In Part Three of our three-part series on the famed Japanese female subculture (Part One, Part Two), we examine the sharp turn in 1999 from the mainstream kogyaru look to the extreme styles of dark-faced ganguro and yamamba. By the end of the decade, the gyaru would merge with the yankii and become a archetypal working class delinquent subculture.

The Extreme Turn to Ganguro: 1999-2003

By 1998, Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood overflowed with thousands and thousands of high-school girls adhering to kogyaru-inspired trends, who shopped at Shibuya 109, read the magazine egg, worked increasingly with marketers from large companies, and dominated the sexual fantasies of men’s magazines. The female subculture spent most of the 1990s tarred by the enjo kōsai schoolgirl prostitution panic, but with so much kogyaru-driven media in the marketplace in the late 1990s, the group was finally moving closer towards mainstream acceptance.

Full social integration of the style, however, was not to be. At the end of the decade, the gyaru subculture made one of the most radical shifts of any Japanese fashion subculture ever, embracing an eccentric and shocking personal style that frightened and disgusted wider society and turned away regular high-school students who had once looked to the gyaru for their fashion cues. The kogyaru had entered into the era of ganguro — and there was no turning back.

The Gyaru Class Drift Downward and Their New Fashion Look

In 1997, writer Baba Hironobu published a book on kogyaru called Shibuya-kei vs. Kamata-kei, likely the first work that noticed a split growing within the new subculture. Baba well understood the nature of the original Shibuya gyaru — their origin from wealthy Setagaya-ku homes and rich delinquent style of hiked up skirts from prestigious high school uniforms. At the same time, he noticed a growing number of kogyaru hailing from Tokyo’s less affluent neighborhoods such as Kamata (蒲田) in Ōta near Kawasaki and Kamata (鎌田) near the Tama River. As short-hand, he thus calls these new gyaru “Kamata-kei.” These new recruits tanned themselves a much darker color and colored their hair in silver-y streaks called messhu (from the french mèche). The book’s cover shows an almost Jomon vs. Yayoi-esque battle between the two kogyaru subsets — a dark-skinned Kamata gyaru and a light-skinned Shibuya gyaru.

Baba believed that this battle was actually over: In Shibuya, the original wealthy “Shibuya-kei” originators had fled the area and the “Kamata-kei” gyaru were making up the bulk of the actual kogyaru population. And with this change, the fashion started to look cheaper. Baba attributes this to the Kamata-like areas being home to small-to-medium businesses that suffered most from both the burst of the Bubble and the globalization of Japanese economy in the 1990s. Essentially the Kamata-kei girls were lower middle class trying to imitate a wealthy youth subculture, but in the process, they changed the aesthetic and its values. Needless to say, Baba assigns enjo kōsai to the Kamata-kei girls — not the original Shibuya gyaru.

Baba should not be the ultimate authority about gyaru history, but his book makes the critical observation of the class split that transformed the kogyaru subculture. The new breed of gyaru were overwhelmingly from lower-middle class backgrounds and neighborhoods far from Shibuya. They lacked the spending money of the original kogyaru, which moved the fashion into cheaper directions and lowered the “class” (gara, 柄) of the Shibuya streets. At the same time, the kogyaru were no longer confined to Shibuya. Ikebukuro — a much less prosperous commuter hub in North Tokyo — became well-known as a kogyaru haunt — as well as the east side of Shinjuku around the ALTA Building. The gyaru love life changed as well. In gyaru magazines, readers stopped requesting editors to send information about guys at prestigious Tokyo schools and instead asked about the hunks at lower-rung schools (Namba 2006).

Lower socioeconomic status teens had always had their own subcultures in Japan. Starting in the 1970s, Japanese delinquent teens in working class neighborhoods, mostly outside of Tokyo, started organizing into a subculture called yankii that revolved around modified school uniforms and bike gangs called bōsōzoku. Yankii girls followed the concepts of the male style; the sukeban long-skirt look of the late 1970s was basically identical in form to the men’s banchō tinkering of the Prussian schoolboy outfit. Meanwhile yankii women joined biker gangs called rediisu (Ladies/Lady’s) in imitation of their bōsōzoku brethren, adopting the jump suit aesthetic and strict hierarchy of their male peers. The rediisu peaked in 1991, with around 10,000 female bikers across Japan (Macias 37).

