In Part Two of our four-part series on the famed Japanese female subculture, we look at how kogyaru style took over Japan in the mid-1990s. Before they became associated with their own shopping complexes and magazines, however, the kogyaru first rose to fame through an unfair association with the national moral panic over schoolgirl prostitution.

The Peak of the Kogyaru: 1993-1998

At the end of our last installment, the gyaru movement had spontaneously erupted in Shibuya — but in small numbers. These delinquent private high-school girls with light brown hair, tanned skin, and sexualized uniforms became known as kogyaru in certain circles, but they were still unknown to most of their peers. PARCO’s 1995 anthology of Japanese street fashion Street Fashion 1945-1995, for example, mentions the term kogyaru only in passing and labels a photo of typical kogyaru under the general heading “high school girl style.” Within the next five years, however, the kogyaru’s style innovations would become deeply embedded within high school girl culture and become the default style for all trendy teens across Japan.

Since the days of the Taiyo-zoku and Roppongi-zoku of the 1950s, upper-class delinquent subcultures have spread their influence to the middle classes through the mass media. And in most of these cases, the media first reports on the new culture as a moral panic. The kogyaru followed this same pattern, becoming a personification of post-Bubble anxiety towards the declining national character. Social critics widely denounced the kogyaru for the soulless materialism at the heart of their supposed practice of enjo kōsai (“compensated dating”). Yet at the same time, the kogyaru became the attention of marketers as they took up the reigns of consumer culture while the rest of the country’s economic fears resulted in reduced spending. The end result of all the attention was that high school girls ruled Japanese pop culture by the end of the 1990s, and all high school girls became more or less kogyaru.

From fantasy to moral panic

Japan’s quite expansive selection of shūkanshi weekly men’s magazines, such as SPA!, Weekly Playboy, and Friday, dedicate dozens of pages each week on celebrity gossip, glossy bikini and topless photos, reviews of sex services, and phony stories of naughty housewives. They do not, generally, take much interest in the latest fashion trends for young women.

Yet ironically it was these very magazines that first noticed the kogyaru phenomenon and arguably standardized the subculture’s name as “kogyaru.” Sociologist Namba Koji found what may be the earliest direct mention of the subculture in SPA! from June 1993 in an article called “The Temptation of Kogyaru”「コギャルの誘惑」. The article’s writer breathlessly tells his readers about the kogyaru clan and how they have become his new sexual infatuation. The kogyaru, he describes, are “14 to 18” in age and the “little sisters of Juliana’s girls” (Namba 2006). Rival magazine Friday also started to run similar articles at this time, and by the end of 1993, kogyaru would become a standard topic for the entire men’s magazine industry. This wasn’t Time or The New Yorker doing serious trend pieces and psychological examinations of kogyaru. The shūkanshi intended their reportage as titillation. They had found a brand new sexual object for a new decade — diminutive party girls with short skirts and bare legs in golden brown — and would make the most of it.

The kogyaru emerged just as Japanese men grew bored with the 1980s’ obsession over female college students — the so-called “joshi daisei” boom. Beyond the kogyaru, men’s media were already lowering their gaze to secondary education. The March 24, 1993 issue of Takarajima, for example, ran an article about the purchasing of sexual favors from high school girls, complete with a price guide (Namba 2006). The overall message to male readers was that the new generation of teenage girls had — very conveniently — embraced consumerism and materialism so fully that they no longer felt qualms about selling their own bodies. Further proof of this arrived in a new type of sex shop popping up around Tokyo called burusera, which specialized in schoolgirls’ used burumā, sailor suit uniforms, underwear, and even bodily fluids. Towards the end of 1993, the police started to crack down on these stores and even rounded up hundreds of girls in the supply chain. The shops did not disappear, however, and the news reports of the police busts had the unintended effect of spreading word to schoolgirls that their old clothing and waste products could fetch high prices on the open market.

This was also an era when a new suite of communication technologies provided greater independence to young women — playing right into many of the men’s magazine fantasies. Tokyo high school girls in the early 1990s, especially those in kogyaru circles, started carrying around primitive pagers called pokeberu (“pocket bell”) to send numerical messages to friends. Pager usage went from 1.1% of high school girls in 1993 to 48.8% in just four years (Namba 2006). At the same time young women were calling into terekura “telephone clubs” in greater numbers. Terekura are physical spaces, usually around train station hubs, where men pay to connect into party lines that young women have also called into. Based on anecdotal reports, girls of this era mostly called to prank the guys with ridiculous conversations and to set up fake dates for which they did not show up. While girls may not have started using pokeberu and terekura primarily to set up paid liaisons with older men, both services greatly facilitated these kinds of transactions. The end result was that men could now easily contact younger women still living at home, going easily around the parental supervision that would have stopped this kind of interaction in the past. And with kogyaru becoming well known for their pokeberu adoption — an episode of 1993 TV Asahi late-night show M10 titled “The Kogyaru Night” had the provocative subtitle “pokeberu and bare legs” (Namba 2006) — the new subculture became the face of loosening schoolgirl morals.

By the mid-1990s, these threads crystallized into the greatest moral panic of the entire decade — enjo kōsai. The term, meaning technically “compensated companionship,” became a widely-used euphemism for teenage prostitution and a buzz word of the era. Former egg editor Yonehara Yasumasa claims that enjo kōsai began as a mischievous but relatively innocent way of playing pranks on middle-aged men. Girls would accept ¥10,000 to go on a three-minute “date” with an older salaryman — and then leave promptly after three minutes in the restaurant. SPA! and Friday, however, distorted the truth in their faux reportage to play into the aforementioned narrative that kogyaru were spearheading a new generation with no qualms towards selling themselves. Soon the mass media started a full-fledged freak out over enjo kōsai, giving the impression that high school girls from all corners of life — especially upper middle class ones — were rushing to Shibuya and having sex with men in karaoke boxes just to buy luxury goods.

This unfortunately became a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more the media reported on the shocking phenomenon, the more that the small percentage of girls who were looking to sell themselves ended up flocking to the streets of Shibuya and finding buyers. There is no doubt that many schoolgirls did prostitute themselves in this era, but it remains unclear today how widespread the phenomenon was. There certainly had been changes in sexual mores among youth during the era; girls who had lost their virginity by the end of high school went from 12.2% in 1984 to 34% in 1996 (Namba 2006). At the time sociologist Miyadai Shinji made news with his estimation that 8% of all schoolgirls were involved in the sex trade (Reitman/WSJ). On the other hand, police in 1995 only picked up 5,481 girls under 18 for prostitution — a 38% increase from 1993, but not exactly “every other girl” in a country of millions (Reitman/WSJ). A 1996 survey found that 4% of all junior high school girls had taken money for some sort of “date” but that does not reveal how many of those ended in sexual transaction (Kristof/NY Times).

