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.

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.

Representatives of the necktie industry made an official appeal to Environment Minister Sakihito Ozawa to end Cool Biz — the campaign to cut greenhouse emissions by encouraging white-collar workers to work sans jacket and tie in the summer months to reduce dependence on air conditioning. The necktie lobby says it’s unfair to treat neckties as if they were the cause of global warming. They claim that summer sales are down 34% since Cool Biz started. They claim that their “necklace-tie” innovation failed to catch on. They also pointed out that PM Hatoyama campaigned with his necktie on, the association chairman emphasized that neckties bestow oan air of integrity (of course, Koizumi famously kept his off during the 2005 general election and won a similar landslide victory).

And as far as the short articles on the issue explain, it doesn’t look like the necktie representative even bothered to make much of a case, instead relying on an emotional plea to sympathize with the suffering necktie makers/sellers. But why force a good portion of the working population to cut off the circulation to their heads to benefit a mere 45 companies?

His argument isn’t even consistent. If he is advocating the end of Cool Biz, then why would we need those necklace-ties? If the necklace-ties are just an example of a failed attempt at innovation, then what is their alternative proposal for helping the country meet its Kyoto commitments? Whatever its faults, Cool Biz at least keeps thermostats higher and prevents people from wasting energy making neckties.

Even in a statement on its website, the association can offer no good reason for reversing the recommendation, aside from the fundamental unfairness of singling out neckties. You can feel the rage as they blame the government for “cultivating the image that the country can achieve almost all its CO2 emissions targets just by not wearing neckties.” They also mention they support the underlying goal of cutting emissions and are even a member of Team Minus 6, a coalition of groups signaling their commitment to helping meet the Kyoto goal of a 6% emissions cut vs. 1990 levels.

This isn’t the first time the necktie industry has tried to stop Cool Biz. Back in 2005 when the program began, the association sent a letter asking the cabinet to stop using the words “no necktie,” resulting in ample Internet ridicule not unlike this blog post.

And in 2007, members of the fashion industry ran a “Dress Up Men” campaign showcasing ways to stay cool while still wearing a suit and tie (with official support of METI, seemingly running at cross purposes with their environment ministry “rival”). At that point, Cool Biz was considered uncool enough to inspire an ironic Coca Cola commercial, but since then white-collar workers seem to be have reverted to following corporate dress codes like good worker bees.

One detail mentioned in the media is that the chairman handed Ozawa an official request. Sadly, we have no way of knowing what they said since this document is not on the web, but surely it’s some rehash of their website. It’s kind of amazing they are having such a hard time winning support for white-collar formality in Japan of all places. I’d have some sympathy for them if ties weren’t such a random, arbitrary accessory to begin with.

Another troubling undertone of this story: The premise that the government can turn Cool Biz on or off like a faucet. Sure, this movement started as a government initiative, but can’t organizations in Japan decide for themselves what makes proper office attire?

The minister made no promises but said he understands the need to “strike a balance.” Sure, unless Big Neckties control millions of votes or somehow know how to press the minister’s buttons, I can’t see this meeting getting them anywhere. If I were him, I would be mad at DPJ secretary general Ichiro Ozawa for approving this meeting. Since the new government came into power, all lobbying activity to MPs must be approved by the party headquarters. If people like this are getting through, maybe that’s a sign the environment minister isn’t exactly the most valued member of the cabinet.

While we weren’t looking, Cool Biz has suddenly become more vulnerable. In November, the Government Revitalization Unit recommended cutting the PR budget for Cool Biz in half. As far as I can see, the Environment Ministry does not even bother mentioning it in its FY10 budget requests (PDF). It’s possible that a silent majority is on the tie industry’s side. People don’t really seem to plan their wardrobes around Cool Biz, so when the season comes ’round it just looks like a bunch of salarymen who forgot to put their ties on. Some companies even wear special tags informing visitors that a special mission from the government is preventing them from showing the proper seriousness by wearing ties.

Cool Biz is great, despite the occasional setbacks (some offices get too hot). My only complaint is that it doesn’t last year-round. The government has no responsibility to promote one industry over another (unless it’s part of an ambitious industrial policy). So sorry tie industry, the planet and millions of neck take priority over your 45 companies. Unless the minister suddenly decides neckties are a vital national industry you are out of luck.

Sometime in November, Marxy of Néojaponisme and Patrick Macias — author of such books as Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo and Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook — met in Inokashira Park and recorded a very long podcast about Harajuku and the past, present, and future of Japanese fashion. The result spans over an hour and twenty minutes, and yes, we edited out a lot of the boring parts. Hear Marxy talk about the minutiae of his first visits to A Bathing Ape in 1998. Hear P. Macias talk about the high-pressure sales staff at Shibuya 109-2. Good news: it ends on an optimistic note.

