The second part of Matt Alt’s interview with popular author, academic, and super fan Patrick W. Galbraith on the key controversies in otaku culture and his new book, Otaku Spaces.

Otaku Spaces Chin Music Press (2012) Buy on Amazon

In the last installment, we talked to Patrick W. Galbraith, author of Otaku Spaces, about how Japanese society defines the word “otaku,” and why he decided to interview so-called otaku directly to break through the stereotypes. This time we look at some long-standing debates in the otaku discourse, including whether otaku are “cool” thanks to Cool Japan and whether recent “moe otaku” are continuous or a break from the original 1980s subculture.

OTAKU SPACES © 2012 by Patrick W. Galbraith and Androniki Christodoulou. Photographs reproduced by permission of the publisher, Chin Music Press

Both your intro and the experts you interview define otaku as “super-consumers.” When you think of the economic downturn in Japan and the decline of consumerism, that must mean that otaku really, really stand out as consumers. Has this new economic power legitimized otaku? It’s pretty ironic to see the powers that be suddenly anoint these perpetual social outcasts as “Japan cool.”

Yeah, or try to! There is no doubt that society’s revaluation of otaku is linked to shifts in capitalism and consumer society. One of the interviewees in the book, University of Tokyo professor Yoshimi Shun’ya, describes otaku as paradigmatic of “information-consumer society,” which spread in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. Or you can see the revaluation of otaku as linked to the rise of immaterial or communicative labor and cognitive capitalism. (Thomas LaMarre has an article on this, for those who are interested.) In 1989, manga artist, editor, and cultural critic Ōtsuka Eiji voiced the zeitgeist by saying that Japan doesn’t produce anything anymore but rather just “plays with things” and produces information. This is an apt description of immaterial labor, which spread with advances in media and communication technologies. But Ōtsuka didn’t see it that way at the time. Instead, he criticized the consuming Japanese nation as a land of “shōjo” (girls), as opposed to the ideal producing salarymen of the past.

Retrospectively, people also see in the 1970s and 1980s a shift from the salaryman producer — mature and masculine — to the otaku consumer — infantile and feminine. This has been the source of endless social anxiety in Japan about youth, individualism, and the future.

The 1990s was then a turning point in this debate. On the one hand, it was a bruising decade of receding economic and political significance for Japan, and on the other, there were reports of Japanese popular culture (and, it was hoped, influence) spreading throughout Asia. As early as 2002, Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō made a speech to the Diet about making Japan an “intellectual property-based nation.” The high visibility and praise of manga and anime in North America and Europe bolstered such propositions, along with Douglas McGray’s “Gross National Cool” article in 2002. Not long after this, in 2004, the Nomura Research Institute released its infamous “revaluation” of otaku as “enthusiastic consumers,” who fuel hobby and pop-culture markets that remained strong despite the recession. According to this and other reports, otaku were supposed to be the engine driving innovation in media such as manga and anime, which fit well with the “intellectual property-based nation” idea.

So we have social, economic, and political reasons for the normalization of otaku. Remember that Asō Tarō served under Koizumi as Minister of Foreign Affairs. His rise to power in the Liberal Democratic Party is emblematic of larger power dynamics. As is well known, Asō touted otaku as a major wellspring of creativity and at least partially responsible for the global competitiveness of Japanese anime, manga, and games. But we have to be careful, because when Asō started to associate himself with a certain type of otaku in Akihabara, he lost some mainstream support. People can rally around works by Tezuka Osamu and Miyazaki Hayao (especially Spirited Away) as national culture, but maybe they are a little less comfortable with titles like Rozen Maiden or Strawberry Marshmallow.

Didn’t Asō specifically mention Rozen Maiden as a personal favorite? Looking back it seems like a calculated pose, but I suppose that the reality of his interest is less important than the fact that a politician even mentioned a moe manga in interviews.

Right. He actually thought that it was innocuous to say that he liked it, if not beneficial to his political career. We know how that worked out for him! (See UMSL Professor Laura Miller’s article on “pimping” pop-culture, where she specifically calls Asō out.) But anyway, what’s so interesting about “Cool Japan” is that it opened up a space for people to say and do things that they never would have before. The fact that suddenly Akihabara, otaku, and moe were on the radar along with anime and manga opened up a contested terrain where the boundaries of subculture, pop-culture, and national culture were (re)negotiated. The backlash against Asō points to a simple fact: Not all “anime” is “popular” culture or even agreeable to the mainstream inside and outside Japan. This came out most dramatically in the recent “non-existent minor” debacle, where representatives of the Tokyo metropolitan government stated that they find no artistic merit in manga and anime, which thus need to be legislated against as a threat to the normative development of “healthy youth.”

Getting back to the place of otaku in Japan today, let me return to the position of Ōtsuka Eiji, who characterized shōjo girl culture as being about consumptive pleasure suspended from (re)productive functions. The shōjo became a symbol of this herself, and otaku, oriented toward images of shōjo, were similarly seen as “unproductive.” With the contemporary nostalgia for “Japan, Inc” and the Japan that makes things, we see that otaku fit uncomfortably in “Cool Japan.”

So otaku don’t fit well into Cool Japan?

As I argued in the case of Akihabara, the idea of otaku is a lot easier to deal with than the people themselves. We can just slap a Densha Otoko bandage on it, redeem the consuming Japanese male with a new look and girlfriend and all live happily ever after. But what about people like writer of light novels and cultural criticism Honda Tōru, who instead advocate marriage to fictional characters? Those who reject the redemptive narrative and live outside acceptable norms, even intentionally, publicly mocking them? That is a problem for Japan, both in terms of internal politics and external image campaigns.