Yet once the kogyaru style appeared, the delinquent girls looking for a welcoming social group, who would have joined the rediisu in the past, instead saw something appealing in the kogyaru and headed to Shibuya. Yankii style had always been oppressively masculine, while kogyaru style exaggerated the feminine, cute, and sexy — all things denied in traditional female yankii circles. No doubt many Japanese young women found the gyaru’s female-focus a more attractive path than trying to mimic the hard-ass kōha aesthetics of their boyfriends.

So with kogyaru a new style option for delinquent female teens in the mid-1990s, high schools across Japan saw ruptures in delinquent aesthetics between girls who became bikers/aligned with classic yankii values and girls who became gyaru. The former kogyaru interviewed on Tokyo Damage Report notes that when she took up gyaru fashion, the style contrasted starkly with traditional working-class yankii style. She explains that the yankii girls “hated us, because they were the old trend, and we were the new trend.” By the end of the 1990s, however, there were no more rediisu left — they were all gyaru now. The interview subject continues: “A lot of junior high yankii girls turned gyaru, and soon the remaining yankiis were totally outnumbered.” There was no coincidence that the classic rediisu biker magazine Teen’s Road stopped publishing in 1998. That entire subculture had essentially vanished and been absorbed into the gyaru. (As further proof of this, many former rediisu dress in a classic 2000s oneekei gyaru style.)

So as these girls started to join the gyaru ranks, they added their basic cultural DNA to the pool. Former Editor-in-Chief of egg said “The source [of gyaru style] was surfer clothing and accessories, but then people who would have been called yankii a decade ago mixed into that. Gyaru style is the clothing of a certain type and also a reaction against society” (Namba 2006). Even Queen of the Gyaru Hamasaki Ayumi would openly admit that she spent her teen years as a “yankii.” The two cultures had merged.

And with this new hybrid gyaru-yankii culture around 1998, the kogyaru movement started to move away from its roots. The first round of style evolutions had the air of conscious divergence from the base material but stayed overall in line with the summer-obsessed principles of gyaru fashion. Accompanying the aforementioned mèche streaky or bleach blond hair came color contacts in blues and greens — all on top of much deeper shades of salon tan. Most famously the new gyaru started to take up enormous platform boots, inspired mostly by Amuro Namie, but taken to extremes and much maligned in the wider culture. Not only were the boots gigantically high and caused the girls to walk in an awkward hunch, they were thought to be deadly: A woman driving in platform heels crashed her car as her shoes got stuck in the pedals (Ono/WSJ). Moreover, the platform boots bucked the traditional idea that women should be diminutive in both attitude and physical size (Namba 2006). But these men-repelling boots were just the tip of the iceberg — the entire gyaru style began to move away from being sexy and uke (“attractive to boys”) and into an anti-uke style meant to impress female peers more than possible boyfriends.

Between these style changes and the rise of central community magazines such as egg, the new girls in the movement understood that they were no longer just imitating the 1990s look but creating something of their own. So they voraciously rejected the term kogyaru and rechristened their style with the original term “gyaru.” Kogyaru would be reduced to an dead slang term that would only refer to a historical period of 1990s female fashion.

And with so many girls clustered in Tokyo’s commuter hubs, hanging out in the streets, it was inevitable that groups of guys in the same age range would rush to their side. Called gyaru-o (ギャル男), these young men intentionally dressed in a masculine version of gyaru style — with the intention of hitting on the gyaru. They looked like Kimura Takuya-lookalikes: shoulder-length brown hair and caramel salon skin. They were also called V-o (V男) due to their love of V-neck sweater vests, mostly worn over T-shirts (Namba 2006). To the outside world, they appeared to be clubbing lethario types in Gucci loafers and baggy dark clothing. But in their pursuit of the darker-faced gyaru, these men started to take on stylistic aspects of the female subculture — especially the tanned skin. The end result was a women’s fashion look influencing a parallel style in men’s fashion — rather than the other way around. The traditional man → woman influence seen in yankii and rediisu had been reversed. The gyaru style did not just take over female fashion but also strongly influenced men too.

