This week’s Shukan Bunshun (8.2.07 edition) has a story by writer Ochi Yoshiko (越智良子) called 「どこがいいの？」今どきの美女論 examining the mysterious popularity of models Ebihara Yuri (”Ebi-chan”) and Oshikiri Moe, singers Koda Kumi and Hamasaki Ayumi, and Miss Universe Mori Riyo. The first article reiterates the fact that no one in Japan has anything but total antagonism towards Mori Riyo, so we can leave her out of this discussion. (Damn you, America and Donald Trump).

With the other women, however, the older generation and a great deal of Japanese men have serious problems comprehending why these particular stars are popular. Out of the remaining four, Ebi-chan is the only one with any real appeal to men, but at the end of the day, even her fame is primarily the product of female admiration. Ochi names these women 「下積り美人」— something to the effect of “bottom of the barrel beauties.”

Ochi comes to the conclusion that contemporary girls like “imperfect” celebrities who have reached physical beauty only through hard work and determination. Even the Koda Kumi fan interviewed for the piece acknowledges that Koda is not an “orthodox beauty” but has worked her ass off to become “pretty.” Same goes for the CanCam girls Ebihara and Oshikiri who have shown that apparel expertise, make-up techniques, and hair curling voodoo complete the woman more than her raw material. These stars suggest that contemporary Japanese women want idols who look similar to themselves, thus creating a comfortable myth that anyone can overcome natural flaws to reach the top. Sympathy now trumps simple adoration.

Guys, on the other hand, still like the natural girl who doesn’t look like she’s trying so hard. This was true with Hirosue Ryoko and now explains the popularity of Nagasawa Masami. Girls may admit that Matsushima Nanako is as elegant as they come, but they are totally disinterested. She can’t teach them anything about struggle. For the exact same reason, third-world despots looked to Stalin and not Kaiser Wilhelm the Second.

I find it hard not to draw some general socio-psychological conclusions from this trend. The emphasis on gambaru — doing one’s best — opposed to natural talent echoes the Japanese post-war national mythology. But in opposition to the static Confucian view of the world, Japanese women now seem to be hesitant to blindly accept their social-betters in a pre-determined hierarchy. They want style and beauty leaders who can be imagined to represent them and thus prove the possibilities of upward-beauty-mobility. If I can become Ebi-chan through effort, there is no reason why I too cannot become #1 like Ebi-chan. This seems to reflect a much more American democratic-capitalist “can-do” spirit of self-betterment through determined effort, rather than a Confucian-statist belief that low social position should be embraced and higher-ups worshiped unconditionally. Is this further proof that the onset of socioeconomic disparity has shaken faith in a static universe? Everyone is aiming for the top, and these girls are dragging down the quality of their idols to make sure they can get there themselves.

“There is a case to be made that the kogal image epitomized Japan’s hazily defined crisis of the 1990s at least as well as did layoffs by top Japanese firms,” writes David Leheny in his book Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, And Anxiety in Contemporary Japan. Although the kogyaru/kogal appeared too late and peaked too early to really sum up the entirety of the Lost Decade, Lehery is right that most would rather visualize the era through wild youth female subculture than gray old men losing jobs in corporate restructuring.

Hell, everyone loves rebellious kids, and the kogals — with their tanned skin, scandalous skirt length, “loose” socks, mysterious argot, and alleged promiscuity — were perhaps the world’s most fascinating youth tribe in the 1990s. For foreigners looking at Japan from abroad, the kogal appeared to be empowered young women forming a revolutionary army against the patriarchal mores of traditional society. Some gawkers came for the the fashion innovation and and some were mystified by the large numbers, but the kogals’ widespread popularity/infamy came mostly from the unbridled teenage sexuality at the heart of the movement. Maybe this is slightly unfair, but Punk:Music::Kogal:Sex. For many Japanese men, the kogal movement legitimized and updated a latent pedophilia. When tales of enjo kosai (compensated dating) appeared in the media, it created a narrative where young women were willing participants in the lolita fantasy as long as prices were high enough.