Sure. Otaku allegedly marrying pillows and videogames and whatnot was a popular soundbite among foreign media outlets for a while, but I’ve always questioned how widespread the phenomenon actually ever was.

The “phenomenon” is not widespread, but men and women who don’t fit into the Densha Otoko or “cool otaku” mould are rather common. They are invested in different sorts of networks, relations and meanings than mainstream Japan. These are the otaku who disrupt Cool Japan, because they are neither perceived as “cool” nor assisting in the (re)production of Japan. Think about all the debates surrounding people not getting married or having kids, people not curbing “childish” enthusiasms and taking on “adult” roles and responsibilities at work and home. This often translates into stock criticism of the individualism, selfishness and “antisocial” behavior of young men and women. So otaku are both revalued as an asset to the nation (for their creativity and consumption) and demonized as poisonous to its future. Academics Sharon Kinsella and Anne Allison both have great articles on this, which, though published a decade apart, show that the major anxieties and tensions surrounding otaku in Japan have not changed all that much.

The otaku that have always been seen as most problematic are those orientated toward bishōjo, or the fictional girls of manga, anime, and games, which raises issues about social and sexual development. Simon Fraser University professor Melek Ortabasi suggests that the male otaku in contemporary Japan is akin to the prewar moga, or “modern girl,” in that this lived identity and media creation crystallizes concerns about individualistic and indulgent consumption, gender and sexuality, and acceptable socialization. This extends beyond mainstream reactions. If we go back to the original articles on otaku from inside the fan community in the early 1980s (translated into English and published on this site), we see that these same concerns were crucial to the formation of the otaku discourse there, too.

There is this lingering notion that manga and anime “pervert” the mind, as we saw in the debates surrounding acceptable depictions and interactions with “non-existent minors.” We see a problematization of “otaku sexuality” and “otaku psychology,” for example in the work of clinical psychologist Saitō Tamaki. For what it’s worth, I think that there’s a politics to consuming in certain ways, which often entail rejecting (re)productive roles at work and home. In the aforementioned Honda Tōru’s critique of “love capitalism,” for example, he advocates that we escape from dating based on consumption and pairing based on income and earning potential. This leads to traditional roles and responsibilities at work and home, which he also wants to escape from. For Honda, what is preferable to this, and offers a means of escape, is idealized relationships with two-dimensional characters. (MIT’s Ian Condry wrote a book chapter on this.)

This seems like a good time to ask: Do you feel there is an inherent difference between old-school, 1.0 otaku and modern-day moetaku (moe otaku)?

I think that we need to be careful about imagining the history of otaku as a series of radical ruptures. This is endemic in “otakuology” (the study of otaku), and, unfortunately, commentators outside Japan too often follow the contours of the Japanese discourse instead of questioning it. Most of the experts in Japan like to think in terms of “generations” of otaku, which relate somewhat loosely to advances in technology — TV, VCR, computer, and so on.

In the most popular version of this narrative, otaku begin in the 1970s with people watching Space Battleship Yamato on TV. The story was complex, and demanded regular and engaged viewing, cultivating a mature fanbase. This was supported by subculture magazines about anime (the special issue of Gekkan Out in June 1977 is a landmark). Okada Toshio, arguably the most influential proponent of this narrative, adds that at the same time older fans became critically aware of stylistic differences in the continuity of Getter Robo. Then we have the taping, reviewing, and analyzing of anime using VCRs in the 1980s, not to mention the market for OVAs. This contributed to even more mature anime and fans. Finally, we have computers and games in the 1990s. We can update this with the Internet, social media, and portable linked devices, but Okada got sick of it and just declared otaku culturally dead in 2008.

Yes. I remember covering that. I assume you don’t agree.

Well, if you follow this line of thought, then there are no more otaku in Japan, be they interested in moe or not. I don’t think that is true at all. A trip to Akihabara reveals a thriving fandom. When you get down to it, Okada is interested in authenticity. One of the problems with Okada and people like him is that they can only see their version of otaku and degrees of separation from it. For Okada, that is sci-fi fans, who also got into anime. There is an original or authentic otaku against which all others can be judged. You said 1.0 otaku, but Okada tends to say otaku “elite” or even “aristocrats,” who are of a time past, his time. It would almost be comical if he wasn’t totally serious, and if his opinions did not carry as much weight as they do. When the self-proclaimed “king of otaku” (otaking) declares otaku dead, he effectively silences the younger generation, makes them invisible and leaves them to the mercy of mass-media pundits. Okada’s attitude as an “elite” fan naturally rubs a lot of younger otaku the wrong way.

There is a politics and hierarchy in the fan community that we should be aware of when evaluating the claims of otakuology. In the case of Okada, we should note the way that he saw otaku in the 1980s, which was as losers. Following Nakamori Akio’s articles, he and other sci-fi fans stopped using the word. Nonetheless, Okada popularized otakuology in the 1990s as an intervention into otaku bashing in the mass media. To create distance from the earlier subculture, Okada started using the katakana version of the word otaku (オタク). He also appealed to foreign fandom for legitimization. Ironically, due to larger social, economic, and political factors, otaku were naturalized and trivialized in the 2000s in a way that Okada could not have anticipated. The mass media and government picked up the katakana version of otaku and Okada’s strategies of creating distance from the “bad” otaku of the 1980s (those pathetic imagined beings Nakamori wrote about, and the pathological ones associated with Miyazaki Tsutomu) and showing how much foreign fans loved anime and manga and wanted to become (Japanese and) otaku. This upset Okada, of course.

About the negativity towards moe in the community these days, it’s kind of ironic that certain fans were called otaku in the early 1980s for liking bishōjo, and certain fans are now denied the moniker of otaku for liking bishōjo.

