The end of 1981 saw the debut of a new women’s fashion magazine in Japan called CanCam. The name was curiously derived from the phrase “I can campus” and nominally targeted at female college students. Publisher Shogakukan created CanCam as a response to the popular magazine JJ from rival Kobunsha, which had arrived in 1975 and ushered in the “new traditional” (nyutora) boom in women’s fashion.

2011 thus marks the 30 year anniversary of that fateful January 1982 issue of CanCam, and while the magazine has seen a major decline in sales after the departure of iconic model Ebihara “Ebichan” Yuri, it is remarkable that this particular magazine of conservative Japanese fashion has stayed alive and relevant for so long, especially in lieu of recent days’ intense media churn.

Since CanCam put together a 30th anniversary issue and I got my hands on the debut issue for ¥105 in Nakano Broadway, I thought it would be useful to compare the two and see what has changed in the last three decades for the nation’s ojosama.

January 1982
The front cover, just as today, screams “Come On, Join Us!” — yet at the time, this call to arms was meant for an extremely limited set of women. In 1982 CanCam was not a media guide for a specific “consumer lifestyle” or fashion sub-group, but arguably, to an elite social class.

The issue’s main article “New City Formal ‘82 Manifesto” jubilantly suggests that readers dress in formal suits not just at “ceremonies” but as daily wear. Girls were expected to master the Louis Vuitton bag and a ¥480,000 Chanel suit — or its cheaper clone — as a complement to Western-style hotel lunches, airport visits, club house invites, theater, and something called “trad parties.” These idealized CanCam women do not just eat at hotels with other rich women once in a while but have a deep connection described as a “hotel life.” There is also an entire section on “what to wear to your après-ski disco party.” And these female college students apparently should know how to cook a Christmas chicken and other ultra-American dishes.

Yet despite CanCam‘s culture of the young madame, there was a certain level of cultural sophistication expected that you would never see in today’s likeminded magazines. There is an interview with former Happy End singer and “city pop” icon Ohtaki Eiichi as well as Chinese landscapes from famed photographer Shinoyama Kishin.

The overall effect is a magazine full of 21 year-old girls who look like they’re about 40. At the time, Japan had spent a few years in the aforementioned nyutora boom. This was the country’s answer to American “preppie,” directly reflecting the culture and style of the nation’s most wealthy residents. The idea was to dress like women from good families in Kobe or Yokohama, shopping at their small shinise stores that had clothed the elite for decades. The initial issues of CanCam offered a guide to this unadulterated upper class dress, with absolutely nothing that could be considered “subcultural” influence. The magazine’s men meanwhile look like they were shipped in from a Spring semi-formal at Cornell: navy blazers, gray flannels, and red rep ties. If all fashion is indeed costume, the idea here was to look wealthier and older than your years — although not in a vulgar nouveau riche way. (A reminder: This is a few years before the Bubble economy.) The title of the issue’s hair guide could not make this message any clearer: “I want to look like an adult.”

This all boils down to the age-old “traditional” clothing ethic of TPO (time, place, and occasion) — coined by Ivy League-style instigator Ishizu Kensuke. But in this, CanCam connects its consumer focus to broader society. The editors were saying, you need to buy these things in order for you to properly participate in these activities at these locations with these worthwhile people. Not all the readers could necessarily replicate the lives of Japan’s affluent, but it says a lot that Old Money was the aspiration of the time.

By the middle of the first issue, however, CanCam suddenly admits that the fashion pages were a parochial fantasy, and that real women of the early 1980s dressed in a more casual and gaudy style. Suggestions for winter coats involve a “surfer” (?) variant that is just a varsity jacket. There is an article about vintage shopping in Osaka, where people are, gasp, wearing sweatsuits and bold primary colors. These glimpses of the real Japan show the degree to which the CanCam world was mostly imaginary, or at least, idealized and extrapolated from a tiny set of existing college students at the top private schools.

Ironically, this magazine, openly obsessed with Western culture, sees its biggest style antithesis in the actual American college students the editors encounter during a visit to “American campus life.” Every single student is in jeans and sweatshirts, co-habitating with their long-haired boyfriends in ragged apartments. (Surprise appearance from one time punk rocker, one time Harvard freshman, and now radio host Morley Robertson!)

