W. David Marx looks at one of Japan’s first modernist magazines, Shinseinen, and the tragic life of Japan’s first fashion columnist, Nakamura Shinjirō.

In 1920, a new publication called Shinseinen『新青年』(“New Youth”) hit Japanese newsstands, filled with short stories and writings on culture for urban, modern men. At first, the editorial focused on the joy of international adventures, encouraging readers to board ships to foreign lands like Brazil and the new Japanese colonies in China, Manchuria, and Karafuto (Sakhalin). The magazine later became a clearinghouse for unauthorized translations of foreign texts sent in from readers.

By the mid-1920s, most readers picked up Shinseinen for its iconic detective stories. But in January 1929, the magazine started Japan’s first-ever column dedicated to men’s fashion. The first one was called “Vanity Fair” 「ばにちい・ふえいあ」written by Kudō Akiko (工藤晃子). In January 1930, this morphed into a new column called “Vogue en Vogue” 「ヴォガンヴォグ」. From the Meiji Restoration onward, Fukuzawa Yukichi and other luminaries had publicly advocated Western dress, but “Vogue en Vogue” was cut from a different cloth: chic illustrations, wry observations on Tokyo fashion trends, educational tutorials for dressing up on the town, and even short skits.

The man behind “Vogue en Vogue” was 24-year-old Nakamura Shinjirō (中村進治郎), a notorious philanderer and the living embodiment of the mobo modern boy. Nakamura knew how to write about Tokyo glamour because he lived it daily. He wrote lyrics for musical reviews at Casino Folies. He hit the town with novelist Kitabayashi Tōma, actor Egawa Ureo, and his roommate, fiction writer Watanabe On. Often described as a “beautiful young man,” he was most well known for his chronic concupiscence. According to later court documents, he dated “four female students and two waitresses” back to back. He moved through women so quickly he once broke things off with a woman simply through a telegram that read, “Sayonara.”

Tokyo’s mobos hung on to Nakamura’s every word in each month’s installment of “Vogue en Vogue.” But between the shallow history of Western fashion in Japan and the author’s own lack of sartorial experience, Nakamura’s fashion advice was often times dubious. VAN Jacket founder Ishizu Kensuke went to Meiji University during the peak years of “Vogue en Vogue” and learned all his style basics from Nakamura. Ishizu’s adherence to the column, however, often got him in trouble. After reading Nakamura’s review of an amazing new cologne, Ishizu bugged every department store in Tokyo until he finally found a bottle. Ishizu proudly wore the fragrance around town, despite the fact that it made him smell like a sweaty animal. Turns out that it was not a cologne at all, but pure musk oil.

This was the least of Nakamura’s problems: at the end of 1932, his transgressions escalated to national infamy. On December 12, newspapers reported that he attempted a double-suicide with the brooding 18 year-old Moulin Rouge Shinjuku-za soprano Takanawa Yoshiko (高輪芳子). Takanawa often talked about dying at a young age, and after meeting Nakamura, she finally decided to take matters into her own hands (source). Despite a platonic relationship, the once-cynical playboy Nakamura fell so hard for the young woman that he decided to join her plunge into death. Nakamura poisoned them both with gas in his apartment.

But the couple failed to enter the afterlife together: Nakamura survived, while Takanawa died. Police prosecuted him for his role in the suicide. In the courtroom, the judge accused Nakamura of ruining the lives of countless young virgins from good families, but Nakamura argued that it was the girls who kept begging him for relationships. Perhaps his explanation resonated with the judge, as he only received a suspended sentence. And as further proof that all publicity is good publicity, the incident put Tokyo’s Moulin Rouge Shinjuku-za theater on the early Shōwa pop culture map.

After the scandal, one of the hit productions at the Moulin Rouge was Nakamura’s own self-written play about his double suicide — “Shinjuku Souvenir.” He played himself. And then on November 15, 1934, Nakamura again attempted suicide with sleeping pills, this time with the actress who played the Takanawa role in the play. But in an ironic reversal, Nakamura died this round, and his female companion survived.