Nevertheless enjo kōsai became the defining issue of the era. Academic David Leheny later wrote “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.” Conservative moralists used the trend as evidence that society had become overly materialistic and that society was decaying rapidly. On the opposite side, radical voices and feminists saw the young women as cleverly negotiating their own position in a male patriarchal world. Sociologist Miyadai Shinji told The Guardian in 1996, “[Young women] know that they’ll be discriminated against in the workplace, but also that they are desired. So they try to take advantage of that demand. The adult male symbolises in their eyes a hypocritical society that is there to be manipulated” (Pons). Writer Murakami Ryu likened enjo kōsai to revolutionary action: “Unconsciously, these high school girls are involved in a kind of movement. To use a bit of hyperbole, they’re spearheading a movement whose message is, ‘Do you really think everything is as it should be in Japan? Don’t be so complacent, all of you.’” (Japan Echo).

So by the mid-1990s, Japanese male sexual culture became obsessed with high school girls, the mass media became obsessed with schoolgirl immorality, and right in the middle of this, a brand new sexually-styled delinquent subculture had shown up in Shibuya. Kogyaru were “wild and sexy” before the enjo kosai moral panic, but the media swell made them the obvious image when society talked about the pliant and immoral young woman indulging in paid sexual adventures. Writer Kuronuma Katsushi’s 1996 work Enjo Kōsai of course had a girl with loose socks, tan legs, and penny loafers on the cover.

Yet it is becoming clearer now that despite twenty years of stereotypes, the kogyaru were not the core practitioners of enjo kōsai. Famed sexual health doctor Akaeda Tsuneo, who has spent his years giving free consultations to teen girls in Tokyo, explained to Takarajima in February 2008 that “The girls called gyaru had too much pride and weren’t the ones doing enjo kōsai” (Kurihara). Yes, the kogyaru had sex with their boyfriends but they weren’t the primary ones having sex with older men for money. Akaeda identified the girls who engaged in enjo kōsai as lonely outsiders (ハズレ者).

The gyaru’s style, attitude, and Louis Vuitton bags, however, made them fit the stereotype, and they faced both the wrath of moral authorities as well as the constant advances of older men in the streets. A former kogyaru interviewed on website Tokyo Damage Report noted that “You’d get old guys who would say, ‘How much for sex?’ Some would hint, some would just start negotiating without any pre-amble. It’s the damn media — they give people the idea we’re down for whatever. [...] If you had blond hair and loose socks, everyone looked at you like you were a teenage prostitute.”

This battle against the media and adults ended up changing the gyaru subculture in many ways. The aforementioned Yonehara Yasumasa believes that the kogyaru’s constant harassment from older men is what led to the development of their famously gruff and masculine speech. They turned inward — sexy to their own group, but angry and intimidating to outsiders. And as we will see in the next installment, this move away from open sexuality focused the gyaru on impressing fellow subculture members with extreme dress rather than wearing “cute” things to attract boys.

While the enjo kōsai controversy certainly tarred the gyaru subculture for years to come, at least by the mid-1990s, every single person in Japan had heard of it.

Kogyaru as fashion market

While the country debated the morality of schoolgirls, the schoolgirls themselves were busy shuffling into Shibuya and taking up influence from the kogyaru’s approach to dress. The Shibuya style may have been simple to replicate — chapatsu light brown hair, slight tan, hiked up school girl uniform, loose socks — but the original subculture also depended upon a certain social position and attitude. Since the kogyaru descended from an actual group of people and not the direction of the fashion industry, they were not instantly imitable.

So how would a new kogyaru recruit figure out how to properly dress in the style? When the kogyaru reached mass consciousness in the mid-1990s, there were still no dedicated “gyaru” magazines that worked with “gyaru” brands to show a step-by-step guide on becoming a “gyaru.”

There was, however, a shopping complex with increasing centrality to the subculture. In the early 1990s, both kogyaru and their older paragyaru-type tanned party-girl big sisters had patronized a store called Me Jane in a generally-ignored fashion building called Shibuya 109. Known later in gyaru circles as just “maru-kyu,” Shibuya 109 opened in 1979 but never achieved any level of popularity in its first decade. Fashion business analyst Kawashima Yoko described its early days as “Like Marui, but worse.” With Me Jane, however, the building finally started to attract a dedicated clientele. Soon kogyaru moved beyond Me Jane and started hanging out next door in a clothing store Love Boat and in the shoe brand ESPERANZA (Kawashima 178). The brands all focused on a sexy, summery style, with shirts, for example, that showed off the belly button.

Shibuya 109’s owner Tokyu noticed this sudden interest in their flailing complex and decided to do a “renewal” of the building in the mid-1990s, asking more stores of the kogyaru fashion variety to become tenants. This turned 109 into the gyaru shopping mecca we know today. As kogyaru wannabees poured into Shibuya, they made a beeline to 109 and essentially understood any store in the building as selling “gyaru” clothing. In this period, Me Jane saw double digit growth every year, ultimately making ¥700 million a year in Shibuya alone (Namba 2006).

Besides the financial success, the establishment of 109 as a legitimate location for kogyaru style meant that the brands inside were now pumping out thousands of new garments that could be used to build a “kogyaru” outfit. No longer did girls need the uniform — they could wear mid-riffs from Me Jane and ESPERANZA platform sandals. Hardcore adherents wore “flare mini-skirts from surfer brand Alba Rosa, bustiers, blue mascara and pink rouge” along with the standard chapatsu and salon tan (Okamoto quoted in Namba 2006). In expanding the look, the kogyaru unwittingly opened up their growing subculture to girls who were not in the proper Tokyo social status to participate before. Anyone who shopped at Shibuya 109 could now potentially become a kogyaru, making the style open to non-Tokyo girls and the middle classes.

Even now Shibuya 109 is the main fashion instigator for gyaru style. One of the reasons for the complex’s enduring success has been the brands’ innovation in retailing methods, namely creating strong relations between customer and shop clerk. In the late-1990s, many of the original kogyaru started to get jobs at 109 shops, and they became authoritative figures of the movement. Referred to as “super charisma clerks” (スーパーカリスマ店員), these 20-something workers took their responsibilities far beyond mere in-store transactions and acted as spokespeople in the media for their brands. The word “charisma” here does not necessarily indicate “charm” like its English root; it denotes something like “authoritative power,” which in the retail context means the ability to influence the purchase decisions of fans and followers. Young kogyaru would come into the stores, ask shopping advice of the super charisma clerks as big sisters, and then buy whatever was recommended to them. The clerks then became featured in magazines as the brand spokespeople, leading to even more fans from across the country coming to 109 to meet them and buy whatever they recommended. The stores smartly knew that the clerks were important business assets and listened to them for tips on merchandising and marketing — leading to a bottom-up type of business that exists to this day. The 109 brands are known to make quick product changes based on the gyaru’s preferences.