Intro song: “1996″ by Cornelius
Ending song: “Volunteer Ape Man (Disco)” by Cornelius

Download: Harajuku Requiem: Marxy x Patrick Macias on Tokyo Fashion Past and Present
General Néojaponisme Podcast RSS Feed: .rss

The publication of the magazine Koakuma Ageha in 2005 sent a shock-wave through Japanese society: when did cabaret-club hostesses become socially accepted to the degree that they have their own widely-available fashion magazine? And when did “kyabakura girl” become a glamorous and enviable occupation for young women? The answers to these questions were not apparent. And since the Japanese media is not allowed to talk about trends in terms of socioeconomic class or subculture, Koakuma Ageha‘s popularity gave the impression that all young women, no matter the family background, have suddenly clamored to work nights in Kabukicho.

Enter market researcher Miura Atsushi, who started looking at the why’s of the phenomenon. Back in the 1990s, Miura worked for shopping building PARCO‘s think-tank Across, where his job was to pontificate on the latest consumer trends and social movements to keep corporate clients in touch with the “leading-edge.” Now with the sharp decline of art-infused, cutting-edge consumer culture, Miura has turned his eye to heavier and less optimistic social issues. The popularity of his 2005 book Karyū Shakai (『下流社会』, “Downwardly-Mobile Society”) provided the media sphere with an easy way to bring up the slightly-taboo topic of Japan’s growing income divide. The credibility of Miura’s claims relies on his simple methodology: his conclusions mostly come straight from data analysis, based on his company Cultural Studies‘s large-scale youth surveys. Unlike the other pop cultural theoreticians, Miura is just “reporting the survey results” — an inductive antidote to the wilder and generally-unprovable “latent desire” pontificating of formal sociologists like Miyadai Shinji.

Miura’s latest book is Onna ha naze kyabakurajō ni naritai no ka? 『女はなぜキャバクラ嬢になりたいのか?』 — “Why Do Women Want to Become Kyabajō?” He took interest in the topic after conducting a mobile phone survey in 2007 for the advertising firm Standard Tsushinsha on the topic of “Generation Z” — Japanese aged 15 to 22. The survey asked young women, “What profession do you want to do/which job would you like to try doing?” (「なりたい職業、してみたい仕事」). He was shocked to find that “kyabajō (cabaret club girl) / hostess” ranked at #9 with 22.3%. Thinking this must be some statistical fluke, Miura chartered another survey of the same demographic in 2008, but he got nearly the same result: the kyabajō / hostess category came in at #12 with 20.5%. In short, one-fifth of young Japanese women aged 15 to 22 apparently hoped to work in the mizu shōbai industry. When he took a similar survey of women in “Generation Y” (age 25 to 32) for comparison, he found that only 9.1% had either wanted or still want to try out the hostess profession. Miura came to the conclusion that there has been a recent social shift toward wanting to work in this sector and started on specific research towards the topic.

The premise of the book — that young women have increased desire to become hostesses and kyabajō — is obviously controversial, and there has been some backlash against Miura’s statistical methods, best outlined in the Amazon review section for the book. Most criticism focuses on the fact that women in the survey could freely check as many occupations as they pleased, thus not proving they “want” to become hostesses as much are “would be fine with it.” To Miura’s credit, however, he fleshes out the hard data by interviewing 32 actual kyabajō and kyabajōs-in-training, and nothing about their stories seems to contradict his general conclusions on the phenomenon.

Even taking the possible survey biases into account, Miura’s results do match up with multiple clues in the broader pop culture that the hostess profession has become more socially-acceptable in the last decade. Prime time television dramas like Jotei follow the exploits of hostesses without any moral judgment on their line of work. Popular manga in mass market weekly magazines take up the challenge of young hosts and hostesses aiming to become “#1″ with the same narrative tone as if they were in an amateur band aiming for the top of the pops. Coffee advertisements offer quotes from hosts to convince consumers about the product’s value. The aforementioned popular magazine Koakuma Ageha has transformed real-life kyabajō into elegant fashion leaders and lifestyle models for the gyaru community.

