Dokumen - Pub Schoolgirls Money and Rebellion in Japan Hardcovernbsped 0415704103 9780415704106

SCHOOLGIRLS, MONEY AND
REBELLION IN JAPAN
Japanese society in the 1990s and 2000s produced a range of complicated mate-
rial about sexualized schoolgirls, and few topics have caught the imagination of
Western observers so powerfully. While young Japanese girls had previously been
portrayed as demure and obedient, in training to become the obedient wife and
prudent mother, in recent years less than demure young women have become cen-
tral to urban mythology and the content of culture. The cultic fascination with the
figure of a deviant school girl, which has some of its earliest roots in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, likewise re-emerged and proliferated in fascinating
and timely ways in the 1990s and 2000s.
Through exploring the history and politics underlying the cult of girls in con-
temporary Japanese media and culture, this book presents a striking picture of
contemporary Japanese society from the 1990s to the start of the 2010s. At its core
is an in-depth case study of the media delight and panic surrounding delinquent
prostitute schoolgirls. Sharon Kinsella traces this social panic back to male anxieties
relating to gender equality and female emancipation in Japan. In each chapter the
book reveals the conflicted, nostalgic, pornographic, and at times, distinctly racial-
ized manner in which largely male sentiments about this transformation of gender
relations have been expressed. The book simultaneously explores the stylistic and
flamboyant manner in which young women have reacted to the weight of an
obsessive and accusatory male media gaze.
Covering the often controversial subjects of compensated dating (enjo k sai),
the role of porn and lifestyle magazines, the historical sources and politicized social
meanings of the schoolgirl, and the racialization of fashionable girls, Schoolgirls,
Money and Rebellion in Japan will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese
culture and society, sociology, anthropology, gender, and women’s studies.
Sharon Kinsella is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.

The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series
Series Editors:
Roger Goodman, Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies, University of Oxford,
Fellow, St Antony’s College
J.A.A. Stockwin, formerly Nissan Professor of Modern Japanese Studies and former
Director of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Oxford, Emeritus Fellow,
St Antony’s College
Other titles in the series:
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Peter Dale The growth of protectionist sentiment and
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The Emperor’s Adviser Syed Javed Maswood
Saionji Kinmochi and pre-war Japanese
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Translated and with an introduction by
A History of Japanese Economic Ann Waswo
Thought
Tessa Morris-Suzuki Biotechnology in Japan
Malcolm Brock
The Establishment of the Japanese
Constitutional System Britain’s Educational Reform
Junji Banno, translated by J.A.A. Stockwin A comparison with Japan
Michael Howarth
Industrial Relations in Japan
The peripheral workforce Language and the Modern State
Norma Chalmers The reform of written Japanese
Nanette Twine
Banking Policy in Japan
American efforts at reform during the Industrial Harmony in Modern Japan
Occupation The intervention of a tradition
William M. Tsutsui W. Dean Kinzley
Educational Reform in Japan Japanese Science Fiction

Leonard Schoppa A view of a changing society
Robert Matthew
How the Japanese Learn to Work
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Ronald P. Dore and Mari Sako The use and understanding of numbers in
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Theory and practice
Second edition Ideology and Practice in Modern
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Technology and Industrial Treacherous Women of Imperial
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Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard, 1884–1934 Patriarchal fictions, patricidal fantasies
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Japan’s Early Parliaments, 1890–1905 Japanese-German Business Relations

Structure, issues and trends Co-operation and rivalry in the inter-war
Andrew Fraser, R.H.P. Mason and Philip period
Mitchell Akira Kud
Japan’s Foreign Aid Challenge Japan, Race and Equality

Policy reform and aid leadership The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919
Alan Rix Naoko Shimazu
Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan Japan, Internationalism and the UN

A political biography Ronald Dore
Stephen S. Large
Life in a Japanese Women’s College
Japan: Beyond the End of History Learning to be ladylike
David Williams Brian J. McVeigh
Ceremony and Ritual in Japan On The Margins of Japanese Society

Religious practices in an industrialized Volunteers and the welfare of the urban
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Edited by Jan van Bremen and D.P. Martinez Carolyn S. Stevens
The Fantastic in Modern Japanese The Dynamics of Japan’s Relations

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The subversion of modernity South Africa, Tanzania and Nigeria
Susan J. Napier Kweku Ampiah
Militarization and Demilitarization in The Right to Life in Japan

Contemporary Japan Noel Williams
Glenn D. Hook
The Nature of the Japanese State
Growing a Japanese Science City Rationality and rituality
Communication in scientific research Brian J. McVeigh
James W. Dearing
Society and the State in Inter-war
Architecture and Authority in Japan Japan
William H. Coaldrake Edited by Elise K. Tipton
Women’s Giday and the Japanese Japanese-Soviet/Russian Relations

Theatre Tradition since 1945
A. Kimi Coaldrake A difficult peace
Kimie Hara
Democracy in Post-war Japan
Maruyama Masao and the search for Interpreting History in Sino-Japanese
autonomy Relations
Rikki Kersten A case study in political decision making
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twenty-first century Yusaku Horiuchi
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Brad Williams in Japan
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Modern Japan Edited by Jeff Kingston
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Party Politics and Decentralization in International inside out
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When the Opposition governs
Koichi Nakano Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion
in Japan
The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan Sharon Kinsella
The career of Matsumoto Jiichiro
Ian Neary Social Inequality in Japan
Sawako Shirahase
Labor Migration from China to Japan
International students, transnational migrants
Gracia Liu-Farrer
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Schoolgirls, Money
and Rebellion in
Japan
Sharon Kinsella
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Sharon Kinsella
The right of Sharon Kinsella to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kinsella, Sharon, 1969-
Schoolgirls, money and rebellion in Japan / Sharon Kinsella.
pages cm. -- (The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese studies series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Girls--Japan. 2. Schoolgirls--Japan. 3. Clothing and dress--Japan. 4.
Japan--Social life and customs--20th century. I. Title.
HQ777.K564 2013
305.230820952--dc23
2013016990
ISBN: 978-0-415-70410-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-70411-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-76231-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by GreenGate Publishing Services, Tonbridge, Kent
CONTENTS
List of illustrations x
Series editor’s preface xii
1 Introduction: the age of the girl 1
2 Gathering and interpreting the statistical evidence 25
3 Compensated dating as a salaryman subculture 39
4 Kogyaru chic: dressing up as a delinquent girl 60
5 The surveillance of financial deviancy 88
6 Girls as a race 107
7 Ganguro, yamanba, and transracial style 130
8 Minstrelized girls 151
9 Schoolgirl revolt in male cultural imagination 167
10 Problems compensating women 188
European language bibliography 199

Japanese language bibliography 213
Newspaper and magazine articles 218
Filmography 226
Interviews 228
Index 231
Illustrations
1.1 Girls with up-to-the-minute caramel-colored hair and platform

boots (atsuzoku) posing in Shibuya in 2003 2
1.2 Graph depicting the rate of girls entering university
from 1970 to 2011 4
1.3 Graph illustrating the growth of irregular employment among
men and women from 1995 to 2012 5
1.4 Graph illustrating the changing trends for wages for male and
female full- and part-time employees from 1990 to 2011 6
1.5 Screen pixilation in news coverage 9
1.6 “I hope to do compensated dating …” declares a voicemail
message transcribed into telop on-screen subtitles in a teatime
television news report in 1998 10
1.7 Roving camera crews meeting schoolgirls in April 2004 11
1.8 The mountain of news media reportage of the key terms—
compensated dating, kogyaru, and ganguro—between 1995 and 2007 11
1.9 Fictional schoolgirl pimp Jonko, in the 1997 film Bounce Kogals!,
is scripted to say “It’s all the media’s fault” for encouraging the
deluded men who approach her in the streets for sex 14
1.10 Man-hating schoolgirl Yoko dawdling across a crossing gives
a van driver the finger in the film Love Exposure (2008) 16
1.11 A hardened schoolgirl fights off prying cameras in an eighties
pink eiga (porn movie), Lolita Vibe Torture that prophesises
news media attention to schoolgirls in the 1990s 17
3.1 Popteen cover, November 2002 issue 46
3.2 The race for sales between weeklies: Gendai, Shincho,
Post, and Bunshun 51
4.1 Tropical accessories and grimy skirts and blouses worn by
kogyaru girls in Kichijoji, summer 1998 67
4.2 An anthropologist’s drawing of the stylized koha “tough school”
postures of male gang members in the early 1980s 68
Illustrations xi
4.3 Picking noses and unladylike squatting by kogyaru girls on the

street in Kichijoji, Tokyo, summer 1998 69
4.4 School tartan-clad members of Cawaii! editorial team at teatime
in November 1997 76
4.5 A spontaneous joke about photos by schoolgirls gathered at a
plaza near Kichijoji station in summer 1998 79
4.6 A public display of putting on make-up, at a plaza near
Kichijoji station in summer 1998 79
5.1 A full-page illustration of the history of compensated dating
shows a barefoot girl in school uniform walking on the shore
with cash in her hand 89
5.2 Hosts of the late-night show Hamasho visit a “soapland” and
find a girl in school uniform 91
5.3 Japanese Apricot 3 – a pink dream by Aoshima Chiho 102
6.1 The “Shibuya gyaru hierarchy” published in (Weekly)
Shukan Playboy 112
6.2 Ōtsuka Eiji’s Native Ethnology of Girls (Sh jo minzokugaku) (1989) 117
6.3 Aida Makoto’s Azemichi (path between rice fields) (1991) 120
6.4 Aida Makoto’s Harakiri Joshik sei (Harakiri Schoolgirls) (1999) 121
7.1 A girl wearing braids outside McDonald’s in Shibuya in 1999 138
7.2 In “Talking with Girl Teacher,” Gyaru-sensei transmits her
worldly wisdom to an “18-year-old dry-cleaning shop assistant” 138
7.3 Television comedian Gori in drag as a gyaru 146
8.1 A d jinshi image of an infantilized girl with dumpy limbs in
bondage in a doggy chain 152
8.2 Theater poster showing a heavily caricatured Dan Emmet
prancing to banjo music (1844) 154
8.3 Miyadai Shinji posing as a kogyaru schoolgirl for a series of
cross-dressed portraits of famous male cultural figures first
serialized in the weekly magazine Sh kan H seki in 1987 157
8.4 An older man dressed as a fashionable kogyaru in a tartan
miniskirt attempts to make small talk with actual young
women in similar garb at the entrance to Yoyogi Park in 1997 159
8.5 A boy in love and in drag in Sono Sion’s Love Exposure
(Ai no Mukidashi, 2008) 160
8.6 Cover of the “Zip Coon” song sheet (1834) 163
8.7 A d jinshi of a gyaru schoolgirl titled Orange (Orenji, 2002) 164
9.1 Carefree girls take off their sailor tops and sing about their
customers in Throw out Your Books, Let’s Get into the Streets
(Sho o suteyo machi e dey , 1971) 178
10.1 A comparison of the number of news articles containing the
terms “comfort women” (ianfu) and “compensated dating”
(enjo k sai) in their titles, between 1991 and 2006 192
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan

Sharon Kinsella
Few topics have caught the imagination of Western observers of Japan in recent
years as powerfully as the apparent growth in delinquent and materialistic behavior
of young Japanese women. Young Japanese girls have previously been portrayed
as demure and obedient, in training to become the perfect wife and mother that
the society needs to support the development of the Japanese economy. Less than
demure and obedient young women have been collectively identified as gyaru in
the Japanese media and they have become central to a great deal of urban mythol-
ogy and creative production over the past three decades. The behavior of teenage
Japanese girls in the 1990s which most fired the Western imagination was the
practice known as enjo k sai (generally translated as “compensated dating”), which
came to define an older man dating a schoolgirl to whom he paid money, goods or
the price of a meal, in exchange for companionship or sexual favors.
Sharon Kinsella unravels the social and imaginative roots of the media focus
on apparently disorderly girls and subjects the entire topic of enjo k sai to rigor-
ous sociological analysis. Looking at compensated dating allows her to conduct a
broader investigation of late twentieth-century girl culture and street style in Japan,
which, she argues, counteracts, often humorously, the (male) media construction of
supposedly greedy and unruly young ladies. Compensated dating, Kinsella argues,
became a media panic because it linked the circulation of young girls to the circula-
tion of money. Such moral panics, of course, are far from uncommon in Japan and
indeed have a predictable trajectory as Kinsella, along with other colleagues, have
argued in another book also published in the Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese
Studies Series, A Sociology of Japanese Youth (Goodman et al., 2012).
Kinsella identifies some of the key figures in the public debates about enjo k sai
and how they not only created, but actually championed, the highly sexualized
imagery of the joshi k sei, or schoolgirl, as a stand-in for their own desires for a cer-
tain kind of political radicalism. One of the key themes of the book is the fact that
Series editor's preface xiii
the girls themselves were not passive in the face of this media construction. She
describes a fascinating feedback loop between the media—the porn industry, as
well as mass magazines and television shows aimed alternately at middle-aged men
and high-school-aged girls—and teenage girls themselves who adopted parodies of
the challenging fashion and attitudes of the image promoted by that media. Perhaps
most fascinating is Kinsella’s analysis of the racialization of kogyaru (fashionable
schoolgirls) including their appropriation of attributes that would identify them
(in their ganguro and yamamba form) as racially other: dark skin, white eyeshadow,
thick wavy hair in a variety of hues.
There will be a wide readership for this book, including those interested in
all aspects of contemporary Japanese society and popular culture, as well as those
interested more generally in women’s and gender studies, and race and ethnic stud-
ies beyond Japan. We are delighted to be able to publish it in the Nissan Institute/
Routledge Japanese Studies Series which has been designed to explore all aspects of
Japanese society through the rigorous application of theoretical and methodologi-
cal skills from social science and humanities disciplines. As this addition to the series
demonstrates, even the most apparently sensationalist topics, when subject to such
analysis, can tell us a great deal about the development of contemporary Japan.
Roger Goodman
Arthur Stockwin
April 2013
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1
INTRODUCTION
The age of the girl
An intense and diverse lode of cultural and journalistic material has been produced
about girls in contemporary Japan, escalating in volume particularly from the 1980s
to 2010s. This book analyses this cult of girls and takes as its core case study social
panic and media delight about delinquent schoolgirls in the second half of the
1990s. The prolific outpouring of girl material reflected the convoluted and tricky
male reaction to further realms believed to be lost to gender equality and female
emancipation. These were under-employment and the loss of privileges and secu-
rity in the workplace, which have been bound up with the restructuring of the
postwar Japanese labor system in a period of extended recession extending from
the early 1990s. Accompanying the erosion of wages and onset of labor insecurity
(Ishida and Slater, 2010) were losses of expected service, care, and reproduction in
the home through the consequential unraveling of the established and dependent
bolster of under-paid part-time female labor and dedicated housewifery. The con-
flicted, nostalgic, pornographic, and at times, racialized manner in which largely
male sentiments about this transformation have been expressed, and the flamboy-
ant and stylistic manner in which young women have reacted to the weight of an
obsessive and accusatory male media gaze in the 1990s and 2000s, are the substance
of this book. See teenage female expression in Figure 1.1.
Pornographic by means of tortuous metaphors (“loose socks” or “loose sex”?)
and greased with juvenile smut, material about girls has rarely excluded a dosage
of visceral titillation. This is not to say that the staging of girls’ bodies in culture
is commensurate simply with the servicing of personal and compensatory “por-
notopias” (Marcus, 1966). Though hunched, perhaps, behind the voyeurism and
insistent vulgarity of girls staged in the various lacunae of male subculture, the
ghost of sexual starvation does not provide an explanation for the convoluted nar-
ratives, sarcastic jokes, elaborate physical appearances, and peculiar metamorphoses
of animated girls from the late 1980s through to the present, nor does it explain the
2 Introduction: the age of the girl
FIGURE 1.1 Girls with up-to-the-minute caramel-colored hair and platform boots
(atsuzoku) posing in Shibuya in 2003
Source: photograph by Sharon Kinsella.
intricate code of meanings underlying the news-reportage on sexually and finan-

cially independent high-school girls in the mid to late 1990s.
The popularity of both official (cute and sanitized) and underground (porno-
graphic, iconoclastic, and anti-bourgeois) images and narratives about Japanese
schoolgirls, imported and reinvented overseas, suggests that the type of multivalent,
ambivalent, and avenging postures projected onto girls in Japan—and the under-
lying structures of feeling operating behind those projections—have a resonance
in other societies that are experiencing different versions of the same disintegrat-
ing social totality (Tiqqun, 2012) and disordering of labor, family, reproduction,
and gender but that are less able or willing to evolve explicit cultural tropes and
local journalism through which to give form to and disseminate these sentiments.
Japan in the 1990s and 2000s became the source of a range of complicated mate-
rial about sexualized schoolgirls and girls with power, which was broadly cathartic
to male viewers and in specific cases hostile to women, but whose precise import
and insider ironies could remain obscure, foreign, and conveniently lost in transla-
tion. Cute sh jo (girl) and sexy schoolgirl (joshi k sei) figures have been celebrated
as wonderfully, incomprehensibly Japanese and kooky. But the fascination with
animated and licentious Japanese schoolgirls in the US and Europe perhaps hints
at depths of hidden longing, nostalgia, and resentment of women, that are not
otherwise easily discerned in the public sphere in North American and European
culture. Hints about the domesticated but unfinished business of difficult gender
relations in post-industrial Western states can be gleaned through observing the
selective importation of girl iconography from Japan.
Introduction: the age of the girl 3
Female advancement
Visions of female advancement, whether real or merely anticipated, have permeated
culture and public debate in Japan over the past two decades. Journalism has played
upon anxious thoughts about the critical retraction of unpaid and underpaid female
labor—servicing, reproductive, caring, and sexual—resulting in a generalized “care
deficit” (Allison, 2009: 13). The retraction of unrewarded female contributions
appeared to be having a corrosive impact on the strength of the family, the labor
force, the population, and national morale. Female advancement appeared from
across national borders, too, in the form of the multi-state campaign for the finan-
cial compensation of former comfort women of Imperial Japan that ran through
the 1990s and 2000s. Government-sponsored social research published in numer-
ous white papers showed over and again that women in Japan were not marrying as
much (Ōhashi, 1993; Yamada, 1996; Kitamura and Abe, 2007; Tokuhiro, 2009),
not having as many children (Ueno, 1998; Schoppa, 2006), and that they were
applying to proper four-year universities (Fujimura-Faneselow, 1995; Edwards and
Pasquale, 2003) instead of women’s two-year colleges. The divorce rate rose most
conspicuously between 1990 and 2005 (from 1.28 to 2.10 per 1,000 of the popula-
tion). The age of first marriage has also climbed steadily from the early-seventies
reaching 28.8 by 2010. The rate of marriage and national birth rates having already
declined gradually between the mid-postwar turning point of 1973 and 1990, then
dropped again between 2000 and 2010. The national birth rate reached its lowest
point on record in 2005 after a five-year slump (at 1.25 live births per 1,000) and
marriage rates reached the lowest levels on record of 5.5 per 1,000 in 2010 after
two decades of steep decline in the rate of marriage.1 The proportions of young
women choosing not to marry or not to have children—which are closely con-
comitant in this society (Hertog, 2009: 1–4)—have risen in the 1990s and 2000s
as the proportion of unmarried men and women (mikonsha) of parenting age has
risen without pause. In 1980, 11.42 percent of 35-year-olds were unmarried; in
2010, this had risen to 32.04 percent. Almost half (47.2 percent) of all those adults
aged 30 years and under were unmarried, in 2010. In 2010, 28 percent of Japanese
women and over 38 percent of Japanese men aged between 25 and 49 years old
were unmarried and, unlike their counterparts in Europe, only rarely cohabiting
with partners or children (Kokusei ch sa, 1980, 2010).
Observe the increases in the rate of young women pursuing university educa-
tion in Figure 1.2. In 1970, 6.5 percent, and by 1989, 14.7 percent of women
were going to university. This figure rose rapidly in the 1990s, almost doubling to
33.8 percent by 2002 and tripling by 2011, when entering university was achieved
by 45.8 percent of all young women. The numbers entering graduate school also
rose, from 3 percent in 1989 to 6.3 percent by 2000 and 7.1 percent in 2004, and
then creeping to a peak of 7.5 percent in 2008. At the same time, the number of
women attending a two-year junior college to receive ladylike skills (McVeigh,
1996) slipped by one-third, from 22.1 percent in 1989 to 10.4 percent in 2011.2
Ironically, young women in the 1990s and 2000s began to attain the university
Percentage entering higher education 50

45 Junior college
University
40 Graduate school
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
‘70 ‘73 ‘76 ‘79 ‘82 ‘85 ‘88 ‘91 ‘94 ‘97 ‘00 ‘03 ‘06 ‘09
Year
FIGURE 1.2 Graph depicting the rate of girls entering university from 1970 to 2011
Source: Fujin Hakusho (~1999), Josei Rōdō Hakusho (2000–2002), Danjo Kyōdō Sankaku Hakusho
(2001–2011).
education required to compete directly with young men for what was a simulta-
neously shrinking number of secure graduate jobs as full-time company recruits.
With and without degrees, however, women were struggling to find employment
and to stay in the workforce despite the pressure of low wages linked to part-
time and non-permanent employee status and the largely maintained exclusion of
women from managerial track positions with corresponding higher salaries. The
proportion of women in pure employment (excluding work in family businesses
and housewifery) has steadily risen from 26.9 percent in 1975 to 37.9 percent in
1995, and to 40.8 percent in 2010. The White Paper on Gender Equality (Danjō
Kyōdō Sankaku Hakusho) introduced in 1998 attempted to monitor a transition
in Japanese gender relations, and can be considered symptomatic of government
goals to channel the “active participation of women” into the “revitalization of
economy and society” (Danjō Kyōdō Sankaku Hakusho, 2010: 10). At ministerial
levels, capturing the energy and skills of young women has been viewed as critical
to the healing and cohesion of a more flexible society that could weather the reces-
sion and economic restructuring.
Lack of male advancement and economic recession

The effects of the collapse of the financial bubble of the 1980s at the end of that
decade began to shake through the economy and society in the early 1990s, and
crystallized in full-blown economic recession, rising unemployment and a freeze
on hiring new recruits from universities from 1995. The “employment ice age”
(koy hy gaki), extending from 1995 into the 2000s, forced previously securely
employed cohorts of male high-school and college graduates into a permanent

cycle of irregular (hiseiki), part time (paato), temporary (arubaito), and contract
(haken) work, strung between bouts of unemployment, giving rise to contempo-
rary social problems, from youth poverty, unmarried adults cohabiting with parents
(“parasite singles”), the working poor, and reports of widespread stress, heavy
workloads, and minimized workplace training for those gaining full-time employ-
ment (Genda, 2006, Suzuki et al., 2010). Critical academic analysts estimated that
the rate of unemployment in 1995 was as high as 8.9 percent (Kishi, 1995: 290),
though it increased most sharply from 1997 onwards, affecting younger men and
school-leavers not attending college disproportionately. From another perspective,
the male labor force participation rate fell to an all-time postwar low of 63.3 per-
cent in 1998 (K sei r d hakusho, 1999). While the proportion of men channeled
into irregular employment increased steadily in the 1990s, reaching 14.8 percent
by 2002, women fully absorbed a greater part of the growing demand for cheap
and flexible irregular employment—50.7 percent of all female employment was
“irregular” by 2002. (See the movement of men and women into the irregular
employment pool in Figure 1.3.) Interestingly, through the 1990s and 2000s the
wages of part-time and irregular male employees began to drop behind those of
both full-time male employees and those of the small but emerging cohort of full-
time and permanent female employees, whose wages steadily rose through this
period and tracked those of their full-time male colleagues. By the 2000s the wages
of part-time male employees were closer to those of their female counterparts than
60
Women
Percentage in irregular employment
Men and women

50
Men
40
30
20
10
0
‘95 ‘96 ‘97 ‘98 ‘99 ‘00 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 ‘11 ‘12
Year
FIGURE 1.3 Graph illustrating the growth of irregular employment among men and
women from 1995 to 2012
Source: Josei Rōdō Hakushō 2004:82; figures continued in Hataraku Josei no Jitsujō Heisei 23/2012,
sourced online at: http://www.mhlw.go.jp/bunya/koyoukintou/josei-jitsujō/dl/11b.pdf.
those of other men: gender-based wage inequalities systematized within the twen-
tieth century labor market had been partially redistributed and de-gendered within
the ballooning pool of irregular employees (Genda, 2006; Ishida and Slater, 2010).
Thought provoking shifts in wage levels can be examined in detail in Figure 1.4.
Rising unemployment and poverty linked to irregular employment impacted on
the potential of younger generations to “envision a stable life-course” (Suzuki
et al., 2010: 513) and generated “widespread anxiety” and a potentially exagger-
ated sensitivity to unequal developments: “Emblematic of this vague, amorphous
uneasiness is the concern over widening economic disparities” (Genda, 2006: 2).
Girl cult in the media

From the 1980s to the 2010s both mass media and underground culture mirrored
government policy-making, in the sense that it too was dominated by the vision
of ranks of able, heroic, and energetic young women. In the expanding spheres
75
Hourly wages as a percentage of full-time
70
65
male employees
60
55
50
45
40
‘90 ‘92 ‘94 ‘96 ‘98 ‘00 ‘02 ‘04 ‘06 ‘08 ‘10
Year
Hourly wages of female employees as a percentage of male

full-time hourly wages
Hourly wages of part-time male employees as a percentage of
full-time male employees
Hourly wages of part-time female employees as a percentage of
full-time male employees
FIGURE 1.4 Graph illustrating the changing trends for wages for male and female full-
and part-time employees from 1990 to 2011
Source: basic Survey on Wage Structure, Heisei 24, MLHW.
of communications, advertizing, television, and new digital visual media, the exu-
berant faces and voices of robotic little girls bouncing with energy became the
messengers, voices, and actors. The single most widely broadcast animation and
lyrics at the start of the 1990s were “pi-hyara, pi-hyara,” the lusty nonsense chorus
of a ditty sung by the willful and eccentric animated girl character “Chibi Maruko
Chan” (Little Miss Chubby Cheeks; Yamane, 1993: 12). Cultural critic Saitō
Tamaki goes on to estimate that about 80 percent of the most popular animations
produced in Japan in the 1990s featured some version of the beautiful fighting girl
(bish jo senshi) character at its core (Saitō, 1998: 8).The image of an alert and intelli-
gent schoolgirl with short, cropped hair avidly reading the news, which featured in
an Asahi Shinbun poster advertisement in 2003, was symptomatic of the widespread
anticipation of an informed teenage female initiative, that was widely presumed
to be imminent in this period. In fact, smart young women in business suits or
school uniform were the recurrent characters of adverts for broadsheet newspapers
throughout the late 1990s and 2000s. The slogan of this advertisement was “Read,
Think, Gain Power: Power Paper Asahi Shinbun” (Yomu, kangaeru, chikara ni
naru: Power Paper, Asahi Shinbun). Commenting on teenage girls’ consumption
and cultural activity over the preceding decade, the director of social research
at the highly regarded Hakuhodo Institute (HILL) suggested that in the midst of
the long Japanese economic recession, schoolgirls had displayed an “unanticipated
vitality” that ought not be criminalized but channeled instead—commercially, that
is—for its energizing and healing (“iyasu”) potential (Sekizawa Hidehiko inter-
view, 24 October 2002). Through the recent historical period in which the male
cult of girlhood has peaked, girl material has moved between different media sec-
tors through specific channels, becoming associated with both more (film, art,
literature, photography) and less (comics, animation, internet, games, pornogra-
phy) educated readers.
Resistance to female ambition