So while Shibuya 109 marked the mediation and commercialization of the once organic kogyaru style, the retail structure helped keep the actual girls in control of setting trends — rather than big brands and magazine editors.

Gyaru culture goes mainstream: Amuro Namie, purikura, and choberigu

In the second half of the 1990s, kogyaru style finally broke into the mainstream. The look itself still carried delinquent overtones, and the girls dying their hair chestnut brown did so because of the act’s rebellious nature. Other parts of kogyaru style, however, became less controversial decisions in the consumer space and dominated the pop culture of the time.

Amuro Namie is a perfect example of “safe” gyaru culture — a kogyaru-like singer who became the most popular female artist of the 1990s before the rise of Utada Hikaru. The exotic looking, Okinawan Amuro had spent the early years of the decade as the leader of an unsuccessful singing-dancing unit called The Super Monkeys, but after joining burgeoning Eurobeat-influenced J-Pop label Avex Trax and working with super producer Komuro Tetsuya in 1995, Amuro achieved one of the greatest strings of hit singles in Japanese music history. The 1990s already saw incredible growth of the Japanese music market itself, and Amuro was J-Pop’s quintessential star of this era.

Although Amuro was not an actual kogyaru nor ever made any direct associations with the Shibuya movement, Amuro became the first gyaru icon in broader mainstream culture. Her hair and skin color appeared to be an almost natural version of the kogyaru’s artificial look. And whether accidental or stylist-planned, her outfits became increasingly linked to the trends coming out of Shibuya 109. This not only further moved hardcore gyaru style away from its schoolgirl roots but also created a new style tribe called amuraa (Amurers) who dressed in imitation of the star. The amuraa were lumped in with gyaru style and soon the two groups melded together. The July 1996 issue of egg, for example, dedicated two pages to “Get!! the Amurer,” canonizing the style as straight shag hair, a navel-showing top, and high boots.

Meanwhile another innovation from gyaru culture became ubiquitous in Japan: purikura. Short for “print club,” these were small instant photos that could be taken within booths set up in game arcades and malls. When the machines went on sale in July 1995, the original intention was for salesman (or female night workers) to be able to take small face photos and put them on their meishi business cards. A year later, however, they began to take off within high school girl culture, with girls taking photos and then trading them with others (Namba 2006). These later became an integral tool for gyaru expression, with pages and pages laid out in gyaru media such as egg. Certainly purikura were not limited to gyaru or Shibuya, but they were one of the first products where mass diffusion started with high school girls in Tokyo as the early adopters. The 1990s became the school girl era — for much wider swaths of society than just lecherous men. Marketers camped out in the Shibuya streets trying to get schoolgirl opinions of new products.

This idea of gyaru cultural leadership also spread to the linguistic realm. A new set of slang words, attributed to the kogyaru, became the talk of Japan. Specifically, the term cho beri gu — meaning “super good” — or cho beri ba — meaning “super bad” — became some of the most talked about new phrases in the mid-1990s. Gyaru certainly had started using the slightly unusual superlative cho (超) in regular speech, but the whole suite of cho words did not spread directly from the gyaru but went mainstream from use in TV shows such as Kimura Takuya drama Long Vacation. It is unclear whether kogyaru ever actually used these terms with any sort of frequency, but the words combined with the rise of Amuro and enjo kōsai to suggest that the kogyaru subculture went beyond a mere style fad and represented a greater shift in female values. The kogyaru looked, spoke, and acted differently than previous generations.

Namba (2006) uses these linguistic clues to place the peak of kogyaru style in 1996, as “Amurer”, “cho beri gu”, “enjo kōsai”, and “loose socks” all made the top ten in the annual Ryukogo Taisho slang awards (流行語大償). By the end of the 1990s, the original kogyaru subculture of delinquent private school Tokyoites suddenly reached almost every teenage girl in Japan — whether in style or language.

The Birth of egg and the Gyaru Media

Just as kogyaru style started to mix with the mainstream, more and more girls became attracted to the core gyaru subculture situated in Shibuya. But just like with any great influx into an established small culture, the original class purity of kogyaru style became diluted as time went on. The new kogyaru masses were mostly middle-class — perhaps from private schools but not necessarily from the most affluent families in Tokyo. Younger and younger girls also started wearing the kogyaru style, leading to a new term mago-gyaru (grandchildren gals) for middle schoolers. More importantly, teenage delinquents from outside of Tokyo, who in the past would have likely joined female-only motorcycle gangs called ladies, started showing up in Tokyo. (Tokyo Damage Report had an excellent interview with one from Shizuoka.) The end result was that gyaru had taken over Shibuya. They swarmed in huge numbers around Shibuya 109 and in the Center-gai area.

Despite the growing numbers, none of the Japanese publishers were rushing to create new magazine titles intentionally targeted towards kogyaru. Members of the subculture had always read the surfer girl mag Fine, but it wasn’t a “kogyaru” magazine per se. A few titles started showing up in the 1990s, including Tokyo Street News in 1994 and Cawaii! in 1995 but neither made any serious social impact nor became the official mouthpiece of the movement. (Cawaii! later became an important part of gyaru culture but early issues did not cover the more hardcore kogyaru).

The kogyaru finally got their own central media source, however, with the rise of egg. Founded in August 1995 and subtitled “Get Wild & Be Sexy,” egg began its life as a magazine for men interested in the not-so-wholesome 20-something party girls at clubs and on the streets of Shibuya. In its original incarnation, the magazine focused on new B-grade tarento, race queens in bathing suits, and party girl snaps, but was not particularly interested in kogyaru or the emerging new Shibuya high school style. Editor Yonehara Yasumasa, however, convinced the mag that the real “wild and sexy girls” were the kogyaru in Shibuya. Yonehara started running pages and pages of the kogyaru in a gritty documentary style — polaroids, home-shot photos, and later, purikura. The girls mugged, stuck out their tongues, mooned the camera, and generally showed themselves up to no good in trains and other public places. While guys may have gotten a kick out of the photos, the girls were clearly taking the shots for themselves. Although more streetwise and vulgar, the photos resembled the “girls photography” art movement spearheaded by Nagashima Yurie and Hiromix — giving both men and women the chance to gaze into the private space of teenage girls.