Living only to the age of 29, Nakamura was a great mystery in his day and fell into obscurity in modern times. Magazine Brutus asked older readers to send in personal accounts of Nakamura in a 1980 issue but came up dry.

Like most liberal modernist culture in Japan, Shinseinen faced tough times in the fascist 1930s. The magazine expanded its readership to women during that decade, and “Vogue en Vogue” came to cover fashion trends for both sexes. Translator Hasegawa Shūji took over under the column, writing under the female pen name Hara Narako. But “Vogue en Vogue” ended in December 1938 just as the Pacific War took on a new intensity in China. Shinseinen dropped its stylish modernism for jingoistic war reports.

In the peace of the postwar, the magazine returned to its roots with detective fiction. But unable to keep up with increased marketplace competition, Shinseinen folded in 1950. With 30 years on newsstands, the magazine lived just one year longer than NNakamura Shinjirō.

Sources and Further Reading
Yasuko Claremont: Shinseinen in the Interwar Period (1920-30)
湯浅篤志・大山敏編『叢書新青年　聞書抄』
中野正昭: 新興芸術派とレヴュー劇場

Néojaponisme puts the “occasionally-published” into “occasionally-published web journal.”

As you may have noticed, Néojaponisme has not been overflowing with content in 2013. I, David W. Marxy, III, take the full brunt of responsibility, but I have an excuse. I am writing a overly-detailed book on the history of American menswear in Japan.

My original idea to look at the development of Ivy League fashion in Japan — a before, after, and behind-the-scenes of photo book Take Ivy — but my prospective publisher made the extremely sensible call of expanding the narrative into the world’s first English-language cultural history of Japan’s import, absorption, and export of traditional American clothing — i.e., VAN Jacket, the Miyuki-zoku, Okayama denim, Heavy Duty, Popeye, Hamatora, Uraharajuku, and the excitement around Japanese Americana back in America. The story starts in 1911 and will end in present times. This may sound boring for non-fashion enthusiasts but about 90% of the book is about the people and stories around the clothing rather than the intricacies of fashion design, like hook vents, Union Specials, and open-end spinning (although these all make an appearance).

The reason for my tackling this specific subject matter is that the people who first brought American fashion in the early 1960s are hitting about 80 years old. Their memories and health are fading — or at risk of doing so soon. (We sadly lost Take Ivy photographer Hayashida Teruyoshi just last month.) If there is a time to write this book, it’s now.

So far I’ve written 50,000 words and counting — probably the most I’ve ever written about anything in my entire life, and already exceeding the total output of my most prolific year of blogging. Books are much harder projects for a whole variety of reasons, but it’s been rewarding and stimulating to sit down and really delve into a single topic — especially one that flows through a very small set of individuals and organizations who are all linked. It’s also been fun to interview lots of people who only remember dates by the Showa year. If you’re interested in the history of Japanese fashion, I post side stories, trivia, and things cut from the book over at ametorajapan.tumblr.com.

The writing requires a lot of organization and discipline, so I have had less time for other pieces (except my satirical, non-hoax “Open Letter to Kanye West from the Association of French Bakers” on Medium.com, which Politico notes, too easily fooled mainstream media outlets such as Time and Fox News).

I, Ian Lynam, have been equally to blame for the lack of content here. It’s been a very busy past number of months for many of the same reasons that David mentioned above. I have been busy working on a book of collected essays, as well as in the initial stages of another book on the emergence of Japanese Modern graphic design.

These efforts have been compounded by a number of editorial and curatorial projects. I wrote, edited, and designed a new 96-page feature on the legacy of the California Institute of the Arts in issue #360 of Idea Magazine recently, the result of a weeklong workshop that Idea Editor-In-Chief Kiyonori Muroga and I held earlier this year at the Valencia, California school (and my alma mater). That workshop sucked up a good chunk of time, as did preparing our lecture — the first on the birth of the Japanese graphic design press ever delivered in English.

