We ask two American writers Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Matthew Firestone what it was really like to walk the 88-temple-long henro pilgrimage route in Shikoku — and learn that foot comfort is the secret to success.

Tucked between the very end of Honshu and the top of Kyushu, Shikoku is the least traveled and least familiar major island of the Japanese archipelago. There are few famous sites or tourist attractions, and most guidebooks recommend the location as a way to “experience rural Japan.” Shikoku does, however, attract a constant stream of visitors every year to walk, bus, bike, or drive through its famed 88-temple Buddhist pilgrimage route.

While most pilgrams in modern times are retirees moving through the course easily with the aid of tour buses, we wanted to get a sense of what it was like to do the course by foot as a young explorer with modern travel expectations. So we caught up with two American writers who have turned their Shikoku foot journeys into books: literary memoirist Gideon Lewis-Kraus and former travel writer Matthew Firestone.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus

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Gideon is the author of the 2012 memoir A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful in which he recounts his personal experiences through three pilgrimages: El Camino del Santiago with fellow writer Tom Bissell, the Shikoku henro by himself, and the Rosh Hashana pilgrimage to Uman in Ukraine along with his father and brother. Gideon walked the Shikoku henro on foot, without knowing much Japanese and seemingly surviving on a diet of combini onigiri.

Why did you decide to do the Shikoku Henro by foot?
I’d walked the Camino de Santiago by foot and never really considered doing the henro any other way. There was some brief talk about doing it the way most Japanese people do it — by bus, or apparently for some wealthy people by helicopter — but by the time I got to the point of leaving for Japan I knew that the book was going to be more personal than anthropological so there wasn’t really a question.

Did you wear the traditional garb?
I wore the white pilgrim vest with the Heart Sutra inked on the back, yeah, because you really do need some indicator or you won’t get osettai (gifts locals give to the pilgrims). And after a few days you realize that trip is spectacularly taxing and the moments of real grace are mostly osettai-related.

I also had the traditional walking stick but halfway through I bought Nordic Walking Poles. I kept the traditional stick lashed to my bag, though. I didn’t wear any of the brightly colored sashes because they would’ve gotten dirty, and the traditional sedge hats don’t fit Western heads very well.

What is the average day-to-day on the pilgrimage look/feel like?
It varies quite a bit. There are days where you’re just walking through the run-down, rather dreary suburbs of cities like Tokushima or Takamatsu, and then there are days when you’re alone along the coast for long stretches. The flat parts are almost all along roads, and the traffic is jarring. The bits in the mountains are much more serene but, well, you’re going up and down mountains. It rains all the time, at least when I was there, in March and April.

How would you compare Shikoku to the rest of Japan?
Well, it’s hard for me to answer this question because Shikoku was the first place I ever visited in Japan. Now I’ve been all over the country and have a broader view, but my initial impressions were all formed in a vacuum. I suppose the answer is that it’s both. There’s some really stunning scenery, particularly in the southwest, between temples thirty-six and thirty-eight, but there’s also some pretty nontrivial squalor.

What was your ultimate fantasy of what you would get out of it?
The most honest answer to that question is that you probably have to read my book, but the easier answer is probably that I’d done this Western pilgrimage that was a line culminating in some supposedly climactic goal and had heard about the henro en route; the Japanese pilgrims who told me about it said that the circuit of the eighty-right temples was different because it was a circle, not a line. So I guess I had some vague ideas that maybe arriving where I’d started would provide an interesting sense of finality that I — and most other pilgrims — found wanting in anticlimactic Santiago de Compostela.

What is the harsh reality of doing the henro by foot?
Really, and this answer is always so banal, that it’s on asphalt. At the end of the henro, at this pilgrim welcome center between temples eighty-seven and eighty-eight, this guy asked me what the difference was between the Camino and the eighty-eight temples. There were a million things I might’ve said — that the Camino was social, and fun, for one — but I said that it was that the Camino was on these nice dirt paths. Your feet get used to the soft dirt in a way that they just never acclimate to the asphalt. I didn’t lose a single toenail on the Camino, and I lost three on Shikoku.

How much did you cheat? Was it worth it?
I cheated three times, but two of them were in places where you had to retrace your steps, which I thought was out of the spirit of the circle anyway. The first was the three kilometers downhill from temple twenty-seven; I’d twisted my ankle on the way up and needed to rest it. The second was about twelve kilometers between temples thirty-eight and thirty-nine, because it was pouring and I didn’t feel like walking back up the same road I’d walked down to Cape Ashizuri. And by then I was walking with an American guy who badly needed a break. The third time was when I took a train between temples sixty-four and sixty-five for about fifteen kilometers; that one vexed me considerably, and is treated at great length in the book. By then I had to get back to Osaka by a certain date for a party.

What was your greatest moment on the route?
That’s hard to say, because as much as I like to complain about the henro, there was a lot of it that I loved. The long stretch in the sun along the peninsula between temples thirty-six and thirty-seven, Yokonami Prefectural Natural Park, was just stunning and took place on the first day that my feet weren’t hurting in an urgent way. The walk through the inland woods between temples forty-four and forty-five was beautiful and I was with two young Japanese women I was very fond of. The summit of the mountain just above temple eighty-eight, obviously. And the whole last stretch, walking backward in the sun from temple ten to temple one, brought with it a whole welter of feelings about the six weeks I’d been on the circuit.

