Harajuku is the Disneyland of global youth culture. Just as the Magic Kingdom has spacially-divided “Lands” to represent different parts of the human imagination (Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, etc.), Harajuku has Punks browsing at Vivienne Westwood, Mods shopping for authentic surplus army parkas, Skinheads scuffing up their red Docs on the curb in front of Londsdale, clean-cut 21st C. Hip Hoppers laying down Fukuzawas for some Ice Cream, Skaters at Stüssy, college Preps bouncing between Lacoste and Ralph Lauren, ’60s girls with decal eyes storming Courrèges, and Paris-dreaming Art Students in deconstructed garb floating down the hill from Comme des Garçons. This one Tokyo neighborhood has more stores dedicated to youth street fashion than anywhere else in the entire world. And not only does Harajuku singlehandedly preserve dead subcultures, the district has created some of the most unique fashion looks of the last two decades: namely, Decora-chan/Hyper-Cutie Punk (as seen in FRUiTS) and Gothic Lolita. No matter how much attendance declines in the next decade due to anemic Japanese birth rates, Harajuku has secured an almost-permanent place as one of the Seven Wonders of the Pop Culture World.

In light of this, an entire book on the Harajuku neighborhood is almost criminally overdue, and we are blessed that fashion writer and editor Tiffany Godoy finally delivered with her colorful new work Style Deficit Disorder. Godoy — probably one of the very few Westerners to ever have worked as a real-deal editor for a real-deal Japanese art or style magazine — hits all the most critical points for understanding the historical development of this youth culture sanctuary. Japanese fashion critic Hirakawa Take, KERA editor Suzuki Mariko, and Honeyee.com boss Suzuki Tetsuya pop up to provide short essays of macro-level analysis, but the book mostly tells the story of Harajuku through photographs and short profiles. Godoy offers introductions to the most important people, places, and brands — from the Central Apartments (locus for the birth of young independent brands in 1970s), Yacco Takahashi (Japan’s first stylist), brand Bigi, An•An’s original model Kaneko Yuri, seminal high-fashion magazine Ryuko Tsushin, New Wave band The Plastics, Comme des Garçons, iconic Takarajima magazine CUTiE, stylist Sonya Park, hyper-cute brand Super Lovers, beyond-weird street couture label 20471120, original A Bathing Ape graphic designer Skatething, and over-hyped, under-stocked Ura-Harajuku brand Bounty Hunter. SDD somewhat lacks an overarching narrative to link together these encyclopedic references, but redeems itself by addressing topics that have never seen the daylight of English: in particular, Rockabilly brand Cream Soda and iconic punkish designer and Godmother to Ura-Harajuku, Ohkawa Hitomi from Milk. For anyone who wants to know the whos and whats of the neighborhood, I highly recommend the book. (Reactions will be divided on the in-your-face graphic design.)

Style Deficit Disorder greatly succeeds at its goal of laying out the facts behind Harajuku’s development. The subtext, however, may be even more interesting. By taking a step back and doing a meta-reading, the book allows us to glimpse into the organizing myths the West has built up around this sacred fashion neighborhood. The Harajuku of SDD’s introductory chapter is quite literally the most amazing place on earth: masses of youth successfully fighting to create their own trends at a “grass-roots” level in the face of an increasingly-irrelevant global fashion market pushing industry-decided clothing on a rigid seasonal basis.

This “Harajuku Myth,” as I understand it, is comprised of five statements:
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Kawakami Mieko took home the 138th Akutagawa Prize last month for her novel Chichi to Ran (『乳と卵』, “Breasts and Eggs”). At its core, the work is a simple story about a crisis in the relationship between Makiko, an Osaka hostess and single mother in her late thirties, and Midoriko, her 12- or 13-year-old daughter. Makiko feels that life has quite literally used her up and has decided that breast augmentation surgery is the only way to recharge her body, and therefore, her life; Midoriko is standing at the edge of puberty, terrified that it will make her life her mother’s.