Within male-oriented subculture and journalism, however, ambivalence about the
liveliness of women (“onna wa genki”), who were felt to be fully applying themselves
neither to corporate needs nor duties in the home but who had instead disposable
income and leisure to hand, were distilled into the evolving stereotype of the selfish
and assertive gyaru (Miller, 1998, 2000b; Kinsella, 1995: 243–249; Bardsley, 2005;
Miyake, 2001). Caricatures resonant of pantomime and popular scenarios involv-
ing young office ladies (OL), gyaru, and later kogyaru (junior or teenage gyaru) and
high-school girls, occupying a central position in news and entertainment, expressed
discomfort with young female ambition. Public shaming of young women perceived
to be ambitious and insufficiently obedient and demure was partly concealed, having
its more hostile and derogatory face in commercial magazines, comics, and anima-
tions produced specifically for male audiences, which converged at their lower levels
with even more exclusively male reportage linked to the sex-services (f zoku) under-
world and otaku (manga and anime fan) subculture and online communications.
From the mid-1980s, creating and monitoring the movements of girls carica-
tured in comics and animation became the main activity of the compact, hermetic,
and male Lolita-complex subculture (Kinsella, 1998; Saitō, 1998, 2011; Takatsuki,
2009; Galbraith, 2011), which continued in the 2000s with commercial ‘otaku
youth culture’ based in Akihabara and linked to moe aesthetics (Azuma, 2009: 25–58;
Galbraith, 2009a: 154–156; Condry, 2012: 266–268) surrounding cute girl charac-
ters.3 On the gender fault line that catalyzed “maniac” (maniaku) otaku, Lolikon and
moe subculture, young men who were fascinated by young ladies but found them to
be uncannily forward—and themselves effectively locked out of dating and marriage
(Hayami, 2002; Honda, 2005; Kinsella, 2006; Kitamura and Abe, 2007)—created
peculiarly animated, deformed (deforume), and sexualized (hentai) effigies of girls
through which their complex yearnings, nostalgia, and resentment were decanted.
During the past three decades the projected attitudes and bodies of girls have fluctu-
ated and proliferated to such a degree that an extraordinary panapoly of girl creatures
has been accumulated within contemporary culture in Japan. On one level, the news
media charivari about delinquent schoolgirls in the 1990s constituted the importa-
tion, cultural upgrading, and concretization into news of the pre-existing schoolgirl
character (kyara) animated in Lolita-complex and moe subculture.
While this phenomenon has escalated in the recent historical period, we can also
observe that girls have been the key personae of largely male cultural imagination
and production from the early twentieth century, when girls of an independent mind
became the focus of tension in naturalist literature4 and an emblem of modernization in
the mass media.5 In Vicarious Language Miyako Inoue makes a painstaking examination
of the mode in which Meiji “schoolgirls” were cited and observed incessantly by “male
intellectuals” concerned with their vulgar speech and sloppy, unfeminine habits (Inoue,
2006). The mass ownership of portable digital devices, computers, and television has
meant that the intensity of mediation focused on ostensibly deviant schoolgirls in the
1990s was without precedent, but it nevertheless bore many fascinating thematic simi-
larities with the focus on “fallen jogakusei” of the prewar period (Ambaras, 2005: 82;
Czarnecki, 2005) and journalistic and theatrical uproar clustered around the saucy and
independent figure of the “modern girl” which erupted in the 1920s. While based on
analysis of the recent wave of schoolgirl iconography and its political meanings, this
book takes many historical detours while excavating the sources of the feelings invested
in and patterns for imagining girls. We will consider the legacy of the largely inden-
tured and teenage female labor force which manned and oiled the launch of Japan’s
industrialization, and take a detour into the prewar and wartime associations of race,
ethnicity, and women, to trace how specifically ethnic and sometimes racial frames for
categorizing girls have taken root.
“Japanese schoolgirl inferno”—an introduction to

compensated dating
Our study takes as its starting point an extraordinary event in the passage of media and
subcultures that took place initially in a narrow window of time between 1996 and
1998. Early in 1996, liberal news-magazines and broadsheets in Japan discovered that
high-school girls (joshi k sei) had developed a lucrative new activity called enjo k sai
(translated in this book as compensated dating), which involved going on dates—probably
involving sex—to get money or goods. Over the following two years in particular, the
extraordinary intensity of the mediation of the image of the sexually deviant schoolgirl
in her multiple guises, cropping up in weekly magazines (sh kanshi), manga magazines,
television news, documentaries and dramas, and in railway station posters and ban-
ners hanging within railway carriages—all concentrated within the commuter transport
system in the Tokyo Metropolitan Region—brought to mind Marshal McLuhan’s
visionary description of “the crossings or hybridizations of the media [that] release great
new force and energy as by fission or fusion” (McLuhan, 1964: 48).
Early shocking reportage on the scandal of schoolgirls doing compensated dating
hid the identity of minors’ faces and voices. These were often disguised with screen
pixilation and voice synthesizers. During these broadcasts, girls appeared mainly
as blurred and shifting impressions of flesh and uniform emitting digitalized syn-
thetic voices. See screen pixilation of compensated dating news in Figure 1.5. Those
described as otherwise “just like ordinary schoolgirls” (marude f tsu no ko) who were
breaking the mold of previous conceptions of sexual deviancy were also pictured
using mobile phones and public phone boxes to dial into telephone club (terekura)
chat lines. After 1999, girls were described tapping into the keypads of i-mode (smart)
mobile phones to access internet introduction sites (deaikei saito), where they might
FIGURE 1.5 Screen pixilation in news coverage (1997)

solicit older male customers for paid dates. See a voicemail message accessed by using
a public telephone to call into a “telephone club” transcribed into on-screen subtitles
(telop)6 in a teatime news report in Figure 1.6. In order to search for high-school girls
to investigate, interview, film, and photograph, television camera crews wandered
along the main streets of Shibuya like bands of nomadic traders. In 1997 and 1998,
up to four or five different camera crews could be found on Center Gai shopping
street in Shibuya or outside Tokyū’s 109 department store on a weekend shopping
day. See a camera crew interviewing schoolgirls in 2004 in a, by then, relatively
civilized and routine manner in Figure 1.7.
Schoolgirls’ uncertain and blunt utterances temporarily became a stand-in
for the voice of the public and schoolgirls themselves became jaded subjects of
a revolving wall of veiled slurs and indecent propositions spelled out in head-
lines: “The Lust of Girls Swilling around the Voicemail Introduction Services”
(Sh kan Bunshun, 2 May 1996: 205–209); “The Underlying Sickness of Infantilized
Men and the Children for Whom Calling Prostitution ‘Compensated Dating’ Is
Common Sense” (Economist, 7 January 1997: 90–92); or, on a sillier note, “Beat
Takeshi’s End-of-the-Century Venom: Pro-Wrestler Girls and Nude Idols Are
Just a Continuation of Compensated Dating High School Girls” (Sh kan Post,
12 September 1997: 206–208). Over the next few years, compensated dating,
high-school girls, and the street styles linked to them—referred to generically as
kogyaru (sometimes romanized back into American English as kogal)—became a
central feature of media, academic, and art content. See the bulge in news media
reportage of these key terms in the graph in Figure 1.8,7 which shows the number
of uses of these terms in article titles and headlines alone. Critic Azuma Hiroki
FIGURE 1.6 “I hope to do compensated dating …” declares a voicemail message

transcribed into telop on-screen subtitles in a teatime television news report
in 1998
FIGURE 1.7 Roving camera crews meeting schoolgirls in April 2004
Source: photograph by John Fitzpatrick.
60 ganguro
kogyaru
50 compensated dating
40
30
20
10
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Year
FIGURE 1.8 The mountain of news media reportage of the key terms—compensated
dating, kogyaru, and ganguro—between 1995 and 2007
testifies to the indelicate mode of this engagement in comments on how “1990s

journalism foraged” on “the so-called kogal” (Azuma, 2001: 131; 2009: 90).
Television programming on compensated dating, mainly in the form of
investigative news reports and documentaries, sometimes involved its audiences
as participants in undercover surveillance work on schoolgirls in motion. On
23 October 1997, for example, TBS Television broadcast an episode of the popular
series Gakko e ik (Let’s Go to School!) at 7 pm. This episode showed the anchors—
members of the boy band V6—with audiovisual spying equipment, chasing and
spying on schoolgirls, and moving between a studio audience of schoolchildren
with disguised voices and pixilated faces and sections of breathless footage in the
city. In one cut, a secret camera and microphone hidden inside a karaoke box show
what is interpreted to be schoolgirls consorting with a salaryman. In another cut,
police are shown raiding a sunakku (“snack bar”)8 that is said to employ a 15-year-
old hostess. Neither the police nor the viewers can find her.
In another long segment, a young girl is followed across Tokyo by the show’s
good-looking boy-band host squatting in a heavily equipped spy van. She is
referred to as a “sh jo” (girl) but her age, identity, and how she was intercepted by
the camera crew are not discussed. What are believed to be the girl’s phone calls
are tapped and broadcast, and the camera follows her to two locations where she
has just arranged to meet two different men. The excitement of the clandestine
chase is powerful, and eventually the girl is shown as a distant silhouette in a diner,
apparently sharing a meal with a man before later visiting an amusement park with
another. At the end of the sequence, the tarento (talent) hosts are seen visiting
the home of the girl’s mother, who is in turn filmed receiving a shocking video
recording of her daughter’s movements. She is urged to pop the incriminating
video tape into her VHS machine, and the show’s host requests that she verbalize
her reaction to it to the intervening camera and television audience.
The right to spy, know, and make public judgments of the private lives of
high-school girls was forcibly carved out through invasive media work and social
research. Every utterance made by the schoolgirls intercepted was absorbed by
microphone booms held in front of their faces. Something similar to the per-
formance of Tokyo media professionals “catching” (tsukamaru) schoolgirls had
happened in England three decades earlier in the 1960s, in what became the first
and most influential academic case study of the media creation of a “moral panic.”
As sociologist Stanley Cohen recalls,
Seaside resorts were invariably full of journalists and photographers, wait-

ing for something to happen, and stories, poses and interviews would be
extracted from the all too willing performers. One journalist recalls being sent,
in response to a cable from an American magazine, to photograph Mods in
Picadilly at five o’clock on a Sunday morning, only to find a team from Paris
Match and a full film unit already on the spot.
(Cohen, 1972: 141)
Mod hunting,” Cohen went on to remark, “was at the time a respectable, almost
crowded subprofession of journalism. The fact that those who were hunted were
willing performers does not make the pattern any less exploitative; presumably hunch-
backs were not always unwilling to perform the jester role” (Cohen, 1972: 141).
In a similar pattern, journalists specializing in interviewing and filming schoolgirls,
especially those in kogyaru-style school uniforms or seeming willing to talk about
their sexual exploits, became a temporary subprofession (to be discussed in Chapter
3). Girls’ voices and teenage sartorial style had a premium value in authenticating this
media story but reached the news kiosks, bookshelves, and screens only as the care-
fully selected and edited products of older and professional editors and producers.
While it has been recognized that both deviant schoolgirls and kogyaru were
“exploited as symbols” (Leheny, 2006: 79–82) in the 1990s, something more
involved and intriguing than a straightforward process of opportunistic exploita-
tion was also taking place. Sociologist Maruta Kōji utilized social construction
analysis and the terms of the American news media critic Daniel Boorstein and
earlier critical Japanese social historians to argue that compensated dating was a
“pseudo-event” (Maruta, 2000: 209–222) in the first instance.9 Maruta argues that
the reality of “compensated dating” was that the news media was the “organ-
izer,” “transmitter,” and “classifier” of what was in fact a “social event constructed
within the media” (Maruta, 2000: 210). Most specialists of various shades of opin-
ion privately agreed: in the case of compensated dating, the engagement in the
wide and complex symbolism of the discussion far outweighed its sociology or
life in bodies. The chief designer of the 1996 TMG Youth Survey, the results of
which were widely cited as the source of evidence that compensated dating was a
serious problem, was discreet but clear about his own interpretation of the results:
“Compensated dating is not a serious problem, simply because the number of chil-
dren involved is so few. Compensated dating is not a social problem so much as a
media phenomenon” (Iwama Natsuki interview, April 2003).
Suspicion that the news about deviant schoolgirls was simply a profitable inven-
tion of “the media,” was voiced by critical observers with insider insight at the
earliest onset of the media conflagration. By 1997, ironic deconstructions of the
role of the media in framing and “branding” schoolgirls as the deviant subject of
desire were being widely shared between culture workers and their audiences.
See the fictional schoolgirl pimp Jonko, in the film Bounce Kogals! (1997) scripted
to say “It’s all the media’s fault” for encouraging the deluded men who approach
me in the streets in Figure 1.9. Comments penned by teenage school students in
1998 on the way kogyaru were presented in the media (gathered by myself and dis-
cussed in Chapter 4) indicate the commonplaceness of critical anti-media attitudes
generated around this topic. Through the 1990s a feedback loop was put in to
motion through which salacious and male-oriented media narratives about saucy
schoolgirls stimulated respectable news reports on teenage prostitution, which in
turn provoked statistical surveys and intensified the media spotlight on potentially
deviant schoolgirls, which then became the stage for further shockingly sexualized
street fashions among girls, and provoked further media attention.
FIGURE 1.9 Fictional schoolgirl pimp Jonko, in the 1997 film Bounce Kogals!, is scripted
to say “It’s all the media’s fault” for encouraging the deluded men who
approach her in the streets for sex
Source: used with kind permission of the director, Harada Masato.
Cliques creating the story