By 1997, Yonehara’s focus on the gyaru had taken over egg, and the editors decided to fully flip the magazine to being a female-focused title with its April 1997 issue. The June 1997 issue, for example, is pages upon pages of polaroids and reader-submitted photos with overlaid hand-drawn illustrations. The magazine retained some of its older attributes — how-to guides for less common sexual practices and lurid testimonials from girls about their own experiences. With egg making the transition, a host of other gyaru mags also came into existence — Heart Candy (Toen Shobo), Pretty Club (Core Magazine), Happie (Eiwa Shuppan), and Street Jam (Bauhaus). Namba (2006) notes that almost all of these publishers normally printed erotic titles. Despite the mainstreaming of gyaru style, no major publisher would touch the look with a stick — or at least believed it could build a mainstream publication that attracted top tier advertisers and brands.

In the five years since its emergence in Shibuya, the kogyaru style took on massive changes — a shift from a privileged to a mainstream audience, an expanding retail network, and with egg, a clubhouse newsletter. Yet viewing the kogyaru in egg from the late 1990s reveals that the style itself had not changed much. The standard look was still a private school uniform with Burberry scarf and loose socks. The Shibuya core adherents may have started to developed their own style and understood as increasingly charai — an adjective meaning cheap and superficial. Yet the kogyaru were not yet associated with the traditional working class yankii lifestyle. Kogyaru dated surfer-tanned urban guys in long hair who liked to go to dance clubs and wear V-neck sweaters — not ridiculous bikers in giant regents. Yankii types may have been moving to Shibuya to become gyaru but around 1998 there was still much class ambiguity about who the kogyaru were and were becoming.

With the low-culture egg as the main media and an increasing influx of delinquents from around Tokyo into Shibuya, however, the kogyaru look was primed to combine with the long-standing yankii cultural stream. This would happen at the very end of the decade with what we will look at next time — the intentionally shocking style called ganguro.

References:

Across Editorial Desk. Street Fashion 1945-1995. PARCO, 1995.

Kawai, Hayao. “The Message from Japan’s Schoolgirl Prostitutes.” Japan Echo. Vol. 24, No. 2, June 1997.

Kawashima, Yoko. Tokyo Fashion Buildings. Nihon Keizai Shimbun Shuppansha, 2007.

“Kogal Interview.” Tokyo Damage Report. March 19, 2009.

Kristof, Nicholas D. “Tokyo Journal; A Plain School Uniform as the Latest Aphrodisiac.” New York Times. April 2, 1997.

Kurihara, Masukazu. “25sai ni nattemo nukedasenai ‘moto enkōshojo’-tachi no kurayami.” Takarajima. February 2008.

Leheny, David. Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan. Cornell University Press, 2009.

Marx, W. David. “Interview with Yasumasa Yonehara” MEKAS. January 29, 2009.

Namba, Koji. “Concerning Youth Subcultures in the Postwar Era, Vol. 5: ‘Ko-gal’ and ‘Urahara-kei,’” Kwansei Gakuin University Sociology Department #100, March 2006.

Pons, Philippe. “Schoolgirls pander to the Lolita Fantasy.” The Guardian Weekly. Dec. 8, 1996

Reitman, Valerie. “Japan’s New Growth Industry: Schoolgirl Prostitution.” Wall Street Journal. October 2, 1996.

A four-part series on the famed Japanese female subculture and its the evolution from a summery look of rich delinquent high-schoolers to an extreme set of working class styles

Introduction

The Japanese understand their own history of street culture as a constant succession of youth “tribes” who dominate the landscape for a few years with a specific style and then disappear just as quickly as they arrived. The tribes were often useful as a human representation of the era’s zeitgeist — for example, the Futenzoku hippies in the late 1960s or the Bodicon girls of the Bubble era — but sometimes were not much more than historical quirks — e.g. the preppy Miyuki-zoku who only existed for a few short months in the Summer of 1964. Regardless, Japanese cultural taxonomy requires the tribes to quickly rise and fall as to make room for the next set.

With such expectations of ephemerality, what are we to make of the long-lived gyaru subculture? Starting in the early 1990s and hitting a new peak around 2010, gyaru have existed in one form or another for two decades. Although the style has changed dramatically multiple times and splintered into distinct factions, a few principles have remained stable: hair dyed anywhere between chestnut and deep blond, relatively sexy clothing, an embrace of youth, chronic shopping in Shibuya 109, and a generally “wild” attitude.

Many have seen long-term gyaru dominance as a symptom of a depressed Japanese economy’s inability to invent and push new styles. Looking closely at the actual changes in fashion and cosmetics, however, the gyaru of 2012 look almost nothing like the gyaru of 2000 let alone those of 1992. Gyaru, in other words, have not actually been a single tribe or subculture, but instead, something like a “style stream” — with each incarnation influencing the next but radically changing along the way. The gyaru look has shifted from the relatively natural kogyaru schoolgirls of 1995 to the shocking ganguro of 2000 to the koakuma glamorous blondes of 2008. While very different, they all understood themselves as “gyaru” and were understood in wider society as “gyaru” as well.

This ability to evolve with the times may be the gyaru movement’s core strength, but the transformations have not simply been a superficial shift in fashion. Most critically, the class composition of gyaru has changed over time. Gyaru style started as a delinquent look for rich girls at top Tokyo private schools, but ended up as the new face of yankii non-urban working-class delinquent style, blending seamlessly into preferred aesthetic of kyabajō “women of the night.” The gyaru thus provide a perfect case study to understand how style in Japan often trickles down from the affluent to the middle classes through the mass media and then is co-opted and re-conceptualized by the working classes.

This four-part series attempts to look at the origin of gyaru style, the nature and mechanisms of its style changes, and the shifting social context of each historical stage. And hopefully these essays will clear up a few of myths surrounding gyaru along the way.

The Origin of the Kogyaru: 1991-1993

There is no exact date or even year when the gyaru first appeared on the streets of Shibuya. Their arrival was both gradual and unexpected. As former egg editor Yonehara Yasumasa told me in 2008, “The gyaru totally came out of nowhere.” But sometime in the early 1990s the nation began to notice a swarm of high school girls with brown hair, short schoolgirl skirts, and slightly tanned skin clutching European luxury bags and wearing Burberry scarves. And eventually they were known widely under the name kogyaru (コギャル).

In the past, most youth fashion tribes found their look by following instructions from the media. The Shibuya gyaru, on the other hand, were virtually sui generis — the fashion style just bubbled up organically from a few sources. Indeed, kogyaru culture was the grand culmination of four prominent late 1980s trends: namely, “gal” party girl culture, Shibuya’s rise as a fashion and nightlife spot, chiimaa party event organizer gangs, and schoolgirl uniform pride. This piece will examine what each of these streams contributed to the formation of kogyaru culture.