Okada wanted to set up the sci-fi, media, and technology otaku that he knew and identified with as the standard. With all due respect, his version of history misses a lot of things. For example, in emphasizing anime, it misses the importance of manga and dōjinshi, specifically certain readerships being demonized for the production and consumption of bishōjo characters and lolicon fanzines. Okada never really identified with these guys, so he tries to pretend that they weren’t around, though journalists such as Takatsuki Yasushi and Sasakibara Gō argue that mature desires for bishōjo characters and the lolicon boom were as important as the advent of mature sci-fi anime to early otaku culture. (If you want to read more about this, check out this article.) Okada is right that the emergence of otaku is a matter of changes in audience reception, but he is wrong that it was only Getter Robo and not also, for example, Magical Princess Minky Momo.

Minky Momo being a sort of proto-moe show from the ‘80s.

Well, it’s more about fans responding to it as such. Minky Momo is an important series because we see that an unintended audience of adult men is watching an anime for little girls. This crossing of gender/genre/generation boundaries is important for the emergence of otaku. Maybe even more so than older fans getting into a giant robot show for kids, given the response to bishōjo inside and outside the community.

About Minky Momo, let me just say that Satō Toshihiko, president of Production Reed and a planner on the series, told me that he was unaware of the adult male fandom until after the show was on air and a group approached him about starting up a fan club. Satō says that Minky Momo was from the start an idea to sell magical girl toys for a sponsor. He called male fans and their activities “disgusting.” It seems likely, however, that some in the company, for example animators and scriptwriters, were a little more tuned in to the lolicon boom. In Minky Momo, the protagonist’s father watches from the land of dreams and comments on how sexy she looks when she transforms (parodying the male gaze). The following year, Studio Pierrot produced another magical girl anime, Creamy Mami, the Magic Angel, which again attracted older male fans. In a personal interview, Nunokawa Yūji, representative director of Studio Pierrot, told me that he was aware of older male fans when producing Creamy Mami and was far less upset by them. So this is something of a turning point in awareness of, about, and among otaku.

The sheer pervasiveness of lolicon themes in the ‘70s and ‘80s really took me by surprise when I translated Ejisonta’s 1983 article on the topic. I’d thought it was a recent trend, but it isn’t.

Yeah, there was a massive boom in the early 1980s. Enough so that if you pick up Gekkan Out, Animec, and Animage from that time, you’re likely to encounter articles about lolicon. Of course, there were subcultural magazines such as Lemon People and Manga Burikko, but we also see work by Uchiyama Aki, the “King of Lolicon,” appearing in Shōnen Champion (specifically his Andoro Trio, circa 1982). Mainstream manga, anime, and game companies were involved in lolicon, for example Enix, which put out the erotic game Lolita Syndrome in 1983. The first erotic animation in Japan was Lolita Anime in 1984. This boom reached far beyond the confines of what we commonly imagine as “subculture.”

But I am more interested here in bishōjo characters, as in those developed in the work of Azuma Hideo, than the specific genre of lolicon. Let me just stress that bishōjo were already there at the beginning of the otaku age of anime in the 1980s. Looking at a foundational work such as The Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, what do we find? Mecha and bishōjo. War and romance. Looking at Okada’s own magnum opus, Gunbuster, what do we find? Mecha and bishōjo. War and romance. Okada himself once bragged that all you need to succeed in anime is a giant robot and a girl who goes into space. He and the Gainax team knew what otaku wanted — hell, they wanted it too! I personally just think that Okada is upset that his interests aren’t dominant anymore, in that now anime is more weighted towards girls and romance than robots and wars.

So are you saying that there were similarities between fan groups then and continuity until now?

Exactly, yes. The approach to otaku generations makes it seem like an emphasis on cute characters is something new. It’s not. It thus serves to mask the presence of fans of bishōjo characters who have always been at the center of the debate.

Further, we end up missing similarities between modes of engagement within the fan community then and now. In the good ol’ days, people noticed continuity differences in episodes of the Getter Robo anime and got fired up talking about mecha designs, battles or the Itano Circus. Well, right now people notice continuity across anime series and get fired up talking about character designs, relationships or moe elements. Otaku then and now are affectively attuned to the moving image and feel excitement when exposed to certain designs of movements, be they of mecha or characters. They still memorize information and share it. They still communicate with and through commodities.

Okada doesn’t like bishōjo. Period. Feminist sci-fi critic Kotani Mari notes that there is a sort of misogyny to the backlash against moe, in the sense that men are upset that properly masculine interests in mecha and heroism have been replaced by something else. Despite the fact that bishōjo manga, anime and games are not necessarily feminist texts (though that depends on one’s definition), I think that Kotani Mari has a point about the borderline misogyny of the red-hot rage that many express over the increased visibility of cute girls.

Along these lines, Meiji University’s Morikawa Ka’ichirō does a great summary of otaku history, which goes something like science to science fiction to science fiction anime and finally just to anime. He notes an increasing focus on the everyday and on bishōjo characters leading to the explosion in the 1990s and 2000s with the boom in bishōjo games, craze over the characters of Neon Genesis Evangelion and figurine boom. We see how these things relate to the transformation of Akihabara, a physical space that people like Okada can’t stand. But you see the problem, right? At a place where otaku are alive, Okada cannot see them, in effect saying that there is nothing going on.

The problem with otakuology as I see it is not that as a discourse it raises certain objects and people up as canonical, lionizing some while marginalizing others, but rather that it actually obscures important aspects of history and forecloses the study of otaku here and now. When talking about past generations of otaku and dismissing today as an afterthought, we make otaku into static objects of historical analysis and deny the living present of otaku. As an anthropologist, the living present is really what interests me the most.