The topic of compensated dating moved in a series of discrete hops through
sectors of the publishing world and up into the public spheres of television broad-
casting, government, politics, film, and art. Close scrutiny of this phenomenon
throughout this book, especially in Chapter 3, demonstrates how highly symbolic
and resonant narratives can be collectively germinated and worked to fruition.
While the wide appeal of the compensated dating story reflects its collective and
accreted production, a small and tightly bound cultural and intellectual elite was
responsible for adding intellectual high notes and key subplots to the principal
tale. Not only were the specific magazines and television programs involved in
passing along the story traceable, but their editors and freelance writers—along
with a field of academic and legal specialists sustaining cultural content and com-
ment on deviant schoolgirls—were concrete personages. This book is based on
interviews, shared activities, and a few long-running relationships with many of
the few dozen individuals involved in producing the great majority of the original
copy about deviant schoolgirls and compensated dating, as well as its alternative
and more progressive versions.
The earliest interlocutor of schoolgirl deviance was a young sociologist, Miyadai
Shinji, then based at Tokyo Metropolitan University, who had co-produced a well-
received book on cultural studies in Japan, Deconstructing the Myth of Subculture (1993),
and had followed this up with ethnographic research on high-school girls, leading to
multiple publications on teenage female subculture and attitudes. In the second half
of the 1990s Miyadai, at that time dubbed the “school girls’ pants Professor” (buru-
sera gakusha),10 appeared frequently on television and radio and published numerous
nonacademic interviews and articles, in which he invited viewers and readers to
see casual prostitution as widespread and as the harbinger of a revolutionary shift in
teenage female thinking that signaled the onset of a new epoch of post-political prag-
matism. In the late 1990s he became an advisor to the Monbukagakushō (Ministry of
Sports, Culture, and Education) and reported to the National Diet during prepara-
tion of the Child Solicitation and Child Pornography Prevention Act.
The most highly rewarded and well-known public specialists on schoolgirl
deviance were also acquaintances in the same trade, with insider knowledge of
the range and hidden political context of work produced on schoolgirls. They
forged alliances among themselves and established camps based to some degree
on political cleavages: the schoolgirl issue was new material through which politi-
cal positioning could take place. Left-wing “returnee” journalist Fujii Yoshiki
worked alongside the libertarian sociologist Miyadai Shinji, who also worked with
Hayami Yukiko, a leading female investigative journalist associated with AERA
(a center-left news magazine) in this period. The opinions of these professional
writer specialists appear throughout this book. Miyadai Shinji and Hayami Yukiko
formed an intimate relationship of their own, and both were friendly supporters
of the film director Iwai Shunji, who also produced films on the disturbed emo-
tional states and consciousness of schoolchildren (such as All About Lily Chou Chou,
2002). One of these leading specialists was also a close friend of the director Sono
Sion who also directed several films about errant schoolgirls (to be discussed in
Chapters 8 and 9). Another specialist journalist who came to some fame by writ-
ing on compensated dating from a more moralistic and paternal standpoint was
Kuronuma Katsushi, a veteran of articles for weekly current-affairs magazines read
largely by men, whose investigations are discussed in Chapter 3.
In addition to these full-time temporary specialists, several of the leading names
in contemporary culture and social commentary began to produce work on the
high-school-girl issue on a drop-in basis, including the novelist Murakami Ryū
(introduced to some of his real-life schoolgirl informants by one of the other spe-
cialists discussed here), who scripted Love & Pop (1998), a film on compensated
dating directed by Anno Hideaki, the celebrated creator of the animation Neon
Genesis Evangelion (1995). Kawai Hayao, the venerable Jungian folklore scholar
and social commentator, at that time also director of Nichibunken (International
Research Center for Japanese Studies), entered into televised and printed dia-
logues with Murakami Ryū and men’s journalist Kuronuma Katsushi to debate
the psychology of problem schoolgirls. Feminist writer, scholar, and activist Ueno
Chizuko formed a partial alliance with Miyadai Shinji and Hayami Yukiko in
work published on the politics of teenage female sexual self-management. Trained
cultural anthropologist and cultural critic, editorial pioneer of the Lolita-complex
genre, and comic script writer Ōtsuka Eiji appeared on the NHK’s educational
channel discussing and meeting with delinquent schoolgirls, and published several
serious articles on the theme of schoolgirls’ ignorance in the wider political context
of moves to increase censorship and repress historical awareness of the period of
Imperial expansion.
Other filmmakers who took up the schoolgirl theme were Harada Masato
(Bounce Kogals!, 1997) and cult producer Sono Sion, for whom eccentric, lusting,
chasing (Utsushimi, 2000), and violently self-destructive (the Suicide Circle trilogy,
2001~) schoolgirls are the center of the drama. A still from Sono Sion’s later film
Love Exposure (2008), in which the damaged lead character Yoko has yet another
new school uniform fresh from a dry-cleaning shop slung over her shoulder on a
hanger, appears in Figure 1.10. Another key figure in the creative firmament of
the 1990s and 2000s was the artist Aida Makoto, arguably the most influential and
respected artist in Japan throughout that period (Favell, 2012). Aida Makoto added
images such as Joshik sei harakiri (Harakiri Schoolgirls, 1999) to his established
oeuvre of national schoolgirls (Azemichi, 1991) and idol-like bish jo (beautiful
girls). These schoolgirl pieces are discussed further in Chapters 6 and 9 and can be
seen in Figures 6.3 and 6.4.
It is important that the reader takes particular note of the fact that the crea-
tors, including the people named above, were almost exclusively male sociologists,
journalists, artists, novelists, intellectuals, film directors, and sundry other image
professionals, who had a specific male imaginative trajectory embedded in social
FIGURE 1.10 Man-hating schoolgirl Yoko dawdling across a crossing gives a van driver
the finger in the film Love Exposure (2008)
Source: used with kind permission of the director Sono Sion.
and symbolic networks dominated by men. Unraveling the ways in which the cult
of schoolgirls has been generated necessarily becomes a feminist project because,
with the exception of a few highly prominent female writers and photographers,
the academic, legal, and cultural pioneers of material about delinquent schoolgirls
were men.11 The highly gendered balance of power underlying the construction
of girl icons and “bad schoolgirl” narratives is explored in stages throughout this
book, particularly in Chapters 3, 5, 8, and 9.
Whether sympathetic or damning, the male stars of the culturati who engaged
themselves with the task of finessing representations of the lives and habits of devi-
ant schoolgirls shared this job with a warren of lesser-known writers and editors
producing copy for men’s comics and magazines. Outside of the core of special-
ist writers and leading names that coalesced around the schoolgirl enigma was
another layer of more obscure (and more purely male) producers—many of whom
had been producing entertainment and scripts around images of sexy, canny, and
fighting schoolgirls many years prior to the public events of the mid-1990s, and
who were typically embedded within largely male-oriented avant-garde, porn, or
otaku milieus. Among the more famous of these, for example, are the director Satō
Hisayuki—a veteran of splatter and pink films—and Mori Nobuyuki—the covert
otaku taxonomist of high-school girls’ uniforms. See a late 1980s prototype of a
heroic deviant schoolgirl ward of the camera in Satō Hisayuki’s pink eiga (cinema
porn movie) in Figure 1.11.
Enquiries into the academic, journalistic, and cultural activities of these
individuals—and many other either unknown or more peripherally engaged
editors, academics, local government officials, lawyers, and writers—are the
principal empirical sources grounding the analysis in this book. Initial phases
FIGURE 1.11 A hardened schoolgirl fights off prying cameras in an eighties pink eiga
(porn movie), Lolita Vibe Torture that prophesises news media attention to
schoolgirls in the 1990s
Source: image used with the kind permission of the director Satō Hisayuki, of Lolita Vibe Torture (1987).
of interviewing and some participant observations of magazine production and

editing were carried out between 1997 and 1999, during the time in which
compensated dating and wayward schoolgirls occupied the center stage of news
media attention. As a liberated European and female researcher and visitor to
these magazine offices, with no clear political angle or immediate employment
interest invested in how schoolgirls ought to behave, I exerted little consistent
impact on how editors and specialists chose to talk to me, and was often—after
an initial flurry of delinquent posturing—in the case of teenage kogyaru edi-
tors, or moral intoning in the case of institutional representatives—rather quickly
regarded as remote and irrelevant. Unlike other overseas journalists, especially
from North America, I also displayed little personal, moral or entertainment
interest in the sex-lives of (underage) schoolgirls. Important opinion leaders in
the public debate about compensated dating sought fiercely to present their own
perspective—namely that compensated dating was either rampant or that it was
barely taking place as a sexual activity per se—and on several occasions I found
myself in the inscrutable and apparently wasteful position of declining offers to
be introduced to “girls who will talk about compensated dating” for interviews,
or to accompany the sociologist Miyadai Shinji on a deviancy-spotting stroll
through 109 department store. Other interviews and evidence drawn on in this
book were gathered over the ensuing decade until 2013, during which time
reiterated narratives and portraits of the deviant Japanese schoolgirl led to sev-
eral increasingly simple and rigid archetypes set in urban folklore that circulated
smoothly through global and regional Asian media. The fashionable problem
schoolgirl and the kogyaru and yamanba were frequently and often nostalgically
revisited in domestic culture and journalism of the 2000s. During this period of
reification and mythification, compensated dating became less the contentious
and uncertain object of politically motivated conflicts and more an established
social fact, a key social event summing up society of the 1990s, for instance. This
period also spawned offshoot migrating deviancy “problems” overseas, in Korea
and Taiwan (Lam, 2003), through which the amoral character of contemporary
youth in those societies was also to be understood.
Japanese schoolgirls as a global archetype

