Oh, young love! Famed baseball pitcher Darvish Yu — age 20 — and entertainment production company employee Saeko — age 20 — have decided to get married! In an era where youth take their pretty time to stagger aimlessly towards the responsibilities of adulthood, there is something refreshing about a couple with their whole lives ahead of them deciding to throw future possibility to the wind and settle down at such an early age. And for a professional ball player, who can have scores of different women every night, to show such adult devotion to a single woman without even taking a few years to taste the crate-loads of free fruit his athletic prowess ensures! The purity of their endeavor will surely make them role models for an entire generation.

Oh, I should also mention that Saeko is pregnant with Darvish’s baby.

(I had my suspicions that he had “hit a home run” after seeing his sexy shirtless photo on cover of an•an’s Sex issue last month, but their public announcement of a dekichatta kekkon ended all rampant non-speculation about his virginity.)

If the Darvish-Saeko shotgun wedding sounds like a familiar story, you are probably thinking of the post-conception marriage announcement of Morning Musume’s enfant infantile Tsuji Nozomi (age 20) and some guy who dresses up in Ultraman costumes as a career (age 26). While it’d be fun to call this unplanned pregnancy rodeo a “trend,” the preggers –> wedding bells narrative also explains the past marriages of stars Amuro Namie, Shiina Ringo, Tsuchiya Anna, and Ishiguro Aya (also from Morning Musume). I know Japan is a unique country — with the totally unprecedented “four distinct seasons” and all — but as in the rest of the world, unplanned pregnancy is often caused by unprotected sex. Even the most talented celebrities succumb to reproductive forces.

I certainly do not advocate drawing larger conclusions about the state of sexual attitudes in Japan from these twenty-year old stars. Without even glancing at current statistics, American teenage pregnancy rates must dwarf anything seen in Japan. (And are Britney Spears’ model marriage to what’s-his-name and Nicole Richie’s pregnancy with the guy from that terrible band really so different?) Abortions have been decreasing in Japan. And the birth rate and frequency of sex rate are amongst the lowest in the world.

Somebody made the hilariously naïve mistake of asking Tsuji and the finance at the press-conference why they didn’t think about using contraception. I guess the reporter did not know that Japan is the one of the only countries on Earth where condom use declined in the 1990s. More famously, Japan only legalized the birth control pill in 1999, despite decades of feminist protest. Although safely used in dozens of other countries since the 1960s, Japanese male lawmakers and bureaucrats knew something that others had not considered: bitches don’t deserve control over their own reproductive systems, because they would just go out and prove themselves to be dirty ho’s. Or maybe, it was the formidable oligopoly power of the condom lobby and the neighborhood abortionists. Whatever the case, the Gov only decided to give the Lesser Gender the Pill once the Feminazis started asking too many questions about the selfless and speedy efforts to legalize Viagra — a harmless recreational drug with mild side-effects like death.

But the bonered-up Old Patriarchs still managed to win the larger war, since the Japanese public is so massively uninformed about the Pill’s safety that barely anyone uses it. According to this, 70% of Japanese women would never even consider trying oral contraceptives, and I don’t blame them: if rumors are to believed, this demon medicine makes you permanently infertile, distorts your emotions, and screws up your natural cycles. Also, taking the pill is “kinda slutty” — like a giant billboard announcing the desire for daily sex that no one else can see. These arguments are neither new or unique, but they’ve settled in for the long run.

So no Pill and not much condom use among kids is going to lead to some babies. Any sort of criticism of dekichatta kekkon (できちゃった結婚, something like “Oops, We Conceived” Marriage) will fall automatically into worthless pronouncements on sexual morality, and in Japan, the mainstream sentiment seems to be one of snickering mockery rather than outrage. Maybe some crusty old men like Wada Akiko will go out of their way to say that Nozomi was “irresponsible,” but Nozomi can just answer back, Pro-Life, y’all, in her 12-year old baby-doll demeanor. Behind the scenes, I am sure the girls’ management companies are not so happy about their female stars’ immediate drop in future earning potential, but serves them right for not forcing temporary sterilization as part of their indentured servitude to the media-entertainment complex.

Otherwise, what are the drawbacks of a shotgun marrying nation? Look at the cute conservatism displayed so far: “I am pregnant, so we must properly get married.” Sure, most of these celebrities get properly divorced less than a year later (Shiina, Tsuchiya; Amuro actually gave it a few years), but as they say, trying and failing is better than not trying at all. And really, can you blame someone for not liking at 23 what they loved at 20? I forget the statistic, but maybe 70% of college juniors who get that awesome tattoo of a wrist watch pointing towards 4:20 regret it later in life.

Most importantly, no one in Japan is going to come out against this kind of teenage shotgun wedding spree, because the couples are serving the goals of the State. With adults waiting too long to get married, the birth rate has reached a critical low. Whether the actual marriage works out or not, these celebrities are taking up the slack to make sure someone will be around in the blazing hot future to pay for their nenkin retirement funds. The best thing that could happen to Japan right now is if 20 year-old boys from Wakkanai to Yonaguni repeatedly impregnate their 18 year-old girlfriends. Mass weddings? No problem: Prime Minister Abe can get us a great rate with the Moonies. Condoms or ovary-destroying Pills are unpatriotic, creating barriers between the forces of national replication.

So, who’s irresponsible now, Wada Akiko?

“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 »