Natsuko, our narrator, is Makiko’s thirty-something younger sister who lives in Tokyo. Makiko and Midoriko have come to visit for a long weekend, and she relates the events that transpire in a stream of Osaka dialect that, as Kawakami readily acknowledges in interviews, owes much to Higuchi Ichiyō’s writing: “sights, sounds, feelings … all knitted together without any quotes or punctuation marks.” In fact, Chichi pays homage to Higuchi’s most celebrated work Takekurabe on a number of levels. Chichi’s character names are all borrowed from Takekurabe (except for Natsuko, who is named after Ichiyō herself), and the work relies on the same melancholy view that the end of childhood means an irreversible loss of control.

We get this view more or less directly from the young Midoriko: the novel uses short, determined essays from her notebooks that periodically interrupt Natsuko to rail against menstruation and childbirth. Self-consciously written, they stand in opposition to Natsuko’s purely verbal presence as shaman-narrator. Natsuko is generous and free-wheeling, while Midoriko is wary of committing too much of herself to anything unknown. Many of Midoriko’s essays take words themselves as their theme — the kanji etymology of shochō (初潮, “menarche“), the -shi (子, “child”) in ranshi (卵子, “ovum”). Before long we learn that Midoriko only uses writing to communicate with her mother because, she explains, talking always leads to fighting.

Midoriko and Natsuko share one main topic, of course: Makiko. Midoriko, preoccupied by her attempts to erect a coherent philosophy that can protect her from adulthood, uses her mother as a sort of anti-role model: “I love her, but I don’t want to become her”, she says. Her writing is shot through with helpless guilt over having played a part in making her mother’s life and body what they are now.

Natsuko has no such agenda, and so her Makiko is vivid and human, so clearly delineated by her words and deeds that she is by far the most believable character of the three. Midoriko is serious, almost Buddhist in her determination to break the cycle of birth. Natsuko is neutral, rarely making her opinions explicit. Makiko therefore supplies basically all of the comedy and most of the pathos that brings Chichi to Ran to life.

Kawakami’s self-imposed literary restrictions do limit the structure to a certain extent. Natsuko’s in-story narration is really just a linear chain of jo-ha-kyū, bouncing off Midoriko’s self-exposition — which is in turn immature and fragmentary by design. Even working together, these two voices don’t work up quite enough steam to drive the final climax. The denouement is plenty entertaining, but its believable aspects don’t come as a surprise, and its surprises feel a little forced. Refreshing as it is to read a work of character-based fiction that doesn’t use withheld closure as a cheap substitute for realism or depth, Kawakami goes so far in the other direction that she ends up dangerously close to a pat conclusion. (Perhaps this is a reflection of her other career as singer-songwriter?)

Still, these faults in the last few pages don’t detract from the rest of the book. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn about breast augmentation surgery. Just follow Kawakami’s lead, enjoy the characters, and let the symbolism take care of itself. (Aside to non-native, non-Kansai-based readers: You really don’t need to know more Osaka dialect than you can pick up from a few hours of TV in the evening. Think Huckleberry Finn, not Trainspotting.)

Suwa Tetsushi’s Asatte no hito (『アサッテの人』, “Day-after-tomorrow Man”) comes wrapped in a screaming green cover and obi copy to match: “Double winner! An achievement unmatched since Murakami Ryū 30 years ago!” It’s hype, sure, but the facts back it up: Asatte no hito is the first novel since Murakami’s Kagiri naku tōmei ni chikai burū (Almost Transparent Blue) in 1976 to win both the Akutagawa and the Gunzō Prize.

That being said, Murakami — who is now an Akutagawa Prize selection committee member himself — didn’t think it deserved to win because, as he bluntly stated: “It was a boring novel.” Miyamoto Teru also deemed it unworthy of the prize, and Ishihara Shintarō called Suwa’s technique “obscure and annoying.”

Counterbalancing their complaints were the pro-Suwa side, which included Yamada Eimi (who claimed that it was the first Akutagawa Prize nominee to make her laugh since she had joined the committee), Kuroi Senji, and the newly appointed Ogawa Yōko and Kawakami Hiromi. The latter praised Suwa’s quiet portrayal of “the awkwardness that in reality many people feel about having to live and interact with people using words.”