At this point, so much myth and innuendo surrounds the kogal phenomenon that it is worth going back and looking at their point of origin. According to egg magazine founder Yonehara Yasumasa, the first kogal were delinquent private school students (Aoyama Gakuin and Seikei listed as two main sources by Wikipedia) with rich delinquent boyfriends who cruised in the roving gangs of Shibuya called chiimaa (teamer). Their particular clothing style and gruff speech were intended to scare off the lecherous old men. What is important to remember at this stage is that the kogal were relatively rich and relatively attractive, and they were called “ko-gal (maybe from 子ギャル)” because they were imitating their older “gal” superiors at a precocious age. Their collective reason for rebellion was nothing particularly novel: they were your stereotypically bored (sub)urban rich kids who were ready to be adults but were stuck within the concrete confines of secondary education. So they acted out by having older boyfriends and sexualizing their uniforms.¹ The darker skin may also have been a product of a psychological impulse to appear more sophisticated rather than the misconception that they had any association with or interest in African-American culture. The short skirt is also telling, because the previous style of rebellion had been the yankii practice of lengthening the uniform’s skirt — something much harder to pull off and without immediate sexual message. The kogals wanted to rebel, but they also wanted to show a little skin like their elder peers.

Mainstream kogals

By 1997, however, the commercial establishment began to catch up with the kogal movement and spread its gospel of fashion liberation out to the entire nation. Starting around 1995, chapatsu — brown hair — went from an act of juvenile delinquency to a mainstream style. Magazines then created the guidelines for openly constructing the “kogal fashion,” and middle-class girls rushed in to participate. Soon to follow came a less glamorous bunch of young women from the countryside who wanted in on the delinquency angle.

The male-dominated shukanshi did their part to twist the aggressive anti-lolita of the original kogal look into a masochistic neo-lolita fallacy. The “oyaji pranking” of “enjo kosai” — where girls would charge men 10,000 yen for a one minute date — became transformed into something more titillating: a slightly less-stigmatized form of child prostitution. The media attention not only sent middle-aged men out on the prowl to find these girls, but also gave many girls from the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder a convenient way to afford the consumer component of the gal lifestyle. Those who couldn’t cough up the cash just used magic marker for their eyebrows instead of makeup.

Ganguro kogal

Once the look peaked as a mass trend in 1999, the movement became more and more marked by its late-adopters. The extremes of the style — the ganguro and yamamba — took the slightly provocative “delinquent consumer subculture” (a mix between delinquent subcultures and consumer lifestyles) over the edge to aggressive confrontation. When egg became a consumer lifestyle mag for these delinquent girls, the clear difference in “morality” became reflected on the pages: issues featured tales of outrageous and casual sexual play and guides to “how to have sex in car” that would never fit in an issue of an-an (a magazine that still asks girls “which celebrity would you like to be bedded by” instead of “who would you like to bed?”) What had been a slightly new style and beauty aesthetic turned into Frankenstein costumes. The extreme character of the kogal movement post-’99 immediately displaced mainstream society’s original feelings of curiosity and lust with something new: massive antagonism.

In her essay, “Black Faces, Witches, and Racism against Girls” in Bad Girls of Japan (Ed. Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, 2005), Sharon Kinsella identifies and explores this widespread hostility against the late-stage ganguro kogal. Her essay lists quote after quote from the weekly male magazines disapproving of the youth look. Kinsella even finds female writer Nakano Midori (from “Yamamba,” Japan Echo 27, vol 1, Feb 2000) admitting, “In all honesty, I have seen very few girls sporting the style that brings me even close to thinking, ‘Without that makeup, she must be a beauty, what a waste.’” In sum, Kinsella writes that the girls are “an affront to the tastes of male readers.” Indeed.