Of course, the actual situation is much more complicated than “all Japanese girls want to become hostesses.” Miura is able to build a very specific demographic and psychographic profile of young kyabajō and kyabajō-wannabes, illustrating exactly which subset of Japanese society is most contributing to this growing labor sector. He found that kyabajō are most likely to have the following characteristics:

• low socioeconomic background
• low level of education
• moved to Tokyo from small villages in outlying prefectures (in the case of Tokyo, most hostesses are from the Tohoku region)
• high rate of parental divorce (double the rate of the total survey sample)
• hate being in their school, their own house, their own room, or their own living room (especially compared to those who want to become government workers)
• are confident about their looks
• strongly dependent on men
• comfortable with traditional gender roles
• hate their moms, like their dads
• read magazines Egg and Koakuma Ageha
• love the music of Hamasaki Ayumi

This list almost perfectly illustrates the profile of a single Japanese socioeconomic class-bound taste culture: namely, the “yankii” taste culture situated in lower-middle and working-class communities outside of Tokyo. Many of the above factors — divorce rate and socioeconomic background, for example — are well-known to be correlated. The embrace of “traditional” values such as gender role division and dependence on males could also be posited to be more associated with a certain social environment and education level. And when Miura asked women in the survey whether they wanted to “break the rules,” the hostess set generally answered in the negative. (Those who want to work in the sex industry, in comparison, were affirmative on the question.) The data’s “typical” kyabajō does not see the profession as a “rebellion” against community mores, but as a logical extension of her teenage lifestyle and limited career opportunities.

To explain why this specific group of women has embraced the kyabajō profession as a legitimate career, Miura mainly focuses upon structural economic factors. First and foremost, women are no longer able to secure a middle-class existence for themselves solely by marrying a man with a full-time job. During the Lost Decade, writes Miura, the steady dismantling of the corporate safety net meant men could no longer provide economic stability for their wives and girlfriends. Furthermore, even if women want to work themselves, they have had a particularly hard time becoming sei-shain “regular employees” in the recessionary environment. These conditions have created more pressure for women to establish financial independence, but for women with low levels of education and low social capital (both the result of non-urban working-class backgrounds), kyabajō is one of the few jobs that can provide high incomes and independence at a young age.

The women’s economic necessity for hostessing is reflected in their fiduciary behavior. Contrary to popular dismissals of kyabajō as soullessly selling their sexual dignity to buy foreign luxury goods, the kyabajō interviewed by Miura for the book claim they are mostly saving the money for the future. (The average salary seems to be around ¥6,000,000 a year, which is very good for a 20-something but not extravagant.) Most acknowledge that they only have a limited time in this particular industry and are trying to create a nest-egg for the future. Some even send money home to their parents. Although this parallel is a bit loaded, the idea of sending money back to parents almost perfectly echoes the pre-war system of prostitution where poor farmers’ daughters would be sold off to brothels to help their parents pay-off debts. Surely cabaret clubs are not as extreme in terms of labor duties as brothels, but children earning money for the household has been taboo amongst the middle-class for at least the last 100 years.

Miura’s profile of hostesses also clearly delineates the cultural tastes of the profession’s leading demographic group. We receive the rich detail that hostess-wannabes read the magazine Egg — a glimpse into pre-kyabajō cultural affiliation. Egg is the quintessential “deep gyaru” magazine — for the ganguro yankii wing of the fashion movement rather than the part that touches upon middle-class mass style (like Popteen). Egg readers are disproportionally based in places other than Tokyo, so the profile of the kyabajō seems to almost perfectly match that of the female yankii — women with a particular set of cultural and sexual values who mostly live in non-urban prefectures. Girls who read softer fashion magazines like non•no or arty high-fashion magazines like Spur are apparently not hostess material, which makes logical sense. The values of the gyaru subculture — in terms of sexuality, future hopes, and gender dynamics — are much more conducive to mizu shobai than any others.

Miura describes the cabaret club itself quite pithily as “theme park of traditional gender roles.” In an age where men have to actually make an effort in personal presentation and manners to win over possible girlfriends and can no longer sexually harass secretaries in the workplace, the kyabakura provides men with a chance to return to a much simpler time, before women became educated, independent, judgmental, aggressive, and demanding. Kyabakura and hostess clubs offer men increasingly-rare female adulation for a simple payment. They can be drunk, loud, obnoxious, and speak with toxic tobacco-scarred breath, but the hostesses are required to treat them like kings — just like an idealized recreation of the good ol’ days.

Many women, however, consider the hostess job no harder than desk work, and in particular, enjoy the fact that their job allows them to dress up in a glamorous way and find constant “acknowledgment” from the opposite sex. Miura suggests that kyabakura provides these women, who never succeeded at school and had a rough home life, the self-confirmation that they are good at something for the first time. They feel respected by customers and can work towards finding a wealthy spouse in the customer base.

Most hostesses — perhaps in a reflection of classic yankii values — want to marry at a relatively young age, and the pages of Koakuma Ageha are filled with perky confessionals from divorced 20-something mothers with multiple young children who work at kyabakura to support their families. For the hostess looking for a husband at work, however, things are not always so easy. Miura claims that one of the reasons so many mizu shobai girls spend their hard-earned money on host clubs is that hosts are the only men in their lives who will promise to marry them. Of course, promising matrimony is a core duty of the host job, but the hostesses can walk away sated that night at least.