The fun-loving gals

The word “gyaru” (ギャル) — a Japanese pronunciation of the English word “gal” — first entered the Japanese language in 1972 as a sub-brand of Wrangler jeans. After prominent mention in a 1979 Sawada Kenji song title, “gal” eventually came to designate young women who were highly socially active and relatively superficial (Namba 2006). Compared to the fussy, snobby ojōsama types from good families and always worrying about social protocol, the gal were easy-going and fun. In an 1989 survey uncovered by sociologist Namba Koji (2006), young women defined gals as “those who don’t care if their guy is from money or a good family; they go for trendy looks, clothing, behavior, and are cheerful.” In other words, gals were party girls.

In the 1980s, magazines like Gal’s Life, Carrot Gals, Popteen, Kids, and Elle Girl came to target and represent this gal sector, offering more salacious and realistic stories about teenage sex than one would find in upper middle-class consumerist lifestyle magazines like JJ, CanCam, and olive. While not explicitly based on yankii (i.e. non-urban, working class delinquent) aesthetics, the magazines did offer a more down-to-earth and inclusive view of Japanese teenagers that, unlike their more well-funded and prestigious rivals, did not constantly demand Japanese women reenact American and European lives. But when the Diet singled these magazines out for bad influence on youth in 1984, the “gal” became further stereotyped as sexually promiscuous, and the term took on generally negative connotations (Namba). Men’s magazines amplified this nuance by using gal to describe the young participants on the era’s sexually provocative TV shows All Night Fuji or Onyanko Club’s Yūyake Nyan Nyan.

As Japan entered the Bubble era, the term gal started to represent a specific consumer segment, mostly made of young office ladies (OLs). The gals were personified in the media as those wearing bodicon (“body conscious,” i.e. tight fitting) outfits and dancing on raised platforms at mega-disco Juliana’s. In 1993 journalist Yamane Kazuma wrote an entire book called The Structure of Gals that tried to explain and celebrate this new generation of women obsessed with the nouveau riche nightlife and wanton materialism. For most of society, however, the word “gal” became known as the party girls at discos, and from here we finally discover the direct link to modern day usage.

The term kogyaru — “ko” being either for “small” (小) or “child” (子) — is said to have started as jargon among bouncers to designate the high school girls who tried to sneak into clubs and look like their older peers. These “little gals” formed the core of the first modern gyaru movement, and even when the “ko” was dropped in later years, the term “gyaru” came to represent their descendants.

The rise of Shibuya as the fashion center

Shibuya is now famous as the birthplace and mecca of modern gyaru style, but the neighborhood was not always a breeding zone for Japanese fashion. As a commuter hub with ample options for entertainment and shopping, the area attracted lots of visitors throughout the post-war. Then when wealthy Baby Boomers began to construct new upper middle-class neighborhoods in Meguro, Setagaya-ku, and Suginami-ku on Tokyo’s West side, their teenage offspring gravitated towards Shibuya as the most convenient central urban location (Chimura). This influx solidified Shibuya as a hotspot for youth culture.

Harajuku had been the main youth fashion center for Tokyo since the 1970s, and from 1985 to 1988, national style centered around the “DC boom” for “designer and character” brands mostly located in the interconnected areas of Harajuku, Omotesando, and Aoyama. During this period, teens slavishly followed media advice from glossy fashion magazines, flocking to exclusive labels like Comme des Garçons and Y’s to buy highly-designed and avant-garde outfits.

The burgeoning generation of rich kids who hung out in Shibuya, however, spurned this designer-driven approach to fashion, preferring a laid-back preppy vibe. When the Harajuku fashion bubble collapsed in 1988 and the DC boom petered out, all eyes turned towards the emerging Shibuya style, which came to be known as shibukaji or “Shibuya Casual.” Suddenly every lifestyle magazine had forgotten the idea of high-concept fashion design and started singing the virtues of traditional basics like Polo Ralph Lauren navy blazers, Levi’s 501s, and loafers. The upscale Shibuya girls meanwhile carried Louis Vuitton and Chanel bags but in a casual and non-fussy way. The overall atmosphere was moneyed nonchalance — having the right, conservative brands but not looking like you actually paid attention to the fashion world. In the heady Bubble days of wealth accumulation and socially-condoned avarice, these wealthy kids convinced the nation’s young that they were the best style leaders around.

Soon, however, middle-class kids from across Japan became experts on shibukaji thanks to tutorials in magazines like Men’s Non•no or Hot Dog Press, and their influx into Shibuya brought organic changes to the look. The “American” influence quickly moved beyond classic East Coast staples and brought on ethnic, Native American, and West Coast influences as well. And with men, the style split into two camps — a kirekaji “clean” version, and a more rebellious look that mixed in silver jewelry, surfer influences, and a bit of Guns’n’Roses Sunset Strip edge. The latter became well-known as the signature look of “teamers” who started ruling over the neighborhood.

Teamers / Chiimaa

Starting in the late 1970s there had been a long-tradition of university clubs at top private schools holding intermural disco parties, often with the strong backing of the venues and even advertising sponsors (Arai 33). As Shibuya became the social destination for Tokyo youth in the late 1980s, elite college and high school students began to capitalize on the neighborhood’s popularity by throwing parties at Shibuya clubs. Events became branded as the latest party from regular “teams” of party throwers, and the kids in these groups became known as “teamers” — chiimaa, in Japanese. The team members generally came from affluent backgrounds but clearly had a delinquent streak as they were spending all their times organizing nearly-underground dance parties rather than hitting the books (Arai). When not party-organizing, they hung out in Center-gai — the main strip of Shibuya built up with fast food joints — or drove around in their cars roaming for girls.

All of this minor delinquency was generally tolerated until the chiimaa started finding themselves more and more involved in territorial clashes. The most violent members caused a series of notorious incidents from 1991 to 1992 that left a college student and a homeless man dead and put many others in the hospital. Law enforcement started to crackdown in response, and clubs became less lenient about underage party promoters. The entire chiimaa and Shibuya movement started to take on a highly negative reputation, and the parties themselves slid into oblivion.

The chiimaa were ultimately a temporary movement, now forgotten as a blip on the timeline of pop culture, but ironically, their girlfriends, who played little part in this male-dominated world, would be the ones with a lasting influence. The girls who grouped around chiimaa spent lots of time at tanning salons and baring their browned mid-riffs. They loved the style of Los Angeles and wore LA Gear sneakers. PARCO’s Across marketing guide ended up calling these girls paragyaru — gal who tried to maintain a “paradise” (i.e. beach-oriented) lifestyle all year round. The paragyaru were never a mainstream nor well-known subculture, but these they helped bubble up the surfer-girl elements that would come to mark kogyaru style (Namba 2006).