Some bonus anachronisms:

• A brand called “Gay togs” — Jeans for Gals
• A call-out for Boz Scaggs’ Hits!
• The inside cover ad is Shiseido using a model who looks like a Flash Gordon extra — thus predicting the techno-pop future that Japan would subsume Japan in the mid-1980s

January 2012
The January 2012 issue of CanCam (out in November 2011, natch) celebrates thirty years of publishing from the time of the fateful first issue. Although it spends most of its time celebrating the cult of CanCam rather than the lives of CanCam girls, there is enough material to see stark comparisons of how dramatically things have changed in the last 30 years.

First and foremost, the CanCam look has taken on heavy elements from gyaru culture. The style of CanCam has been known recently as o-nee-kei — “big sister style” — after the original 1990s kogyaru who grew up and became older, classier role models for the younger gyaru. These were the kogyaru who came primarily from upper to upper middle-classes — before the great “yankii-fication” of gyaru that happened in the late 1990s with ganguro. Yankii references, however, have slipped into any style related to gyaru aesthetics, so the pure upper-crusty-ness of the original CanCam has taken on lots of new signifiers that would have made the young madames of 1982 blush red like the beets in their New Otani salad.

This is most obvious in the preferred hairstyle — a pleasant golden brown — which would have gotten you expelled from private school back in the day. The Chanel-inspired tweedy suit still makes appearances, but alongside gaudy leopard print and phones bejeweled within every centimeter of their lives. Bags have teddy bears attached. The good news is that no one would confuse these women for being 40. They look their age, and more importantly, they look like they are having fun.

The original CanCam oddly spoke of a “campus life” while showing all the things women should be doing off-campus at hotels, airports, and private establishments. The new CanCam, however, has completely dropped the pretense that the readers are college students. The audience does include college students, but is mostly young Tokyo clerical workers of various class backgrounds. Most importantly they are not women living in the pockets of their parents, and so prices are more down-to-earth than the Chanel obsessions of 1982. In fact some of the clothing choices are actually cheaper than those presented in the original issue, despite 30 years of nominal inflation. The main section has entire outfits for around ¥20,000, which would have only bought you the left shoe of an Italian pair thirty years earlier. Tiffany & Co. makes an appearance but it’s jewelry for daily wear — not a single suit you’re likely to only put on once every few weeks.

CanCam also ceased its over-reliance on Western associations to create value and meaning. Although the typical CanCam-like magazine tends to use Tokyo’s more Western looking backgrounds for photoshoots, this particular 30th anniversary issue puts the models in intentionally Japanese places — a sento bath house, the downtown Asakusa neighborhood. They do visit Northern Europe as part of a Tintin advertorial, but the girls have been relieved of the impossible mission that everyone in Japan needs to suddenly become American.

Ultimately CanCam has given up being a newsletter for a specific social class in Japan, but instead, a highly welcoming consumer lifestyle that anyone can join. The issue’s front pages do the neat trick of dressing up idols from different genres, such as Momoiro Clover Z and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, into the CanCam style. The girls, despite their usual personas, look utterly plausible as mini-Ebichans, thus emphasizing the degree to which anyone can arbitrarily choose to buy into the style. There are no barriers to entry.

As a trade off, however, the magazine had to completely drop all reference to wider society. The clothing is suddenly an end to itself, rather than specific tools to fit with certain times, places, and occasions in a social calendar. Perhaps there is greater economic incentive to turning a magazine into a shopping catalog rather than a manners manual, but this also reflects the degree to which all girls in Japan now can find their styles on a magazine rack and their clothing in a major shopping complex. When everyone is invited to the consumer market and aspirations towards old wealth are over, explicit elite codewords and narratives get in the way and must be removed.