Additionally, I just put together Letterfirm, an exhibition of expressive typography in conjunction with North America’s premier typography conference TypeCon. The Portland, Oregon show featured the work of 24 designers from all over the world. Published along with the exhibition was The Letterfirm Reader, a 96-page booklet of recent essays on graphic design, aesthetics, history, and criticism.

Okay so that’s what we weren’t writing on the site. We do have some plans for Néojaponisme pieces in the coming weeks and months. Maybe get Feedly or one of those new Google Reader clones to follow us. Otherwise we will alert you to new things on our Twitter account as well as Google+. We’re always open to pitches but know in advance that we’re always really, really picky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harajuku is the Disneyland of global youth culture. Just as the Magic Kingdom has spacially-divided “Lands” to represent different parts of the human imagination (Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, etc.), Harajuku has Punks browsing at Vivienne Westwood, Mods shopping for authentic surplus army parkas, Skinheads scuffing up their red Docs on the curb in front of Londsdale, clean-cut 21st C. Hip Hoppers laying down Fukuzawas for some Ice Cream, Skaters at Stüssy, college Preps bouncing between Lacoste and Ralph Lauren, ’60s girls with decal eyes storming Courrèges, and Paris-dreaming Art Students in deconstructed garb floating down the hill from Comme des Garçons. This one Tokyo neighborhood has more stores dedicated to youth street fashion than anywhere else in the entire world. And not only does Harajuku singlehandedly preserve dead subcultures, the district has created some of the most unique fashion looks of the last two decades: namely, Decora-chan/Hyper-Cutie Punk (as seen in FRUiTS) and Gothic Lolita. No matter how much attendance declines in the next decade due to anemic Japanese birth rates, Harajuku has secured an almost-permanent place as one of the Seven Wonders of the Pop Culture World.

In light of this, an entire book on the Harajuku neighborhood is almost criminally overdue, and we are blessed that fashion writer and editor Tiffany Godoy finally delivered with her colorful new work Style Deficit Disorder. Godoy — probably one of the very few Westerners to ever have worked as a real-deal editor for a real-deal Japanese art or style magazine — hits all the most critical points for understanding the historical development of this youth culture sanctuary. Japanese fashion critic Hirakawa Take, KERA editor Suzuki Mariko, and Honeyee.com boss Suzuki Tetsuya pop up to provide short essays of macro-level analysis, but the book mostly tells the story of Harajuku through photographs and short profiles. Godoy offers introductions to the most important people, places, and brands — from the Central Apartments (locus for the birth of young independent brands in 1970s), Yacco Takahashi (Japan’s first stylist), brand Bigi, An•An‘s original model Kaneko Yuri, seminal high-fashion magazine Ryuko Tsushin, New Wave band The Plastics, Comme des Garçons, iconic Takarajima magazine CUTiE, stylist Sonya Park, hyper-cute brand Super Lovers, beyond-weird street couture label 20471120, original A Bathing Ape graphic designer Skatething, and over-hyped, under-stocked Ura-Harajuku brand Bounty Hunter. SDD somewhat lacks an overarching narrative to link together these encyclopedic references, but redeems itself by addressing topics that have never seen the daylight of English: in particular, Rockabilly brand Cream Soda and iconic punkish designer and Godmother to Ura-Harajuku, Ohkawa Hitomi from Milk. For anyone who wants to know the whos and whats of the neighborhood, I highly recommend the book. (Reactions will be divided on the in-your-face graphic design.)

Style Deficit Disorder greatly succeeds at its goal of laying out the facts behind Harajuku’s development. The subtext, however, may be even more interesting. By taking a step back and doing a meta-reading, the book allows us to glimpse into the organizing myths the West has built up around this sacred fashion neighborhood. The Harajuku of SDD‘s introductory chapter is quite literally the most amazing place on earth: masses of youth successfully fighting to create their own trends at a “grass-roots” level in the face of an increasingly-irrelevant global fashion market pushing industry-decided clothing on a rigid seasonal basis.

This “Harajuku Myth,” as I understand it, is comprised of five statements:
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