So what has changed for otaku?

Certainly not the passion of otaku for manga and anime, or the desire to become involved in an intimate way as consumers and producers. I think that we are just looking at a different set of circumstances or a media environment that encourages different sorts of engagement. The definition of otaku that many people are working with is someone who is narrow and deep in his or her interests, but this isn’t really suited to deal with fandom today. There is so much information and media out there that no one can master everything, so they watch a little here and a little there and depend on others to fill in the blanks. We see a lot of networking and sociality emerging as a result, just as in earlier times people might have formed otaku circles to pool limited resources (art supplies, videos) and knowledge. About sociality, otaku today are going out more often and in larger numbers. Instead of staying cloistered away in a room watching anime with a closed circle, they are going out, staging events, making unexpected encounters. It’s a lot more open. Fandom moves, across boundaries and borders. Unlike Okada, who ultimately affirms an authentic otaku — older Japanese male with specific interests — we see movement across generations, geography, gender, and genre distinctions.

The critique goes that otaku today are wide and shallow in their interests. But what about, for example, the fans of Haruhi Suzumiya? Didn’t they get totally involved in working out the mysteries — writing books on the subject, by the way, not unlike Gundam fans writing encyclopedias of their chosen franchise? Watching episodes over and over to work out details and chronology? Checking against the original work? Following producers, staff, and vocal talent? Making trips to western Japan to painstakingly map and photograph location settings? I rather fondly remember when people from the States were visiting Azabu Jūban in Tokyo to track the Sailor Moon settings.

But there is a notable difference between my example of engagement with Haruhi and previous fan engagements. Instead of being devoted to a long-running and continuing series or set of works in the same universe, fans today have shorter series, faster turnover, and more works to sift through. When they do find a work like Haruhi that moves them, they have to follow the media mix across multiple platforms and piece together the franchise. It is less coherent, and in some ways even more difficult than it was when a work and its world came complete and ready to inhabit. Otaku now have to actively work through a field of relations to make meaning.

Otaku today probably consume more media — and might even devote more time and energy to reading and viewing than they did in the 1970s and 1980s, though perhaps they do not always spend a lot of time with specific series. Or pay for the media. Instead of fussing over the continuity of one show, they might produce fanworks or cosplay or write a blog about anime. How does that now show their understanding of the series and characters? Their devotion? How is their engagement not productive? Maybe otaku don’t transition into “producers” anymore, as Okada gripes, because the line between producers and consumers is so blurred.

Today, the whole process of production is much more interactive and communal. I think that otaku engagements with anime, manga, and games reflect an intense interest that continues over a long period of time, which might be a fairer approach if we want to judge whether or not someone is an otaku. This is a qualitative, not quantitative, issue. How does one measure the intensity of engagement? By testing knowledge acquired or calculating dollars spent? Maybe we aren’t looking at things the wrong way. At a time when anime, manga, and games are commonplace, otaku are people who love anime, manga, and games in an entirely uncommon way. Things are different, but not necessarily worse.

Next time: What’s truly a weirder passion for adult men — being obsessed with robots or adorable little girls?

Matt Alt interviews popular author, academic, and super-fan Patrick W. Galbraith on the key controversies in otaku culture and his new book, Otaku Spaces.

Otaku Spaces Chin Music Press (2012) Buy on Amazon

Most academics write for other academics and keep their knowledge within academic institutions. Thankfully, Patrick W. Galbraith has never subscribed to those unwritten rules, contributing quite prolifically to the popular literature on his subject of choice — Japanese otaku culture — while finishing his PhD at the University of Tokyo and now working on another Doctorate at Duke University. His 2009 The Otaku Encyclopedia: An Insider’s Guide to the Subculture of Cool Japan worked to formally organize the key terms and key ideas inside the famed Japanese “nerd” subculture. Now his new book Otaku Spaces from Chin Music Press deepens and personalizes that knowledge through interviews with and photographs of a wide range of passionate collectors.

We talked with Galbraith over email to learn more about working on the book and to settle a few key debates within the otaku community — including whether 21st century “moe otaku” are continuous or a break from the original 1980s subculture originators.

OTAKU SPACES © 2012 by Patrick W. Galbraith and Androniki Christodoulou. Photographs reproduced by permission of the publisher, Chin Music Press

For your new book Otaku Spaces, you decided to interview actual otaku rather than just comment on them. Do you feel like there is any actual value in this? I was struck by how few of them were able to articulate why they did what they did. I sensed the passion, but it almost came across as a sort of fetishism.

I never expected the people introduced in the book to be able to explain why they’re so into something. It’s always unfair to ask fans to be reflexive in self-absent situations or when they lose themselves in the object of affection. This is the fan setup, which is usually played for laughs. Affective attachments never really translate well into rational thought and logical explanations.

Nonetheless, I think that there are multiple reasons why we should interview otaku — mostly as an act of intervention. The discourse on otaku has been almost entirely framed by the mass media in Japan, which deals in easily recognizable stereotypes. We oscillate between “good” and “bad” otaku — bad being serial killer Miyazaki Tsutomu and good being 2ch folk hero Densha Otoko. Both of these are media constructs. There’s the otaku panic versus the otaku boom, the irredeemable male pervert versus the redeemable consuming male. These images serve the interests of people other than otaku. And it’s so schizophrenic! One moment, everyone is a little bit otaku, and the next otaku are the most aberrant and horrifying outsiders. Media personality Nakagawa Shōko is allowed to be a “otadol” (otaku idol) on a variety show, which is followed by a retrospective on Miyazaki Tsutomu, the “otaku killer.” This is the situation as I found it while working on the book in Tokyo in 2008.