What was the nicest osettai a passerby gave to you?
This one lady gave me a little jelly pocket of this energy glop, and I was a little apprehensive about eating it, so I left it in my bag for a few days and remembered I had it at a perfect time. One of the Japanese women I describe above introduced herself to me with the osettai of an expired onigiri, and that ended up as a kind of inflection point on my trip. Another woman fished me out of the rain and gave me homemade miso soup and onigiri at a moment that, in retrospect, was probably critical morale-wise.

Do you think that you would have gotten more out of it had you been a Japanese speaker?
Oh, for sure. No question. The Camino is a ritual that you can just sort of parachute into and get a lot out of it. The eighty-eight temples are much harder to approach without some native resonance and familiarity.

Compared to your other pilgrimages, what was the sensation upon finishing it?
This is something I go into in great detail in the book so I’m not sure how to approach a short answer here, but I think a lot of my experience on Shikoku ended up being about pilgrimage as an evasion rather than as a quest. There’s something wonderfully and helpfully futile about the fact that ultimately you’ve just been running in a circle. There’s something quietly self-admonishing about the whole project, as opposed to the self-congratulation the Camino lends itself to.

Who would you recommend the henro to?
Japanese speakers. Japanese young people. People who fell so in love with the Camino that they need a bit of a corrective.

Your ultimate advice to someone planning to do it.
Don’t wear hiking boots; wear comfortable walking shoes. Nordic Walking Poles, for sure. Don’t go in March when it’s still really cold. Even though henro season starts March 1, I’d wait until April, or maybe do it in the fall. Get both the English-language guidebook and the Japanese one, as the latter has much better maps and is really useful even for non-Japanese speakers. Try to get lists of the zenkonyado and tsuyado in advance and have them translated if you don’t speak Japanese. Make reservations in advance if you’re staying in ryokan or minshuku, and ask at each place you stay where they recommend you stay the next night; the locals know the circuit really well and have a good sense for how far the next day should take you, and where a nice place to stay would be. You can have them call ahead to book you a room if you don’t speak Japanese. Plan for at the very least a day off in Kochi and a day off in Matsuyama. Get the katsuo bonito in Kochi and the grilled mochi at temple fifty-one, Ishiteji, in Matsuyama. Bring a poncho. Take the coastal road to Cape Ashizuri, not the highland route. Plan shorter days at the beginning and know that you’ll speed up later. And resist the temptation to feel like it’s all over after temple sixty-six, Unpenji, just because it’s the highest one; you’ve still got a ways to go. And, lastly, do not stay at any of the ryokan near temple seventy-five, Zentzuji. Those people are all crooks.

Matthew Firestone

Matthew Firestone is a former travel writer who co-authored 38 books for Lonely Planet and traveled to 85 countries. He currently lives in Tokyo, Japan. Matthew completed the Shikoku henro by foot in 2007 on assignment for the travel guide Lonely Planet Japan 2007

Why did you decide to do the henro by foot?
In 2006 I was working as an author for Lonely Planet. I had just finished a lengthy stint in Botswana and Namibia when the henro gig landed in my inbox. It was a quick decision. I studied Japanese in university, and probably read a bit too much Basho for my own good. Plus I had both the time and the money to commit to a lengthy trek. A rare combination.

Did you wear the traditional garb?
No, but I’m rather particular about my travel gear. I was also hauling a pre-Macbook Air era notebook computer and an assortment of bulky and overpriced SLR equipment, so a proper rucksack and all-weather gear were non-negotiable.

What is the average day-to-day look/feel like?
There are infinite variables that will shape your individual experience, but the walking is constant.

How would you compare Shikoku to the rest of Japan?
By Japanese standards, Shikoku is a rural backwater suffering from systemic depopulation. The majority of towns and cities on the island are not very appealing to foreigners, even more so if you don’t speak Japanese. And Shikoku is arguably not as scenic as Hokkaido, hence the comparative lack of rural tourist infrastructure.

What was your ultimate fantasy of what you would get out of it?
My motivations were practical: submitting my manuscript on-time and under budget. But there were a few moments, largely induced by dehydration, where I envisioned myself to be an itinerant poet. Fortunately they didn’t last long.

What is the harsh reality of doing the henro by foot?
Blisters. Without going into the gory details, the henro brutalized my feet. Moleskin and neosporin helped to a certain extent, but I severely underestimated the crushing humidity and constant downpours of the Japanese summer. I opted for sturdy combat boots, but breathable, high-top sneakers would have made all the difference. There are also centipedes. And they bite.

How much did you cheat? Was it worth it?
A little bit. And no, it wasn’t.

What was your greatest moment on the route?
I have a soft spot for Dōgo Onsen, which inspired the visual design of the enchanted bathhouse in Spirited Away. A soak there makes you believe in the Ghiblii world.

What was the nicest osettai a passerby gave to you?
You tend to get a good mix of onigiri and omamori. A few times I received hip flasks of Japanese whiskey. The nicest osettai was an old pocket knife that was on its nth circumnavigation of Shikoku.

Do you think that you get more out of it as a fluent Japanese speaker?
Knowing a few key phrases and recognizing the kanji for place names will make your travels in Shikoku much easier. Being a fully fluent Japanese speaker obviously opens up doors. But there is no language requirement to complete the pilgrimage, nor obligation to share your time on the road with anyone else. To indulge in cliches, the henro is a journey of the self.

Compared to your other long travels, what was the sensation upon finishing it?
Equal parts exhaustion and elation, with a sprinkling of disbelief. This is a fairly standard reaction to finishing a trek. What differed was the restlessness that followed. “Miles walked” and “temples visited” are convenient metrics for measuring your days, but life isn’t always this easy to quantify.

