad in his costume, attempting to play table tennis.

And on July 21 — over a year after his dog debut in 2022 — Toco uploaded a video of himself outside, interacting with parkgoers and their pooches. Toco said in the video caption that the footage was recorded last year, when he was interviewed by German television station, RTL.

A few dogs could be seen scurrying away after taking a closer look at Toco.

"Of course the dogs weren't fooled, they trust their scent," one person commented on the video.

"This is the most bizarre and insane thing I've ever seen," said another person on YouTube.

The company behind the furry outfit, Zeppet, posted the details of the costume on its website. Zeppet is known for creating models and movie sculptures, primarily for television and film.

"At the request of a customer, we made a model of a dog suit. Modeled after a collie, it reproduces the realistic appearance of a real, quadrupedal dog," the company wrote.

Zeppet's Twitter account also documented what the final dog suit looked like from multiple angles.

According to the company, the suit took 40 days to make.

In an interview with the Japanese media outlet MyNavi, Toco said he chose a rough-collie costume because the dog's long fur would obscure the human-like aspects of his figure.

"I made it a collie because it looks real when I put it on. My favorite animals are quadrupedal ones, especially cute ones," Toco said. "So I made a suit of the collie, my favorite breed of dog."

A representative for Zeppet told MyNavi that the structure of a dog's skeleton differed significantly from that of a human being, which made it time-consuming for the company's designers to figure out how to make the costume as doglike as possible.

"We collect photographs taken from various angles so that the beautiful coat of a collie can be reproduced, and devise ways to let the coat of fur flow naturally," the Zeppet representative said.

Toco didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.