This is fine, of course. But one worrying thing is that the de-emphasis of “occasion” seems to also have removed the men from the magazine. CanCam in 1982 is full of guys in Ivy style, loitering around at some parent-funded disco party. In the modern CanCam, however, men almost never appear. The January 2012 issue does have a “Xmas date” section but you barely see the men. Christmas feels like complete obligation: Oh that day every year where I have to go out with my boyfriend. (Interesting the men look like members of EXILE rather than A students.) Meanwhile there are triumphant images of a flamboyant “kirakira” party scene and a year-end bonenkai that feature no men at all. The CanCam world has become almost exclusively homosocial — perhaps another influence from the yankii-fication of gyaru culture.

During the 2005 Ebi-chan — the peak of Japan’s second wave nouveau riche culture — CanCam did promise its readers that they could meet a doctor if they only wore the right shade of peach. But when no one ended up meeting doctors or tie-less entrepreneurs who would carry them over the threshold of Roppongi Hills Residence, that particular dream imploded. Hence came the rise of magazines ViVi and Sweet — style for girls who want to impress other girls. CanCam now reflects this slightly depressing sexless present, and maybe it has to. Japan’s lack of children stems from a lack of marriage which stems from falling salaries and job prospects for young men. The idea of over-promising an easy path to marriage with affluent men has become a cruel hoax. So the editors dropped the whole “men” thing and now celebrate those years when young women can be young women. “Come on, join us!” — just don’t expect to meet any guys.

Previously on Néomarxisme / Néojaponisme:
• 2008: Ebi-chan Graduates (12/2/08) – essay about the departure of Ebihara Yuri from CanCam
• Super Attractive Japan (9/19/07) – translation of essay on the meaning of Ebihara’s popularity
• CanCam: Moteko vs. Busuko (11/13/07) – CanCam‘s guide to perfect behavior
• Néomarxisme Archive: I Know What Boys Like (08/29/06) – explanation to the Ebi-chan phenomenon
• Néomarxisme Archive: I Can CanCam (05/29/05) – an introduction to the magazine

Over the last six months, there has been a precipitous increase in the number of young Japanese women wearing giant, thick-rimmed glasses with no lenses. These are somewhere between your garden-variety, Woody Allen ironic hipster glasses and toy spectacles worn by kindergartners in school plays. Just to make sure you understand what’s going on here, let me repeat: These glasses do not have fake lenses, they have no lenses. You can see them on women here and here although I observe them normally in the gyaru variety seen here and here (scroll down for myriad examples).

The lens-less frames are apparently an Asia-wide trend, and I have been in a few Twitter spats with people assuring me that everything must have started in Taiwan or Korea. I personally am fine with a theoretical non-Japanese origin for Asian fashion trends, but I remain skeptical. Young Japanese women have basically zero opportunity to get information from the Taiwanese or Korean fashion media nor even see many images of Taiwanese or Korean women beyond K-Pop idols. (And at least in the post-war period, the Japanese have never really considered Taiwanese and Korean women to be style icons in any institutionalized way.) Meanwhile both Koreans and Taiwanese are avid readers of Japanese media (a few Japanese magazines are republished in Chinese), and based on this alone, I would guess the trend started in Japan and spread out from there.

But to make sure, I went back and looked at photos from my MEKAS. trend-spotting days, and the earliest visual record I have of these fake glasses is in late 2007, worn by an incredibly colorful CUTiE-esque shop staff girl at a party (click on the Photo Gallery icon). The article’s main conjecture — that Harajuku cutie style and hardcore Shibuya gyaru style were starting to blend — has held up to be relatively accurate, and over the last few years, we have seen a lot of trend overlap between these once rival subcultures. The giant lens-less glasses definitely look more like a prop from the crazy Harajuku wardrobe, and I assume that they drifted slowly over to mainstream Shibuya style, likely through the magazine PopSister, which is solely dedicated to building a bridge between the two adjacent Tokyo neighborhoods.