Miura sees this rise in the number of hostesses as part of a broader trend for society: youth’s desire to continue their cultural lifestyle into adulthood. In his survey comparison between Generation Z and Generation Y, he found that the latest crop of young men and women are desperate to become singers, actors, and models. Generation Y was much more realistic and seemed content on more “serious” jobs. In the past, Japanese society’s high toleration of youth culture stemmed directly from the social contract that youth would abandon all cultural activities at employment (usually aged 23 for white collar, earlier for blue collar). Now that companies cannot offer youth the previous level of benefits for “going straight,” most youth without long-term career prospects are choosing to bring their youth style into adulthood. The gyaru pioneered this social change, and now one of the few growth fashion markets is gyaru brand clothing made for mothers and their young children. Oddly, the gyaru still believe in early marriage and early childbirth, but they have abandoned the lack of fun and glamour formerly associated with adult responsibility.

So there is a “kyabajō segment” of young women, mostly corresponding to the gyaru/yankii subculture. Young college students and daughters from “good families” are well-known to work part-time or occasionally at cabaret clubs, but the “career girls” most definitely fit a specific subcultural affiliation. That understood, does this really mean something for society? Haven’t the working and lower classes been historically been the suppliers for the sex industry and the mizu shobai? If we believe the Miura evidence and analysis, economic conditions have deteriorated to the degree that a certain segment of women are electing to work a relatively-degrading job in order to maintain a middle-class level of income. But as the book suggests, the profession itself is not as dire or exploitative as say, the pre-war brothel system. Girls make the choice to join and can essentially quit whenever they want. Prostitution is less ambivalently bad; hostessing can be dangerous and demeaning, but in theory, there are protections in place to keep it from being sexual slavery.

That being said, the high salary for hostessing — in light of low education and no skills — should be our first clue that employers are compensating for something negative in the work duties. First and foremost, the job leads to no long-term career nor builds any portable skills. So while a clerking position pays little in its 20s, women can move up the ladder to a certain degree in their 30s and 40s to make a better salary. Hostesses have at most, a decade at the job and then cannot use that experience for anything else (other than being a “mama” perhaps). And exceptions aside, the hostess work generally degrades the labor and social value of the woman. The stigma has been reduced in recent years, but in most cases, hostessing can be a “scandalous” past background in a way that “secretary” never could. The kyabajō job also does not build strong social capital: working in Kabukicho means running around with yakuza, touts, and pimps, who are low on valuable social capital themselves. (There is also the issue that being a “kept woman” rather than a wife, which we can assume is a common path for many hostesses and kyabajō, means no legal rights to property from their partner.)

These facts tends to discount the “economic empowerment” argument, that the hostess business is a nice welfare system that transfers money from corporations (through entertainment budgets) and middle-class men to working-class women. And even in this model, those with power and capital are abusing their position to win special conditions from the recipients. Women can only receive these funds if they are young and willing to act out a form of sexually-charged subservience. In a more “fair” economic system, there would be high-paying jobs for women not conditional on indulging men. Yes, any job in the hierarchical white collar Japanese corporate system means hiding personal feelings to please the whims of the boss, but in an office atmosphere, this is not predicated on sexual gratification nor strict sexual division (women pleasing men).

But could the popularity of kyabakura amongst men be a good sign? The fact that men must pay high fees in order to receive unconditional treatment from kyabajō means that women are not willing to act accordingly in “real life.” The better solution, of course, would be a mass move away from the kind of childish misogyny that fuels the hostess industry, but Japanese men have shown long-term resistance to the new gender values (or at least tolerance) that have come to be strongly rooted in the rest of the post-industrial world. The word “feminist” in Japan does not even mean “one who believes in gender equality”: it means “one who is nice to women.” It appears that kindness to the second sex is still a radical idea.

Miura’s research has been and will continued to be challenged. Some times for legitimate reasons, but there will always be serious resistance from men to a re-conception of the hostess/kyabakura industry as a site of class exploitation. Flirting is more fun when you don’t think the girls are sending the money back home to support their poor family in some tiny Hokkaido fishing village. The “greedy girls who want Louis Vuitton bags” myth created a comfortable equality of sin: men would go to hostess clubs out of lust, women would work there out of avarice. But nothing about Miura’s research should be surprising or controversial. Japan has a long history of hostess-like institutions — from geisha to the cafe waitresses of the 1920s — and the lower classes have always been the main supply of labor. But now thanks to magazines like Koakuma Ageha, these girls are no longer invisible. They have their own world, own style, and own values. The only thing new is that they are succeeding in making this lifestyle seem appealing for those not predestined to end up there.