She Came from Outer Space: An Interview with Kosmic Sans, Tokyo’s Techno-Queen

By Kat Joplin

When I first became involved in Tokyo’s drag scene some six years ago, there was one name on everyone's lips: Kosmic Sans. The French-born drag prodigy. The anime artist. The up-and-coming superstar. The golden one. Any drag show you went to, you knew you were in for something surprising, strange, and stupendous if Kosmic Sans was on the roster. 

In one of the first performances I saw, at a small goth/industrial club in Kabukicho, Kosmic wore a costume of cyber dreads and holographic vinyl and lip-synced to ‘Diva Dance’ from The Fifth Element. When the beat dropped, the stage lights went out. UV lights in Kosmic’s headdress came on, and her eyes and face glowed with UV-reactive contacts and paints. I’ve been a huge fan ever since.  

A petite and soft-spoken queen, Kosmic (she/her), or Sompra (he/him) as her friends call her outside of drag, is an easy face to spot, no matter how much her silhouette changes. The first time I met boy-mode Sompra—clad in black cyber rave clothes—she asked me in a sly voice, “Did you know it was me?” 

“Well, obviously,” I said. “Unless Kosmic has a hot twin brother.”  

Kosmic has lived in Japan since 2011, and has been a veteran of the drag scene since 2017, the year she double-debuted at Tokyo and Taipei Pride. A fluent speaker of many languages, Kosmic performs regularly both in foreigner- and Japanese-oriented shows, as well as a range of venues from small, local cabarets; to street shows outside of AiiRO Cafe in Tokyo’s Gay Town; to higher-end gay clubbing events like The Ring Party at Kabukicho Tower. The summer afternoon I walk to her and her husband’s Nakano apartment, however, it’s a shy graphic designer who greets me at the door. 

“Come have a seat,” Kosmic says, ushering me to a living room-bedroom combo (the intended bedroom of the flat functions as a Santa’s workshop of Kosmic’s drag costumes and her husband’s film equipment). She scoots a small fan in my direction as I cool down. “You can sit in Axel’s gaming chair.” 

“Do you ever play games?” 

“Me? Never!” she says with a laugh and gestures to the laptop, the pile of costumes on the bed in mid-repair, the sketches and designs laying out on the desk. “It’s work, work, work for me, all the time.” 

Sipping water in the pleasant little apartment the two share, I settle in for the interview where I learn more about my longtime friend and colleague, and the background that led to her meteoric rise in Japan’s drag scene. 

An Alien in Paris 

Kosmic starts by ripping off the bandaid: “I’m forty-one years old.” 

Somehow I always forget this fact and make the usual gasps and cries of amazement. 

“Yes, everyone is always surprised so that’s why I don’t often say it. You and I have the Asian genes which flatter everything,” she says, preening. “Especially in France I’ve always looked younger—even as a child I didn’t look my age.” 

Kosmic grew up in the Parisian suburbs not far from Disneyland. She is Lao; her parents came to France to escape the war in Laos. 

“And then years later I would come to Japan to escape France,” she jokes. 

Kosmic describes growing up with her older and younger sisters in an Asian enclave, her neighborhood full of extended family members. She grew up only speaking Lao, raised predominantly by her grandparents in her early years, and only learned French once she started kindergarten. Nowadays, she can understand Lao well but has trouble speaking it—“The last time I wanted to speak Lao with my family, Japanese came out!” she says. 

Her family’s connection to Laos was a key part of her childhood. Her mother was part of the Association of Lao Women in France, and Kosmic recalls watching Laotian dance classes and admiring the shiny, glittering fabrics, crowns, and nails, little by little sparking her own love for the stage.  

Kosmic—as her drag name implies—often weaves a celestial alien character into her different looks and performances, a persona she finds easy to don because she has felt like an outsider for much of her life.  

“It’s so easy for me to embrace the alien because I always feel like an alien,” she says. “Since my parents were immigrants, people didn’t see me as fully French. In Lao, I’m not seen as Lao but as French. In Japan, when I say I’m French they ask me why I’m Asian!” 

She also experienced casual racism and stereotyping in school growing up, “The Jackie Chan kind of thing.” 

“‘Don’t mess with Sompra, he’s going to do kung fu,’ they’d say. Even though France is very mixed, we still have the Asian stereotypes. But I think the reason I have so many ideas in my head is because my background is so all-over-the-place. I’m very international, belonging nowhere.” 

Art and Technology  

Thanks to her mother’s work in the Association of Lao Women, Kosmic feels she was always living in a creative space. As a kid she enjoyed drawing, eventually winning a painting contest when she was around six years old. This experience bolstered the young Kosmic’s self-esteem and inspired her to pursue drawing more deeply: “My eyes were opened to creativity.” 