So it occurred to me that otaku are far too often talked about instead of talked to, and when they are talked about, it is usually in naïve behavioral and psychological terms. They are either the assumed context for textual readings of manga and anime or are themselves read like an open book.

I thought, what if there was a book that instead put otaku in dialogue with themselves and others? I felt that the best way to intervene in the otaku discourse was to focus on individuals. Not just to take a photo of someone’s room and talk over it, but allow individuals to present themselves and their spaces as they pleased. To let them take control of the narrative in long interviews and take control of the space in portraits. To have them in their element and let them interact with the objects and the camera as they saw fit.

Thanks to this format, I hope that Otaku Spaces challenges stereotypes about otaku — in at least four ways. First, these individuals are allowed to talk in the interviews directly about the otaku discourse and place themselves within and against it. Second, in the portraits, the stereotypes become too obvious to ignore. These individuals are aware of what people are saying about otaku both inside and outside Japan — hugging pillows as a “social phenomenon,” for example — and they played with and performed stereotypes. They were able to overturn things by laughing at expectations and those who buy into them.

Third, the more you get to know the people in the book, the less you see them as weird “others” who are unknowable and unapproachable. Though it may seem cliche, I am convinced that most stereotypes are based on misunderstandings, which develop through distance and become compound. I think it comes through in the interviews just how kind the people I met were, how generous they were with their time and space, how open and articulate they were about their hobbies and desires. You sense passion, yes, but I hope also shared humanity. Putting aside value judgements, those of us living in societies in the advanced stages of consumer capitalism find ourselves in similar otaku spaces. Maybe these people aren’t into the same things that you are, but once you get to know them, I hope that it will be harder to criticize and dismiss them based on received notions of “otaku.”

This leads me to my fourth and final point: We don’t know what the term “otaku” really means. The term is used generally and trivially on the one hand, but is used in very specific and meaningful ways on the other. Because we have only had models such as Miyazaki Tsutomu and Densha Otoko — and maybe also “elite” fans and “public” otaku such as former Gainax head Okada Toshio — there have been few opportunities to reflect on what otaku means to us. We just see otaku and think, that person is or is not like me — end of story. In Otaku Spaces, we meet 20 individuals who either identify as otaku or were introduced as otaku by others. Men and women of different ages with different hobbies and interests, all collected together into the same space of “otaku.” What makes one person an otaku and not another? How much of the judgment is theirs, yours and mine?

The interviews are a great way to complicate the otaku image. Someone told me that one of the interviewees, Ōno-san, is not an otaku because he collects calculators. Ōno-san is a sci-fi aficionado who would likely be categorized as a first or second generation otaku, which is to say the same generation as Okada Toshio. But someone didn’t see that in him and questioned his inclusion in the book. The question for me, then, is who counts as an otaku, when and why?

This is the debate that Otaku Spaces opens up in its pages.

I was particularly interested by the inclusion of the “underground” collector Mr. Watanabe in the book, a man who collects memorabilia from serial killers, racist organizations like the KKK, and religious cults. He doesn’t exactly fit my stereotype of an otaku. What led you to include him alongside cosplayers, doll collectors, and Gundam kit builders?

Maybe he doesn’t fit your stereotype of an otaku, but to some people he is the stereotype. The person who introduced us to Watanabe-san told me that he was the epitome of the “scary” type of otaku. As a loner who collected “junk” that no one else understands, he fit the classic image of an otaku, which was likely shaped by the “Miyazaki Incident” (the highly publicized arrest of Miyazaki Tsutomu and debate about the state of Japanese society and youth). Certain parts of Watanabe-san’s multi-room collection did visually resemble the famous police photo of Miyazaki Tsutomu’s room.

Note that in the interview Watanabe-san denies being an otaku, which he associates with consuming popular manga and anime. He says that such things are too “normal” for him, and he got bored with them as a kid.

Do you think that an American guy who collects racist paraphernalia can also be considered a harmless otaku?

First of all, whether or not a person, otaku or otherwise, is or isn’t harmless has to do with individual personality and circumstances. Let’s not jump straight to generalizations or provocative juxtapositions. Second, I am not really concerned with deciding whether or not someone is or isn’t an “otaku.” This is not about determining authenticity or providing more accurate definitions. I feel that Watanabe-san belongs in the book because he was introduced to us as an otaku. He does not recognize himself as such, and perhaps neither do we, but Watanabe-san is nonetheless located in a time and place where he can be identified as an otaku. That is to say in Tokyo in the late 2000s. This indicates a subtext and context to otaku that we would be remiss to ignore. Given the whole “Cool Japan” and “otaku boom” thing in the 2000s, Watanabe-san perhaps represents a return of the repressed, a sort of unwelcome and inconvenient “otaku” of the past appearing in the present.

Otaku experts such as Okada Toshio describe otaku as perpetual outsiders, but is that really the case anymore? We live in a era when Japanese leaders consider video games and anime to be top export properties.

I deeply respect Okada Toshio, but I have to disagree with his “otaku are dead” stance. What if instead of as outsiders we looked at otaku as insiders, at least of a fashion? Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute PhD Lawrence Eng has argued that otaku are “reluctant insiders,” or those who are part of the majority, mainstream, or middle class but feel alienated by their very inclusion in that larger group. They thus engage in unanticipated consumption and appropriation of media and technology to actively become a minority, or to find a place on the margins. Eng is talking most specifically about otaku in the United States, who, in the early days of the nascent anime fandom, consumed across geographical, generational, and gender/genre boundaries.

