A cosplayer for 14 years, Zhang Wei was among the first Chinese to try costume play when it came to China in 2000. She designs and makes most of her clothes and props. [Photo by Zhang Wei/China Daily]

Zheng, who graduated in marketing from Beijing Union University in 2014, first worked at a sub-district office for Beijing's local government. There he earns about 3,000 yuan ($460) a month, he says, and regularly spends two thirds of that on model toys that depict his favorite anime characters.

He orders these from Japan, and they cost at least 600 yuan each, not including shipping. A newly released or limited edition can cost thousands of yuan each, and he sometimes needs to order them as long as six months in advance. If that seems exorbitant, Zheng says that for the nijigen faithful there is something even more expensive: "the pilgrimage". This is what they call a trip to Japan whose main purpose is to visit places that were the setting for a comic or anime or one of their scenes.

Zheng says that places he has visited include Lake Toya, in the northern island of Hokkaido, which bears the same name as the wooden sword of Gintoki Sakata, the hero in the comic and anime series Gin Tama, and the railway crossing at which a passing train conspires to keep the hero and heroine from meeting one another in the animated film 5 Centimeters Per Second by Makoto Shinkai.

Zheng has done the pilgrimage twice, and he plans to continue doing so once a year. The two visits cost him a total of 110,000 yuan, more than half of that spent on buying models and other comic goods, he says.

"Basically, I buy whatever I see."

That kind of sentiment is no doubt welcomed by those who run Hokkaido's tourist industry, but they seem not to be alone in seeing the prospects of rich financial pickings in a group that on the face of it is highly marginal.

Recently, the Japanese multinational consumer electronics company Nintendo announced that it would be releasing a Chinese version of its game Pokemon, the first time it has done so in the past 20 years, after endless pleas for a localized version from those in China who play the game. However, the individuals who inhabit the world of nijigen do not seem to fit a neat profile that anyone intent on making money from them could use to draw up a quick-fire marketing campaign.