Ganguro — “Black Face”

As ridiculous as the giant platform heels looked, this would be a relatively minor step in the gyaru style evolution. Attention soon turned from wild clothing to extreme transformation of the face and hair.

Around 1999, the gyaru started to take on a deep tanning and make-up style pejoratively called ganguro — a term written in katakana but literally meaning “black face.” This took the light surfer tan of the original gyaru and pushed it so far it became an unnatural, deathly shade. The ganguro look required either long hours at a tanning salon or just slathering on very dark face cake base make-up (see tutorial here). With skin so dark, the standard gyaru make-up would no longer be visible, so the ganguro gyaru started wearing white or otherwise bright make-up, thus creating a “panda”-like reversal of skin tone and highlights. Girls also started attaching fake eyelashes to draw more attention to the eyes. This facial look was then added to lightly-colored orange or silver hair, thus suggesting an almost photographic negative of the normal face. With ganguro, the original kogyaru aesthetic had gone Frankenstein.

For as extreme as the look was, it caught on quickly in the community and became a standard part of gyaru culture. The magazine Da Capo did a survey in August 18, 1999 and found that 99.5% of egg readers were ganguro (Namba 2006). With ganguro being so far removed from other female fashion looks, being a gyaru now required shocking style choices rather than just adding a few Shibuya trends into an otherwise cutesy high-school wardrobe.

Ganguro was not the furthest point, however. An even more daring version became known as gonguro — a style which Patrick Macias in Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno describes as looking “burnt beyond all recognition.” Then developed the most far-out faction, the yamamba — “mountain witches” — with pitch black faces, Halloween white make-up, face stickers, and rainbow-colored stringy hair. If ganguro were taking the natural aspects of surfer style into unnatural places, yamamba was full costume with almost no relations to mainstream style. One of the most outrageous aspects to develop in the yamamba look was white streaks painted on the nose, which had more in common with tribal warpaint than the entirety of post-war Japanese fashion.

Needless to say, the entire Japanese media went completely insane over the ganguro and yamamba. The most angry may have been the men’s magazines, who had coddled the kogyaru over a decade as new sex objects only to have them move their style into direct confrontation with the male libido. In her essay, “Black Faces, Witches, and Racism against Girls” in Bad Girls of Japan, scholar Sharon Kinsella collects quote after quote from the weekly male magazines disapproving of look, especially as ganguro girls started to appear in pornographic films. Female critics were not any more kind: Kinsella finds a female writer Nakano Midori (from “Yamamba,” Japan Echo 27, vol 1, Feb 2000) admitting, “In all honesty, I have seen very few girls sporting the style that brings me even close to thinking, ‘Without that makeup, she must be a beauty, what a waste.’”

Kinsella believes the root of ganguro-loathing exists in the racist underpinnings of Japanese society. She writes:

Commentary about the race, tribe, and skin color of girls, was sometimes entwined with a derogatory and pseudo-Darwinian commentary about dark-skinned girls, which implied that they were a kind of species or animal. Classified as dark-skinned primitives and animals, girls daring to wear black face and witch outfits sometimes became subject to a racist assault on their humanity.

While this may certainly have played a part in setting the parameters of the discussion, the girls deserve much more credit for having intentionally engineered the ganguro look to frighten off anyone not in gyaru circles. They may have unconsciously tapped into long-standing racial and skin color prejudices to settle on a darker skin, but their goal was extremity rather than racial reference itself.

Ironically, however, the ganguro brought a close to the moral panic of the kogyaru age — when everyone worried about the daughters of good families drowning in the moral ambiguity of the Bubble era. The kogyaru looked plausible as “normal girls” gone bad, but the ganguro were clearly an anti-social subculture in the classic mold, who Kinsella hears constantly described as “dumb, dirty, and ugly.” There was social wrath and disgust towards the ganguro, but they were essentially ignored as common deviants.

Viewed within the context of Japanese fashion, however, the ganguro phase of gyaru style was fairly radical — especially in its complete detachment from classic or contemporary American or European styles (Namba 2006). While the original gyaru style was loosely tied to American casual and Hawaiian surfer looks, ganguro blew these signifiers so far out as to make their fashion completely home-grown. Certainly the gyaru had a vague desire to transform themselves away from being “Japanese,” but the style itself grew straight out of the Japanese streets. One had to travel to Shibuya or Ikebukuro, not London or New York, to see “authentic” gyaru. No one may have noticed at the time, but this was a concrete step in Japan finding pride in its own domestic, non-designer fashion — overcoming the constant dull pain of an inferiority complex towards style originators overseas.