Rather like the international televising of the zengakuren (Zen Nihon Gakusei
Jichikai Sō Rengō, or All Japan Union of Student Self-Government) demonstra-
tions in 1970 (Dowsey, 1970: 1–2), and the recent repetitive academic attention
to deviant otaku (Kinsella, 1998; Azuma, 2009; Galbraith, 2009b; Ito et al., 2012),
there was a large secondary global market for copy about materialist and slatternly
Japanese schoolgirls in the English-speaking press. Described sarcastically by a local
journalist as a “flood of research package tours” (Hayami interview, 3 March 1997),
overseas journalists got busy placing articles about flirtatious and young Oriental
girls in reputable publications.12 In the US there was “Japanese Men’s Obsession:
Sex with Schoolgirls” (New York Times, 3 April 1997), and in Australia, “Schoolgirls
the Prey in Paradise for Paedophiles” (The Daily Telegraph [Sydney, Australia],
20 October 1996: 44). In the UK, The Guardian published “Teenage Kicks: Sex
with Schoolgirls is a Booming Industry in Japan” (30 October 1996), and later
recapped that with “Schoolgirls Trade Sex for Designer Goods” (9 June 1997).
Meanwhile, The Weekend Australian had picked up on the “Japanese Crackdown
on Schoolgirl Sex Rings” (22 June 1996), and France’s Le Monde published similar
copy in “Schoolgirls Pander to the Lolita Fantasy” (8 December 1996). The rapid
translation and reception of the Japanese schoolgirl story in Europe and the US was
facilitated by the pre-existing psychosexual symbolism of Japan–West culture and
relations. The cute and saucy schoolgirl who rebels against a repressive Japanese
patriarchy was adopted as a new incarnation of the long line of fictional charming
and willing Oriental femmes fatales suffering inhumane treatment at the hands of
Japanese men. Such maidens have long featured or filtered into North American
and European culture, from Madam Butterfly at the turn of the twentieth century
to the cult following of the clone schoolgirl character Ayanami Rei in the anima-
tion Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995~) at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Rising levels of interest in Japanese schoolgirls outside of Japan has been amply
evidenced online and in art, film, and fun publications such as Patrick Macias and
Jay Tack’s appropriately titled Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno (2007) and Brian Ashcraft
and Shoko Ueda’s Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential: How Teenage Girls Made a Nation
Cool (2010). The latter book is based on a regular column in Wired magazine,
“Japanese Schoolgirl Watch,” which feeds a West-Coast-inflected view of Japanese
schoolgirls as leaders of style with a focus on nifty retail inventions. While overseas
culture industries have installed the deviant Japanese schoolgirl into their regular
cast (Kill Bill: Volume I is discussed in Chapter 9), stimulating a secondary appetite
for deeper understanding among students, there has been little in-depth analysis of
the schoolgirl thing in English or European languages.13
Considerable awareness that compensated dating constituted the latest in a long
parade of simultaneously smug and titillating international news stories about a dys-
functional and eccentric Japanese citizenry was deflected back into Japanese news.
Take this headline, for example: “Yamanba Make-up That Started in Shibuya is
Amazing the World” (Sh kan Shinch , 26 October 2000: 38.) Sensitivity to the
international appetite for Japanese impropriety influenced Tokyo Metropolitan
Police strategy, which was targeted largely at quashing all media escalation of the
topic.14 In March 1998 publishers received a call from the police informing them
that the words enjo k sai (compensated dating) and oyajigari (old-man mugging)
referred to illegal activities and that they must forthwith stop using them.15 The term
joshi k k sei (high-school girl) was banned from circulation across the media in the
same period (Adachi Kaoru interview, AV company director, 5 July 2010). Calls
from the police came too late: the Japanese schoolgirl, wielding a deadly weapon or
robotically attached to a designer handbag, solidified into an enduring global arche-
type over the following decade. Tanaka Kenichi’s award-winning 2010 animation
Japan: The Strange Country deploys an ugly schoolgirl with a designer handbag in his
mocking digital animation about the new consumerist “Japanese character.”
Chapter outline
The figure of the materialistic, delinquent, militant, or vengeful schoolgirl involved
in prostitution, self-harm, and violence continued to generate a cycle of content
for journalism, novels, art, and film for a decade and more, in the wake of the
initial moral panic in 1996 to 1998. “High-school girl behavior” grounded social
and legal theory and discourse, inspired academic articles and student dissertations,
stimulated local government activism, prompted police and government research,
and underwrote a sequence of local and national legislation tightening up the regu-
lation of sex introduction services, social networking websites and magazines, and
sexual imagery in culture. Yet despite this enormous media and cultural output
purveying the shock of amateur schoolgirl prostitution, and several large quan-
titative sociological surveys carried out among schoolgirls, no evidence gathered
suggested that the activity of compensated dating was either consistent in terms of
what it referred to, or increasing.
Chapter 2 examines the lively market for statistics on deviant sexual behavior and
the generation of what might be considered a form of pseudo-ethnography, based
on media sources and casual source work (sh zai) with “professional schoolgirls.”
Regardless of the quality of the sources of evidence about schoolgirl prostitution,
successive legal controls on self-advertising, pimping and soliciting for (buying) sex
(kaishun) were introduced over the following decade, cutting access to sex-services
work and voluntary prostitution for men and women.
Tireless editorial work and significant points of interaction between porn maga-
zines, weekly news magazines, and a new type of “lifestyle” magazine produced for
teenage girls—including Egg and Popteen—are explored in Chapters 3 and 4. With
its resonant and proliferating symbolic meanings, the schoolgirl debate, as copy
(kopii) managed by magazine editorial offices, was lucrative content (Chapter 3).
Content analysis, interviews with cultural professionals, and participant observa-
tions of media production are brought together in this book to map out a detailed
picture of the how the story of prostitute schoolgirls was incubated.
By the summer of 1996, a challenging fashion subculture had taken shape on
Ikebukuro and Shibuya pavements, in train station toilets and department store
stairwells, and in convenient café perches and hideaways, such as those lining
Center Gai, the pedestrian boulevard at the center of Shibuya, or the top floor of
Tokyū’s 109 department store. Models of the new kogyaru look were highly visible
at previously established foci of urban commuting and encounter around train sta-
tions. Their key pastimes—appearing in “adult” clothing, posing for photographs
to be placed in kogyaru magazines, and adding witty captions and lewd gestures to
posed photographs in print club (purikura) booths—were a playful mimicry of the
broader social context and experience of commercial media interest in citing, film-
ing, and framing.
Kogyaru styles were responsive and timely, and came replete with sartorial cues
bringing not only the image of a female delinquent (f ry sh jo) but also the bur-
lesque trappings of the sex industry, and its attendant lower-class female styles,
into school corridors and commuter trains. Slumming it as a kogyaru, the develop-
ment of kogyaru magazines, and photo street culture are examined in Chapter 4.
Teenage aping of the precociously streetwise and self-funded schoolgirls portrayed
in the “adult” (otona no) media served to both “evidence,” magnify, and disturb this
characterization. The anticipatory and proscriptive quality of journalistic reportage
on schoolgirl deviancy in the first half of the 1990s demonstrated the potential for
narratives to move from porn, to fiction, to news, to street style, to academia, to
art and film—in that order. Meanwhile the antiphonal and interactive speed of
kogyaru style and posturing demonstrated the complex and symbiotic interaction of
subcultures with the offices and studios of mass-media production.
Political tensions lurked beneath the apparent frivolousness of much of the
journalism on compensated dating and mute kogyaru posturing. Alarm about com-
pensated dating was also rooted in a deeper, even ancient, concern: the possibility
of female independence through independent employment, or sexual freelancing.
Though sent out to work in large numbers from the later part of the nineteenth
century until the postwar era, the conditions of labor of working girls in their
teens and twenties were typically those of daughters sold as indentured labor-
ers and receiving little by way of cash earnings to use for themselves. Chapter 5
explores the recent criticisms of young women and schoolgirls desiring money or
bragging about having it in the context of the history of suspicion and surveillance
by news media, police, and government institutions of young women making and
keeping their own money. Consideration of the widespread deployment of inex-
pensive and readily available young women as factory hands, domestic maids, and
prostitutes, throws new light on the lingering resonance and nostalgia bound up
with images of deferential, servile, and plentiful (if not clonable) young women—
and stories about those who have not been so easy to buy—in the postwar period.
Aspects of the imagination of girls in contemporary Japan are grounded in the
reverberations of the long history of female employment and in its attendant lower-
class subcultures, as well as in an equally long history of societal anxiety about
girls becoming self-serving and independent: becoming, that is, schoolgirls. Hints
of a feminine subcultural tradition were embedded as a playful cultural code in a
revolt into style in girls’ street wear and posturing (albeit steered by fashion maga-
zine editorial prompting). However, the predominantly male image of professionals
and writers who produced news and opinions on society drew upon this complex
field of clever fashion posturing to produce literal—in other words, sociological—
“portraits” of the ostensibly licentious personality and consciousness of girls.
Ethnic play has been an intriguing dimension of gyaru subcultures, and of the
“black face” (ganguro) and “witch” (yamanba) styles that emerged as later derivations
of kogyaru style from 1999. Much has been written about the logic, authenticity,
and legitimacy of the racial looks embedded in more diffuse Japanese hip hop
and b-kei gyaru styles (Condry, 2006, 2007; Cornyetz, 1994; Russell, 1996, 2011;
Sterling, 2010, 2011; Wood, 1998). Chapter 7 explores ganguro style and tastes,
and suggests that its aesthetics are knowingly fictional and composite, not so much
racial as transracial, and in this respect working to contradict the tendency within
domestic entertainment and journalism to frame schoolgirls as ethnic nationals and

to interpret ganguro girls as a pseudo racial clan connected to people of African
descent. Chapter 6 explores this latter treatment of girls as an alternately ethnic and
racial or biological category in journalism of the 1990s and 2000s, and traces some
of the sources of this Darwinist burlesque in earlier tendencies to gender Japan as
“girl” and girls as core to a Japanese race.
Chapters 8, 9, and 10, deepen the historical analysis already brought to bear
in thinking about the sources that have fed the image of deviant schoolgirls and
gyaru street fashions, and introduce other cross-national and comparative ways of
grasping the dynamics of the situation. Chapter 8 suggests that there are struc-
tural similarities between black face minstrelsy, which was a central staging device
underscoring nineteenth-century North American and European popular culture,
and the media and subcultural fetish and creation of girl characters in contemporary
Japan. The cultish fascination with schoolgirls, sh jo, and young women—par-
ticularly when misbehaving and sexualized—has waxed and waned and moved
forward through the Japanese twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It spans
and connects different cultural modes and genres, appearing in mass media, avant-
garde genres, otaku subculture, and the symbolic discourse of the intelligentsia.
It is a girl fixation rooted in male sensibilities and creativity projected onto the
figures of women, through which a collective male subjective reaction to women
is expressed.
Chapter 9 uncovers a countertendency to the derogatory minstrelized girl char-
acters in the current of reformist, left-wing, and radical political fascination with
the transformative social potential of young girls. The iconoclastic and libertarian
compulsion to valorize schoolgirls and paint images of their energy channeled
into anti-establishment militancy both rebutted and at other times combined with
other more derogatory trends, through which they were sexualized or presented as
natives or subjects of natural science. Narratives about female fight-back reflected
the quite specific centrality and political sensitivity to gender matters and shifts in
the gender order in modern and contemporary Japan.
In Chapter 10, we return to the charivari and discourse surrounding com-
pensated dating from the middle of the 1990s, to observe that this gathered pace
precisely as the new trend towards re-evaluating Japan’s colonial history, and the
delayed claims of former comfort women (moto ianfu) for compensation (for their
incarceration and forced sexual labor during the Pacific war period), reached the
peak of their intensity in domestic media and politics. Close examination of the
thematic slippage between compensating schoolgirls and compensating comfort
women hints that saturation coverage of compensated dating in this period was
not coincidental but symptomatic and strategic to the broader political tensions of
this revisionist period, in which the history of Japan’s relations with neighboring
countries and the history of its treatment of women were entwined issues (Hein
and Seldon, 2000; Angst, 2001; Ueno, 2004). Compensated dating as “scandal”
in mass and male journalism served as both a distraction from and a fantastical
distorted reinvention of the wider political moment. Through the construction of
schoolgirl prostitutes, the problem of women under Japanese governance re-eval-

uating their selves and demanding appropriate financial compensation was covertly
and intensely worked over at one entertaining and comical remove.
Notes
1 Statistics in this paragraph have been sourced at the Gender Equality Bureau (Danjo
Byōdō Sanka Kyoku) established in the Cabinet of Government in 1994. Basic figures
are available in English and Japanese at: http://www.gender.go.jp/index.html.
2 Statistics in this paragraph are sourced from the Fujin Hakusho, Josei Rōdō Hakusho,
and Danjo Byōdō Sankaku Hakusho, which provide continuous data despite the
evolving titles and format of these white papers.
3 Leaving aside the gauche stereotypes of a clinical, over-industrialized Japan evoked by
the editing and narration, Jean Jacques Bienex captures glimpses inside the lives of men
involved in the business and appreciation of the Lolita complex in his widely broadcast
documentary Otaku (France, 1994).
4 See discussion of the progressive social reformist view of the new elite cohort of
schoolgirls in Mariko Inoue (1996) and discussion of the conflicts arising over the
appropriate behavior of schoolgirls reflected in literature in Deborah Shamoon (2012:
14–28).
5 Discussion of the eroticization of young working women takes place in Miriam
Silverberg’s discussion of the creation of the modern girl and her culture in the Taishō
media, in Erotic Grotesque Nonsense.
6 Television opaque projector, or “telop,” as it was known in abbreviation, was a
technology for rapid transcription of oral speech into subtitles, brought into wide
practice in the 1990s.
7 The Nichigai Associates “Magazine Plus” database incorporates news and current
affairs weeklies such as AERA, VIEWS, Sh kan Bunshun, with predominantly male
readerships, and a limited number of established titles aimed at married women, such
as Shufu no Tomo, and Fujin K ron, but entirely excludes the extensive range of fashion,
opinion, and lifestyle magazines targeted at young women and teenagers. Figure 1.8
illustrates debate about girls, but not material published for or by girls.
8 A snack bar is a cheaper variant of a hostess club. It typically offers conversation and
consolation to working class men, which is provided by a proprietress “Mama San” or
her employees.
9 Satō Takeshi describes an earlier “pseudo-event-ization process” (“‘giji-ibento’-ka
shitsutsu”) set in motion by radio, film, and magazine publishers of the 1920s as they
competed to present modern life, modern thought, and modern girls to the public.
(Satō, 1982: 29).
10 Burusera is derived from “bloomers” (blue gym pants) and “sailor” (from sailor suits, the
traditional uniform of Japanese schoolgirls).
11 An extraordinarily similar pattern pertained in the production of journalistic and artistic
material about the modan gaaru in the mid-1920s. Miriam Silverberg’s analysis of the
original commentary on “modern girls” considers the work of a male playwright
(Fujimori Seikichi), film director (Suzuki Shigeyoshi), artist (Kishida Ryūsei), and
novelist (Tanizaki Junichi), several “male writers” positioned at various points across a
contested political spectrum (Kitazawa Shūichi, Kataoka Teppei, Nii Itaru, Kiyosawa
Kiyoshi), and one feminist female journalist (Kitamura Kaneko); Silverberg (2006:
52–57).
12 Brian Moeran comments wittily on the comically risqué Oriental lady conjured up in
earlier stages of postwar British advertising (Moeran, 1996).
13 Linguistic anthropologist Laura Miller has written a string of interesting articles on
aspects of gyaru and kogyaru looks, linguistic codes, and photo-culture (Miller, 2000b,
2003), which relate not to schoolgirls as media copy but to the gyaru street style with
which they were strongly linked and which is examined in Chapter 4 of this book. In her
articles Miller draws attention to the derogatory vein of domestic Japanese journalism
that seeks to undermine and critique girls involved in subcultural styles. This book
takes a similarly defensive attitude in favor of the creative strength and sexual autonomy
of young and teenage women in Japan, but it is based on an analysis of news media
and cultural production and sociological surveys that uncovers surprises in the origin
and circulation of material about schoolgirl behavior and gyaru culture. Producing and
consuming schoolgirl deviance and subculture emerge from a specifically male-oriented
imagination and magazines, and ideas linked to kogyaru have also been produced largely
by male editors, designers, and writers.
14 The moral panic about compensated dating stimulated increased police surveillance
and new legislation. This legislative reaction forms a case study in David Leheny’s
academic study of international politics, Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and
Anxiety in Contemporary Japan (2006). Leheny explores how the conflict of political
interests—between reformist activists (concerned to make Japanese law adhere to global
human rights agendas that condemn child-sexual exploitation in Asia) and national
politicians and police (concerned to tighten up laws controlling female sexuality and
casual prostitution)—led to a local reinterpretation of the global agenda to fit in with
national interests.
15 A somewhat similar tendency toward police extrication from media escalation of youth
problems was observed in England at the same time. Discussing youth rioting in Britain
in the 1990s, Sarah Thornton notes the police strategy of “playing down the scale of
such incidents” (Thornton, 2000: 189).
2
GATHERING AND INTERPRETING
THE STATISTICAL EVIDENCE
The power of weekly magazines, newspapers, and television shows to define

