Oh, young love! Famed baseball pitcher Darvish Yu — age 20 — and entertainment production company employee/actress 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?

I have been thinking about breasts a lot these days. No, not in a sexual way.

This all started with Hoshino Aki — a horribly annoying ex-young woman who has become a variety TV regular solely because of her enormous breasts. I wrote an entire column for OK Fred on the topic, so I don’t want to explicate my tirade here. But that essay did not placate me. Now I can’t be so surprised that a no-talent, nobody gravia idol had a boob job (the unconvinced can check the not-so-old picture here), but I am royally annoyed that her handlers make such a big deal about her “perfect” breasts and no one bats an eye.

These days, the same thing is happening with the marketing of Fukada Kyoko. In some weird twist of fate, I actually met her back in 1998 via my Kodansha internship. All I remember is that she had terrible skin as a youth, but she has grown out of this in recent years. She also, apparently, grew H-cup-sized breasts while no one was watching. Japanese gossip sites are suddenly required to describe her as “H-cup Fukada Kyoko.” In the past, she had just been an actress with a storied sex life. Now she is cup-coded.

Starting any day now, she will be seen each week in the subtly-titled Fuji TV drama Mountain Girl, Wall Girl 「山おんな壁おんあ」. Her mysteriously new H-sized breasts won themselves a starring role as the mountains in “mountain girl.” Just in case you did not catch the metaphor, the entire plot of the manga-based series revolves around breast size. Ito Misaki plays a woman with a complex about being a surfboard. From the first two paragraphs of the show’s website

Aoyanagi Emi boasts the good-looks of a Paris Collection model. But she’s got one single complex: Her bust is as flat as a “wall.” Emi is an employee of the Marukoshi Department Store. She is in charge of the bag-sales section of the first floor that is seen as the “star of the department store.”

One day on her way to work, Emi is swayed in a crowded train and feels big soft breasts against her back. She sees a girl with giant breasts through the reflection in the glass. This is the first time she meets her [Fukada Kyoko's character].

This is Fuji TV prime-time Thursday night show, mind you — not some late-night noir with unrealistic lesbian subplots. Casting this over at Ryoichi Sasakawa’s Kenon must have been fun: Hey, Ito Misaki, you have tiny breasts! You’d be great in this role.

Now call me cynical, but photographic evidence (even some secret illegal onsen shots) points to Fukada recently “taking up a new set of skills” to fill this role. Either that or famous Japanese women have evolved some amazing ability to grow two or three cup sizes way after the last pangs of puberty. If they could figure out how to bottle this natural genetic power, they could make millions.

Breast augmentation surgery is so common in countries like Korea and the U.S. that the audacious claims of publicists would be a punchline akin to Paris Hilton’s “I never did drugs” on Larry King. But in Japan, there is this creepy radio silence about the regularity of plastic surgery. This combines with a general media hesitancy in criticizing celebrities to create an odd situation where everyone has to play along that Fukada Kyoko’s breasts are real and that she is “finally going to show us fans in the new show what she has been hiding all these years.” As if, all the swimsuit shots from 1997 to 2006 had been conspiratorial work of deceit and lies — suppressing her supple curves from proper viewing.

Although Weekly Playboy-style patriarchy may not be 100% responsible for Japanese womens’ manifold breast-complexes, I am not sure it helps to have these stars secretly gain enormous breasts and then have no real public dialogue about whether such plastic surgery exists. (This reminds me of the fact that Japanese TV also seems to be the only global media force uninterested in debunking Uri Geller.) Questions of bodily alterations are relegated to the ghettos of spam-financed internet sites.

Okay, okay, I am too easily outraged by the entire Japanese entertainment world, but if you are going to add bags of plastic to women, don’t expect me to bow down to such plastic as miraculous gifts from God. Barry Bonds may hit regrettable home runs with his chemically-induced arm girth, but at least they don’t introduce Barry Bonds as the guy with the “Huge Arms.”