The gyaru also had freed themselves from the subtle class anxieties at the heart of mainstream consumer culture. In his 2001 book My Homeless Child, sociologist Miura Atsushi writes, “From a class perspective, ganguro girls did not think at all about looking like the people who belonged to the class above their own. In that way, this was an epoch-making fashion” (Namba 2006). At the same time, there were no celebrity models for ganguro. The gyaru had become almost completely free from the pressures of fashion’s classic authoritative groups — foreigners, the rich, celebrities — and instead only looked horizontally to their peers.

Why Did Gyaru Style Go Extreme?

Despite the normally quick fashion cycles in Japan, the clothing choices in the kogyaru subculture stayed relatively stable for the first five years. Why then did gyaru style suddenly go so extreme around 1998 and 1999 — from a relatively palatable light brown tan and slightly altered schoolgirl uniform to scorched faces, costume makeup, monstrous rainbow hair?

There are many causes to this dramatic shift, but they all link back to the explosion of the kogyaru population in the late 1990s. First and foremost, the growth of the gyaru had created an environment of negative attention from the rest of society — especially older men. The early kogyaru took up gruff speech as a defense mechanism against the constant sexual propositioning from older men, but as the enjo kōsai media boom filled Shibuya with even more men looking to pay teens for sex, the sexy kogyaru style — originally meant as a way to attract boyfriends of the same age — became a major liability. Hence girls had a immediate reason to move from a uke/mote style meant to please the opposite sex to the ganguro style that naturally turned men away. Dark skin and tall boots irked graying salarymen, which essentially solved the central problem of gyaru’s existence.

The speed and intensity of the changes in gyaru style, however, would not be possible without a centralized media to propagate fashion, and by 1998 girls across Japan could read egg, Cawaii!, and Popteen to see what was happening in Tokyo. In the early 1990s, an era with no specifically “gyaru” magazines, interested parties had to either go to the Shibuya streets or study short glimpses of the girls on TV. Gyaru magazines on the other hand focused on the most extreme aspects of gyaru style and made their dokusha amateur models into folk heroes. This propagated the most hardcore aspects to a large group of dedicated readers across Japan. Before there was a certain nonchalance to the gyaru style, but now the gyaru could study and copy the latest trends thanks to magazine blueprints. So not only were girls able to learn gyaru style in manuals, those manuals offered a more and more extreme style recipe.

As the gyaru style turned deeply inward, there was naturally going to be a desire to mark off the subculture from mass culture. And since mainstream style had already absorbed the basics of kogyaru fashion, more extreme looks like ganguro would be necessary to create the distinction. In other words, almost every high school girl looked like the original kogyaru in 1998, so gyaru who moved to Shibuya to be “gyaru” had to push the look in new directions to create a difference. This is a classic social dynamic — people are forced to create new signifiers to make distinctions between the in-group and out-group when their old signifiers are appropriated. The kogyaru interviewed on Tokyo Damage Report noted a huge shift from “new girls” who entered the look in 1999:

They’d been reading the magazines and studying the gyaru since they were 13, so they had basically passed through their “gyaru” phase while still in junior high. By the time they got old enough make a debut on the Shibuya streets, they were already past the “gyaru” phase! Everything was superlative — darker skin, shorter skirts, brighter colors, more extreme dieting…

In other words, gyaru who reached the peak age were not just fighting against the mainstream kogyaru style but also looking to move into new directions from their own past.

Nothing made a bigger impact on the values of late 1990s gyaru style, however, than the aforementioned influx of lower middle class and working class delinquent teens from the Tokyo suburbs or outside of Tokyo. There has always been a marked difference in values within Japanese upper class delinquent teen subcultures like the Taiyo-zoku, Roppongi-zoku, and chiimaa and lower class delinquent teen subcultures mostly based around the yankii and bōsōzoku. Rich teens can abdicate middle class responsibilities of study since their economic advantage and social connections guarantee a bright future. Working class teens, on the other hand, traditionally experience a period of rebellion in their mid-teens as they drop out of a college-oriented high school system. They, however, quickly “grow up” to take on manual labor jobs in their late-teens. These are two very different modes of teenage rebellion, and with the change in class composition of gyaru, the group slowly shifted from the former to the latter through the 1990s. Gyaru took on the typical values of working class rebellion and lost the original aspects of affluent dereliction.