Her final analysis, however, takes a seriously wrong turn when she begins to blame the roots of the antagonism in profound racial prejudice. She objurgates, and boy does she objurgate:

Furthermore, commentary about the race, tribe, and skin color of girls, was sometimes entwined with a derogatory and pseudo-Darwinian commentary about dark-skinned girls, which implied that they were a kind of species or animal. Classified as dark-skinned primitives and animals, girls daring to wear black face and witch outfits sometimes became subject to a racist assault on their humanity.

Kinsella provides a couple of neat examples of this “racial assault” — Spa calling the kogal’s lack of morals a “Latinization” of Japanese culture, for example. But her analysis fails to recognize all the other reasons to dislike the late-stage kogal that have nothing to do with latent racism.

First, the charge that these girls were “dumb, dirty, and ugly” seems to match certain pre-existing conceptualizations of the girls’ placement within the standard high-school hierarchy. The girls who became the main recruiting base for the extreme kogal were not rich delinquents who dressed in designer bags, snuck out to clubs, and had college boyfriends, but those girls who would be viewed as losers in the prism of their environment — neither smart enough to hold college aspirations nor cute enough to attract boyfriends or popular pals. The ganguro look offered them an escape from the hierarchy, in which they had already realized they were destined to fail, by letting them hide their true identities in costume and bond with girls in similar positions and values from all around the country. Commenting on the late-stage kogal costume, Kinsella guesses that “the main effect… is to frighten” and brings up Dick Hebdige’s theory of subculture as “intelligent style”: girls have invented their own uniforms in order to mark themselves in opposition to the values of mainstream society. But she is angered that, “society just merrily misinterprets [the look] as a form of animal coloring or tribal decoration.”

If the look is Hebdigian in form, however, the goal is precisely anti-social, and the kogals ended up winning the desired effect — total enmity from the mainstream.² Why Kinsella thinks society should respect the “intelligence” of the uniform, however, is unclear. More importantly, the early, mass-friendly kogal had provided older men a three-dimensional sexualized spectacle upon the streets of the city and tantalizing myths of easily acquiring their flesh for a small lump sum (where the girls themselves were understood to graciously remove moral boundaries and replaced them with market prices). The ganguro girls took the rebellious-yet-sexy movement of the original kogal and robbed it of its mass aesthetic pleasure. Kogals now looked scary, and to a certain degree, were less likely to be the “normal” daughters from private schools and more likely to be those “unwanted” in the standardized high school hierarchy. The kogals stole back the style from the fantasies of fathers and made it once more about themselves. To see where the conflict lay, Kinsella quotes a men’s magazine headline complaining about the infiltration of the ganguro look into their precious porn videos — ugh!

Knowing the intentional struggle manufactured by the fashion look, why would men’s magazines be supportive of the ganguro kogal? Adding in the obvious socioeconomic and regional bias — the new girls were neither urban nor urbane — these girls had absolutely nothing going for them outside of their subcultural participation. Kinsella oddly projects the responsibilities of academic anthropologists upon the Japanese media — organizations that clearly see themselves as arbiters of “conventional” values rather than sympathetic social analysts. While men may have felt robbed of convenient sexual fantasy, women on the other hand remained unimpressed with the girls they always saw beneath them in the classroom. Even now, I ask a Japanese female about the types who became late-stage kogals, and she answers, “The dumbest (一番バカ) and ugliest (一番ブス) girls in the class.” The word “dirty” (汚い) also comes up. Kinsella finds the same sentiment — “The allegation that witches and black faces were ugly and stupid, circulated widely and formed a base stereotype” — but then crams it into her shaky narrative — “underlying more intricate considerations of their hygiene and racial origins.” Do we dislike them because their skin color goes against traditional ideas of Japanese beauty and colonialist concerns? Or is it that many have misanthropic feelings that they are merely ugly, dirty, and dumb girls in outdated and unflattering makeup?