Reference: Previous Neomarxisme essay on Japanese breast obsession “Magazine Rack”

The new issue of Weekly Pureiboi offers us an epic dichotomy to titillate our senses: “Japanese Idols vs. World Sexy”

On the cover, the issue’s featured women are organized into two distinct groups:

The left-hand column makes sense: all four of the girls are Japanese race-queen/idol types with proper Japanese names. (Although “Leona” sounds like she could be half-Jewish.)

The right-hand group, however, is extremely problematic. Ignoring the fact that no one finds Paris Hilton “sexy,” Beyonce and Paris at least fit the most basic description of being global celebrities. Why then is purely Japanese actress and model Kuriyama Chiaki — the magazine’s cover model — part of “World Sexy”? This affiliation seems like an implicit acknowledgment that Kuriyama’s popularity stems solely from her appearance in Kill Bill. Objectively speaking, she does not fit the normal profile of a “hot girl” in Japan, and Pureiboi appears to feel the need to legitimize lust towards her from the perspective of popularity abroad.

Ozawa Maria’s inclusion in the “world sexy” group, on the other hand, boils down to question of nation-state being strictly defined through racial homogeneity. Ozawa is a 21-year old half-Japanese, half-Canadian porn star and Christian Academy in Japan graduate whose career is based exclusively in Japan. You may know her from such films as 2006′s Barely There Mosaic and 2007′s Popular Fashion Model Maria Ozawa Nakadashi Raped for 20 Consecutive Times! Ozawa is not especially known outside of the Japanese adult video market. Unlike Kuriyama, she has no feet on the global stage. Pureiboi consciously or unconsciously placed her outside of the “Japan” group only because she has what amounts to impure blood and semi-Western features.

So here, being a “Japanese idol” requires popularity originating in the Japanese market — unless you are half-Japanese, which makes “Japanese” categorization impossible. Even in matters of objectifying women, “Japan” remains so narrowly defined.

I have a Canadian female friend who used to work at a foreign hostess club in Roppongi, and I invited her to write something about her experience. (I edited for grammar and length.)

I was backpacking through either Thailand or Cambodia — it’s a blur at this point — when some British girl mentioned to me that I could make a lot of money being blond in Japan. Japan sounded equally Asian as Thailand (or Cambodia or Laos), so I booked a ticket for Tokyo Airport and then figured out how to get from the airport to Tokyo, which took me like three hours or something.

I ended up crashing on my college roommate’s cousin’s floor for a week before I finally got an interview with the club. My college roommate’s cousin had mentioned that this whole “water business” of foreign hostessing was sketchy and sometimes dangerous. So I was a bit on edge during the interview. The manager’s English and breath were terrible, and there was something very dark and depressing about the whole bar. When not trying to look down or up my dress (he had this kind of Galileo telescope thing), he kept staring at my roots to make sure I was really blond. He reached for something in his jacket and suddenly asked me, “You dye now?” and I started to freak out. (Turns out he was just scratching himself.) I explained that I had been naturally blond as a child but that most adult Western women become more brunette as they get older. He ominously told me, “Well, I hope you dye soon” and then handed me my punch-card. I was hired.

The job was boring. I would come in to work at around 8, and then the awful customers would start coming in. First of all, the customers were mostly Japanese men. Second, they were Japanese men without any sort of history with real life women. It was almost as if going to this club was a product of failure with Japanese women. They smelled bad and wore boxy black suits and wanted to talk about golf. The liked to sing John Denver at karaoke, and I don’t like John Denver. I would always want to sing No Doubt or that one Adam Ant song, but they didn’t have these in the karaoke machine.

One guy always came in and wanted to show off by reciting Pi to 6,000 digits. This would take three or four hours — before he finally gave up and went to the bathroom. He would always want us to join in, which was impossible for most of the girls, but this helped me learn to count in Japanese.

Another guy used to come in and recite “e” — the natural log digit or whatever — and he would get in a battle with the Pi guy. This was a big source of stress. The Pi guy was “my guy,” and the e guy was this Russian girl’s guy. This Russian girl hated me, and the e guy started to like me, because he thought I liked to have digits read to me, which I don’t, even to this day. So the Russian girl starts to totally hate on me, because the e guy and the Pi guy are fighting for me very openly. In the end, they both got over me and started to like this bimbo from New Zealand. Once they made amends, they would read off together the 3,000 digits of if you subtracted e from Pi. All I remember is that it starts out 0.4233.