Who would you recommend the henro to?
If you’ve read this much already, then you’re already a likely candidate.

Your ultimate advice to someone planning to do it.
Comfortable shoes, thick socks, and a good first aid kit. Entire armies have ground to a halt because of negligent foot care.

Matt Treyvaud reads through the stories from Kōdansha Bungei Bunko’s Contemporary Okinawan Literature: A Selection. First up, two-time Naoki Prize nominee Adachi Seiichirō

Introduction: I thought it might be fun to read through Kōdansha Bungei Bunko’s “Contemporary Okinawan Literature: A Selection” (現代沖縄文学作品選), because why not?

Dragged Out to Sea by a Shark by Adachi Seiichirō

Two-time Naoki Prize nominee Adachi Seiichirō’s Dragged Out to Sea by a Shark (鱶に曳きずられて沖へ) has the simplicity and brutality of myth. Set on a small fishing boat, “just before dawn” (夜明け前), its characters are initially identified only as an elder and a younger brother. Their conversation reveals bad blood over a woman, and within seven pages, one of them is dead.

Mishima Yukio’s The Sound of Waves (潮騒) was famously inspired by Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, but Dragged feels closer to Japonic traditions. In the Man’yōshū (one of the poems of which was the source for Mishima’s title), boats tend to be viewed from a distance, preferably from atop a mountain far inland; they were useful as symbols of loneliness and demarcators of dominion’s edge, but the inner lives of those who operated them didn’t really come up. Adachi’s story, set at the edge of the modern state which traces its lineage back to the culture which wrote the Man’yōshū, takes us onto the boat and into the lives of its operators.

The elder brother reeled in the seventh rope with his right hand, looping the slack around his left forearm. The cold water dripping off the rope ran down his bare arms and dampened the thick black hair in his armpits.

“Nothing on this one either,” he said, clicking his tongue in disgust.

The younger brother jerked the oars violently …

But for all the shocking power of the story itself, the final lines feel awkward. The surviving brother had to yell something, I suppose, but did his words have to so artlessly reiterate what has already emerged so satisfactorily from the workings of the story itself? It feels like a cushion, dampening what should come as a terrific, uncompromising blow.

Further reading: Higa Minoru, 祟りなすものの南島的形象: 鱶伝説にみる南島の思想

In Part Three of our four-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 never 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 delinquency 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, gyaru style was about to experience an unexpected resurgence in the mid-2000s thanks to a aesthetically-pleasing “white” style. 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.

Highly popular blog and 2ch aggregator Alfalfa Mosaic serves up a mix of posts on otaku culture, teenage idols — and conservative politics. We try to figure out what this means.

The Internet bulletin board 2ch has long been the “heart” of Japanese web culture. The primitively-designed, text-based site is almost impossible to navigate for casual readers, yet remains responsible for generating most Japanese language memes.

Even with more professionally-produced content on the Japanese web in recent years, 2ch still controls web culture beyond the BBS: Ranking site Authority.jp lists two 2ch aggregators Itai News (#3) and Alfalfa Mosaic (#5) in the top five most influential Japanese blogs. These blogs locate popular threads on 2ch, pull them out of the notoriously hard-to-read BBS format, and publish them and the best comments as easily-digestible RSS-feed blog posts. Itai News publishes only a few posts a day, mostly centered around bizarre and depressing news items that are currently engaging and enraging 2ch readers.

While similar in content to Itai News, Alfalfa Mosaic — named after a plant virus — covers a wider set of topics, primarily focused around otaku culture. The site offers around 30 articles a day and is an easy way to catch up with the current interests and topics of 2ch-reading otaku. The site, however, is also famous for its right-wing political bent. In this, Alfalfa Mosaic’s “taste culture” — defined as “clusters of cultural forms which embody similar values and aesthetic standards” — seamlessly combines the otaku love of manga, anime, lolicon, and games with populist right-wing politics.

Despite a slew of topics that mainstream society would consider “marginal,” Alexa has the Alfalfa Mosaic listed as the 117th most visited in Japan, close to mass media sites like Oricon or Hot Pepper, and even higher ranked than Rocketnews24 or ZakZak.

Instead of just asserting the otaku-right wing mix as fact, however, we thought it would be more effective to a list out the blog posts themselves. See the Appendix below for a complete list of three days of posts. Analysis follows right below.

Findings: Categories and Favorite Items

The majority of Alfalfa Mosaic posts would fall under the category otaku culture. This includes video games, anime series (especially involving young girls), manga (especially involving young girls), cosplay, vocaloid music, collectible card games, and tokusatsu series.

The next most common category could be broadly defined as politics. The current controversy is the universally conservative worry about welfare benefit fraud (i.e., the Komoto Junichi incident). Alfalfa Mosaic readers also are interested in China, North Korea, and South Korea — usually highlighted in negative news about the countries. (Taiwan, in contrast, is commonly portrayed in a positive light.)

The third most common category is weird and current news items. This is the bread-and-butter of blogs around the world, and most of the posts are things that would be found on similar sites in other cultures: funny cat videos, animated gifs, bizarre happenings, etc. Most overlap with Itai News is in this category.

Finally, there are many articles covering women and sex. Readers adore idols, AKB48, voice actresses, animated female characters, women who look much younger than their age, and women with large breasts. References to real life adult women are mostly negative — portraying them, for example, as gold-diggers who are marrying for money.

Analysis in Dialogue

What conclusions would you draw from this data set?