More importantly, the very first kogyaru were some of the younger girls in chiimaa circles. Former egg editor Yonehara describes the original kogyaru as “girls from Keio and other private high schools who hung out with the bad boys (chiimaa).” To wit: the first Shibuya kogyaru were essentially chiimaa girlfriends.

Schoolgirl uniforms reformed

The previous trends explain why rebellious girls in Shibuya preferred tanned skin, Louis Vuitton bags, and a slightly sexy approach to clothing, but the most important style innovation of the kogyaru was certainly their embrace of the schoolgirl uniform. In the subculture’s most stereotypical incarnation, the kogyaru wore a pleated plaid schoolgirl skirt hiked up to an extreme mini length, matched to standard issue weejun loafers and bulky white “loose socks.” The look mutually emphasized their bare thighs and young age, thus titillating the nation’s significant base of lecherous old men.

While most social analysis until now has fixed upon the kogyaru’s sexualized transformation of the uniform, it’s worth asking a more basic question: Why were trendy high school girls wearing their mandatory school clothes rather than changing into their own individual outfits?

In the early 1980s, high school girls were quick to abandon their sailor suits every day before heading out into the town, whether by choice or to comply with school rules. This essentially hid the fact that they were still high school students while they shopped or partied.

By the end of the decade, however, most of the top private schools in Tokyo started to face serious competition in light of declining birth rates (Across Editorial Desk 236). School boards came up with a grand solution: hire top designers to redesign the uniforms and make them more akin to modern fashion. Thus was born the School Identity (SI) movement, which took off nationwide around 1987 and saw schools dressing their young women in blazer-type ensembles rather than the traditional and slightly infantile sailor suit look (Namba 2006).

The students evidently loved the change and began to see their uniforms as a proud piece of personal clothing rather than mandatory attire (Across Editorial Desk 236). They then flocked to Shibuya in the afternoons or on weekends still wearing their school clothes, and this changed the overall look of the neighborhood’s fashion. But also, by wearing their uniforms, high school students were embracing their youth rather than hiding it. This streamlined into a general social trend — the “high school girl boom” (女子高生ブーム) — where the ideal age for a woman in Japan, both in women’s own estimations and in the male gaze, hovered around 16.

With most early kogyaru coming from the top private schools, the burgeoning subculture built upon the base of a well-designed school uniform and then added a few rebellious touches. Following the paragyaru’s summer-friendly style, they hiked up the skirts to make a knee-length dress into a mini-skirt. And the “loose socks” were another personalized touch, influenced by both American sport socks and kushu kushu socks from the French casual boom of 1992 (Namba 2006). In further defiance to authority, the kogyaru dyed their hair from rulebook black to a subtle reddish chestnut color known as chapatsu. They essentially took the best parts of the uniform and then broke it down to make it their own.

Interestingly school uniforms have always been the primary look for delinquent teens in Japan. The most famous example is the extra-high Prussian collar (gakuran) of yankii in the late 1970s. Working class delinquent girls of the past also openly violated their school’s uniform policy, but the sukeban girl would lengthen her skirt beyond the required hemline, rather than making it shorter. This actually took much more effort as you had to find matching materials and know how to sew.

Kogyaru on the other hand, in their affluent delinquent nonchalance, just hiked the whole thing up to give it both a light air of defiance as well as a nod to sexy Shibuya style. This small touch was easy to do but radical enough to give birth to what became known as kogyaru style.

The initial kogyaru were high-school girls partying in Shibuya with chiimaa boyfriends, adding summery style cues from older girls into their uniforms. While certainly “bad girls” in society’s eyes, the gyaru were well-to-do for the most part — attending private school and hanging out with other rich delinquent kids whose parents and pedigree would get them to a good college or job without much effort. What is also interesting is the fact that no magazine or media invented this look, but instead it grew organically within this small subculture of rich delinquent teens.

By 1993, there were enough kogyaru on the streets of Shibuya to notice a new “trend” but it was hardly a mass style. In the next installment we look at how the kogyaru became mediated in mass culture — moving seamlessly from sexual objectification to moral panic to nationwide fashion trend.

References:

Across Editorial Desk. Street Fashion 1945-1995. PARCO, 1995.

Arai, Yusuke. Gyaru to Gyaruo no Bunkajinruigaku. (The Cultural Anthropology of Gyaru and Gyaruo) Shincho Shinsho, 2004.

Chimura, Michio. Post-War Fashion Story 1945-2000. Heibonsha, 1989.

Namba, Koji. “Concerning Youth Subcultures in the Postwar Era, Vol. 5: ‘Ko-gal’ and ‘Urahara-kei,’” Kwansei Gakuin University Sociology Department #100, March 2006.

Namba, Koji. Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues) Chikuma Shinsho, 2009.

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.

With the U.S. publication of the Japanese photo book Take Ivy last year, the world has taken sudden interest in the Japanese lust for Ivy League style that began in the mid-1960s and stays strong to this day. And as part of that, the fashion brand wholly responsible for bringing Ivy to Japanese shores — VAN Jacket — is finally being recognized for its global role in preserving and codifying American style.

In Japan, of course, VAN’s founder Ishizu Kensuke (my longer English bio of him here) is a legendary figure — a designer, businessman, author, and fashion critic credited with importing American collegiate style, starting the radical idea of selling apparel to youth, drilling the idea of “time place and occasion” (TPO) into the collective mind of post-war Japan, and inventing several new words, including “trainer” for sweatshirt.

What many may not know, however, is that VAN was also the party responsible in Japan for making the T-shirt — once seen as little more than an embarrassing piece of underwear — into a fashion item.

In the early days of the post-war, Japan certainly had T-shirts, but they were called “meriyasu shirts” (メリヤス or 莫大小 or 目利安) — from the Portuguese word meias, which, yes, means “socks.” Meriyasu at first referred to the light-weight machine knitting technique that emphasizes the material’s ability to stretch, which is mostly used in socks and stockings. The term later, however, came to encompass all undergarments — including undershirts.

When the U.S. soldiers entered Japan en masse during the Occupation, they often wore T-shirts as outerwear much to the shock of the Japanese. But the shirts had one difference from the Japanese meriyasu: a pocket on the chest. While the American influence surely helped start idea of a “town wear” T-shirt, all fashion styles associated with the troops were generally classified under “delinquent” and only showed up in the margins of the Japanese youth population during the peak years of the Occupation. Some kids in the 1950s, however, did wear a special kind of meriyasu shirts with blue stripes out on the playground, which were called “pirate shirts” (海賊シャツ), but this was like wearing a pajama top outside and was only tolerated because they were children.

