The cover story in the February issue of Takarajima 『宝島』 is titled 「バカ化する若者」— “Youth are Becoming Idiots.” The small print above the title states 「”ゆとり”チルドレンが日本を滅ぼす！」You see, our idiot Japanese children — spoiled by the less rigid “yutori” education established in the early 1990s as a way to bolster individualism and creative thought — are ruining Japan. Tough to be a kid in Japan these days: you are not only stupid, you’re a traitor.

Takarajima, however, is hardly broaching a new topic. Earlier this year, Japanese critic Uchida Tatsuru’s latest book 『下流志向──学ばない子どもたち、働かない若者たち』」 (my trans: Aiming Downward: Kids Who Don’t Learn, Youth Who Don’t Work) got some attention, another in a long series of “下流” titles about the (semi-voluntary) descent of middle-class kids into the pits of lower-class hell. The basic idea that the younger generation has failed “society,” however, goes back even further — one of the few constant themes in 20th century Japanese social criticism. Maybe the radical young soldiers in the 1930s who assassinated liberal politicians and demanded greater power for the Emperor proved themselves good kids in a warped sense, really living up to the ideals of the Imperial Rescript on Education. But ever since then, young people have basically dropped the ball generation after generation: juvies, hippies, bikers, consumerists, whores. Youth of the 1980s were derisively christened 新人類 (shinjinrui, The New Breed) — almost as if to say, these kids’ rotten values must be the result of genetic dysfunction and devolution, like overbred mini-chihuahuas.

So like every cohort in the past, the current batch of Adults are ripping into their own offspring, regretting the Whitney Houston Principle that “Children are our future.” The cast of guest authors at Takarajima, however, are not suffering from mere moral outrage. They have objective measure on their side!

Famed management consultant Ohmae Kenichi starts things off by noting that Japanese 20-somethings do not sufficiently feel urges for material things. They no longer desire cars (this is supported by lots of data and a panicky auto industry). They do not buy computers, and their share of total web users has dropped from 23.5% in 2000 to 11.9% in 2006. They are not interested in international affairs apart from the occasional vacation abroad. They have low expectations for the future, nil ambition, and not enough wrath to make any challenges to an economic system that puts all the nation’s assets into the hands of their elders. With such low salaries and pitiful future earning potential, young men find it too sadistic to ask for their girlfriend’s hand in marriage — especially when women can live a life of luxury under their parents’ auspices.

Ohmae makes a particularly good point that the weakened consumer power of youth in Japan has forced manufacturers to re-gear their marketing and merchandising to suit older customers. (This is evidenced already in the fact that almost no youth-oriented products made the “Hit Products of 2007” guide in Nikkei’s newspaper Marketing Journal.) Since most material needs are manufactured or at least greatly influenced by the commercial complex, companies ignoring youth essentially amplifies the problem of their insufficient materialism.
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A major-label Japanese hip-popper, naturally interested in the flora of 420 A.D. C.E., once informed me that the term “munchies” comes from the Japanese expression himan chuui (肥満注意): “be careful that you do not become obese.” I explained the probable English derivation, and he conceded that his trusted volume on the plant taima was regrettably misinformed.

My friend pulled some truly punk rock ingenuity, learned from years of bunking down with crusties and sketchy West Coast kids. In MacGuyver-like fashion, he injected a nearly-parched inkjet cartridge with rubbing alcohol in order to coax out enough ink to print both of our invites to the Nike SB Nothing But the Truth video premiere. Even though I didn’t witness my friend’s feat of Yankee can-do spirit, his simple retelling ended up being the most interesting event of the evening.

Located amongst love hotels and gauche rock clubs, the theater used for the video premiere is a stark futurist slab with concrete façade — a venue more inclined towards reprints of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent than commercial skateboard hype. Apart from the extravagance of Nike’s promotional crew renting out a theater in Shibuya, there wasn’t as much flash and pop as I expected. Nothing like the Shanghai premiere with ramps, several of the SB team, and a bouquet of scantily-attired girl-hires. Maybe the budget had already been blown on the video itself, and the remaining green would get further cashed out in RMB rather than yen. That’s casino capitalism doubled down: marketing and venture commerce + faddish extreme sports = bloody consequences for bad judgment.

The subdued crowd of style-fiends in expensive denim and fitted T’s with requisite 59 caps and unscratched boards seemed nonplussed by the chic theater, and this indifference hung thick in the auditorium air. Two kids sat quietly beside me, rocking a pair of expensively-swooshed windbreakers cut and patterned from a 1980’s steroid-muscle beach aesthetic. They murmured “hot” or “amazing” or “scary” as key moments of physical jeopardy and triumph blazed across the screen.