Attending art school became Kosmic’s dream as she grew older, but she became daunted by the history and philosophy aspects of the courses; with her low humanities grades, she worried an art school would not accept her. But, having always excelled in the sciences, Kosmic devised an alternative route: attending an electrotechnical college and attaining a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering first, and pursuing art school afterward at the graduate level.  

“It was a very masculine path!” she says of her electrotechnic school. “There were almost only males in my class, and just one girl—naturally she became my best friend. We learned about cars and motors; many of my classmates later got great jobs that probably pay way better than art!” 

In graduate school, Kosmic pursued Art and Communication—a marketing-oriented program where she studied advertising and graphic art. It was in art school that Kosmic first came to Japan as part of a six-month program to study the manga industry and the Japanese language. Her now-husband Axel flew over on Christmas to see her. They both were hooked. 

“We loved Japan and wanted to try living here. After one year back in France we moved back to stay. The year was 2011, right after the Fukushima earthquake.” 

A close friend of the couple helped land Kosmic a job at an anime company, where she worked for two years providing background art and adding her “long ass name” to the credits of series like Dog Days, the Puella Magi Madoka Magica movies, and a recent iteration of Space Battleship Yamato. Like many companies in the notoriously brutal animation industry, the experience was fun, exciting, educational—and Kosmic was delighted to leave it forever. She swears she will never work at a Japanese company ever again, comparing the company’s low pay and long hours unfavorably with France’s ultra progressive and strike-happy work environment.  

“Then after years of working freelance, I joined the advertising company I’m still with now,” she says. “It’s the Japan division of a French company. I do a lot of retouch and creative design. Not as much drawing as when I worked in anime, but I get to put up ideas and concepts for the packaging; most of our products are cosmetics—very appropriate for me as a drag queen.” 

Entry into Japan’s World of Drag 

 Prior to beginning her drag journey, Kosmic had some nominal experience dressing in costume and mugging on stage, as she had entered cosplay competitions in France a few times with her cousins and younger sister. 

As with many newer generation queens, it was Kosmic’s exposure to RuPaul’s Drag Race that inspired her to begin experimenting with drag. 

“I was fascinated by the transformation, by the art of it all. Changing all the features with makeup fascinated me—another art medium, a new canvas, a different brush.” 

She began studying makeup on her own, watching tutorials and trying out looks on herself. Axel and friends encouraged her to try full drag when Tokyo Pride came around that April.  

“I bought a white-grey wig, a secondhand outfit from Harajuku, some heels. It was very pedestrian, but it was my first drag—Tokyo Pride 2017. Then a Taiwanese friend invited me to do drag in Taipei for Pride just a few months later. My first gig was on the big stage of Taipei Pride, dancing go-go for a closing party! I learned very quickly about choosing the right heels for the parade—the shoes I had at the time were not that high, but they were cheap and had pointy toes, and I wasn’t used to them.” 

While painting had been Kosmic’s entry to drag, it was her love for dancing on stage in the lights and playing with the audience that held her interest. 

“That’s why I never have choreography—I just love to interact with people!” she says. 

Like many multi-disciplinary artists who find their way to drag, Kosmic found that every facet of her career until now seemed to fuel her new persona: digital visualizers, 3D-printed facial accessories, LED lights. 

“I’m not necessarily bringing any new features to drag, but I am bringing my features—everything I learned throughout my life. Even the 3D eyeliner I use is my comic artist side coming into play—a reference to the 90s and Y2K American cartoons I used to watch as a kid.” 

Even her name, ‘Kosmic Sans,’ was given great thought, ensuring it captured her creative identity perfectly.  

“I wanted to use a font name because I’m a graphic designer. Initially I thought about ‘Helvetica’ but it felt too basic. I wanted something more fun, less polished, less corporate, less bland! ‘Comic sans’ is hated by graphic designers but popular with normal people, and I thought, this font is actually very cute and friendly and inviting. I can make something nice with this. I made the ‘comic’ into something more other-worldly, kosmic, with a ‘K’ because I like the shape!” 

An upcoming goal of Kosmic’s is to start incorporating more Laotian culture into her costumes and performances. She brings out a large bundle of shiny, glittery silk fabric from her workshop—women’s sinh (wrap skirts) and phaa biang (shawls) that make up the national outfit of Laos. She throws several different fabrics over herself and models a few skirts, sending a plume of glitter drifting to the floor.  

“This is Lao silk—kind of expensive. I’m thinking what I can make with this fabric. It’s so pretty and so precious to me, so I have to really think. It’s something I’ve wanted to do from the beginning of my drag.” 