Just from an Occam’s razor approach, the cultural mix of Alfalfa Mosaic suggests that the men who want to read a site about little girl anime and gaming also want to read about right-wing political content. We should understand that there is a sub-section of the web population interested in both topics.

But the otaku are apolitical! They are just ignoring or tolerating the right-wing stuff on the site.

Why would you mix these two particular categories of content — moe-focused otaku culture and right-wing politics — if they didn’t appeal to the total readership? If the otaku were turned off by right-wing politics, wouldn’t a site with only otaku culture be more successful? And vice versa, if you were into right-wing politics why would you read a blog that is dominated with posts about anime like Smile PreCure? Alfalfa Mosaic is clearly a successful site. This formula works.

What’s more, we see the exact cultural combination of lolicon idols and right-wing thought in other parts of Japanese culture, especially the AKB48-loving, China-hating magazine Weekly Playboy.

Compare this to massively popular U.S. West Coast Boing Boing, which combines science geekery, bizarre (but mostly positive) news, and DIY crafts with vaguely liberal and libertarian politics. This formula is highly successful on the English-language web, and there would be nothing controversial about saying that Boing Boing readers skew Democratic. If someone posted an article about “games that girls like are boring” on Boing Boing, both readers and editors would revolt. If that comparison rubs you the wrong way, similarly-formatted and often juvenile male-driven 4chan is home to much more libertarian and anti-authoritarian causes than conservative ones.

So you are making the ridiculous claim that all otaku, lolicon fans, and moe fans are right-leaning?

Of course not. Not all otaku read or contribute to 2ch, and we should not confuse the two groups. There is, however, an intersection between these two groups that is large enough to boost Alfalfa Mosaic into high page views, and we should assume that some relatively large percent of moe fans either hold or are comfortable with right-leaning political views.

But wait, do Alfalfa Mosaic posts really reflect “right-wing” political thoughts?

This is an important point. The themes skew right but posts rarely advocate voting for conservative politicians or activism within the political process. The recent 2ch support of LDP politician Katayama Satsuki for welfare fraud audit is an interesting exception. There has also been pro-Ishihara Shintaro sentiment for wanting to purchase the disputed Senkaku Islands.

In general, 2ch’s brand of conservatism is mostly an identity politics based in populist resentment against other minorities — women, zainichi Koreans, Asians, gays, new religions, the poor, outcast populations — who are seen to be given an unfair attention from the government and society. They are obsessed with the idea of a conspiracy where broadcasters like Fuji TV are “forcing” (gori-oshi) Korean content onto the Japanese public. 2ch posters see themselves as the protectors of traditional Japanese values, the arbiters of “common sense.” They are the very angry “silent majority.”

In the realm of domestic politics, this translates into being against expanding the welfare state but since 3/11, they have also become anti-TEPCO. In foreign affairs, they are strongly against North Korea and China, as well as suspicious of South Korea’s recent economic success.

But aren’t most subcultures in Japan politically conservative?

Yes, true subcultures now skew right — but in different ways. Yakuza are the traditional manpower for uyoku organizations. Yankii/gyaru exhibit archetypal working class/lower middle class values of early marriage and traditional gender roles. 2ch, on the other hand, exhibits views of populist conservatism often labeled “net uyoku.”

The best comparison for otaku, however, may be with other consumer segments, which are almost wholly apolitical. Fashion magazines do not have anything that could be construed as “political” content.

Are you saying that moe media has conservative themes?

Not at all. Most of these series are made for pre-teen girls or made to look like they are made for pre-teen girls. They too have nothing that could directly be called “political content.”

The creators of so many classic anime and manga media series come from a background in left-wing politics! Otaku can’t all be right-leaning.

Yes, but Alfalfa Mosaic is not particularly interested in the anti-war messages of Gundam and other classic anime. The curation focuses on series featuring adorable little girls, nominally not made by the great post-Leftist manga writers. We’re also talking about the consumers of moe content — not the artists themselves.

So are you saying that moe makes you conservative or that conservative politics make you want to read about fictional little girls?

I don’t think these two interests share a causative relationship. I would suggest they are correlated, but even if you don’t believe that, they do appear to sit happily within the same subculture.

Explaining the link between the two requires some level of psychological analysis, which gets messy when you assign motives to an entire segment of people. That being said, being openly interested in “little girls” — especially when done in tandem with berating feminism and modern Japanese women — suggests the desire for more traditional gender roles, male dominance, or at least a disinterest in maturity among the opposite sex. Hard not to see this as a reactionary position in the context of the female gender’s steady (but slow) progress in the last half-century.

Why should I believe this analysis from just three days of posts?

After three years of reading the site, I found these random three days of posts to perfectly fit site’s basic content pattern. I recommend that you read Alfalfa Mosaic on a daily basis to get a rounder picture of the site’s particular interests.

Who reads Alfalfa Mosaic though? People in Tokyo? Outside of Tokyo? How old? My otaku friends in Tokyo never talk about right-wing topics.