After a while, the whole thing became very tedious. The money was not that great, and Japan had no beaches or anything.

With nine-year old girls in thong bikinis currently leading the march of eroticism in Japan (or at least grabbing the most real estate in der Zeitgeist), refined culture magazine for urban professionals Brutus has decided to come out and remind its readers that “adult” women can also be beautiful. The idea is a bit of radical contrarianism, for sure, but such sensational headlines are known to move copies. Relatively young and over-make-up’d Kashii Yuu graces the cover, but the main feature exhibits portrait shots of various older and professional Japanese women that buck the recent infantile gravity of beauty standards.

From the Brutus website:

As seen in the rush of new women’s magazines starting publication, this is an era of diverse ways in which women can “shine.” From catchphrases such as “You’ve graduated from trying to attract boys (mote)” and “Adult, but cute (kawaii),” more focus is being put on “adult” women. Beauty comes from refinement, intelligence, and a strong will. The keyword for the charming female image is “adult” for men — and maybe for females as well. Our sessions with famous photographers are full of charming beautiful women. In this special feature, adult women are beautiful!

Japan these days is a bit SCREAM — Socio-economic Class Rules Everything Around Me — and we therefore are best seeing Brutus as a media representation of the taste culture of professional, well-educated upper middle-class Japanese men rather than as just as a magazine. Brutus is “kachi-gumi” (winners) media and not targeted towards either middle-range salarymen in the “make-gumi” (losers) without proper cosmopolitan taste or artistic freeter who have chosen passion for individual creation over a high income. Mr. Brutus is drinking champagne at the opening of Tokyo Midtown in a slim navy-blue pin-striped Super 120s suit with slant pockets. He is not playing pachinko within a dirty cloud of nicotine and J-POP Trance Best 2005.

Sexual attraction and social class are not independent of each other, especially seeing that a specific attribute underlies both career success and interest in “adult” women: self-confidence. This is starting to read like the script to one of those businessman LPs of the 1960s, but the self-confident man has no need to fear women who may challenge him in the realm of ideas or even, gasp, on the income ladder. A sophisticated man needs a sophisticated women on his arm. James Bond does not dote after 16 year-old girls — at least while the camera is rolling.

But whether self-confidence is a source of business acumen or just an inherited privilege of the wealthy, lusting after little girls under the guise of appreciating “genki” or the “blossoming of youth” does not match the chic Brutus lifestyle. The relative newness of the Under-15 boom suggests that it is a sexual desire born of contemporary social conditions: Men are attracted to these girls’ innocence as a retreat from a harsh reality in which they are completely emasculated. The “make-gumi” man lacks self-confidence, and extremely young girls (or in more mainstream cases, hostesses/prostitutes) symbolize a desire to create fantasy moments in which the man can regain a sense of control and dominance. Adult women are no good, because they are a reminder of the fall in stature rather than a cure for the failure itself.

Brutus smartly reminds us, though, that “adult” is not just the key for men, but also for women. Japanese analysts posit that women in contemporary Japan pay attention to their style primarily to meet and secure upwardly-mobile men (or at least, self-confident without necessarily the economic motive), and if so, the woman herself must now move towards “adult.” A man’s affection for the immature is a sure sign of low earning potential. This means young women must eventually abandon the simple algebra of “mote“ (being cute in the way that boys like –> a boyfriend) for a more complicated calculus of following your own will as a means to attract the sophisticated man (who may just happen to possess a bulging pocketbook.)

I had doubts on the fairness of putting “adult” sophistication on the same continuum as the pedophilic tendencies of the otaku, but I just went to the bookstore to check out the issue, and much to my surprise, the intro paragraph of the Brutus feature specifically name checks the “Junior Idol Boom” as proof of infantile sexuality taking over modern society. And they too see the fear towards adult women in the communal lack of self-confidence. Without saying it specifically, Brutus does seem to be asking, are you enough of a Winner Man to take on a Winner Woman?