I can see that in my own experience, growing up obsessed with anime in the pre-Internet era of the 1980s. My friends and I were so off the radar that we weren’t even a subculture.

I love Eng’s conceptualization, too. And I think that we can also apply it to Japan, especially when talking about men consuming media and material perceived to be for or targeting kids and young girls. If we look at the original articles on otaku written by Nakamori Akio — translated into English and published on this very website (translation here) — we see that those men were called otaku in the early 1980s. Here we have a discourse of infantilizing and feminizing not only because of a alignment of consumer demographics (adult men with children and girls), but also because of the perceived “failure” of otaku to become adult men. In a similar way, fujoshi, or “rotten girls,” consume media and material meant for young boys, appropriating established male characters and transgressively imagining sexual encounters among them. Isn’t the label a reflection of a perceived “failure” to be in (re)productive relationships with men? That is what AERA journalist Sugiura Yumiko argues, anyway. These are stereotypes, but they point us to a logic that operates behind the otaku label. It has to do with the choice of objects in relation to the person, the ways that the objects are engaged with in private, and how these attachments communicate or are performed with and for others in public.

When these relations with objects are perceived to be “inappropriate” in part or in full, the person is usually labeled an otaku. Meiji University’s Morikawa Ka’ichirō was right when he said that otaku are on a “vector towards dame (no good).” But, as Okada Toshio replied to him, otaku don’t necessarily choose things because they are “bad,” but rather the things that they choose are identified as “bad” by others.

This is really starting to sound like fetishism now.

Well, let’s try a sociological approach before we get into psychoanalysis. National University of Singapore’s Kam Thiam Huat conducted interviews with Japanese university students who did not consider themselves otaku (i.e., considered themselves “normal”). He asked for their impressions of otaku, which were rather negative, and tried to zero in on the “common sense” (jōshiki) that otaku were perceived to be lacking. To put this another way, Kam is interested in the logic behind otaku labeling, and from his interviews identifies four major discourses: detachment from reality, inability to communicate, failed gender and minor interests. For Kam’s informants, otaku are those who indulge in consumption and play that detaches them from “reality,” or roles and responsibilities at home, school, and work. Otaku are unable or unwilling to relate to others as a result of indulgences in certain consumption and play activities. Among the people Kam interviewed, otaku were identified as men, specifically men who do not meet the social standards of masculinity or consume and play in ways that are inappropriate for men or appropriate only for women. (I suggest that we open this up from men to a general question of gender roles and expectations, which then allows us to discuss female otaku and fujoshi.) Finally, otaku were described as people who do not follow mainstream patterns of consumption and play. They consume what is unpopular or unknown.

Like a good sociologist, Kam codifies a set of “rules” that govern the “common sense” of consumption and play in contemporary Japan, and acknowledges that they only represent the thinking of a group of university students in Japan in the mid-2000s. But it is interesting that in the midst of the otaku boom when otaku were supposed to be “cool,” they were not for these non-otaku university students. Even if we don’t want to label otaku, we can see the truth of Kam’s “rules,” or the logic of the labeling, in Japan and elsewhere, even today. If we take only one thing away from Kam’s very interesting study, let it be that for many in Japan otaku are those who consume or play in uncommon ways. They take their engagements beyond the limits of common sense, acceptability or normativity, to what is considered the extreme or excessive.

In order to get a grip on the logic of the otaku label, and how it relates to specific people and practices, let’s take your example of video games. Yes, electronic entertainment is a massive, global market that implicates almost everyone from a young age. Playing Super Mario Bros. isn’t in and of itself “otaku” behavior. But what about someone who continues to play? Who has played it so many times that he or she can clear it blindfolded, posts time trials online, or has played every game and can talk endlessly about them? This reflects a different level of engagement and such a person might identify or be identified as an otaku. It’s a matter of intensity and duration. And pride.

What about someone who handicaps him or her self — who plays “masochistically,” as scholar Kijima Yoshimasa puts it — to get more value out of the game? For example, beating a game with one quarter or without continuing. Or mastering a crappy, glitchy game like Sega’s Fist of the North Star, sharing the experience with others and becoming a champion at Tokyo Ranking Fighters in Nakano? Even though this falls into the broad category of gaming, we recognize otaku behavior, right?

Can you expand on what you mean by “masochistic?”

It is Kijima’s term. He means that people handicap themselves when playing a game, which requires that they play more often and purposefully to develop skills. This amounts to playing so long and hard that it becomes work, or even torture. I think that some of us can recall an experience where playing a game becomes agonizing, but at the same time pleasurable. In Kijima’s example of Fist of the North Star, the glitches represent patterns to memorize through a process of trial and error. It’s about finding pleasure in unusual ways, and taking the play activity underground. Casual players see Fist of the North Star, think that its just see a crappy game, and move on.

To get back to how Kam’s insights about otaku labeling might apply to gaming, think about someone who gets so into an RPG — better yet, an MMORPG — that they hole up in their room and miss school or work. Such a person has lost control, allowing the game to take over and impact his or her life, which is something that he or she laughs about with friends. A new Final Fantasy game? Oh, there goes my social life! Again there is a masochism to this self-parody. Many people seem to consider devoted players like this to be otaku. What about someone playing a bishōjo game? Most people would say that such a person is an otaku, more so if he is so into Fujisaki Shiori (Tokimeki Memorial) or Anegasaki Nene (LovePlus) that he had an intimate gathering of friends to marry the fictional character.

Is this the same as a kid obsessing over, say, Pokemon?