So Asatte is divisive, and it is a novel about words. Not only the work itself but every character within it, from the narrator on down, concerns themselves primarily with the struggle against a common enemy: language. Indeed, the narrator ends the first chapter with an admission of defeat:

The most vexing point is this: is the novel Asatte no hito itself, emerging as it does from a collage of drafts and diaries, in the end a finished product or another draft? This is the question, and of course I do not at the present time have the skills required to answer it. I shall simply rearrange events into their proper order, and what emerges from that shall define itself as the finished product.

This is the frame through which we enter the world of Asatte, in which language manifests itself as a physical as well as emotional presence. The narrator, charged with the task of clearing out his uncle Akira’s apartment after the latter’s mysterious disappearance, arrives to find it full of junk — including a “mountain of books” that fills two-thirds of the upstairs floor and seems to mock his assertion of authority over it:

Most of the books were already in cardboard boxes. But now it was the cardboard boxes that took up space, and the room did not become any less uncomfortable a place to be in.

The narrator’s world is cramped and claustrophobic, and moreover, deserted; the only way out is to dig deeper. So he slips into the earnest, innocent voice of his aunt — “a recreation based on my notes from conversations with Tomoko herself” — and, later, a collage of his uncle’s diaries and his own family memories. Layer upon layer of story is wound around the mysterious absence of his uncle until the shape of his life emerges, defined by his struggles with language and its “artifice” as he gropes towards the titular “day after tomorrow.”

What surprised me was the realization that the words Yukihiko had spoken [in his madness] had been nothing more than clusters of sounds. Once words, they had become empty husks, floating around him like dust. And he himself did not realize how unusual this was… This was a way of being that was as close to death as you could get.

As noted above, Asatte no hito has been criticized for its self-conscious intellectualism, and much of it is indeed artfully ambiguous, distorted by viewpoint and implication. The reader must find their own way through, and every reader’s will be unique. The meaning of the exercise remains unspoken; hidden behind the omnipresent first-person voice of the narrator, Suwa remains unseen and unheard. It is no coincidence that some of Asatte’s most intense, exhilarating scenes are relayed to us through closed-circuit television — fragmented, grainy, uncannily silent.

Bandō Mariko’s book Dignity of Women『女性の品格』 may be piggybacking on the immense popularity of Masahiko Fujiwara’s 2005 bestseller The Dignity of the Nation 『国家の品格』 but the former somehow manages to discuss the abstract concept of “dignity” in a way that avoids diatribe and provides practical information for the reader. A self-help book for women who would not admit to reading self-help books, Dignity of Women offers Japan’s second sex a total of 66 to-do lists for becoming a “strong, kind, and beautiful woman.”

A Tokyo University graduate, author Bandō Mariko’s first-rate credentials are the key to establishing the credibility such an authoritative self-help book requires. She led a 34-year career as a civil servant, beginning in 1969 at the Prime Minister’s office, while commanding a role as a working mother and a behind-the-scenes champion of women’s rights in the male-dominated world of Japanese politics. In addition, Bandō served as General of the Bureau for Gender Equality and Consul General to Australia before taking on her current position as professor at the Graduate School of Showa Women’s University. In other words, Bandō perfectly embodies the kind of woman that tickles the fancy of successful young career women. Yet rather than writing a biographical success story about being a professional woman with an indomitable spirit, Bandō has instead concocted a guidebook for the modern woman with a single crucial point: just because you may reach the very top tier of Japanese society populated mostly with “undignified” businessmen that doesn’t give you the right to start acting like them.

Ms. Bandō begins her book by recognizing the existence of the aforementioned The Dignity of the Nation but argues that dignity of an entire nation is not attainable without the dignity of every individual belonging to that nation. While she admits that courage, responsibility, sense of logic, integrity and resilience are attributes that must belong to dignified men and women, responsibility for the dissemination of dignity falls on the female.