In his book Kamikaze Biker: Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan, sociologist Sato Ikuya researched working class bōsōzoku living in Kansai during the 1980s and found a certain number of psychological drivers to the subculture. First and foremost was the desire to ”stand out” (medatsu). The bōsōzoku were unexceptional students destined for a life of unglamorous manual labor, and they used the brief flirtation with extreme costume and delinquency as a way to grab their local community’s attention. The easiest way to do this was through a shocking uniform that openly violated social norms — bleached hair, punch perms, work clothes festooned with right-wing slogans, and loud, chopped bikes. egg editor Yonehara Yasumasa explains this more simply, “Yankii are perfect examples of how Japanese people have the tendency to go too far with things.” Hence we should understand working class delinquency as a desire to push values into extremes.

More broadly speaking, however, working class yankii misfits were creating their own society, one in which they decided what is excellent and beautiful instead of being constantly told that they were failures. This links to American criminologist Albert Cohen’s subcultural theory that gangs have a “compensatory function.” As Dick Hebdidge summarizes, “working-class adolescents who underachieved at school joined gangs in their leisure time in order to develop alternative sources of self-esteem. In the gang, the core values of the straight world — sobriety, ambition, conformity, etc. — were replaced by their opposites: hedonism, defiance of authority and the quest for ‘kicks’” (Hedbidge 76). The yankii have been the Japanese youth subculture that most closely followed this typical global pattern.

So as yankii types drifted into the gyaru subculture, these new recruits changed gyaru style to fit their needs and inherent group values, imbuing the community with a rebellious and anti-social edge that would flip mainstream values on their head. The look thus got pushed into extremes within the old yankii context of “standing out.” Furthermore, yankii and rediisu had traditionally been strongly homosocial — in other words, bōsōzoku hung out with other guys, rediisu hung out with other girls. This orientation further contributed to the fashion being increasingly meant for fellow gyaru and not potential suitors.

In this, the yankii and ganguro gyaru adhered almost perfectly to the archetypes of subculture outlined in Dick Hebdidge’s landmark study Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Hebdidge looked at British youth subcultures from the 1950s to 1970s, starting with the Teddy Boys whose interest in historical and fantastical outfits stemmed from being “effectively excluded and temperamentally detached from the respectable working class, condemned in all probability to a lifetime of unskilled work.” Ultimately Hebdidge saw subcultural style as an attempt to intentionally separate from society: “[the fashion looks] are obviously fabricated. They display their own codes or at least demonstrate that codes are there to be used and abused … The communication of a significant difference, then (and the parallel communication of a group identity), is the ‘point’ behind the style.” (Hebdige 101).

While Kinsella perhaps overplayed the racial elements (ganguro, for example, was not intentionally meant to imitate the look of African-Americans), she does correctly identify that the blackened skin itself worked as a naturally anti-social signifier, marking the ganguro off from not just straight society but other female subcultures. And once freed from need to attract men and look at least somewhat respectable, the girls entered into an echo chamber of the Shibuya streets and egg magazine. The reward structure favored intensity rather than modesty. As the ex-kogaru from Tokyo Damage Report says:

Maybe, if you are cute, but everyone around you is also cute, you want to stand out from them. And once you stand out, everyone else has to take it to the next level to stand out from you. It wasn’t so much an anti-society thing, it was more like an oblivious-to-society thing. All they cared about was out-doing their immediate circle of friends, and maybe getting in a magazine.

The rest of society may have watched on in horror, but the ganguro girls were getting exactly what they wanted out of the gyaru subculture: their own society, values, and fashions in which they were celebrated and rewarded.

The End of Gyaru?