the state of society and compose an agenda of social problems, such as schoolgirl
prostitution, was seen as meddlesome troublemaking by organizations such as the
Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and National and Tokyo Metropolitan Police,
Seinendan (Youth League), NGOs such as ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and
Tourism), and by civil servants based in local and national government offices.
In June 1994 the national assembly of the PTA was the first to respond to media
reports of the use of telephone clubs by schoolgirls. PTA Survey results indicated
that 27.4 percent of children aged 14 to 16 years old claimed to have had experi-
ence of calling a telephone club, and 1 percent of the third-year middle school
students (aged 15 to 16 years old) claimed to have visited a bloomer sailor shop
(Miyadai, 1994: 1–3).
In The Decision of the Girls in Uniform (1994), and subsequent best-selling books
and articles written through the 1990s, sociologist Miyadai Shinji was consistent
in his claim that the rate of involvement of girls in their mid-teens in the new
sex-service industries was high and rising. Though citing the 1994 PTA Survey
as an important source of evidence supporting his thesis that schoolgirl prostitu-
tion had flourished from the late 1980s, Miyadai questioned the validity of these
national figures in the Tokyo Metropolitan region. Presenting examples from his
own Tokyo-based fieldwork, Miyadai commented that in 1993 he had visited
a girls’ high school where ten in a class of “thirty-five to forty” girls had sold
their pants to a bloomer sailor shop, and almost the entire class had experience of
calling a telephone club. The skepticism with which Miyadai Shinji viewed low
digits was shared by magazine journalists, who also placed their bets on a bigger
number. In October 1994 the editors of Dime, a magazine for trend-conscious
salarymen, carried out their own survey on “the sexual awareness of teenagers,”
the results of which were published under the headline “What’s All That Talk
26 Gathering and interpreting the statistical evidence
of Only a Fraction of Girls Using Telephone Clubs and Bloomer Sailor Shops!?”
(Dime, 1994: 118).
Miyadai Shinji estimated that in 1993 there were between 6,000 and 10,000
girls across the nation selling their underwear (Miyadai, 1994: 124), and pointed
out that 90 percent of the messages deposited in 2-shot dial voicemail telephone
clubs were left by schoolgirls, of whom half clearly indicated an intention to pros-
titute themselves (Miyadai, 1994: 2). The question of commercial dissimulation
and role play in the sex industry—the possibility that some, if not the major-
ity, of these voicemails were deposited by young women stating that they were
schoolgirls in order to attract men, rather than by schoolgirls themselves—was
overlooked. Although Miyadai’s research was significantly based on qualitative
ethnographic methodology, in which he carried out “deep” interviews with a
self-selected segment of women claiming to be “schoolgirls” whom he intercepted
on the switchboards of telephone clubs, his claims about the extent of schoolgirl
disaffection and sexual deviancy were largely quantitative and based on unsubstan-
tiated hand counts in school classrooms and personal estimates. His generous claims
about errant schoolgirl sexuality, however, fueled media interest and created a
platform for Miyadai to air his charismatic thoughts on the new psychological state
of accepting owarinaki nichij (endless everyday) existence no longer interrupted by
hopes for radical change or revolution on a distant horizon.1
Section chiefs in the Department of Women and Youth in Tokyo Metropolitan
Government (TMG) sought to trounce the media with sober investigations into
the real situation. Each year the Tokyo Metropolitan Government commissions a
large-scale sociological survey of youth behavior and attitudes (Seish nen kenzen iku-
sei kihon ch sa Heisei 8, 1997) known in abbreviation as the Youth Survey (Seish nen
ch sa). The survey, commissioned in 1996, asked questions about telephone clubs
and enjo k sai, and selected details of the results were more widely reported than
usual. Statistics of compensated dating that the 1996 TMG Youth Survey yielded
were universally interpreted as high figures, and as official proof of the seriousness
of the problem of schoolgirl prostitution (sh jo baishun)—with which compensated
dating was generally conflated. Headlines in newspapers shouted “4%!” The official
figure of 4 percent (of high-school girls claiming to do compensated dating) entered
into the flow of newsworthy digits and “numerical metonymy” (Crump, 1992: 46)
indicating the direction of society: “There’s No Misrepresenting the Meaning of
‘Compensated Dating at 4 percent,’” claimed Sunday Mainichi (3 November 1996:
138), while K hy journal presented the same single figure as a quality of all teenag-
ers: “The Experiences of the Compensated Dating 4% Generation” (K hy , July
1997: 26). Despite weaknesses in the structure and distribution of the surveys in
the first instance,2 and the special narrative treatment of its results in the second,
numbers embedded in headlines were taken as potent signs of a desired revelation.
The interest in numbers overlapped a tendency to link compensated dating fees to
the other values in the national economy. A briefly fashionable book titled Japan’s
Underground Economy (2002) argued that, while the legal economy was in recession,
the black market might represent a hidden boost. Underground Economy found, by
Gathering and interpreting the statistical evidence 27
means of an undisclosed calculation, that compensated dating was at its peak in

1995 to 1997 (Kadokura, 2002: 133), and claimed that by 1999 compensated dating
represented 4.9 percent of the sex industry, which as a whole has a total turnover
equivalent to 0.23 percent of the official national GDP (Kadokura, 2002: 136). In
his work on statistics Joel Best identifies the tendency for some statistics to gain a
perceptual aura and “magical properties” (Best, 2004: 116–143). “Magical num-
bers,” Best suggests, appear especially at “culture’s fault lines—at those spots where
conflict, uncertainty, and anxiety seem particularly intense, where we feel the need
for a firmer foundation on which to base our actions” (Best, 2004: 118). The cat-
egorization of women and their sexuality certainly constituted a point of conflict
and uncertainty in the Japan of the 1990s.
What was not reported was that a notable 2.9 percent of 12- to 13-year-old
first-year middle-school boys also said they had done compensated dating (1996
TMG Youth Survey, 1997: 50), rather undermining the significance of the magical
number 4, and raising doubts as to what the word “compensated dating” in fact
meant to the school population. If “compensated dating” was something young
lads did as well as older teenage girls, then what was it? Responding to a later
question about “earning money through anything connected to sex that is not
compensated dating,” 3.2 percent of middle-school girls, but also 3.1 percent of
middle-school boys, said they had done this (1996 TMG Youth Survey, 1997: 54).
In the fashionably brassy slang of the mid-1990s, part-time work talking on tel-
ephones operated by sexual service companies and unadorned prostitution were
both known as uri (“sell”), and both would have fallen into this firmer category of
part-time work (arbaito).
While the significance of compensated dating snowballed from the mid-1990s
onwards, what it referred to did not become any clearer; in fact, it remained, at
core, uncertain for the duration of the 1990s. According to Iwama Natsuki, whose
company conducted the 1996 TMG Youth Survey, compensated dating was a “sub-
tle slang word with an indirect meaning” being used among schoolchildren to
mean “earning money by ‘meeting people’ and any type of ‘sexual service’ that did
not include full sexual intercourse” (Iwama Natsuki interview, November 1997).
According to media research carried out by another sociologist, Maruta Koji, the
first trace of the term in postwar Japan can be found in the Naigai Times in 1953,
when it was used in an article about the new popularity of “free mistresses” who
could now be paid by the date rather than retained as kept women (Maruta, 2000:
212). The term resurfaced in print once in 1973, while the first magazine article
to mention “compensated dating by wives” in the text, but not in the title, was
published in the Sh kan Post on 23 December 1994 (Maruta, 2000: 212). (Further
discussion of the ironic undertones and etymology of the term enjo, which linked
it to the state of the economy, can be found in Chapter 10.) Surveys commissioned
by local government avoided questions that used this problematically unclear term
in subsequent years.
According to an account given by Miyadai Shinji, the term was used in oral
slang in the early 1980s, when personal ads magazines were launched. In the early
1990s the phrase was picked up by women using telephone clubs to find custom-
ers for occasional acts of prostitution. Miyadai suggests that it was later adopted by
teenage girls working in date-clubs to refer to dates with customers that explicitly
excluded sexual intercourse, while from 1994 on “compensated dating” came to
mean paid dates with high-school girls. Whether or not this included sex var-
ied, but Miyadai suggests that in the mid-1990s most schoolgirls were using the
phrase to mean payment for sexual intercourse. Miyadai concludes that, after the
extensive television coverage of “compensated dating” in the summer of 1996,
schoolgirls began to use the term to refer to wandering up and down streets in pairs
and waiting for groups of school and college boys to shout out to them. In this
period, which corresponded to the height of the media coverage—and to the time
when the 1996 TMG Youth Survey was conducted—it did not necessarily refer
to sex at all, according to its most public analyst, but rather constituted a series of
fashionable poses (Miyadai, 1997a: 10).
Another statistical survey also based in the capital region, Environment Factors
Influencing High School Girls and Their Consciousness in Relation to Compensated Dating,
was commissioned by the Asian Women’s Foundation and carried out in October
1997.3 Noting the uncertainty of what the term “compensated dating” appeared to
have meant to schoolchildren responding in previous surveys, including the 1996
TMG Youth Survey,4 the survey team, led by Fukutomi Mamoru and based at Tokyo
Gakugei University, carried out a preparatory interview survey of 30 high-school
girls before designing the questions for a major quantitative survey to follow. On
the basis of the preliminary interview survey,5 the team discovered that by March
1997 there remained “considerable variation in how high-school girls defined ‘com-
pensated dating.’”6 This survey was distributed to 960 female high-school students
between the ages of 15 and 18, of which 600 unspoilt surveys were returned. The
relatively high return rate can be attributed to the more solicitous and more sensitive
method of its distribution compared to the 1996 TMG Youth Survey: respondents
were selected at random according to residency records in each of 80 neighbor-
hoods (chome) included in the survey field; female researchers called on the selected
respondents at home in person; and anonymous surveys were then disbursed and
returned by hand in sealed envelopes (1997 AWF Survey, 1998: 39). Responses were
more specific than those generated by the 1996 TMG Youth Survey: 2.3 percent of
high-school girls stated that they had been on a compensated date that included sex-
ual intercourse; another 2.3 percent had been on a compensated date that included
a sexual activity other than intercourse; and a further 4.8 percent of respondents said
that they had been on a compensated date that involved meeting in a café but that
had not involved any sexual exchange at all (1997 AWF Survey, 1998: 13).
The essential problem with the interpretation of such official survey results in
the media—namely, reportage that compensated dating was increasing at a precipi-
tous rate—was the fact that there were and are no previous statistics from which to
get a measure of either 4 percent, or the 3.2 percent of all schoolchildren who said
that they had earned money from sex-related work, or indeed the later figure of
2.3 percent produced by the 1997 AWF Survey. Shocked claims that compensated
dating has become “normal” activity across the high-school population represented
what deviancy critic Jock Young has described as “a fantasy crime wave, which
does not necessarily involve at any time an actual increase in number” (Young,
1971: 50). Virtually alone among her contemporaries, journalist Satō Noriko made
precisely this point in an article titled “Schoolgirls and ‘Enjo Kosai’ a Good Deal
of Hype” (Friday, 30 May 1997). While statistics were used to dramatize and give
authority to the idea of an “increase” of compensated dating, both the newness of
the concept and the uncertainty of the behavior to which it referred precluded the
possibility of knowing whether or not it was increasing or extensive.
Let us consider the wider context for talking about teenage dalliances with sex-
related part time work. The relatively large size of the sex industry and associated
companion (hostess) business and commercial sexual services in Japan also suggests
that a small percentage of teenage women testing out some form of sex work might
be a routine feature of the school-to-work transition. According to available but
probably inaccurate estimates, one in every 31 young women worked as a pros-
titute in 1925, and this may have risen by 1955 to about one in every 25 women
aged between 15 and 29 (Kovner, 2009: 782). Various statistics can be loosely used
to get a grasp of the general scale of the sex services and hostess industries (f zoku
eigy and mizu sh bai) in the 1990s and 2000s. According to the International
Organization for Migration, between 200,000 and 300,000 Filipina, Thai, Korean,
Taiwanese, and Columbian women worked in Japan in the 1990s (Douglas, 2000:
116). Of illegal female foreign workers apprehended by immigration officers in
1994, 44.4 percent were working as hostesses or prostitutes in the early 1990s and
this figure dropped to 40 percent in 1996 (Douglas, 2000: 114).7 From this we can
generate a rudimentary impression of a possible 90,000 to 140,000 foreign female
workers employed in core sectors of the sex industry. In addition to these immi-
grant workers, approximately half a million women were entered into the National
Census as the employees of “bars, cabarets, and nightclubs” in the 1990s—a broad
category that incorporates some major sex-service and hostessing outlets such as
date clubs, snack bars, and cabarets.8 Largely outside of these categories and figures
were “self-employed” “bathroom assistants” working in “soaplands” (as de facto
prostitutes), nude models, and adult video actresses.9 Freelance writer Yamane
Kazuma notes that there was a tendency for Japanese nationals to shift out of pros-
titution into more amenable sex services work—in nude modeling and the adult
porn video, or “AV” industry, following a tightening of police regulation of soap-
lands and other de facto brothels in 1984 (Yamane, 1993: 138). This shift to softer
sex work may have vacated a space for an influx of Asian immigrant sex workers
and potentially for other forms of prostitution, including amateur prostitution, car-
ried on outside of the management of the soaplands. Given the demonstrably large
size of the sex-service industry and its continued position as a major employer of
female labor, it seems plausible that a certain percentage of teenage girls and young
women must gravitate towards finding temporary, casual, or long-term employ-
ment in its studios and cubicles, regardless of any political or moral campaigns and
specific occasions of media labeling and prurience.
Voyeurism and statistics