That is the missing piece here. Google Insights for Search suggests that many of the readers may be proportionally higher from non-urban regions, such as Yamaguchi Prefecture. There is likely regional bias in the attitudes reflected in the site, which may be driving a some of the conservative worldview. That being said, this site is still very popular when viewed across the entire Japanese web (although losing steam), and we should still count non-Tokyo moe otaku as representative of moe otaku.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

• POLITICS: Post calling comedian Chihara Seiji “garbage” for defending fellow comedian Kōmoto Junichi’s mother for receiving welfare payments (despite Kōmoto’s financial success, background here)
• RECENT NEWS: Pictures of brand new Tokyo Sky Tree complex
• GAMING: Competitive card strategy games
• GAMING: Call-out for advice on how to improve skills in shooting games
• GAYS AS OTHER: Why are there so many gays among famous writers, musicians, and artists?
• POLITICS: Local Kiryu, Gunma politician Niwayama Mayuki in trouble for a tweet referring to Kiryu as a “radioactively contaminated area.”
• WOMEN: Worries that women are increasingly choosing bras that make their breasts look smaller
• IDOLS: Images of Hello Project idol Mano Erina in bathing suit doing cosplay of a manga
• HATSUNE MIKU: Hatsune Miku parody manga
• ANIMALS: Pictures of a cat falling off a balcony
• EROTIC ANIME: Comparisons of real life and anime images of women in thong bathing suits
• VOICE ACTRESS: Pictures of voice actress Inoue Marina in lingerie
• WEIRD NEWS: Weird picture of Russian eating a bucket of caviar
• VOICE ACTRESS: Haruhi voice-actress Aya Hirano appearing on NHK
• POLITICS: Celebration that 2ch’s complaints about Yoshimoto comedian Kōmoto Junichi’s mother getting welfare payments is now leading to welfare reform
• MOE ANIME: MOE ANIME: Azu-nyan guitar from Moe anime K-on! ends up being sold on Yahoo! Auctions at a high price
• GAYS AS OTHER: News of teenage murder suicide, including “( ^O^)ﾎﾓｫ…” mark that cruelly suggests homosexual context
• IDOLS: Post on AKB48 elections causing depression in members
• WEIRD NEWS: Policeman arrested in Nagasaki-ken for breaking into female colleague’s apartment
• MOE ANIME: MOE ANIME: Sadness that the high-school edition of K-On! manga ending soon
• TOKUSATSU: Revival of tokusatsu show Space Ironmen Kyodain
• MOE ANIME: Kyoto Univ. Co-Op sells 20 boxes of Puella Magi Madoka Magica wafers in 2 days
• PLASTIC SURGERY: Taiwanese ad for plastic surgeon is very deep (complete with racist comments against Koreans)
• MOE ANIME: Akazukin Chacha back after 12 years
• NORTH KOREA: Famine so bad that it’s becoming a “hell where people eat people.”
• MOE MANGA: YuyuYuri author Namori signs 4000 copies of his book, livestreamed for six hours
• CHINA: Chinese man gives away kidnapping plans with web want-ad
• SCHOOL: Silly chemistry test problem
• MOE ANIME: TV creator praises anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica and says he is proud of the Japanese who helped export the title overseas
• WEIRD NEWS: Escaped penguin re-captured thanks to salaryman-like conditioning
• SCHOOL: Stupid poem shows up in homework

Sunday, May 27, 2012

• CRIME: “Hikari City Mother Murderer” wants a re-trial
• MISC: Let’s get rid of cruel mothers!
• GAMING: What if anime Another became an erotic game?
• POLITICS: TEPCO’s price raising based on lies, using it to re-start reactors
• POLITICS: Komoto Junichi starts tweeting again
• GAMING: Sony exec tweets “Ooh! Nyaa!”, fans respond with angry tweets about the Vita being too expensive
• MANGA: Talking about job search in the style of manga Hunter x Hunter
• WEIRD NEWS: Bear farm owner to make bears fight to the death
• MOE ANIME: Grandfather draws great Smile Precure! image for his grandchild
• MOE ANIME: Post about episode 17 of Smile Precure!
• WEIRD NEWS: Perv streaks NHK’s coverage Italian bicycle race
• POLITICS: Comedian Komoto’s mother makes ¥400,000 a month
• POLITICS: Banks to look into welfare fraud payments
• WOMEN: Foreign breast implants are too amazing
• WEIRD NEWS: Perv streaks Italian bicycle race coverage
• IDOLS: The new Momoiro Clover Z video is too amazing!
• KOREA: Who leaked NSC’s corporate secrets about electrical sheets to Korean company Posco?
• GAMING: What was the best title in the SaGa series?
• MOE ANIME: Cure Peace (from Smile Precure!) vs. Sazae-san rock-paper-scissors-off
• ANIME: Anime “Persona 4” to become a movie
• MEDIA: B-CAS wants to fight back against “poison signals” (EMM)
• ANIME: Dragonball Z
• POLITICS: Government creates registration system for 125cc tiny cars
• VOICE ACTRESS: I personally think Imai Asami’s ass is too sexy
• WEIRD NEWS: Guy divorces wife for raising 550 cats
• GAMING: Thread on what’s important in trading card games
• WEIRD NEWS: Animated gif of something suddenly falling on a car
• KOREA,CHINA: Fight between Koreans and Chinese on bulletin board about Korean reunification