By the 1960s, however, VAN made an important step towards a “fashion T-shirt” – by first legitimizing the entire idea of youth fashion. The brand sold recreations of American Ivy League style targeted directly at (wealthy) kids, actors, and members of the burgeoning creative class. VAN mostly sold oxford-cloth button downs, blue blazers, and khaki pants — the casual of its era — but once Ishizu had established a strong consumer infrastructure, he decided in 1965 to finally bring the “brand T-shirt” to market. According to his son Shosuke, Ishizu hand-printed the first batch of logo shirts and would hand them out to friends and business partners. Ishizu’s secretary at the time Hayashida Takeyoshi (brother of Take Ivy photographer Hayashida Teruyoshi) has stated that there was much controversy in 1965 around wearing these T-shirt outdoors. Even within VAN, the staff members passionately debated the pros and cons of making these devilish T-shirts.

When VAN finally put T-shirts out to market, they specifically did two things to move the image away from meriyasu. First, they sold T-shirts with pockets like the American soldiers wore. This little detail announced to the world, “This could not possibly be underwear — it has a pocket!” The soldiers tended to wear an olive green T-shirt, and according to Ishizu Shosuke, this was the color that sold best with Japanese consumers. This was the “correct” color for wearing a piece of underwear outside.

Second, VAN put its brand logo on the other T-shirts. Despite now being mundanely ubiquitous, this act was revolutionary at the time. VAN conveniently had a nice three-letter stencil-like logo (see it here), and the brand’s young fans already wanted to put the logo on everything. Young kids would famously walk around with their stuff in old VAN shopping bags, and when they couldn’t afford to actually buy anything at VAN to get a free paper shopping bag, they would place VAN stickers on old rice bags to fake it. And many would wait outside of retail stores after VAN shipments came in just for the chance to get one of the empty cardboard boxes with the VAN logo. With that kind of passion, these kids became the perfect test audience to see if they would even wear their underwear outside if it had a VAN logo on it.

The VAN T-shirts not only became a source of income for the next ten years, but also worked as promotion for the brand. VAN did a lot of partnerships with other companies, and instead of paying the partners in cash, they would make double-branded T-shirts. This eventually caught on with other companies and became standard. In the mid-1960s, Ishizu’s secretary Hayashida noted that you could estimate how many T-shirts a company produced by sitting in front of Sony Plaza in Ginza after 6pm. If you saw one promotional T-shirt per hour, you knew they printed 10,000 shirts. If you saw two, you knew they printed 20,000.

As both laid-back hippie fashion in the late 1960s and American West Coast “heavy duty” fashion came in style during the early 1970s, the T-shirt would become an integral part of the Japanese wardrobe with almost all of the original taboo lost. In the 1990s, with the rise of both vintage fashion and Ura-Harajuku brands, the T-shirt would take on a mythic status — a garment that could be purchased for ¥5800, saved in its bag, and then sold on the reseller market for ¥30,000 a year later. You can’t sell old underwear for that much, so anyone who got rich off the T-shirt speculation market should thank the pathbreaking work of Ishizu and VAN.

Wall Street Journal: Web-Bargain Luxury Comes to Japan (September 6, 2010)

This indeed sounds damning: The Coach Kristin Leather Hobo bag retails for $298 in the U.S. but $711 (¥59,850) in Japan. And this isn’t a rare example. Foreign premium and luxury apparel brands have always charged consumers in Japan a significantly higher price for the same goods. But now with the super-strong yen and the ability of shoppers to casually view global pricing on the Internet, the Japanese population is growing more weary of having to automatically part with their consumer surplus.

So as the WSJ notes, Japanese consumers are becoming accustomed to “discounts” — ironically making prices equivalent to the what everyone else places at standard retail — at outlet malls and online sales. Or in this era of relaxed fashion standards and falling wages, they are just kicking their Euro luxury habits cold turkey.

For years I too have raised many an eyebrow at foreign companies’ eagerness to charge nearly double for their products in Japan. Yet there is a valid logic at work in this behavior that goes beyond mere price gouging. Earlier this year, I was highly skeptical about Abercrombie & Fitch’s overall Japan entry strategy, but A&F CEO Mike Jeffries is correct when he says, “We are premium brands, and we get premium prices in these markets.” And it just happens that “premium prices” are very high in Japan due to the already high level of “standard prices.”

Before we even consider prices of luxury goods, think about the normal prices paid by Japanese consumers for everything else. Even with a relatively low consumption tax, the Japanese normally dish out 13.4% of their incomes just on food, compared to 9.9% in the U.S. (And in terms of calories, the Japanese are eating much less quantity than similarly rich countries.) A 5kg bag of rice — the staple grain of the Japanese diet — is often ¥2000 if not more. Meanwhile in the culture market, CDs are price-protected at ¥3000, which is a bargain compared to the ¥1800 vinyl albums once cost back in the 1970s (about 2.3% of the monthly salary in 1970 compared to ¥3000 being less than 1% now).

High prices in Japan are mostly a direct product of governmental policy. Protectionist tariffs not only increase the costs of imports but keep domestic producers insulated from having to compete on price. The government also protects a large number of uncompetitive, unproductive industries who keep average prices high. And there is often an informal cartel pricing where everyone in a certain industry agrees to generally keep prices at the same level. When it comes to the fashion and accessories market, mass apparel retailers like Beams, Ships, and United Arrows — despite having no central planning — keep their prices for “basics” around the same level, and in the process, set the “standard” price level in many consumers’ heads.

So when foreign brands come into the Japanese market, the most obvious brand positioning has been to go “above” the domestic makers and be “premium.” This almost necessarily means pricing at a higher level than the standard Japanese price, which as we know, was already very high. When Brooks Brothers came to Japan in 1979, for example, they logically needed to set prices above the Japanese copies of their items like oxford cloth button-down shirts and ties. More recently, the standard $25 T-shirt at Supreme in New York was set at around $60 in Japan. Companies generally want to set prices as high as the market allows anyway, and since the Japanese market has always had a structural need to set prices higher, brands were able to indulge. Conversely, when Japanese electronics or automobile brands went to the U.S., they would often charge much lower prices to match the American price level. (This was often criticized as “dumping.”) In both circumstances, Japanese consumers have always had to bear the cross of the global production system on their backs — using more of their (often lower) salaries in order to essentially subsidize lower prices in the rest of the world.

Now this all worked well when Japanese consumers’ incomes grew at a steady rate from the 1960s to the 1990s. Being gouged doesn’t hurt that much when your income keeps getting a big jump. But when incomes peaked in 1998 and started to fall steadily, the idea that Japanese have to pay more than other populations started to become less tenable. This, of course, opened the door for a clothing brand like Uniqlo, who set up a production system based in China that could deliver high-quality goods at the standard Western pricing level seen overseas at the Gap or H&M. Now in the recession, McDonald’s Japan and Sukiya have followed the same model in the food sector, and at least for McDonald’s, their low-price strategy has delivered record profits.