The Road Ahead 

 It’s strange to imagine the polished queen I met in 2019 was only two years into her journey at the time. Now, of course, she is an experienced artist and performer with over eight years under her belt. In that time, Kosmic has aggressively continued to expand her skills: styling her own wigs, building her own costumes, constructing her own props including a fake guitar which bursts with LED light pulses when she pretends to play it. Partly thanks to her background as both an electrical engineer and a designer, Kosmic has styled herself into something of a drag Swiss army knife. 

“Nowadays, I don’t try to be pretty,” Kosmic says, eliciting a laugh from me. (“Oops, she always winds up pretty anyway.”) 

“Well, I don’t try to stay with a feminized form of drag,” she explains. “I don’t feel an obligation to do traditional glamor. Originally when I started I wanted to be femme and have curves: cinching, hip pads, volume in the chest, less visible shoulders. But now I try to celebrate all kinds of femininity. I don’t tuck too much, I don’t need to proportionalize. It’s okay to be flat, to have no ass, no hips, to be a little masc! I want to show diversity, even when it’s against the norm in drag.” 

Kosmic explains that drag has opened her eyes to many societal issues, particularly those within Japan’s LGBTQ community itself—toxic masculinity among gay men, kink shaming, and even the kink community shaming others for being too vanilla. Gays versus lesbians, masc gays versus femmes, bears versus twinks. 

“I can see it all because I’m part of every circle—I’m in between everything.” 

Kosmic is also in a difficult position as AI-generated art takes the world by storm; many drag queens and kings around the world have made use of its trendy video animations and portrait creations. At a recent environmental activist drag show called Queens for a Cause, Kosmic performed an act where she kills a dummy dressed like Hayao Miyazaki, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli. 

“At the time Ghibli AI pictures were all the rage. I just wanted to point out how AI uses the content of a lot of artists without consent. It kills the art industry. I don’t think AI is necessarily bad—it’s a tool. But you cannot use it to create art.  

“People use it because it’s a trend, but they don’t think about the consequences. It uses a lot of energy, violates copyright. I know artists who are quitting because they can’t compete with AI. The impact it has on actual artists bothers me.” 

She hopes that in the future, AI can be used more responsibly with rules and regulations.  

Kosmic has other hopes for her continued progress in the drag world. Often, she finds, she has far more ideas in her head than she could ever sit down and create in one lifetime. 

Among the queens, kings, and race-chasers of Tokyo, Kosmic has long been a local favorite to appear on Drag Race France, especially after she appeared in the Japan episode of Nicky Doll’s travel show, The Queer Explorer. Appearing on Drag Race is not a priority for her personally, but she admits it would be a fantastic opportunity should she make it, and might help get her the time and money to materialize more of her concepts. Drag Race Japan on the other hand she says would be a no-go. 

“I think I would do so badly on Drag Race Japan! I can’t do Japanese humor—so silly and so slapstick. I love to watch it, but I cannot do it!” 

She is pleased and hopeful about recent developments, such as Japan’s recent reality TV hit, The Boyfriend, featuring local Tokyo celebrity drag queen Durian Lollobrigida on the panel of commentators.  

“I’m glad it exists and has had the impact it’s had,” she says. “On the show they talk very little about LGBTQ people in society—I think it’s a beginning, and I hope [in future seasons] they go deeper, and that there are more queer personalities among the commentators.” 

Her greatest hope, however, is that all these reality TV shows will help drag to go wider. Kosmic explains she would love a world where everyone has a chance to do drag if they so choose, where every school had drag as an elective option. 

“It opened my eyes in so many ways: wearing heels is hard, doing makeup is hard, wearing a wig and staying out all night is hard… even just the most simple drag opens your eyes. I love that there are more and more baby queens, that the scene is getting more saturated.” 

She looks around happily at the small, sunlit apartment and its walls studded with paintings and photos of her and Axel and the adventures they’ve had with friends.  

“Drag changed me, and it will change you.” 

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Bio: Kat Joplin (they/them) is a writer and journalist based in Tokyo. Their work explores queer sexuality and gender, as well as themes of foreignness and belonging. They have written articles for platforms such as GAY TIMES, QueerAF, and The Japan Times; have published creative fiction and nonfiction pieces with Beestung, Bloodletter Magazine, and The Examined Life Journal; and in 2024 was a contributing author for the book Planet Drag by Quarto Publishing (UK). As a drag queen, they perform internationally under the name Le Horla. You can follow Kat on Instagram: @kat_dearu and Blue Sky: @katjoplin 

You can follow Kosmic Sans @kosmicsans