As the streets of Shibuya “swarmed” with gyaru in the mid-1990s, the area brought to mind a Japanese version of London’s swinging mod Carnaby Street of the 1960s — a commercial area alive with a new youth fashion. By 2000, however, the rise of ganguro made the area more like late 1960s Haight-Ashbury — a meeting ground for the nation’s lumpen, middle-school drop-outs, and runaways. A new word developed o-gyaru (汚ギャル)— o is the on-yomi for “dirty” — to describe the ganguro types who partied all night, lived on the streets, used magic marker to paint on their eyebrows, and generally did not bathe, brush their teet, or change their underwear. The o-gyaru may have not been large in number, but they increasingly symbolized Shibuya style. (Personally I remember hanging around the streets of Shibuya in 2000 after the last trains and randomly being introduced to emotionally-scarred middle-school runaways.)

The neighborhood also filled with gyaru-mama – young single mothers who dressed in the gyaru style and brought their babies in strollers to hang out in Shibuya. This was another shock for the typical consumer culture of the neighborhood, where middle-class youth go to shop precisely because adult responsibility for work and family are very far away. Gyaru-mama brought the consequences of sexual activity and the typical life-pattern of non-urban, working class women too far to the forefront.

Throughout the 1990s, Japanese high school girls had been infatuated by the upper-class and confident kogyaru, but needless to say, the new Shibuya breed inspired much less imitation. In just a few years, the gyaru style had become an extreme and non-aesthetically pleasing costume with which “normal” girls did not want to associate themselves. The population lost new recruits from anyone other than yankii-types, thus starting the decline of gyaru style. egg stopped publishing for a few months in 2000. In April 2001, Spa! already noted the falling numbers in an article called “Where did all the ganguro platform boot gyaru go?” (Namba 2006). Upon my own moving to Tokyo in 2003, I had noticed that gyaru were basically non-existent other than tiny groups of hardcore hold-outs moving around Center-gai. In just a decade since their initial appearance, the gyaru were on the verge of extinction.

Things looked grim for gyaru style, doomed to be forever remembered in its most terrifying yamamba state. Yet things were far from over. Gyaru style would forever again be linked to heavy makeup and the yankii strata of society, but the next generation of gyaru would work incredibly hard to redeem the subculture from its anti-social nadir and raise the community’s social standing in wider society. As we will see next time [editor’s note: this follow-up piece never happened], gyaru style was about to experience an unexpected resurgence in the mid-2000s. Not only would the gyaru become the most important female fashion subculture in the 21st century, they would essentially take over pop culture.

References:

Baba, Hironobu (馬場広信). Shibuya-kei vs. Kamata-kei (シブヤ系対カマタ系). Bunkasha, 1997.

Hebdidge, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge, 1981.

Kinsella, Sharon. “Black Faces, Witches, and Racism against Girls.” Bad Girls of Japan. Ed. Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

“Kogal Interview.” Tokyo Damage Report. March 19, 2009.

Macias, Patrick, and Izumi Evers. Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno. Chronicle Books, 2007.

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.

Ono, Yumiko. “These Boots Aren’t Made for Walking But for Taking Stands” Wall Street Journal. November 19, 1999.

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.

Last time we saw that the tastes of upper and middle-class “mainstream” consumers dominated Japanese pop culture from the post-war to the end of the 1990s. This time we will explore the most important cultural change of the last decade: the greater proportional power for marginal subcultures. Mainstream consumers, for the economic and demographic reasons given in Part One and Part Two, have ceased to consume with the same force as before and thus have lost their “voting power” within pop culture.

Part Four: The Rise of Marginal Subcultures

The drop in cultural markets has been almost perfectly pegged to the decline in incomes. Middle class consumers are buying less, and when they buy, now go for cheaper or risk-free products. Within this environment, we could expect marginal subcultures to also have curbed consumption. Yet they did not! And their steady buying into their own cultural niches has made huge changes in the tenor of Japanese pop culture.

Yankii and otaku: Consumption as pathology

The yankii and otaku have never traditionally been blessed with high incomes nor high future earning potential, and in pure homo economicus terms, should be cutting back even more than middle-class consumers. We must understand, however, that for the otaku, yankii, and gyaru, shopping is not merely a form of leisure nor has it even been an attempt to buy into a larger society-wide consumerist message. These groups use consumerism as a therapeutic solution to their psychological and social problems.