Skaters in the video rocked-and-rolled and proved street credentials with tricky flips done switch over (requisite) gaps or big flips over handrails to waiting embankments. The filming relied on pre-lit environments and careful choreography while the edits were fast and clean. It left the skaters sanitized and ironically unremarkable in their consummate displays of rare skill. Nike SB has labored to infuse their brand insurgency with legitimacy, but their image-crafting gets in the way of actually revealing how skaters perform split-second miracles through careful calculation and control. Besides Chet Childress’ scenes and a few sequences shot on scarred and barely-ridable concrete highway barriers, the skating itself was mostly a series of predictable set-pieces which belie the risks and intensity of finding spots and dialing them in.
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Along with otaku culture and the cognoscenti culture centered around independent music, art, and fashion, Japanese delinquent subcultures form a key component of the “Japan Cool” construct. I use the term “delinquent subcultures” to describe fringe youth groups like the monstrously-tanned high-school Ganguro, raucous Bosozoku motorcycle gangs, gleefully-anachronistic Gothic Lolita maidens, FRUiTS-type cutie-punk street fashion maniacs, and “Rollers” who once danced in Yoyogi Park every Sunday to pre-recorded hits of the 1950s. But unlike other facets of foreign attraction towards Japanese pop culture, these groups offer no products to buy and few individuals to admire; we are simply attracted to their sheer existence out of a Romantic fascination with anti-social organizations costumed in unique and outrageous “style formulas.”

Although foreigners seem to be keen on fashion delinquents and delinquent fashion, Japanese policy-makers and domestic gate-keepers have never had much reason to view these disparate and desperate youth as anything other than vermin. But even without formal invitations to participate in the process of re-branding Japan, delinquent subcultures are still critical to the new narrative. “Cool” may now primarily exist within a commercial marketplace where corporations manufacture goods and chic hierarchies of media organizations spread the marketing word to youth consumers and their elder imitators, but grass-roots rebellion is essential for anchoring cool back to its roots — spontaneous cultural explosion on the streets and deep within the underground.

Patrick Macias and Izumi Evers’ new book Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno (Chronicle Books, 2007) — a “Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook” — has collected and chronicled the stories and styles of the most vital post-70s female delinquent subcultures in Japan.¹ Thanks to a base of solid research, Macias sculpts an exciting and informative narrative of cultural history that manages to capture the bratty fun of the subjects. “History” is the key word here: the authors are less concerned with quickly-dated portraits of modern movements and more interested in showing off the incredible ecological diversity of previous fashion explosions. (And as someone mentions in the book, there has not been a new delinquent subculture of note since the Kogal, so all books about these youth groups are automatically “history” to a certain degree.) The mission at hand may ultimately be a visual one, and Nonaka Kazumi’s skillful illustrations are indispensable for proper consideration of the wardrobe innovations, makeup techniques, and accessory mayhem that defined these subcultures as something new and original.

Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno organizes the female delinquents into three major groupings: Bad Gals (Sukeban, Takenokozoku, Lady’s [Female Bosozoku]), Sexy Gals (Kogal, Gonguro, Manba, Kigurumin, Material Gal), and Arty Gals (Nagomu, Gothloli, Decora). While this coding is succinct and accurate in principle, there can never really be a simple classification system that brings these groups together along geometric lines.

For example, the smiley-faced Heian-era-inspired, E.L.O.-dancing Takenokozoku are included in “Bad Gals,” but they seem to inhabit a completely different aesthetic universe than the general yankii tastes at the heart of the Sukeban and Lady’s. Even now, the “badness” of those two are so obvious that the Takenozoku look like a harmless Sunday drama club outfitted in matching kung-fu shoes. At the time, however, the conservative authorities viewed the relatively tame street dancing in Yoyogi park as another pressing facet of the “youth problem” — synchronized park dancing as potentially dangerous as razor blades, reckless autobikes, or underage drinking.

The “Sexy Gals” grouping, on the other hand, appears at first to describe a mosaic of divisions in the gal/gyaru universe, but the chapter simply tackles the historical progression of the larger gyaru subculture. In an almost perfectly-linear development, the relatively cute Kogal morphed into the frightening Ganguro/Gonguro, who took a more extreme form in the Mamba and went ridiculous for a half-year in Kigurumin animal costumes. In the last few years, the more mainstream members and older graduates discovered the allure of capitalist society and adjusted their styles to score rich husbands and piles of luxury fashion goods.
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