Regardless of the figures in question, and whether these could be considered high
or low, official sociological survey results appeared to anchor rather than undermine
media reportage. Magazine editorials also emulated institutional research with their
own surveys, which kindled new—and as a rule higher—statistics of teenage sexual
experience. In April 1997 Views magazine presented a “Survey of 1000 High School
Girls: The Full Data: (School Test Grades); Graduation from Virginity; Graduation
from Telephone Clubs; Graduation from Compensated Dating; Young Ladies ver-
sus Play Girls; Tokyo Metropolitan High School versus Osaka State High School”
(Views, 7 April 1997: 171). Three months later, President magazine looked at “The
Real Thoughts of Modern High School Girls (“My Customer Is Virtually My
Dad”)—A Survey of Fathers and Daughters: Among High School Children 65%
Have Experience of Sex, 23% Have Done Compensated Dating” (President, July
1997: 280). In October the Sunday Mainichi lined up some new figures with a
review of “80 Men That Had Compensated Dates with 60 Girls (Girls That Lust)”
(Sunday Mainichi, 12 October 1997: 160). The following July, the Sh kan H seki
(Weekly Jewel) thought it prudent to be “Asking 600 Middle School Students
‘What Do You Think of Compensated Dating?’” (Sh kan H seki, 16 July 1998:
20). Within the extensive coverage of deviant schoolgirls in the 1990s, weekly and
monthly current-affairs magazines targeted primarily at male audiences, including
the titles cited above, played a pivotal role in developing and expanding coverage
of the topic.
In a dialogue published in Sunday Mainichi magazine in November 1996,
sociologist Miyadai Shinji quotes, as a viable empirical source, a survey of “100
schoolgirls walking through Shibuya,” carried out by Ry k Kansoku Across maga-
zine.10 Across editors happily discovered that “twenty-two girls out of one hundred
said they had done prostitution or compensated dating, and had no regrets,” and
that a further inexact number of “thirty girls or more” of the remaining 78 said
that “if they came across the opportunity they would like to try prostitution”
(Murakami and Miyadai, 1996: 51–52). The facts that, first, the survey was carried
out by sophisticated male magazine editors able to flatter inexperienced teenage
women into stopping and talking, and second, that the survey was conducted in
central shopping streets in Shibuya that were the rendezvous point for teenagers
allied with the bravado of the kogyaru image, who may have made fashionably
exaggerated claims, go unmentioned.
Rather than towering over the media in terms of methodological rigor and sen-
sitivity to its human subjects, academic and semi-academic research (kenky ) was
in most cases closely entwined with strategic journalistic information-gathering
(sh zai). Quantitative research, ethnography, and journalism converged into an
incoherent sexualized commentary on girls. The young, male investigative jour-
nalist Fujii Yoshiki was one of the small subgroup of journalists who specialized
in writing more concerned commentaries about schoolgirls. In the introduction
to a chapter by Fujii published in The New Book of Commercial Sex (Ueno and
Miyadai, 1999), he refers to areas of Tokyo such as Shibuya and Ikebukuro as the
“breeding grounds for compensated dating,” citing in this case a television show as
his source of information: “according to television shows where the reporter does a
thorough street survey in Center Gai street in Shibuya, about one in every five girls
has done compensated dating, and you can see that there are girls who are clearly
refusing to answer the question too” (Ueno and Miyadai, 1999: 138). Transferring
the secondhand approach to numerical estimates into English, an article placed in
The Guardian (8 July 1999: 8) set the standards. Rehashing figures published in a
Japanese news source, The Guardian was able to disclose how “an astonishing three
in four of the girls questioned said they had experienced solicitation for sex by
older men.”11
While men’s weekly magazines maintained a continuous creative push to dis-
cover fresh numerical signs taken as revelations of the full picture of schoolgirl
prostitution, the most authoritative and morally concerned of authors on the topic
exhibited extraordinarily little or no curiosity about the actual empirical evidence
supporting the idea that they lived in an age of schoolgirl prostitution. Their
approach to the topic tended to be overwhelmingly ideological and symbolic, and
their approach to sources intertextual.12 In two separate dialogues, one between
novelist and script writer Murakami Ryū and Kuronuma Katsushi, and another
between Murakami Ryū and Miyadai Shinji, published in Bungakkai and Sunday
Mainichi, respectively, Murakami starts the ball rolling by talking about his own
novel about high-school girls doing compensated dating in relation to seeing high-
school girls on television: “I’ve written a novel about high-school girls. Just when
I started doing the research for that I saw the ‘All night live’ (Asa made nama terebi)
show on the high-school girl problem” (Murakami and Miyadai, 1996: 50). In
the opening lines of an article published in Sekai (and later published in English in
Japan Echo), eminent psychoanalyst Kawai Hayao declared that
As I have not carried out any practical research specifically into this issue, I will
base my analysis in references to newspaper articles, essays and research reports
connected to compensated dating, and take the experiences of those authors
as the accounts of psychological practitioners.
(Kawai, 1997: 137)
Columnist Nakano Midori cites another journalist’s descriptions as source material

in her scathing critique of the mental weakness of deviant schoolgirls:
About two years ago I read a book that reported on some 14-year-old school-
girls engaged in prostitution. What struck me was the author’s description of
how, all throughout an interview with one of the girls, she was gripping her
cell phone as though it were an amulet. It must have had a tranquilizing effect
on her.
(Nakano, 2000: 62–63; in English)
A few years later, philosopher Azuma Hiroki hedged a brief comment on “so-
called kogal” in a similar vein:
As I don’t know much about this tendency, my consideration will have to

rely on general mass media coverage, and I can only give some rough impres-
sions. However, within those bounds, the kogal behavioral pattern, though it
possesses many traits that appear on the surface to be the polar opposite of the
otaku, of course can still be thought of as “animalistic”.
(Azuma 2009 [2001]: 90)
The popularity of deviant schoolgirls as the mute motif of intellectual discussion,

fine art, art film, and photography in Japan in the late 1990s invites comparison with
the mode in which delinquent teenage boys were discussed in England in the 1960s,
of which Stanley Cohen observed that “intellectual opinion produced appropriately
intellectual, but otherwise just as spurious attributes” (Cohen, 1972: 56).
Surveys of the sexual behavior of youth conducted in the second half of the
1990s were carried out in the midst of a moral carnival in which schoolchildren
were inescapably surrounded by media images of themselves presented as over-
sexualized deviants. The response this attention excited in at least one section of
schoolchildren living in the capital region was reflected in the new weekend and
after-school pastime of traveling into Ikebukuro and Shibuya to meet journalists
and cameramen and get photographed for magazines. From 1996, dressing up
in sexy “adult” clothing, posing for photographs, and competing to have pho-
tographs published in magazines became dominant themes in schoolgirl street
fashion and the basic formula of a new category of girls’ magazines targeted at
kogyaru. A small cohort of schoolgirls able to hang out in central Tokyo regu-
larly began to consider interaction with the media as a form of part-time work,
and made themselves available for interviews and surveys with journalists, edi-
tors, and producers. Media exposure became the catalyst for a series of highly
performative girls’ street fashions that extended to the end of the decade. As I
will suggest in Chapter 4 on delinquency as style, for schoolgirls and magazine
editors, compensated dating was a thrillingly deviant and rich sartorial style—a
Pandora’s box of clothes and behavioral postures, loaded with sartorial cues that
brought some of the unwholesome and burlesque trappings of sexual labor and
lower-class female wit and expression into schools, the city center, and media
editing rooms.
So far as becoming the subjects of social research was concerned, however,
an observation made by Laud Humphreys, of voluntary interview subjects of a
different trope of deviant sexual behavior in the United States, also pertains for
these girls: “Their very willingness to cooperate sets them apart from those they
are meant to represent” (Humphreys, 1970: 37). There is no reason to suggest
that schoolgirls perceived any distinction between social research and journalism,
whereas there is some evidence to suggest that some girls were aware of the type
of answers that they believed editors and researchers would be pleased to hear.
One freelance journalist, who paid the schoolgirls she knew to meet her for inter-
views, complained that
High-school girls know what the media want them to say and they say what-
ever is required, they are ready to do that, and not just because they’ll earn
money, but because the media are irritating and very persistent—saying what
they want is the quickest way to get rid of them.
(Uchida interview, 23 December 1998)
The same journalist also suggested that schoolgirls were annoyingly inconsistent in
the type of sexual information they provided:
Actually the girls say much sexier and more practical kinds of things to male
reporters than to me, they tend to become ashamed of themselves in front of
women. But then they get a bit shy with the really cool, good-looking male
interviewers too, they stop talking dirty stories to them because they fancy them.
Schoolgirls encountered by editors in city centers, and those receiving social

surveys in their classrooms, had already been the more and less willing recipi-
ents of a large volume of entertainment and reportage on the sexual behavior of
Japanese schoolgirls. Media coverage and social surveys introduced a lexicon and
a number of action scenarios that served as prompts informing and shaping the
statements schoolgirls made about their own personalities and behaviors. See a
schoolgirl weighing up the reporter’s question to her “...about compensated dat-
ing?..” in television news footage in Figure 1.5. Discussing the impact of Alexandre
Parent-Duchalet’s seminal survey and 1836 report on the personality and anthro-
pological characteristics of prostitutes in Paris, Alain Corbin encounters a similar
conundrum. Corbin argues that during the nineteenth century, the “portrait of
the prostitute was repeated so often in the literature on prostitution and inspired
so many novelists that, in addition to distorting the vision of later researchers …
it probably determined to some extent the behavior of the prostitutes themselves”
(Corbin, 1990: 7).
Legal controls on soliciting sex (kaishun)