That is considered to be normal, right? But what if an adult male told you that he was into Pokemon or he showed up at a Pokemon TCG tournament? What if he was up all night playing the interactive My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic game online? The uncomfortable proximity between children and adults, even when it reflects the trend of collapsing consumer demographics together (kids getting older sooner, adult children, gender ambiguity), might cause some to call such a man an otaku.

I am really just taking Kam’s findings and applying them to gaming. None of what I have said is absolutely or necessarily “true.” I just want to point out that we should not be too quick to dismiss otaku as an empty word when it does, in fact, seem to operate with a predictable logic. The word is significant to people who are into manga, anime, and games, and to people who observe them. The word is made significant, given meaning, in one’s life and in everyday interactions. Such a statement reflects my preference for an anthropological approach, as compared to a sociological one.

You discuss the “gaze” as being integral to being an otaku — that openly showing ones tastes and interests publicly so as to cement personal identity is key to the lifestyle. Certain people you interviewed seemed to promote their relationships with two-dimensional characters or dolls as a healthy thing, even going so far as to worry about “upsetting” their dolls by picking a favorite for you. How much of this is real, and how much of this is a posture?

In otaku culture, overstating one’s desires, connections, and experiences is a lot of times just for laughs, such as the “my wife” phenomenon among male otaku or the “impregnation by voice” phenomenon among female otaku who are obsessed with voice actors. It is a way to strike up and enliven conversation about one’s preferences and passions, which are affirmed by others.

Impregnation by voice?

It’s just something that female fans of voice actors, and sometimes singers, say. If they are made to go weak at the knees, swoon, or burst with moe at the sound of someone’s voice, they might express this by saying “my ears are pregnant” (mimi ga ninshin shita). It makes sense, I guess, as the sound pierces deep into their ears and leaves a bit of itself there to grow into a love child. That would be the character image burning itself into their brains.

Anyway, otaku become known as a certain type of otaku or one with a taste for certain things, images and characters, genres and narratives. This is about as deep as “identity” goes in otaku culture. Self here is performed with characters, media/material and others. There is a lot of subversive potential in “playing with one’s self,” as McGill professor Thomas LaMarre puts it, but I think that most otaku are just out to have some fun, talk about what they like, and make friends.

I guess what I’m getting at is, is it possible to be an otaku without having an audience? Publicizing it seems to be a big part of the experience, particularly for younger otaku.

I see what you mean. It does seems that otaku are becoming more public and performative in their interactions with favorite characters from manga, anime, and games. Cosplay, itasha cars, anime tattoos and shirts, a room filled with anime goods and so on are ways to express one’s interests, tastes and orientations, and to relate to an imagined self, others, and media/material.

We see performances of private connections to characters, which make those connections public. Intimacy is affirmed by others watching and the self who looks back on the performance. Often there is a component of mediation, recording, and transmission. Otaku are totally wired and seem to enjoy working through “layers” of connections. There are so many layers to anime, manga, and games. When someone says that he or she likes a character, they can be referring to the setting and narrative events that define the character, the character design, the character type, the voice (actor or actress), the creator, producer, studio, the medium in which the character exists, the world that allows the character to exist and is accessed through it, one’s own interactions with the character, the community surrounding it and interactions with it, the way one feels in relation to it, and so on.

This is why I love the Japanese term “layers” (reiyā), which started as an abbreviation of “cosplayer” (kosupureiyā). I like the way that it foregrounds the layers of fictionality involved in costume play. As Saitō Tamaki tells us, working through these layers, connections, and ambiguities is part of the pleasure for otaku. The expanding relationship with a character occurs across multiple media and material forms, across space and time and across bodies, one’s own and those of others.

Next time: Why 21st century little girl obsessed otaku should be seen as descendants of the robot war fans of the 1980s

In Part Two of our three-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” 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 women 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 three-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. [2019 Note: There was supposed to be a fourth part about the post-ganguro gyaru revival, but never got to it.]

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, sexually-provocative 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.

On January 2, 1983, the Japanese Diet called upon the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association’s Ethics Committee Chairman for a frank chat about the conspicuous increase of sexual content in young women’s magazines. In particular legislators were concerned about Gal’s Life (Shufu no Tomosha), Kids (Gakushu Kenkyusha), Elle Teen (Kindai Eigasha), Popteen (Asuka Shinsha), Carrot Gals (Heiwa Shuppan), and Maru Maru Gals (Toen Shobo). These were relatively popular titles at the time, with Gal’s Life selling a half-million copies a month and Popteen right behind it at 350K.

The publishing industry did little in response, and so in February 1984, Mitsuzuka Hiroshi, the Deputy Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Policy Research Council, spoke out in the middle of the Lower House Budget Committee, complaining about the plague of explicit sexual articles in girls’ magazines, which he called “instructional classes on sex.” Mitsuzuka took the struggle from the Diet floor to the media, appearing on TV shows to further indict the publishers. Prime Minister Nakasone also weighed in: “There’s a worry that the sexual depictions in certain magazines for young women may lead to crime” and then hinted that he would be open to legislative or otherwise administrative action against the publishers.

Results were swift. The day after Mitsuzuka’s Diet speech, publishers Heiwa Shuppan and Gakushu Kenkyusha announced they would discontinue Carrot Gals and Kids, respectively. Gakushu Kenkyusha was in a particular bind as it had a huge business in another highly regulated field: educational text books. Popteen meanwhile pledged a new editorial direction. Gal’s Life changed its name to Gal’s City to escape the increasing social stigma and took out all the dirty articles. This was apparently not what readers wanted, however: Sales dropped so violently that Shufu no Tomosha put the title out to pasture one year later.