The ganguro today still exist, of course, although relatively marginal and have not been “cool” for a decade now (at least, as dictated by the domestic fashion authorities.) They have boiled down to their most hardcore delinquent/leftover element. The dark-skinned and often-tacky “gal” style still lives on in mainstream magazines like JJ, although the code word is now “o-nee-kei (Big Sister).” I am sure they even hate the ganguro girls.

Continued »

There comes a time in every young boy’s life — at least in the Southern United States — where a blue blazer and khaki slacks no longer cut it at semi-formal functions. Around sixteen or seventen, the pants and the jacket need to originate from a single bolt of cloth. Accordingly, I inherited a number of suits from my equally tall uncle, an excellent golfer, and subsequently, a fan of the low two-button jacket.

I was grateful to receive such nice clothes and made use of them through college, but visiting Tokyo and then chaperoning a group of Japanese senmongakusei in New York, I couldn’t help but notice that there was something notably sharp and keen about the standard Japanese suit. Was it the color? The slender cut? Knowing very little about suits, I had neglected to notice that the standard Japanese model had three-buttons, starting very high on the chest. Of course, high three-button suits began to explode in the United States again shortly after my discovery — somewhat spurred by fashion industry plot, somewhat spurred by natural aesthetic reactions to our fathers’ two-button monsters. Now in 2006, the Brooks Brothers Three-Button has become a frat-boy staple, and while the three-button still dominates in Japan, the suits still tend to be slimmer and sharper, with tight high-water pants and well-formed shoulders. Americans may have caught up but our diverse body types and expanding girth watered down the classic look.

“Correct” (left) and “Incorrect” (right)

But there is an interesting quirk in the Japanese culture of the three-button suit. Despite the traditionally high levels of grooming in the mass culture, there are still a large number of Japanese men who button the bottom button of their suit jacket. As authoritarian style gurus at GQ will tell you, the first and second rules of Suit Club are that you do not button the final button. Of course, there is no practical, rational reason for this. According to “Andy”, the fashion rule comes to us from a fat royal who could not manage to fasten the jacket over his stomach. From such humble beginnings, we now have a rigid rule — a Western orthopraxy — regarding semi-formal style.

Whether we like it or not, all meaningful fashion trends require a certain slavery to form, not content. Our subcultural heroes — the Mods, the Teds, the Rude Boys, the Hippies — had a strict uniform. If they had taken a Protestant attitude towards faith and devotion to the calling, everyone would have gone off in individual directions, tearing the social fabric that bound them together in visual harmony. Japanese street fashion has been equally succesful in its dedication to form over content: obeying the rules and dedicating time to the details lead a remarkable level of fashion extremism.

Faithful readers of Brutus should all know very well that the last button is not buttoned — anything otherwise would be uncouth. But there may be a natural Japanese resistance against the open final button, for young men are required to button all buttons of their school uniforms — the Prussian gakuran — in strict military style. On one hand you have the “correct” Western fashion rules that advocate an irrational open button, and on the other hand, you have the ingrained Japanese tradition towards a full-buttoned suit jacket. Confucian propriety would perhaps find something grating about intentionally leaving one “t” uncrossed.

Depending on your involvement in this small skirmish, one of these positions is right and the other one is wrong. I do not think the third-button buttoners are acting in response to the Western rule: they are just ignorant of the convention. No doubt there are Westerners who make the same mistake, but in Japan, there is a more solid philosophical justification towards the total buttoning. Japanese fashion magazines will never openly advocate the closed third button, but their decline in readership may launch a newer environment of social distinction — where the button symbolizes not only some archaic cultural regulation, but respective association with an old or new order.

‘Twas Max Weber who long ago aimed to peg modern social and economic behavior on the influence of traditional religious patterns — to back up and look at a people’s ultimate relation to society through their orientation towards the metaphysical. Scholars always tend to categorize Japan and the West through the tired “group-orientation vs. individual-orientation,” but this is a worthless distinction without thousands of footnotes and exceptions. (For example, Americans form more spontaneous social groups than the Japanese and belong to more organizations; whereas the Japanese form a deeper committment to only one group, often the workplace.)