Even Japanese fashion insiders, however, have been stunned these women’s bold rejection of cures for myopia. One of my favorite Japanese fashion bloggers Dale at Elastic did a piece last October about his “culture shock” at seeing gyaru mag Jelly state “It’s common sense to take the lenses out of your fake glasses.” Jelly claims two reasons for this practice. First, lenses tend to smash against gyaru’s enormous fake eyelashes. Second, the reflection from the actual glass in the frames ruins photographs. This may sound familiar: The editors’ logic is explained identically in the Michael Jackson video for “Bad,” where the goofy guy in Wesley Snipes’ gang says that his giant fashion glasses have no lenses because he won’t have to worry about the reflection from the flash when paparazzi snaps him. Needless to say, the guy’s explanation does not feel particularly convincing — at least to Michael Jackson’s character “Daryl.”

Whatever the exact origin, these lens-less glasses are interesting in that they illustrate a core principle to Japanese women’s style: Fashion in Japan is explicitly costume. We’ve read enough FRUiTS over the years to know this to be true in the deep backstreets of Harajuku, where the history of fashion signifiers frolic and intermingle in a mostly meaningless lysergic whirlpool of color and pattern. Yet even with the gyaru — who wear a uniform of sorts based in working class delinquent subculture — everything about the style is allowed to be obvious play as long as the adherents use approved symbols (leopard print, heavy makeup, dyed hair, general gaudiness). Extreme costume, rather than natural aspect of their daily lives, marks the affiliation.

Compare this to the implicit rules of Western fashionistas, where clothing, outfits, and accessories must all be worn with plausible deniability. If someone were to comment, “I like that dress,” the fashionable individual must reply, “Oh this? This is my mom’s. I found it in the attic.” No matter how immaculately coordinated the wardrobe, the trendy wearer must make it sound like the entire thing was lying on her floor when she woke up and her random and lazy assembly of garments that day just happened to all work out for the best. The fundamental philosophy here is that (1) the individual is naturally blessed with excellent taste and that (2) the individual is not trying to look fashionable because trying to look fashionable is not cool.

For these very reasons, lensless glasses don’t work in the Western cultural milieu. Giant hipster glasses with lenses can be explained away under a variety of reasons: medical need, hand-me-downs from parents, “the glasses I wore when I was thirteen,” “I found them in a living room drawer under my dad’s college ribbons,” economic expediency, etc. Giant hipster glasses with no lenses are so clearly beyond the pale, so clearly for costume that no excuse would sound remotely plausible. The wearer absolutely, positively woke up that morning and said, today I will wear a pair of giant glasses with no lenses to be fashionable because I am trying to be fashionable.

This is, of course, completely a fine statement for gyaru because the entire point of getting dressed in the morning is playful allegiance to a certain subculture and peer group. And it’s fine for zany Harajuku girls because their entire concept of fashion is “wearing the most insane things possible before taking on the dull responsibilities of adulthood.” More importantly, Japanese society has not been affected by the “cool” concept: the slightly poisonous value set where effort itself is suspect. The primary way to succeed in Japan is to try very hard, and the secondary way is to look like you are trying very hard. Allegiance in Japan requires effort. Affectation is a dirty word in English, but the idea of going the extra mile in fashion — perhaps through glasses with no lenses — is a perfectly correct move for the Japanese subcultural woman.

The following essay originally appeared as the June 22, 2011 entry on fashion consultant Kojima Kensuke’s personal blog “Professor Kojima Kensuke’s All-You-Can-Say.” We have published this translation without the author’s express permission as means to transmit leading Japanese opinions into English for a broader global dialogue.

I Can’t See Shibuya

The Saison Group — which led Shibuya culture in the 1970s and 1980s — no longer exists, and its remaining parts Seibu Department Store and PARCO lack the momentum they once had. The decline of Shibuya PARCO has hurt the entire Koen-doori (Park Street) area and killed off Jinnan Hill’s sprawl of select shops. Shibuya 109 was leading the neighborhood for a while, but even 109 has now seen its influence wane with the rise of fast fashion. It seems like Shibuya’s main avenue has shifted over to Inokashira-doori where all the foreign specialty brands are lined up.