Shukan Gendai has an article this week called “(Super-popular 21st Century Agnes Lum Has a Surprising Secret) Leah Dizon is Actually Fluent in Japanese!?” (人気沸騰“２１世紀のアグネス・ラム”に意外なヒミツ■リア・ディゾン　実は日本語ペラペラ!?)

At first I wanted to write about this as an example of the weekly magazines being a totally unreliable vehicle for news (Leah Dizon is fluent? Yeah, right), but in classic shukanshi style, the headline kind of oversells the actual meat of the article. The writer never claims that Dizon is “fluent” fluent, but does point out a disparity between her on-air Japanese — described as “カタコト” (stilted, talking like a baby) — and her off-the-job Japanese, which apparently is not so bad. In other words, Leah Dizon is intentionally being pushed (by her management?) to bring down her Japanese level in public.

The writer implies there is a need to appear adorable for her legion of otaku fans, and she appeases them through saying things like “オナカスイタ！” (Very, very liberally, “Oh, me so hungry.”)

Ever since foreigners starting showing up in Japan, many Japanese have been fascinated with the idea of non-Japanese Japanese speakers. Apparently, Tokugawa Ieyasu got a big kick out of making British wash-up William Adams repeat Japanese phrases. Even when the barbarians put in an effort, the locals did not always respond positively. John Nathan claims in his book Japan Unbound that in the early ’60s he would speak to people on the street in relatively fluent Japanese and they would ask for a translator.

These days, society seems more accepting and comfortable with foreign speakers of the language, and Leah Dizon’s allegedly-fake katakoto seems less to be about the threat of fluent foreigners and more about constructing an infantile linguistic image to go along with her cleaned-up visual package. This is very similar to Bobby Ologun whose ridiculously-complicated, fake “dumb mistakes” help paint him as the big, jolly African oaf. This latest charge about Dizon fits with this strangely-progressive 21st century conspiracy theme: The media forces foreigners (who are not white men) to speak mangled Japanese for the delight of the public. The underlying criticism seems to suggest that a certain sector wants a naturalization in feelings about foreign speakers of the language. Or maybe it’s just a larger extension of the paranoia about TV constantly lying to us (i.e., yarase).

I think that if Leah Dizon gradually starts getting better at the language before our very eyes, that probably wouldn’t necessarily damage her persona, but for whatever reason, her handlers are erring on the side of feigned incompetency. Is this some strange form of orientalization — where the (otaku) Japanese male desires the subservient American female who is sexily mute due to language inadequacy? Or do the handlers still think her audience fears the fluent alien? You would think that she would be better at connecting with fans through able use of the local language, but for whatever reason, they are making her play out a different role using a more limited script.

The March 2007 issue of Nikkei Entertainment! playfully warns that “black ships” (黒船) — a reference to American Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 opening of Japan — have arrived in the Japanese gravure (gurabia/gravia) bikini model world. Out of nowhere, a foreign model has stepped foot on sacred soil to displace the pre-existing domestic army of half-naked gals to win the hearts of hard-working Japanese men. In just the last few months, Leah Dizon has gone from the fringes of the industry to the becoming a ubiquitous face on the subway ads for weekly magazines.

Dizon — half-Caucasian/half-Filipino-Chinese — had been working as a relatively-unknown and slightly-naughty model back in the West Coast car circuit before somewhat miraculously being picked up by the Japanese talent complex and thrust into stardom. She is neither Japanese by blood nor speaks the local language with much fluency, but her success proves that such properties were never actually necessary to fit into the plastic fantastic world of selling visual fantasy to the male of the species. She’s a Weekly Playboy regular now, and Japan’s nerds started salivating once they realized she looks quite similar to Maetel from Galaxy Express 999.

Dizon’s cross-cultural journey gives a rare chance to peer into the differences in sexual-aesthetic between the two sides of the Pacific. She has gone from looking like a throbbing orb of aggressive sexuality to a demure and well-groomed model out of Can Cam.