The otaku spend their time as avaricious collectors of goods and trading information with other otaku. In shunning away from mainstream standards of sociability, sexuality, and career success, the act of maniacal consumption becomes their raison d’être. They cannot relate with other people if not commenting upon these cultural goods. Culture — most of which must be purchased and enjoyed as object (even when it is just physical media holding content) — is the great satisfier of their deepest desires.

The gyaru, in comparison, put a high premium on social networks and romance. Yet there is a certain pain at the heart of gyaru culture. In his book Keitai Shosetsu-teki (“Cell Phone Novel-esque”), author Hayamizu Kenrou calls the basic aesthetic mode of gyaru literature — cell phone novels, Hamasaki Ayumi lyrics — “trauma-kei” due to its emphasis on overcoming personal tragedy. When I interviewed Nakajo Hisako, the editor-in-chief of Koakuma Ageha, in 2009 I asked, “Why do gyaru spend so much time on their clothing, hair, and makeup?” She answered, “Because we are not cute. If we were cute, we would just wear a white T-shirt. We have to work hard to look good.” There is an obvious logic to this: The gyaru’s transformation into golden curly hair and heavily painted faces is an escape from their normal selves.

Like Nakajo suggests, gyaru culture looks as it does precisely because they are not “blessed” girls (Nakajo’s words). And this means gyaru must spend on clothing, hair treatments, and makeup in order to achieve the desired self-image. Beyond this desire to look like someone else (and basically like everyone else in their peer group), there is also the social demand to show allegiance to a wider gyaru subculture by donning its uniform. To be a gyaru means dressing like a gyaru — no exceptions.

Marginal groups’ up their voting power in the consumer vacuum

The end result is that the otaku and yankii have an almost inelastic demand for their favorite goods. They must consume, no matter the economic or personal financial situation. They may move to cheaper goods, but they will always be buying something. Otherwise they lose their identity. While normal consumers curb consumption in the light of falling wages, the marginal otaku and yankii keep buying. And that means the markets built around these subcultures are relatively stable in size.

So as the total market shrinks, the marginal groups — in their stability — are no longer minor segments but now form a respectable plurality in the market. In other words, if otaku or yankii all throw their support through a specific cultural item, that item will end up being the most supported within the wider market.

The clearest example of this is AKB48. With the letters AKB in their name, this group of girls was unequivocally marketed towards older males based in the Akihabara otaku culture. Compared to past mass market groups such as Speed, the girls are intentionally chosen and styled to look like elementary schoolgirls and lyrically address older men with direct sexual references. (See the “cat-eared brothel” video for “Heavy Rotation” and the unambiguous “love knows no age” lyrics for “Seifuku ga jama wo suru.”)

The mass idol group regularly has an “election” (sousenkyo) where fans try to vote their favorite girl to Number One. Buying certain AKB48 CD singles gives the fan a vote in the AKB48 election, which thus incentivizes otaku to buy multiple copies of the CD to increase their “political” power. The CD is thus no longer a means of listening to music but a way to influence the future of AKB48. This has created a legion of fans who buy dozens and hundreds of the same AKB48 CD or even 5500 copies. There are now doubts about that story’s authenticity but it basically was an exaggeration of an existing principle. Regardless, the marketing strategy of AKB48 does encourage the purchase of multiple goods, thus amplifying the buying power of nerds beyond their small numbers. This means as a consumer bloc, the AKB48 otaku fans can rival the non-otaku consumer base.

This otaku bloc strength, as well as other niche’s dedicated buying, can be seen through the music charts. In 2010 only three artists made the Oricon best-selling singles market — AKB48 and a Johnny’s Jimusho group Arashi. (At this stage, you can almost argue that music fans of Johnny’s groups are themselves a conspicuous cult rather than a mass market phenomenon.) Only two artists taking the entire singles market is unprecedented in Japanese musical history. In the previous decade, the average number of artists in the top ten was 8.2. The best explanation is that mainstream consumers stopped buying music, even single song downloads, so the favorite acts of marginal subcultures now appear to be the most popular.