Next Spring, the East Exit of Shibuya Station (in the remains of the Tokyu Bunka Kaikan) will see the opening of multi-purpose complex Shibuya Hikarie. This skyscraper will contain offices and a concert hall for musicals, and Tokyu Department Store will be in charge of the commercial space in the bottom floors. There’s a lot of talk that Hikarie’s commercial facility will become a temporary location for Tokyu’s Toyoko branch while Shibuya Station is closed for renovation, or maybe Tokyu’s flagship atop the hill at Shoto will just relocate there. Whatever the case it’s going to be a tenant-based facility. Ten years from now, after Shibuya Station is rebuilt, I assume ecute and Lumine will also show up.

PARCO is planning a renovation and big comeback, but I don’t think that’s going to bring Koen-doori back to life. And there’s no future for Shibuya’s Seibu Department Store as it stands today. There are always rumors that Tokyu’s flagship will close, and Tokyu Plaza — everyone’s already forgotten about it anyway. (Oh yeah and now that I think of it, there’s also that Shibuya Mark City in the back of the Inokashira Line.) So if nothing stops 109’s decline, Shibuya’s entire core charm will disappear. It’s unclear where Shibuya is headed as a shopping district.

While we are all waiting for the completion of Shibuya Station’s reconstruction and the new station-complex to open, the neighborhood’s shoppers will be lost to Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, or even Futago-Tamagawa and Ebisu. Shibuya is likely to decline rapidly. I, like always, have a hard time suggesting the best areas in Shibuya where companies should place stores. The completely uncoordinated plans of JR, Tokyu, PARCO, and Seibu mean that any revitalization will move at a sluggish pace. Shibuya is almost like a microcosm of contemporary Japan itself.

Tokyo tailoring legend Namiki Yuzo passed away on May 12. Although never a major presence in Japan’s fashion world nor well-known in the broader culture, his shop Yofuku no Namiki (洋服の並木) in Umegaoka was renowned in music and showbiz circles for being the place where young punk, mod, and rock bands (and comedians) could make eccentric, matching suits to wear on stage. In his lifetime, he claimed to have made over 10,000 suits, and one of these appears to have been made entirely from a Union Jack.

While custom tailors in the West have become the exclusive privilege of the upper classes, Japan still enjoys a strong culture of affordable local suitmakers. In the early 20th century, virtually all Japanese suits were tailor made, with less affluent men wearing the same suit every day. When the fabric started to show an embarrassing level of wear, you would take it back to the tailor who would turn it inside-out and sew it back together again. In this tailor-driven culture, off-the-rack suits were unthinkable, and attitudes only slowly started to change in the late 1960s with the development of national fashion brands.

Japanese men today mostly wear off-the-rack suits from big box stores like Aoyama and Aoki, yet Tokyo neighborhoods are still littered with old-school local tailors. The department stores also remain bastions of custom suiting. Isetan, for example, has an entire section for complete custom tailoring in the ¥300,000+ range and then on a different floor a small selection of pattern-orders available for around ¥120,000 from the city’s top young tailors like Caid and Tailor&Cutter. There are even cheap made-to-measure chains like F-One where suits can run as low as ¥19,800.

Meanwhile Yofuku no Namiki offered custom suits of virtually any historical style — tight ’60s British mod three-buttons, long-coated Edwardian Teds’ get-ups, zoot-suits, 1970s monstrosities with giant lapels — starting at a mere ¥39,900. (Examples of his work can be seen here.) Everything about Namiki’s store was different from his contemporaries. Most suit tailors fill their windows with alluring bolts of wool but Yofuku no Namiki’s glass porch doors are plastered randomly with faded color photo copies of bands he had clothed. The store’s interior could be most charitably described as a mini-warehouse of deadstock fabrics chaotically stacked up against each other. Yellowing copies of Men’s Club sat on the ground to be picked up by customers as style guides.

Customers who emailed in advance got 5% off the order. Namiki himself — a gray-haired man in glasses with only the slightest hint of past subcultural affiliations — would personally take your order, do the measurements, and give you gruff advice on the stranger parts of your requests.