Dizon’s handlers appear to have tailored her public image to attract female fans as well as male (check out her ridiculous nail art and trademark Japanese girl cross-hand pose in the aforementioned Nikkei Entertainment! if you have a chance), but we should not assume that she has been “cleaned up” at the expense of male tastes. My contacts in the female fashion trade have argued that Japanese women need to maintain a certain amount of “class” and moderation in order to attract Japanese men. Over-sexualized fashion in Japan is strictly for “unattractive” women to feel good about themselves — not to reel in men.

In such an environment, Dizon’s American persona and images are way too aggressive as a female product in the Japanese market. She first must become cute and adorable in a slightly infantile way to establish a non-threatening demeanor. Only then can she show off some skin. Otherwise her curves and sinister smile are an attack on non-confident male sexuality rather than a reward for it.

Here again we come to the psycho-sexual underpinnings of American and Japanese porn. Cast into simplified binaries deduced from the dominant tenor of the pornography, American men want women who echo their own hawkish and callous approach to casual sex; Japanese men are interested in reluctance rather than a predictable submission. Sex in Japan should be a sphere in which the man is the only warrior — where the hawk devours the dove.

So, Leah Dizon becomes the dove next door whose clothes accidentally fall off once and a while.

This “slightly bonkers” blog gets a fair amount of net traffic, but not because of my illuminating insight on Japan nor my biting wit. As far as my stats suggest, everyone mostly drops in to gawk at the pictures of elementary school bikini idol and crossover-child-semi-porn celebrity Saaya Irie. Japanese entrepreneurs may have been the first ones to suspect men like to look at pictures of near-naked fifth-graders, but apparently the consumer demand is global. Unfortunately for Saaya, her “musical group” Sweet Kiss disbanded before they could ever put out any music. My guess is that everyone is following her every move to get hints on the nature of her future musical output — the prodigious F-cup breasts are just a side distraction.

I am not personally interested in this “low teen idol” boom sweeping Japan, but like many, I can’t ignore the societal implications. For a while, Cyzo and their contributor Shinsan Nameko had a story on the market almost every month. In one of the interviews with a participant and her mother, the wannabe idol talked about how doing photos where you “accidentally can see panties” or featuring the “hand-bra” were not really for 12 year olds — but okay when you are 15. Off camera to her friends: Mom won’t let me do anything! Dad!!!!! Is it okay if I do 手ブラ shots?!

The other day, I innocently followed a link to a story about accusations of racist manga from the 2-ch “Itai” News blog and found myself looking at a banner ad for http://www.imouto.tv/ — your one-stop source for “only elementary school and middle school girls” posing in swimsuits and spreading their legs in gym shorts. For those unfamiliar with Japanese, “imouto” (妹) means “little sister.” The site brags that all of its models are under 15 (U-15限定).

The pricing structure for access works exactly like members-only hardcore pornography sites, and the payment system suggests the target market is an older clientele. (I doubt kids are asking their parents for the funds to join up.) The poses, costumes, and general atmosphere are almost identical to normal Japanese pornography — except for the two small pieces of bikini cloth that the pesky legal system requires. (Puritans!) For those into looking behind the curtain, the domain is registered to an “Eichi” based at the same address of Miracle Studio in Ebisu.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that this site is mainstream. My guess is that it generally attracts those with a sociopathic attraction to prepubescent girls, and judging by the ad placement on an Akihabara otaku-focused site, serious trouble dealing with women in what we call the “legal zone” (O-18 in industry-speak) who make up the vast majority of females in Japan. While Saaya Irie’s Weekly Playboy-produced photo book tried to convince the mass T-n-A audience of the virtues of the newly-emerging neo-pedophilia market, this “not-porn” porn site at imouto.tv is the newly-emerging neo-pedophilia market.

My biggest question about imouto.tv is, where are these girls coming from? Who in the world thinks this is their daughter’s “big break” to bigger things? Now I can see a parallel with the ultra-creepy low-teen beauty pageants breaking out like a rash upon the North American heartland, but at least in that case, girls are competing for some kind of prize. They are not posing in swimsuits on a “members-only” site targeted towards socially-dysfunctional men. I don’t think we are really missing any context here — anyone Japanese or otherwise can guess what imouto.tv is about within five seconds of gander time. Wouldn’t inclusion on this site now would lead to a relatively big scandal for an actress/singer in the future?