This idea of undercutting the previous Japanese price level has created an entire new rationale for entering the Japanese market. H&M and Forever21 have seen massive revenues thanks to offering product at a much, much lower price than what used to be considered “low.” Nothing has scared Japanese domestic apparel brands more than a challenge to their previous monopoly on controlling the psychological perception of what is the “normal” cost. Select shops Beams and United Arrows, who have weathered the recession relatively well, responded to the “fast fashion boom” by creating their own lines of lower-priced Chinese-made apparel at prices that Japanese consumers in 2010 can actually pay. Even designer brand Comme des Garçons created lines such as the PLAY casual collection and other Chinese-made basics to offer younger consumers (and Asian tourists) something to buy at a realistic price level.

So as the rest of the fashion industry becomes highly competitive on price, this leaves the Western brands in a difficult position. They cannot quickly drop prices because their pricing is an important part of communicating value and importance to customers. (They did, however, use the strengthening yen a few years ago as a stealth way to cut prices in the recession by 5-10%.) Meanwhile, Japanese consumers, who are growing less wealthy, are pessimistic about their economic future, and are accustomed to paying less for everything, no longer understand the 1990s-era logic of saving/going into debt just to buy a single handbag. And thanks to Yahoo Auction, grey market arbitragers, and a giant network of resale shops across Japan, there are much cheaper ways to buy new or near-perfect luxury items than the fancy flagship stores.

Of course, the broad middle-classes aren’t supposed to be buying luxury goods, and it was only a historical fluke that brought us to the strange situation we are in today, where there are multiple places within a half-dozen Tokyo neighborhoods where you can buy Louis Vuitton and Gucci. For those who are desperate to cling on to a consumer culture that made more sense during the heady days of the early 1990s, many have gone towards the alternatives offered by the industry itself: namely outlet malls and sale sites like Gilt and Yoox. The incoming Chinese travelers will help keep the industry a bit buoyant while middle-class Japanese consumers flee the market, but they may not be able to completely allow brands to keep charging artificially high prices in a deflating market.

The question for luxury brands going forward in Japan is whether they can surf on the deflationary swells to slowly readjust their “premium” pricing. In the thrifty yet wealthy U.S., spending $298 on a Coach handbag may seem like a splurge, and since Japanese incomes are falling to a mere fraction of American incomes, it makes sense that that very same price level may actually be perfect for a more impoverished Japan. Maybe the Japanese will not have to be such outliers — and scorned cash cows — any longer.

WWD: The Real Harajuku Girls

The greatest challenge in any social analysis is linking the macro (the big ideas, narrative, mass patterns, cultural phenomenon) with the micro (individual people, individual cases). A “trend” becomes visible in the movement of multiples, but often no specific person perfectly embodies it. In fact, many birds-eye observations will turn out to be a misunderstanding of the participants’ actual behavior and intentions. Sociologists (either academic or armchair) generally have to try to etch out clean trend lines that “average” a wide distribution of numerous data points. In other words, a particular individual may not singlehandedly tell the story of a trend but his/her point on a graph, when averaged with others, will contribute to a broader understanding.

Social analysis in Japan, however, can often be incredibly easy, as individuals’ behavior and attitudes almost perfectly correlate to central trends. Take the interview subjects of Amanda Kaiser and Kelly Wetherille’s interesting WWD interviews with girls in Harajuku linked above. (And bravo for not just focusing on the Stefani-approved candy-junk fashion girls who have become a minority in recent days.)

The first “girl,” Yoshida Ami, seems to tell a story of diverse style influences and mixed fashion items. If you know, however, that she is a Sweet reader — which she does not state but most certainly is — than you know that all of her self-descriptions adhere without exception to that particular style group. Rinka is the main cover model for Sweet. The transition from “gaudy” to “simpler” fashion is a mark of Yoshida’s movement out of more gyaru-influenced fashion to Sweet‘s adult gyaru/good taste hybrid. And this style group’s favorite brand of the last few years has been Miu Miu, which, of course, she loves. Also note that Sweet is the most popular magazine of the moment.

The next young woman Abiko Yui is a fan of high-fashion magazine Spur, and also, Spur‘s beloved runway model icon Agyness Deyn. Her favorite stores H.P. France and Candy are both domestically-minded high-fashion shops.

Meanwhile less-fashion ambitious Kurosu Risa, who spends little each month on clothing, shops at popular low-price street-casual brand Lowry’s Farm (part of the Point empire.) She, no surprise, does not like designer brands. Comme des Garçons offspring and Takemoto Novala fan Shinohara Aya has moved out of her hardcore Lolita days and on to what brand: the brooding, cute, but affordable Sunao Kuwahara. (Although her outfits in the picture look much more relaxed.)

The point of this exercise is to say something slightly obvious but important: In Japan, you can often judge a book by its cover. Consumers embrace a total, well-defined “taste culture” in which to consume, and once inside that group — usually defined by a specific magazine — they buy goods very faithfully to that culture. We should also remember that there is a certain predestination in which “taste culture” consumers gravitate towards. There are high correlations between the working class, non-Tokyo lifestyle and gyaru culture. And similarly, the girl in WWD whose mother worked at Comme des Garçons did not become a gyaru but an indie girl. (I would wager that no CdG employee’s children have ever become gyaru.)

In some cultures, following the script too closely can often mean being branded as a “soulless” stereotype. (E.g., the oft-berated “fashion punk”) But in Japan, there are few negative social repercussions for this behavior. In most cases, being serious in Japan means living to the script perfectly rather than taking the “spirit” of your chosen culture and spinning an individual take on it.

What is also interesting about this WWD article is the issue of capturing the actual “micro” in surveying/interviewing. People tend to give the interviewer, especially for articles that will be publicly distributed, an ideal representation of self rather than something brutally honest. No one, not even in Japan, ever says, “Oh this? I just bought this because everyone else was buying it.” In the U.S., where consumers actually do follow set social patterns and industry trends more than they would like to admit, the fashion crew will massively play up their most obscure influences in these kinds of interviews and deny any sort of social pressures/trends in making fashion decisions. They try to out-do each other in order to establish proof of individual will. These WWD Harajuku girls, in contrast, are not doing much work to sound like they are not just cut from a mold. Maybe they are downplaying individuality out of modesty, but for collecting information about the market, it’s usefully honest.

This all means that Japanese consumers are often much more predictable than in cultures where society requires a certain amount of chaotic extrapolation of cultural themes or has less strictly-defined culture groups. Once a macro principle is established in Japan, the individual data points fall very close to the trend line.