Bandō’s tutelage is divided into behavioral and philosophical tactics, and it is the combination of the two, she writes, that brings about true dignity. The seven chapters — entitled “Manner and Dignity”, “A Dignified Way to Speak”, “A Dignified Way to Dress”, “A Dignified Lifestyle”,“A Dignified Social Life”, “A Dignified Behavior”, and finally, “A Dignified Way to Live” — can be grouped systematically into those that apply to a woman’s professional life and those that apply to a woman’s personal life. The over-usage of the word “dignity” on every page, however, quickly becomes grating, especially since a brief scan through the first few lessons is really all you need to comprehend what a dignified woman would and would not do. Throughout the course of the book, the dignified woman reveals herself to be a female social organizational construct as palpable as fashion subcultures like Kogyaru or O-nee-kei.
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Along with otaku culture and the cognoscenti culture centered around independent music, art, and fashion, Japanese delinquent subcultures form a key component of the “Japan Cool” construct. I use the term “delinquent subcultures” to describe fringe youth groups like the monstrously-tanned high-school Ganguro, raucous Bosozoku motorcycle gangs, gleefully-anachronistic Gothic Lolita maidens, FRUiTS-type cutie-punk street fashion maniacs, and “Rollers” who once danced in Yoyogi Park every Sunday to pre-recorded hits of the 1950s. But unlike other facets of foreign attraction towards Japanese pop culture, these groups offer no products to buy and few individuals to admire; we are simply attracted to their sheer existence out of a Romantic fascination with anti-social organizations costumed in unique and outrageous “style formulas.”

Although foreigners seem to be keen on fashion delinquents and delinquent fashion, Japanese policy-makers and domestic gate-keepers have never had much reason to view these disparate and desperate youth as anything other than vermin. But even without formal invitations to participate in the process of re-branding Japan, delinquent subcultures are still critical to the new narrative. “Cool” may now primarily exist within a commercial marketplace where corporations manufacture goods and chic hierarchies of media organizations spread the marketing word to youth consumers and their elder imitators, but grass-roots rebellion is essential for anchoring cool back to its roots — spontaneous cultural explosion on the streets and deep within the underground.

Patrick Macias and Izumi Evers’ new book Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno (Chronicle Books, 2007) — a “Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook” — has collected and chronicled the stories and styles of the most vital post-70s female delinquent subcultures in Japan.¹ Thanks to a base of solid research, Macias sculpts an exciting and informative narrative of cultural history that manages to capture the bratty fun of the subjects. “History” is the key word here: the authors are less concerned with quickly-dated portraits of modern movements and more interested in showing off the incredible ecological diversity of previous fashion explosions. (And as someone mentions in the book, there has not been a new delinquent subculture of note since the Kogal, so all books about these youth groups are automatically “history” to a certain degree.) The mission at hand may ultimately be a visual one, and Nonaka Kazumi’s skillful illustrations are indispensable for proper consideration of the wardrobe innovations, makeup techniques, and accessory mayhem that defined these subcultures as something new and original.

Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno organizes the female delinquents into three major groupings: Bad Gals (Sukeban, Takenokozoku, Lady’s [Female Bosozoku]), Sexy Gals (Kogal, Gonguro, Manba, Kigurumin, Material Gal), and Arty Gals (Nagomu, Gothloli, Decora). While this coding is succinct and accurate in principle, there can never really be a simple classification system that brings these groups together along geometric lines.

For example, the smiley-faced Heian-era-inspired, E.L.O.-dancing Takenokozoku are included in “Bad Gals,” but they seem to inhabit a completely different aesthetic universe than the general yankii tastes at the heart of the Sukeban and Lady’s. Even now, the “badness” of those two are so obvious that the Takenozoku look like a harmless Sunday drama club outfitted in matching kung-fu shoes. At the time, however, the conservative authorities viewed the relatively tame street dancing in Yoyogi park as another pressing facet of the “youth problem” — synchronized park dancing as potentially dangerous as razor blades, reckless autobikes, or underage drinking.

The “Sexy Gals” grouping, on the other hand, appears at first to describe a mosaic of divisions in the gal/gyaru universe, but the chapter simply tackles the historical progression of the larger gyaru subculture. In an almost perfectly-linear development, the relatively cute Kogal morphed into the frightening Ganguro/Gonguro, who took a more extreme form in the Mamba and went ridiculous for a half-year in Kigurumin animal costumes. In the last few years, the more mainstream members and older graduates discovered the allure of capitalist society and adjusted their styles to score rich husbands and piles of luxury fashion goods.
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