The only advantage of peddling young flesh now — besides the medium-sized payout to the enterprising parents — is if the girl was determined to be a gravure idol in the future. This way, her fans could escalate with her into a more profound high-school career. But honestly speaking, wouldn’t these guys stop being interested when things hit 16? There is nothing scarier than girls who know trigonometry. To the true U-15 fan, college girls may as well be mountain hag zombies who eat your brains. (Not to mention the overpowering 加齢臭!)

The thing no one ever says about gravure though is that it’s no one’s first choice. The girls are all aspiring actresses and musicians who are not talented enough or connected enough to get cast in anything, so their production company pushes them to pose in bikinis and get filmed walking gleefully in slo-mo. Some girls have crossed over these days — MEGUMI and the anomalous, yet ubiquitous Hoshino Aki (ancient at 29) — but most girls stay in gravure or worse. (Maybe sometime we can talk about rumors of the high-class brothels set up across Tokyo staffed by the unpopular girls in major talent agencies so they can pay for their singing and dancing lessons.) The U-15 cadets are also probably aiming for world-domination in the guise of singers and actresses, but somebody (with an eye on revenues) has decided this questionable proto-gravure is the way to go for an early start. Now their parents’ great struggle towards celebrity children is yours to enjoy for ¥3000 a month.

“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/kogyaru — 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 ephebophilia. 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 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 slightly darker skin may also have been a product of a psychological impulse to appear more sophisticated (or based on the natural tan of wealthy surfers) 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 fantasy. The “oyaji pranking” of “enjo kosai” — where girls would charge men ¥10,000 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.

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 the group’s “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 likely 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 (lower class) 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 the “unwanted.” 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.

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.

Notes:

¹ The original kogal strikes me as fitting well in the “rich kid delinquent” archetype that Ishihara Shintaro and the Taiyo-zoku Sun Tribe set back in the 1950s and carried on through the Southern All-Stars surfer of the 70s.
² This puts the ganguro kogal in the mold of the normal yankii working-class rebellion archetype.

I try not to do too much cross-linking here at Neomarxisme, seeing that we cocoon members all read the same blogs, but I will make an exception for the venerable No-Sword‘s analysis of the new “erotic LOHAS” one-off Erokoto. After reading his post, I saw the actual mag in a bookstore, and unless you can read Japanese, you would be hard-pressed to find the difference between a normal “woman-as-vinyl-wearing-commodity fantasy” soft porn mag and this “enlightened, Green” version. Oh wait, I see it: the naked underwater girls are accompanied by the English text “Save the Ocean.”

The magazine proudly continues the tradition of Japanese fashion and consumer culture being blissfully non-ideological. Thank god no one has to give up their out-of-touch, collectively-imagined misunderstanding of the female species in order to adopt lifestyles to protect the fragile natural environment. Piecemeal progressivism: hemp sneakers with organic rubber sole created by twelve year-old slave laborers.

The choice quote from No-Sword:

I’m sure there were good intentions all round, and there are a few pages where women appear without the objectifying treatment, and just under half of the editorial staff is female &c. &c., but it is depressing to see so much of the same old male-centric approach to sex positivity, where women are expected to just sort of come along for the ride.

I understand the enticement for free-minded Americans to go pro-porn because of its automatic destructive opposition to that fun-hating philosophy of Puritanism. But back to a point I have made several times before, why is porn liberating in Japan — where it has always been a part of the hegemonic, paternalistic system and not a movement away from it? Where it serves as a way to protect “virtuous women” — passing off the scourge of the male libido onto unimportant people’s daughters. Just because you take the same lower-class, unhappy women nice enough to materialize their escape from consumer debt through baring all and put them in front of some trees and Shinto ornaments does not mean you have somewhere gone “beyond” the normal business. If you want the Japanese birth rate to increase and the country to move to a more Euro balance of work-life-and-earth, why don’t you make a magazine about the sexiness of women who don’t exist solely to please the whim of infantile men? Oh yeah, that’s too much like real life: LOHAS and porn both as whimsical dreams far from the groans of the concrete world.