Monday, May 28, 2012

• ANIME: Poking fun at Detective Conan bed sheets
• ANIME: Pokemon character’s tongue is really his foot
• ANIME: Anno gets mad at questions about state of Evangelion follow-up
• AKB48: Oasis’ Noel Gallagher calls AKB48 a “manufactured girl group” (translation of his comments sound way worse in Japanese)
• KOREA: Army captain sued for dissing the president on Twitter
• SEX: The age of “matures” has come to porn
• WEIRD NEWS: Russian guy climbs to top of 320 meter structure, takes video
• GAMING: Josh Trank to direct Shadow of the Colossus film adaptation
• INTERNET: It’s a waste of time to learn coding
• WOMEN: Housewife who snagged rich husband wants advice on how to get lots of palimony
• INTERNET: Students who post on Twitter and Facebook are a public hazard
• GAMING/AKB48: I made Maeda Atsuko in Dragon’s Dogma
• POLITICS: Comedian Komoto Junichi enjoyed ¥4 mil trip to Hawaii
• ANIME: Cute little angelic things in Hyoka
• GAMING: Dragon’s Dogma is way too ascetic
• POLITICS: Battle over tattoos in Hashimoto’s Osaka
• GAMES: What do guys who like Japanese games have against foreign games?
• OTAKU: Okada Toshio’s “FREEex” organization is supposedly terrible
• WEIRD NEWS: Car breaks down in Sahara, guy turns it into a motorcyle, gets home
• MANGA: Surprise at quote in latest To Love-Ru -Trouble-
• WEIRD NEWS: Tuition support site studygift stops service and returns money to donors
• MOE ANIME: Girl tweets that she dumps boyfriend after seeing his K-On! figure collection
• FOOD: I tried to make TV chef Sonoyama Makie’s “Yakiniku Curry Natto-don” and it’s terrible
• MOE ANIME: Signed K-On! guitar sells for ¥500,000 on Yahoo! Auction
• WOMEN: Cute Chinese college student looks like a child
• POLITICS: Welfare to be turned into food stamps
• WEIRD NEWS: Police kill naked guy in Miami who was eating other guy’s face
• POLITICS: More on Komoto Junichi debate over hunger and welfare involving Yoshida from Black Mayonnaise
• ANIME: Cosplay convention in Taiwan
• NEWS: Accident at Tokyo Disneyland

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

Otaku Spaces Chin Music Press (2012) Buy on Amazon

In Part One and Part Two of our interview with Patrick W. Galbraith, author of Otaku Spaces, we talked about how the otaku fit into “Cool Japan” and 21st century society, the pitfalls of “otakology,” and the fact that lolicon is not a new aberration but has always been part of the subculture. This time we go deeper into that final point — why is there more social anxiety about otaku obsessed with little girls than ones obsessed with robots? And while we’re at it, why do anime companies push their fans to buy so much stuff?

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

I get that modern day otaku have the same passion as before, but this argument avoids the issue that obsessing over robots and manga fits better with general consumerism in Japan than the moe otaku’s use of money and time on a pursuit that links more directly to their sexual needs. Isn’t this the root of the discrimination?

If I am understanding correctly, you think that interest in robots and technology is more normal?

It’s less about normalcy and more about attainability. A fascination with robots and spaceships is a fascination with things that we can’t have because they don’t exist. Moe involves a fascination with the lives and happenings of girls and young women, who, last time I checked, are real.

Robots and spaceships don’t exist? I think what you mean to say is that there are robots and spaceships that only exist in manga and anime. The fiction in science fiction. OK, the same way, robot maids, magical girls, angels, cat girls, and so on exist only in manga and anime. They are no more attainable than super robots, and exist only as fiction. I’m prepared to go even further. I don’t think that girls and young women exist in the same form in reality and fiction. We cannot forget that these are fictional characters, drawn and animated. No one is confused about the fictionality of bishōjo characters. They are attracted to fiction as such. We have to date had far too many misunderstandings about otaku because we assume that what they desire in the so-called two-dimensional world is the same what they want in actual reality, or the three-dimensional world. There is not a one-to-one relation between these things, so we need to understand the complexity of engagement with images on their own terms.

Let me get back to your point about attainability. In a country like Japan, where there are government slogans such as “living together with robots” (robotto tono kyōsei), technology is extremely close to everyday life. That is why I thought you meant that desire for robots is more normal than desire for bishōjo characters, which often have no basis in reality. At the same time, with robots, there is a gap between what people dream of and what’s available. This might inspire work in engineering or robotics to make the dream a reality, or consume enthusiastically to feel closer to the dream, to feed it. I have met some people who seem to support a theory that this is productive of actual engagements in the world. Ishizaki-san, who I interviewed for Otaku Spaces, is totally into robots and ended up working as a mechanical designer. But, then again, Ishizaki-san is also an avid player of bishōjo games! It isn’t easy to separate interests and oppose them.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that bishōjo media fulfills the “sexual needs,” immediate or otherwise, of fans. Pornography does that, and we should not confuse the two. I’m not sure that we can categorize it as bishōjo or moe anime, but in any case Haruhi Suzumiya is not pornography. It is a complex, character-driven story. Yes, she is cute, but let’s not stop the analysis at the level of the surface image. I thought that was the problem with moe fans! “They aren’t deep enough.” As critics, I hope that we don’t become that which we criticize.

Anyway, Haruhi is not a porn star — not even a human being. She is a drawing, a fictional character. A desire for Haruhi is not the same as wanking to a skin magazine, in that there is no body, no “money shot,” no climax, no sex — only the continuous movement of desire. Rather than fulfilling sexual needs, bishōjo media accelerates and intensifies desire for something other, something that does not exist. Bishōjo fans are romantics, perhaps even more devoted to their ideals than fans of giant robots. Unlike someone how can try to build a robot or mobile suit in physical, material reality, bishōjo fans can’t ever realize the ideal or dream. And I suspect that most don’t want to. Remember Honda and the two-dimensional character/wife, which can act as an alternative to human relationships.