I first went to Namiki upon my move to Tokyo in 2003. Back in New York, I had sadly blown hard-earn savings on a full-order, Modernist navy suit, but the very conventional tailors completely ignored my request for “stovepipe” pants and snug shoulders. I hoped to redeem my failed investment by taking it to Namiki. He instantly recognized the problem, asked me, “You’re not planning on gaining any weight are you?” and then for ¥10,000 slimmed the pants and made the jacket actually look like it belonged to me. I returned a year later to make a black blazer with white piping much like the one from The Prisoner. Later he made me a standard chalk-stripe suit in winter wool, and later, a fancy shawl-collar tuxedo. Certainly when compared to Japan’s upper echelon of master tailors, Namiki was not known for his craftsmanship. At the price you paid, you put up with weird conventions in Namiki’s work: costume-grade fabrics, extreme shoulder padding, a demand to write a word of your choosing inside of the jacket. But the store offered an incredible dream: you could make anything your heart desired for less than ¥40,000.

Yofuku no Namiki was always one of my absolute favorite places in Tokyo in that it represents the continuation of an incredibly specific subcultural service that has gone extinct nearly everywhere else in the world. For this reason, I included Namiki in CNNGo’s 50 reasons why Tokyo is the greatest city in the world, just between the cyberpunk Shuto-ko expressway and the lysergic Reversible Destiny Lofts. Tokyo’s greatest asset is its thousands of obsessive and idiosyncratic businessmen who eschew all capitalist logic and common sense to run narrow-focused pursuits that would instantly disappear in more rational cities. Namiki was the only one in town who centered his entire suiting business around 20-somethings in bands — with the side business of suiting them for weddings once they “grew up” — and it worked! Even with Namiki’s sudden death, the shop has announced it will stay open, and they no doubt will have hundreds of orders to fill in the next few years. So there is still a chance, at least for the moment, to make yourself a high-buttoning, double-breasted suit that looks exactly like the Saturday night duds of Brian Jones or the lunch time styles of the “Noonday Underground.”

In Summer 2000 I came back to Tokyo to research the popular Ura-Harajuku street fashion brand A Bathing Ape for my senior thesis. My makeshift mentor was an editor of Hot Dog Press — a men’s lifestyle magazine from Kodansha that ceased publication in 2003 — who had covered the Fujiwara Hiroshi family of brands over the years.

One day he drew a triangle on a piece of paper with the x-axis being number of consumers and the y-axis being brand cachet. He explained, “At the top point here are very cool but low-selling brands. At the bottom of the triangle are all the mass market brands with huge sales but no cachet. The secret to A Bathing Ape and the Ura-Harajuku brands is that they keep themselves right in the middle of the triangle and don’t let themselves slip down. They have a healthy number of consumers but they make sure to never go all the way to the bottom.”

This was the general understanding about A Bathing Ape’s success: They would always use specific marketing techniques to appear underground even when selling to millions of young Japanese across the country. I understood this “brand cachet über alles” strategy to be so integral to their success that I ended my thesis with the prediction, “Once the Ura-Harajuku cultural complex disintegrates, Ape may lose its subcultural base and will be subject to the normal forces of fad market structures. [Founder] Nigo will probably stop producing Ape before this point in order to save the brand’s reputation.”

How wrong I was.

Within a year of writing that overly-confident forecast of Nigo’s future fate, the brand embarked on an extremely conspicuous tie-up campaign with soda maker Pepsi. Bape then quickly dropped all of its previously-important artificial brand barriers to mass market appeal and tried to win over anybody and everybody. When I moved back to Japan in 2003, things looked pretty grim for A Bathing Ape: The Tokyo stores were empty during weekdays, and the only consumers seemed to be the high school kids who came into the big city on weekends.

The brand hit their second wind, however, when Nigo met Pharrell Williams, and for about three years in the mid-2000s, Bape became one of the hottest brands on earth — this time framed as an integral part of the American hip hop scene. Nigo made one of the least plausible yet most accepted visual transformations in recent history, dropping the Cornelius-lookalike routine to slot in gold teeth and wayward baseball caps (or worse, a skull cap).