Otaku and gyaru: winners by default

This principle demonstrates how AKB48 became an unlikely “mainstream” phenomenon. Despite AKB48 being so clearly marketed towards a niche audience, their success in a declining market has made them perceived to be the most popular in the entire market. Therefore 2010 and 2011 saw AKB48, with backing from advertising monolith Dentsu, doing advertisements for mainstream brands and chains such as 7/11. (Lawson’s has now countered with a nerd-drooling K-On! campaign.) With no major competition from more mainstream-oriented idols and groups, they became the obvious spokespeople and magazine cover girls — thus amplifying their fame more.

In the case of gyaru, there are larger numbers of gyaru than otaku, meaning that the gyaru can just consume their standard number of items and still dominate the market. Before I mentioned that the extremely “normal girl” fashion magazine non•no once sold close to a million copies per issue in 1996 at the peak of the publishing market, which was once far above the 310,000 copies for hardcore yankii/gyaru magazine Popteen at the same time. Around 2009, however, non•no dropped to a mere 180,000 copies a month while Popteen was still hovering around 310,000. Gyaru are still consuming fashion, and therefore need fashion guides to tell them how to do so. “Normal” girls have generally lost interest in clothing and do not need fashion guides as much. So in this collapse of the mass market, a magazine representing a marginal taste has become one of the best-selling.

With the yankii and otaku culture being so proportionally conspicuous in the market and mainstream and avant-garde styles being so minor and invisible, the once marginal looks have a greater legitimacy for less engaged consumers who mostly just desire socially-acceptable styles. As a result, gyaru and yankii fashion have had a strong moment over the last five years, leading to large-scale booms in things once unfathomable such as “hostess fashion.” University students at elite schools like Keio are likely to have hairstyles reminiscent of yankii hosts. Films and books with obvious yankii narratives, such as Rookies and cell phone novel Koizora, became huge national hits in 2009. Gyaru singer Nishino Kana is one of the few well-selling artists on Sony (formerly known for alternative musicians Supercar, Puffy, and Denki Groove). And even former “arty” magazines like CUTiE have moved towards the gyaru style, and the fiercely indie girl mag Zipper put gyaru icon Tsubasa Masuwaka on the cover. There is no popular female style that does not see a little influence from the yankii side of gyaru culture.

Not truly “the most popular”

While otaku and yankii cultures are enjoying a new cultural influence in their deep commitment to consumption, we should not forget that these groups do not make up any kind of actual societal consensus. The masses may be consuming parts of their culture, but these groups are at best pluralities rather than majorities — dominant in the market but nowhere near 50% of tastes.

For example, if you look at the sales numbers for the #1 single of 2010 — “Beginner” by AKB48 at 954,283 copies — this would not have been enough copies to make the top ten from the years 1991 to 2000, when the wider public bought CDs in droves. In 2001, it would have ranked in at #10 — a successful hit for a niche, but not the symbol of J-Pop for the era. The population of Japan in the last ten years has not dropped enough to make this smaller number of sales proportionally relevant — just less people are purchasing music.

AKB48’s narrow popularity becomes very clear when the group appears on television — a medium that continues to have a mass audience (although disproportionally elderly viewers.) Maeda Atsuko had been repeatedly voted the #1 member of AKB48, and yet her recent drama Hanazakari no Kimitachi e (Ikemen Paradise)saw extremely low ratings (episodes around 6%). AKB48 variety show “Naruhodo High School” has drawna dismal 4.5%.

AKB48 have also been extremely popular on YouTube, which skews towards a tech-savvy male audience in Japan. And yet a song like “Heavy Rotation”— at over 50 million views — has nearly one-third “thumbs down” votes. This is an extremely high amount level of dislikes compared to other music videos on the site.

So AKB48 are the most conspicuous music group in Japan at the moment with the highest record sales and highest number of appearances, but they should necessarily be considered a “mass” phenomenon with widespread fans across multiple segments. The group has captured the strongest plurality in the market, and companies have mobilized around them in desperation. If Dentsu could sponsor a different hit idol group with an even broader fan base, they would. But ironically, no one other than AKB48 or Johnny’s Jimusho groups have the sales or market legitimacy to work in the context of mass market advertising. Marginal groups are now feeding and over-influencing the remnants of the mass market just as counter-consumer once did.

Next time, we look at whether marginal subcultures can produce goods that are easily exportable.