Okay, sure. But if you take it to the logical extreme, doesn’t this essentially put relationships with a fellow human being on the same level of fantasy as, say, piloting a giant robot? I think that’s what rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

I see what you’re saying, but there’s no need to take things to the extreme. Manga and anime already offer us enough such scenarios! So, for the sake of argument, let me be more specific. I think that a series like Chobits, which depicts a romantic relationship between a boy and his computer, anthropomorphized as a bishōjo, is every bit as fanciful as piloting a giant robot. You could say that Chobits is at its core just about young love (boy meets girl) or is a parody of intimacy with technology, meaning that it is about “real life,” but that is really reductive. If we equate a robot girl or a bishōjo with an actual girl we are doing both a disservice. They are not the same, and we should not treat them as such. What rubs people the wrong way is not respecting the distinction.

I agree with you that the root of some of the discrimination against so-called moe otaku is likely the fact that their pursuit of pleasure in the two-dimensional world is “unproductive,” though it fuels consumption of media and material. Perhaps it is not “productive” for Japan and its future to have moe otaku around, as they disrupt the social reproduction of the nation/family. But saying that the mainstream, majority, or politically powerful in Japan are anxious about moe otaku is not the same as explaining why other fans have a problem with them. That’s a tough one, and we all have to think long and hard on it.

I’d like to pick at the idea of normativity a little more. Who is to say that it is more appropriate to dream of super robots than fighting girls? To dream of martial artists than magical girls? It seems that we may be drawn to violence a little too much. When we talk about a director such as Oshii Mamoru, for example, why do we always end up praising Ghost in the Shell and trivializing Urusei Yatsura?

I think it’s about relevance. For whatever it’s worth, I think Beautiful Dreamer is a great film, but Ghost in the Shell just felt more relevant to our times.

Beautiful Dreamer is a great film! For me, on a meta level, it draws attention to the endless loop and inescapablity of the “school festival” or pleasure space that is anime. Haruhi also did this during the brilliant “endless eight” arc. But more than his films, I was thinking about Oshii Mamoru’s work on the Urusei Yatsura TV series, which was a big hit with otaku.

On the surface, Urusei Yatsura is a bawdy comedy, but for those who care to watch the whole series carefully, the real appeal is the complexity, conflicts, and emotional depth of Lum in her tumultuous relationship with Ataru. More than the tiger skin bikini, I suspect that it was the appeal of Lum as a character that attracted fans and held their attention over the course of months, years and decades. That Oshii was able to adapt Takahashi Rumiko’s manga and reach so many people on an emotional level with the Urusei Yatsura TV series is every bit as much of an achievement as the realism and philosophical posturing of the Ghost in the Shell films. Preferences for film over TV in critical and academic circles aside, the valuation of Ghost in the Shell over Urusei Yatsura inside and outside the otaku community is telling, and speaks to the divisions between sci-fi and bishōjo fans I mentioned earlier.

We also seem to demand conflict in our stories. Consider the fact that the world of Magical Princess Minky Momo is one without enemies or bad people. The entire story is nothing more than a girl helping people find their dreams. What’s wrong with that? Think about when the protagonist of the film version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind saves her world from the “god-warrior” instead of, say, piloting it to defeat the enemy. I find this incredibly satisfying, if a little ham-fisted with the religious iconography.

So why insist on putting kids in the cockpit of war machines? Minmay sings for peace, though her song is perverted and used as a weapon, so why are we supposed to be more interested in dogfights and war than love and peace? By focusing only on the machines and confrontations in space, we seem to be missing so much of the internal struggles of the characters and the melodrama — it’s a soap opera, really — of their interpersonal relationships on the ground.

I will confess to fast-forwarding through Minmay’s concerts and Hikaru’s dithering over girlfriends to get to the battle scenes.

And that’s fine. But what I’m getting it is that some fans might be more interested in the concerts and human conflicts, and that’s fine, too. For those who say that representative works of anime today have “no story,” think of Miyazaki Hayao’s My Neighbor Totoro. Acclaimed as the “best last film of the Shōwa era” by Kinema Junpō magazine — and it has no story to speak of. Or at least no “grand narrative.” The director says that he would have been satisfied to depict nothing more than the excitement of a typhoon — nothing more than a child’s emotional response to a meteorological phenomenon. Imagine what kind of a film that would have been! Instead, he ended up focusing on what Thomas LaMarre calls “girl energies.” By minimizing the boy’s role in his stories, Miyazaki imagines “a series of minor adventures without grand design or teleology.” Are small adventures involving girls exploring the world and struggling emotionally somehow less valuable than grand adventures of boys saving the world or struggling against enemies? Totoro is moving in its depictions of small things — the joy of discovery, the power of imagination, the pang of loneliness. You become attuned to the characters and their moods. In this sense it is something like moe anime. Nothing happens. In this sense it is something like “atmosphere anime” (kūki-kei anime). And that is not to diminish it.

Why do we prefer robots destroying things? As LaMarre points out, it seems that male characters experience technology as a problem to be solved, something to be mastered or optimized. This leads to fetishism of technology and ultimate destruction. Female characters experience technology as a condition to be understood. This leads to salvation. Rather than fighting with and against technology, living with technology seems much more productive to me.

One of my favorite anime is Mahoromatic, which juxtaposes the everyday life of a robot maid with scenes of horrific violence from her past as a military weapon. I don’t think I’m alone in wishing she didn’t have to fight and finding myself shedding a tear as she is brutally beaten by her enemies. I wish that those quiet days in her idealized home didn’t have to end, which is why the anime works so well.