Despite this international expansion, Bape’s days at the top of the Japanese brand hierarchy were long over. The Ape head had become too ubiquitous, and the brand was spread way too thin. When the U.S. bubble for Bape burst around 2008, parent company Nowhere started heading towards serious financial insolvency. Now we have learned that Nowhere — A Bathing Ape’s parent company — had been suffering massive losses. The Wall Street Journal states that fiscal year 2009 ended with ¥267.4 million and 2010 ended with ¥119 million in the red. Nowhere also has debt in the range of ¥2.6 billion.

In 2001, we believed that A Bathing Ape had mastered the dynamics of the brand life-cycle pyramid so that it would never fall prey to the dangers of becoming too mass market and seeing their consumer base quickly dry up. But with the changes in 2002, the brand went on an expansion spree that could rival Uniqlo. There were Busy Work Shops in every single major and minor regional city from Kyushu to Hokkaido despite declining demand. At some point Nigo established a Bape-themed hair salon, a restaurant, an art gallery, shops for his secondary lines like Bape Kids and Baby Milo. Meanwhile they were so desperate for consumers that Nigo stopped any sort of passing attempt to be cool. Most famously, Nigo made $15 yellow Ape-head T-shirts for Nippon Television’s charity telethon 24 Hour TV in 2007, which could often be seen on the backs of housewives and elementary school kids.

In 2009 Nigo — seemingly bored with his crumbling empire — stepped down as CEO of his own company, giving the reigns to an ex-World executive. (Perhaps not so coincidentally World also bought up former Ura-Harajuku brand Real Mad Hectic.) Nigo lately has been working on not particularly significant side projects such as “Human Made” and suit brand “Mr.Bathing Ape.” Meanwhile things were not looking good for Nowhere post-Nigo: the L.A. store closed in 2010.

Bape did, however, have one remaining ace in the pocket: massive support from consumers in Greater China especially Hong Kong and Taiwan. Hong Kong in particular had always been attracted to the Fujiwara Hiroshi empire of Japanese street brands, and since 1999, HKers had been intimately familiar with A Bathing Ape. That year Nigo teamed up with locals Eric Kot and Jan Lamb to open an Ape boutique on the 17th floor of an office building. The result was the most draconian shopping policy in Ape history. Potential shoppers had to apply to become Busy Work Shop members, which required a Hong Kong passport. This excluded all non-Hong Kong residents from using the shop. Moreover the applications would be sent to Japan for ultimate approval. Once customers were approved as members, they would have to make an appointment before being able to enter the store — no casual walk-ins allowed. The image, however strict, matched perfectly with the super-exclusivity of the original Japanese strategy.

Although the first Busy Work Shop Hong Kong was never a huge phenomenon in itself, the brand’s sudden presence in the Chinese language media put A Bathing Ape in the wider Asian pantheon of hot labels. The Baby Milo shirts in particular were a huge sensation in Hong Kong, making the evening news as a noteworthy youth trend. While Japanese lost interest, the rise of a new youth consumer in East Asia balanced things out for brands. Anecdotally-speaking, most shoppers I have seen inside or near A Bathing Ape in Harajuku have appeared to be from Greater China. Nigo has also directly targeted fans in these locations with a Taipei store in 2005 and an enormous new store in Hong Kong in 2006. Beijing and Shanghai opened in 2010.

So if Nigo’s 18-year old pet ape is being primarily consumed by the Chinese in its old age, it only makes sense that a Hong Kong based company — I.T Ltd. — would buy out the whole thing (including the debt). The depressing detail was the 90% equity purchase only cost the acquirers $2.8 million. Nigo has easily put more than that in his art, toy, and vintage LV trunk collection alone. This sell off of A Bathing Ape is an incredibly dramatic flame out for a company that defined the potential of Japanese independent brands to go abroad and changed the face of global fashion. It’s better than bankruptcy but not exactly a feel good denouement to an otherwise remarkable success story.

But just as Japanese apparel companies like Onward and Renown bought up heritage Anglo brands like J. Press and Aquascutum in the ’80s and ’90s, Chinese companies are likely to be the future bulk purchasers of Japanese brands. The Japanese fashion ecosystem relies more and more on the flow of East Asian cash, and the desperate fire sale of Nowhere is likely the opening paragraph to an entirely new chapter of Japanese cultural history.