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.