I won’t deny having a techno-fetishistic streak myself, but I question whether a fascination with giant robots equates into a fascination with destruction per se. It’s more about strength, protection, and becoming a hero.

Right. I don’t mean to imply that all giant robots or mecha shows are necessarily about war and destruction. It just seems that all too often technology is mastered and optimized to deal with problems, which results in violent conflict. LaMarre is suggesting that Miyazaki Hayao realized this in the early 1980s, which accounts for his shift to female leads as a way to imagine some other type of narrative and resolution. Maybe bishōjo media is rife with the “girl energies” that LaMarre speaks of, which is one reason to consider seriously its alternatives.

Another criticism of otaku culture has been that the companies are now just making money by forcing fans to buy lots and lots of products instead of focusing on making high quality series.

We hear a lot about this, don’t we? Especially since the figure boom in the late 1990s. But maybe we need some historical perspective. Marc Steinberg’s new book Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan is a really good place to start.

Steinberg takes us back to 1963, when Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy first aired on Japanese television. This was the first weekly 30-minute animated TV show in Japan. It established the super-limited animation style that we recognize as “anime,” which is distinct from Disney, Toei, and Ghibli’s full animation. (Miyazaki Hayao, by the way, hates it when people call his stuff anime, and he blames Tezuka for the degradation of the moving image in Japan.) Tezuka’s curse, as people call it, was underselling his anime to make it attractive to broadcasters — who did not think anime in this form would be profitable, if even possible — and to pre-emptively undercut his competitors. Tezuka could do this because he was already a successful manga artist.

Steinberg estimates that Tezuka sold each episode of Astro Boy in Japan for ¥750,000, even though the actual cost of production of each was ¥2,500,000. This is why, from the beginning, the anime model that Tezuka established in Japan was dependent on licensing — both to foreign markets and for merchandising. Astro Boy became a hit, and was possible to produce, because of the national craze for Astro Boy stickers given away with Meiji Seika candies.

Sponsors and merchandising are crucial in anime. As you yourself have noted, Matt, robot shows in the 1970s were dependent on toy sponsors and, dare I say, sales. Yes, Mobile Suit Gundam changed the paradigm of robot narratives, but it only succeeded in shifting toy sales from children to adults. Today, with fewer children in Japan and less money to be made from foreign licensing due to digital piracy, anime depends on merchandise targeting adults.

The Japanese government estimated in a 2005 report that the market for licensed merchandise based on fictional characters is 10 times that of anime itself. But, in reality, this too is becoming less profitable for Japanese animators. Kubo Masakazu surveyed the anime scene for the 2005 government report, and notes that there were 72 weekly anime TV series in April, with 37.5 percent being new while only three series crossed the two-year threshold, which is in some ways crucial to success. A one season (13-episode) anime makes it very difficult for companies to release merchandise, because they might find themselves overstocked with unknown and unpopular character goods. It takes time to gauge the market and produce things. The high volume and fast turnover of series also limits the appeal of DVDs and Blu-ray Discs, because series are quickly forgotten amid a torrent of new material.

Kubo calls the shortening length of anime series and fast turnover a “death spiral.” He waxes nostalgic about Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z, but we do see similar long-run hits like Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece. The problem is the other 70 series that are on air. Can we really blame the producers of those series for targeting Japanese who actually do purchase merchandise and physical media? Maybe this is a death spiral of a different kind, as things become more insular — otaku targeting otaku in an accelerated and intense circuit that confuses and alienates mainstream and foreign audiences.

Yet if there is no money to be made from other markets anyway then we really don’t have a leg to stand on for criticism. So maybe digital piracy is yet another death spiral — foreign fans loving anime too much to wait for a localization and too up-to-speed thanks to the Internet to care about buying old series, circling the anime studios they love faster and faster and draining the life from them.

It sounds funny, but perhaps this is the perfect time to encourage otaku consumption! Of course you can be an otaku without consuming anything, which seems to be the source of many problems for the industry today. This is also another reason why Okada Toshio is fed up with fans today, who do not seem to be invested enough in the industry and the community to take responsibility for it. If you don’t pay for anime, it disappears. How much do you want it?

Maybe the trend toward digital consumption of disposable series and characters is one reason why it was so refreshing for me to meet the people I interviewed for Otaku Spaces. They were just so into their fandoms and devoted so much time and energy to them! If there is a criticism to be made, it is that they loved certain characters, series and media too much, buying into their fantasies to a fault, but that’s not a criticism that I want to make. I think that they are awesome! Their hobbies seemed to be a huge part of their lives, colonizing their inner spaces and personal spaces, and spilling out into public spaces.

This is another point that Steinberg makes, but he draws our attention to the mono komi, or “thing communication” that occurs in the anime media mix. Manga, anime, stickers, and toys all gave Astro Boy different movements and made him an intimate part of kids’ lives. “Thing communication” refers to the ways that people communicate with and through commodities, which is to say person-thing and person-thing-person communication, but — and this is Steinberg’s point — also thing-thing communication. These things were in dialogue with one another, creating a space of Astro Boy, each image and object acting as a tiny opening into that world. The fans of Astro Boy shared that world with the character and with one another. They actively “stickered” their physical surroundings to provide openings and to expand that world. That kind of intimacy with the character, series and between people just seems like what being a fan is all about. There are multiple overlapping and resonating worlds of consumption open to otaku these days. It is in hopes of inspiring readers to explore these other worlds that I wrote Otaku Spaces.

In case you missed them: Part One and Part Two of the interview.