Although I am not a scholar of religion, I find that it is helpful to gaze upon differences in both cultural traditions through the dichotomy of orthodoxy (”correct belief”) vs. orthopraxy (”correct practice”). Christianity (especially Protestantism) is a primarily orthodoxical religion in which believers adhere to their religion through strict belief and faith. In contrast, Confucianism (the moral backbone of East Asian civilization) is orthopraxical in that Confucius preached proper social behavior and adherence to ritual as the key to aligning society with the cosmos. We must add that all religions have both orthopraxical and orthodoxical elements, but one side is stressed more than the other.

While most Japanese do not have a firm “belief” in religion or God, they certainly take much influence from a long tradition of Confucian humanistic moralism. One needs not to attend Church or pray to make peace with the cosmic order; adherence to daily rituals and respect for hierarchial social relations is enough. Even atheism does not necessarily cancel out participation in this mode of moral behavior.

As Confucius argued, perfect performance of ritual requires strict attention to detail. The idea of performing the ritual is not enough — the performance should be done exactly. Thus, Confucian orthopraxy teaches detail-orientation, whereas the idea of “faith” in Protestant Christianity suggests goal-orientation. The details of everyday behavior are irrelevant as long as they are done in regards to the deeper purpose of God’s wishes.

Westerners often accuse the Japanese of being “illogical,” but clearly they are just embracing a different orthopraxical logic based on adherence to rules and details instead of working towards the bigger picture. Why do Japanese wait for the light to change before crossing the street, even when there are no cars approaching? Because the idea is not the safety itself (big picture) but the adherence to the proper ritual of waiting. Subsequently, this natural inclination to following rules creates a well-ordered society. Orthodoxy, on the other hand, leads to factional arguments between true believers and the subsequent justification of one’s own actions through a specific belief system. With morality breathing within the public domain, Japan becomes a pleasant place — as long as the authoritarians controlling the rules work for the benefit of the populace. The West may not have order, but Weber saw the East lacking the very concept of “liberty.”

Both societies have their pluses and minuses and clearly each civilization has a lot to learn from the other, but with this new age of globalization, nations’ outputs are measured on the same universal scale. Japan’s detail-orientation worked perfectly for their burgeoning quality-controlled manufacturing sector and other Fordist enterprises. The criteria for some fields, however, are so marked by the dogma of orthodoxical tradition that Japan has great difficulty in competing. The idea of the artist as self-centered creator may be completely foreign to Japan, and while the Japanese have adopted the praxis of 20th century artistic or intellectual endeavor, the fundamental assumptions are not well-understood.

Japan rarely recognizes the social status of subcultures who drop out of society voluntarily as an orthodoxical protest. Being “punk” in the West is a question of spirit; in Japan, it is a set of social codes in rituals which must be fully embraced to show solidarity. And therefore, when students reach the shakaijin age and enter society, they must don the new uniforms and ritual behavior of their new firms. Few are punk “at heart” and salarymen “by day.” The faith in that belief system is worthless if not expressed through daily affirmation of rituals.

If the Western critical eye is so deeply shaped by orthodoxical ideas of content or larger notions of playing with form (instead of adhering to it), we hold deep biases towards judging Japanese art or music. We hardly celebrate the rock band who can imitate an other band perfectly, even though this is a result of strict orthopraxical orientation. Japanese hip hop will most likely never be able to fully comprehend the “spirit” behind Western hip hop, but Japanese fans are could care less — they want adherence to specific ritual behaviors encoded within the imported meaning of “hip hop.”

Obviously, there are exceptions to the orthopraxical tradition in Japan, but hopefully this dichotomy can become a useful tool in discussing the artistic intentions of Japanese creators.