What was this sexual content that the Liberal Democratic Party were so concerned about? Essayist Sakai Junko remembers Gal’s Life as chock full of “juicy stories that covered the rawer parts of girls’ lifestyle.” Gal’s Life provided a stark contrast to Magazine House’s olive — a title that imagined all Japanese teenagers wanted to imitate the “good sense and elegance of Parisian lycéenne.” While digging through old issues of Gal’s Life, Sakai discovers these article headlines:

• “Takada Namie’s Girl-Fight Dojo”
• “‘I’m sorry, baby’ — Abortion Experiences”
• “The Exciting Vacation Before We Got Secretly Married”
• “I’m not a prostitute! The Lifestyle and Outlook of Miho, who works at a Shinjuku massage parlor”

There are few images of Gal’s Life available online, and this cover from 1980 has much less controversial headlines (although it does sport the amusing promise “You won’t be an ugly girl (busu) if you read Gal’s Life!”) The general sense, however, is that the magazines had a constant stream of salacious articles for young women on sexual topics, all blanketed in a general atmosphere of “documentary” reporting.

In his book Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues), sociologist Namba Koji mentions a few articles in Gal’s Life such as “Gal Sex Report”, “Document: Love with a Man who Has a Wife and Children”, and “Comparison of Sex from Girls All Across Japan.” He then makes the obvious but crucial point that these are exactly the kind of articles one can expect from men’s magazines.

Framed this way, it is hard to understand the LDP’s crusade against “gal” magazines in the 1980s as anything other than patriarchal sexual hypocrisy. The issue is not “sexual content” itself in the market but who is partaking. As we all know, Japan does not have traditionally puritan attitudes towards sex, and conservatives had traditionally been the staunch advocates of legalized prostitution (against a coalition of women’s groups, socialists, and Christians who worked to outlaw it.) While the 1980s LDP may have been mostly removed from those particular 1950s battles, Mitsuzuka and company did seem bothered with idea that young women — maybe even from good families! — were speaking frankly about sexual experiences and trading tips.

To the LDP’s credit, 1984 was also the year the police started to crack down on an explosion of new sexual services. And perhaps the LDP was most concerned that these magazines explicitly targeted minors and intentionally or unintentionally worked to normalize sexual experiences outside of middle-class social expectations — dating married men, getting eloped, having abortions, working in the sex industry.

Most likely, however, is that the LDP were confused by a different principle all together: the rise of working-class yankii narratives in popular culture. Titles like Popteen and Gal’s Life were not intended for the ojōsama princesses of CanCam or the demure aesthetes of olive. In fact, these magazines built huge audiences by ignoring the slightly imagined, internationalized consumer world of good taste. Instead they spoke to the “real” lives of lower class yankii girls. While the data is not presently on hand, we can assume that working class teens in Japan — who have tended to marry at younger ages, are less busy with schoolwork, cram schools, and extracurriculars, and have less parental supervision — had more sexual experience than their Tokyo upper crust peers. This at least is the message that yankii women have tried to create for themselves in their own media. Starting with these 1980s magazines and carrying all the way to egg and Koakuma Ageha, there have been more explicit sexual articles in yankii/gyaru magazines rather than “good girl” magazines like an•an, non•no, With, or More. And moreover, the most salacious part of the magazine was often the “reader’s column” — where girls told endless and exaggerated sob stories of rapes, bullying, sexual promiscuity, dead boyfriends, and abortions. (I remember reading an issue of egg in 1999, right in the peak of the ganguro movement, that offered a guide to “How to Have Sex in a Car” as well as a particularly graphic reader about group sex in the ocean that involved sea shells.)

Without much perspective on these class-clustered sexual mores though, one can understand elitist politicians seeing gal magazines lined up equally on a bookstore rack with those proffering middle-class consumerist values, easily falling into the hands of a girl who would otherwise read about Chanel suits and marrying guys from Todai. She would be ruined forever! This is almost the virgin-whore complex grafted onto government policy. Interestingly, however, one of the main readerships for the controversial gal magazines was likely normal middle-class girls who liked to giggle at the sex stories and make fun of the yankii narratives. Nakasone and Mitsuzuka may have not known that these titles also inspired mockery from the very girls they hoped to protect.

In the end, only Popteen survived the 1984 gal magazine massacre. The editors promised to clean up the content but then slowly brought back articles about sex techniques and teenage delinquent life when the Diet had moved on to other problems and scandals. It may have also helped that society went through a “sex boom” right after the Diet hearing. Akimoto Yasushi’s mass idol group Onyanko Club was suddenly on TV every afternoon singing about how “being a virgin is boring” and how high school girls needed to have sex with their math teacher to get good grades.

In the mid-1990s, however, Popteen eventually dropped the delinquent lifestyle stories and became a pure style bible for the kogyaru army. This may have ironically been key to the magazine’s longevity. Whether advertiser pressure or consumer demand, there seems to be less desire these days for Japanese magazines to do anything other than provide excessive product details on the latest clothing. Even when Koakuma Ageha takes up frank talk about domestic violence and hostess lifestyles, the idea is dealing with harsh realities rather than sensationalizing for girls who want to fantasize about adult activities.

Yet there appears to be latent demand in Japan for female-oriented stories of sexual exploits and tragedies, as evidenced by the rise of the keitai novel — which writer Hayamizu Kenro has linked directly to the “confessional” narratives of yankii ladies biker mag Teen’s Road. The Diet may have temporarily killed off the teenage delinquent narrative industry but they could not stifle all the curiosity.

Bonus trivia: When Mitsuzuka held up Popteen in the Diet, the page was open to an illustration by now famed media critic Miura Jun.

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.

Sakai, Junko. “Girls’ Yankii Spirit.” An Introduction to Yankee Studies. Ed. Taro Igarashi, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2009.