Toco, a Japanese man, drew notice while taking his first public walk while dressed as a lifelike dog.
After spending more than $20,000 on a customized dog suit, his childhood dream of “becoming an animal” became a reality.
Millions of people have heard about his incredible journey, yet he goes by the YouTube handle Toco out of fear of being humiliated by those who know him in person.
In subtitled videos on the network, he added, “I only told people who are truly close to me.”
“The people I work with would look at me funny if I told them I wanted to be an animal.”
Many of his clips have been viewed millions of times, and Toco’s YouTube channel, I Want to Be an Animal, has 43,000 subscribers and explains his lifelong dream.
According to Zeppet, the company that created the outfit, Toco stated, “I wonder whether it was a desire for transformation.”
“I decided to order a bodysuit in the shape of a real dog to make the fantasy a reality.”
In the YouTube video’s subtitles, Toco claimed, “I have had a hazy dream of becoming an animal since I was a child.”
“In my elementary school graduation book, I wrote that I wanted to be a dog and go for walks outside.”
Toco made his first public walk as a dog a reality last year by waving to passersby with his new hairy paws in a human gesture.
While Toco demonstrated some regular canine features, his “quadrupedal locomotion” was less convincing because he hasn’t detailed how the suit’s internal mechanics work in detail.
Other pets appeared to be skeptical from a distance in a video of the occurrence, while walkers stopped to savor the unique sighting.
Toco’s outfit had been in his possession for over a year, but it took some time for him to be able to wear it in public.
He’s previously stated, “I don’t have the courage to do that.”
Toco’s favorite breed of dog inspired the suit’s custom design, and it was picked “because of its size” to be the bodysuit’s model.
“The size difference with humans is not great,” he noted, “(which) was also a deciding factor.”
Zeppet met with Toco and set up fitting sessions, according to the company’s website. The finished piece cost 2,000,000 yen ($A21,148) and took 40 days to complete.
Toco wrote in a customer comment on the website, “creating a four-legged model for a two-legged human is extremely tricky, as our skeletal structure is quite different from (that of) canines.”Because of this, I was reasonably apprehensive about the outcome.
However, after countless studio attempts and failures, the final result was spectacular.