Proven or otherwise, the debate about the schoolgirl problem encouraged first
local governments and later national lawmakers to extend the legal controls on
child prostitution. The first legal controls, introduced in 1997, aimed to crimi-
nalize adults soliciting schoolgirls, seeking to protect juvenile females from male
exploitation. Within three years, however, a New Youth Law (Shin Shōnen Hō,
2000) firmly re-established teenage girls (or boys) as responsible parties liable to
severe criminal punishment if caught offering “indecent invitations” or pimping
one another as amateur prostitutes available for cash.
Between 1952 and 1985 a Youth Ordinance (Seishōnen Jōrei)13 was introduced
in one of three versions in every prefecture and became the principal law regulat-
ing the access of children and adolescents to the sex-services industries (f zoku
eigy ) through the censorship of violent and pornographic materials and the con-
trol and punishment of those involved with sexual activities involving minors,
largely schoolgirls (Sasaki, 2000: 6). In most prefectures the Youth Ordinance was
updated in 1993, in response to a panic about manga that were thought to cater to
the then newly discovered category of so-called otaku men with pedophile ten-
dencies (Kinsella, 1998: 308–313). After a drawn-out battle with anti-censorship
activists, such as the manga artist and Meiji University academic Fujimoto Yukari,
the Tokyo Metropolitan Government introduced a controversial new amendment
to the Youth Ordinance in December 2010, identifying that “harmful” or “inde-
cent” images of “virtual youth” (hijitsuzai sh nen) could not be sold to minors.
The Osaka branch of the international NGO End Child Prostitution and
Pornography in Asian Tourism (ECPAT), founded in Bangkok in 1992, had been
active in campaigning against Asian sex tourism as well as domestic juvenile pros-
titution and pornography prior to the stories about schoolgirl amateur prostitution
in Japan. In 1993–1994, ECPAT launched a campaign against what it defined as
child pornography published in the weekly magazines Sh kan Gendai and Sh kan
Post. From 1996 the Tokyo branch of ECPAT became active, alongside the PTA
and various quasi-governmental citizens’ groups (shimin dantai), in campaign-
ing for new local legislation against telephone clubs and soliciting from minors.
These groups, organized and bolstered numerically by civil servants employed in
the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Women and Youth Department (Josei
seishōnenbu), began a modest Movement to Reform the Social Environment
(Kanky j ka kaizen und ) on the streets of Tokyo in 1997. Activities in Shibuya
and Shinjuku included removing advertisements for telephone clubs from pub-
lic phone boxes and handing out leaflets printed by the Tokyo Metropolitan
Government informing the public about new ordinances regulating telephone
clubs and criminalizing compensated dating. Members of the PTA also organized
teams to enter red-light areas and search for deviant schoolgirls on the premises of
telephone clubs and date clubs.
In August 1997, Tokyo and many other prefectures added a clause to the Youth
Ordinance to outlaw access to telephone clubs (terekura) for those under 20 years
old. In December 1997 the Youth Ordinance was amended again to include a new
clause making it illegal for adults to solicit sexual services from minors under the age
of 19. This became known as the Solicitation Ordinance (Kaishun Jōrei). The use of
the novel term kaishun (soliciting sex)14 instead of baishun (selling sex) was adopted
after much debate among civil servants, in order to place the legal responsibility for
compensated dating on adult males. The kaishun clause carried a maximum penalty
of 12 months imprisonment or a fine of up to 500,000 yen in Tokyo. The Tokyo
Metropolitan Government also commissioned and placed a range of advertise-
ments in broadsheets, on radio, and on television in November 1997 that warned
the public against consorting with female minors. The “Save Teens” television
commercial showed members of the adult public—a baker, a gym teacher, and a
builder—agreeing that adults must take responsibility for how they treat children.
The advert finished with a guest appearance from the mayor of Tokyo, Aoshima
Yukio, appealing for more “adult responsibility” (otona no sekinin).
The right to sexual self-determination

There was another constellation of individuals in Japan who disagreed with the
introduction of new legislation protecting juvenile females and argued in favor of
legalizing prostitution by abolishing the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Act. Their
focus on sexual self-determination was highly libertarian and strongly influenced
by the state of international discourse about prostitution, which in the 1990s
was led by academic attempts to de-stigmatize and legally protect sex-workers,
linked to published accounts of North American Sex Workers.15 In 1996 sociolo-
gist Miyadai Shinji, well-known journalist Fujii Seiji, and children’s rights activist
Hirano Yūji16 founded the Sei no Kenri Hōron Kai (Sexual Rights Legislation
Society). The Sexual Rights Legislation Society, which also came to include femi-
nist intellectuals such as Kawada Yukiko and Ueno Chizuko, campaigned for the
end to all restrictions on female sexual autonomy. Compensated dating had been a
difficult issue for feminists who opposed the Prostitution Prevention Act because
it seemed to compound male control of female sexuality. The general position of
the Sexual Rights Society was that “Whether or not prostitution is regulated, it
must ultimately be considered an issue for personal discretion” (Miyadai, in Ueno
and Miyadai, 1999: 66–67). Various members produced different theories about
why schoolgirls did compensated dating, including the idea that it was a form of
revenge aimed at their parents—“these girls grow up seeing the deception and
hypocrisy of their parents and go on to exercise their right to sexual autonomy as
an act of retaliation” (Ueno and Miyadai, 1999: 61)—or the idea that sex work had
lost its stigma and become accepted as an everyday form of casual labor by women
(Hayami interview, 15 March 2003).
The Sexual Rights Legislation Society had little impact on the direction of law-
making. Despite the vociferous objections of the Osaka ECPAT and the Democratic
Party (DPJ or Minshutō), which collaborated to produce an alternative version of
the bill that put more emphasis on the punishment of child sexual abuse, the coali-
tion government moved to introduce the Child Solicitation and Child Pornography
Prevention Act (Jidō Poruno Jidō Kaishun Hō) in November 1999. The Child
Solicitation Act outlawed paid sex with children under the age of 18 and nation-
alized telephone club regulation. Its opponents believed that the Act was “more
concerned with regulating the pornographic media than it is with actual child sexual
abuse” (Sonozaki Toshiko at Osaka ECPAT, 26 January 1999). The Bar Association
of Japan and an organization calling itself the Manga Bōei Dōmei (Manga Defence
League) also campaigned against the Bill on the basis that it was essentially concerned
with the cultural censorship of imagery, which would cripple the comics industry
and do nothing to protect children (see Leheny, 2006: 102–107).
Laws for the National Police Association

The National Police Association (NPA) and members of the Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP) represented another institutional center severely disappointed by
the 1999 Child Solicitation Act. Rather than being opposed, however, to the
greater control of female sexual agency, conservative members of the Diet and the
police believed that what was required was not law to punish adult men for having
paid dates with minors, but the stronger punishment of juvenile delinquents. In
October 1997, the LDP organized a committee for the revision of the Shōnen Hō
(Youth Law). In collaboration with the NPA it drafted the Shin Shōnen Hō (New
Youth Bill) aimed at countering the focus of the Child Solicitation Law on “adult
responsibility.” In 2000, the Diet passed the New Youth Law, stipulating that
juvenile offenders between the ages of 14 and 20 would now be sent to criminal
court (keiji saibansho) rather than family court (katei saibansho), effectively lower-
ing the age of criminal liability from 16 to 14 years old. The revised New Youth
Law represented the inclination of police and conservative politicians towards the
stricter control and punishment of youth misdemeanors and voluntary prostitution
for teenage girls in evidence over the preceding 40 years.17 In 2007 the Youth Law
was updated again, this time pushing the age of criminal liability further down-
wards, so that children aged 11 to 18 years old could be treated as legal agents
responsible for their actions.
In October 2002, the NPA established another committee to consider concrete
strategies for dealing with the relocation of juvenile prostitution to the internet.
In June 2003 the Deaikei Saito Kisei Hō (Internet Introduction Site Act), drawn
up by the NPA, came into law. This legislation barred minors under 18 years old
from access to internet introduction and dating sites, and set heavy fines for site
operators who gave access to minors. The Internet Introduction Site Act rede-
fined the newly established legal term “child solicitation” (jid kaishun) to signify
any partner involved in arranging prostitution with juveniles, including juveniles
themselves. Following the 2003 Act, juveniles could be fined up to one million
yen for offering “indecent invitations” (fusei y in) on the internet (Gotō, 2004:
68). While legislation originally sought to criminalize male customers rather than
schoolgirls, the NPA and LDP politicians worked to rapidly overturn this legal
position, with further legislation clearly identifying young women as guilty parties
in their own purchase.
Summary
Through the 1990s and 2000s a feedback cycle was stirred into motion through
which salacious and male-oriented media narratives about savvy and sexual school-
girls stimulated respectable news reports on teenage prostitution. This in turn
provoked both official and governmental statistical surveys, which also intensi-
fied both the media and the institutional focus of attention on potentially deviant
schoolgirls, and through this generated more limelight for further sexualized
street-fashion performances by girls, which were then taken as visual evidence of

the spread of sexual deviance, thereby provoking further media attention. Rather
comically, this feedback loop tied closely together the activities and output of the
largely “irresponsible” adult video and porn magazine publishing industry, serious
academic social scientists and youth deviancy experts, and government-sponsored
statistical survey teams. While porn publishers, topical essayists writing on school-
girls—such as Mori Nobuyuki—and skilled academics such as Miyadai Shinji or
youth delinquency and law specialist Sasaki Mitsuaki, were able to utilize this
dynamic to develop and broadcast their own work, those involved at the more
official and less commercial end of this cycle, on statistical surveys and legislating,
were swept along and placed in the frustrating position of losing control over the
interpretation and effect of their interventions. The feedback cycle, which was
also cumulative, picking up new layers of media and the arts as it rolled on, was
eventually slowed in the 2000s through direct and discreet police enforcement of
media “self-regulation” of material “harmful” to minors, and a series of stringent new
laws controlling youth activities and effectively criminalizing delinquent posturing.
Despite the brief focus of local ordinances on criminalizing men for the sexual
consumption of unprotected minors enacted from 1997, later legislation, backed
by police and national government, criminalized the delinquent behavior of young
women and their friends. While there was no longitudinal or stable evidence about
whether compensated dating or girl prostitution (sh jo baishun) was widespread or
not, the legislative reaction to ostensibly humiliating reports of a society in serious
moral disarray served to concretely increase surveillance and legal intervention to
block voluntary, boundary-testing youth sexual experimentation.
Notes
1 US-based scholar Yumiko Iida summarizes the ideas that made Miyadai a persuasive
author in touch with the fin-de-siècle mood of intellectuals in the 1990s (Iida, 2000: 437).
The analytical disjuncture between Miyadai’s ethnographic fieldwork on schoolgirl
sexual behavior on the one hand and his fascinating and philosophical commentary on
the moods of everyday life which attracted a cult readership in the 1990s, on the other,
was noted in the Japanese academy.
2 The first problem of the 1996 TMG Youth Survey was the low rate of response. Out
of 5,000 surveys distributed to middle and high schools, only 1,291 completed surveys
were returned. Sociologist Miyadai Shinji proposed that the reason most schools were
apparently unwilling to participate in the 1996 TMG Youth Survey was that teachers
were aware of the prevalence of prostitution amongst their pupils and were not willing
to have this involvement disclosed in official statistics (Miyadai, 1994: 3).
3 The Asian Women’s Foundation Fund was launched in 1995 as a means of compensating
comfort women using donations gathered from the national citizenry. It also received a
generous sum from the government budget—480 million yen—that was disbursed in part
to various research and survey commissions. The bias of its researchers was to promote
human rights and dignity of women and to educate the public in a manner that could lead
towards a “gender-equal society” (danj by d shakai). Personal email communication with
a member of the 1997 AWF Survey team, Ui Miyuki, February 2008.
4 In a foreword to the 1997 AWF Survey, Fukutomi et al. comment: “What we can say
about those surveys is that it is not at all clear how the respondents understood enjo
k sai” (“Shikashinagara korera no chōsa de wa, kaitōsha ga ‘enjo kōsai’ wo dono you ni
toraeteiru no ka ni tsuite akiraka de nai”). 1997 AWF Survey (1998: 35).
5 This interview survey is available in English translation as the “Analytical Study on the
causes of and Attitudes toward ‘Enjo K sai’ Among Female High School Students In
Japan,” Asian Women’s Foundation, March 1997.
6 1997 AWF Survey (1998: 35).
7 These figures are derived from the Summary of Statistics on Immigration Control 1996
produced by the Japan Immigration Association, and presented in tables in Mike
Douglas (2000).
8 As a result of the categorization of the employees of registered f zoku eigy (sex-
service business) as “contract employees” rather than permanent staff, official labor and
employment statistics that might indicate the extent of female employment in the sex-
service industry (f zoku eigy ) and bar hostess industry (mizu sh bai) do not exist. The
five yearly National Census (Kokusei Ch sa) does, however, include a statistical category
and record of the number of employees of “bars, cabarets, and nightclubs,” a category
that includes “snack bars” and “cabarets” and other designated f zoku enterprises, and
provides a crude indication of the number scale of employees employed in a large
and well-established sector situated largely within the terrain sphere of sex-service
industries. According to the Census, the number of female employees in “bars, cabarets,
and nightclubs” (which is approximately four times higher than that of male employees)
is approximately half a million women. Employment was rose from 483,976 in 1985,
to 601,757 in 1990, before subsiding again to 590, 828 in 1995, and 531,806 in 2000
(National Census, Somuchō). Unfortunately census figures are vague about the range
of the actual employments designated in this antiquated category, which also includes
attendants in contemporary local public baths (sent ) and hot spring resorts (onsen) which
are not linked to the sex industry, and makes specific application of census figures
difficult.
9 For fascinating insider slices of the adult video (AV) world see both Inaga Shigemi
“Confession and Exposure: Nagasawa Mitsuo’s Adult Video Actresses and Japan’s Male
Intellectual Consciousness” (2000), and the critical documentary film An Yong Yumika
(2009) which investigates the world and social connections of the leading porn adult
video star Hayashi Yumika prior to her death at 35 years old in 2005.
10 No date or issue number provided.
11 As the journalist of this piece discloses, his information can’t be traced to a nameable
survey or individual, but it can be traced to a Japanese news magazine: “‘Nowadays,
older men seem to think schoolgirls are all prostitutes,’ says one unnamed middle-class
Tokyo high-school student-turned-hooker, interviewed in trend-spotting magazine
Sapio” (The Guardian, 8 July 1999).
12 This tendency to uncritically adopt the “problem” of “enjo k sai” or kogyaru as a
convenient symbolic feature of the 1990s also peppers journalistic and academic work
produced outside of Japan.
13 The full title of the Youth Ordinance, depending upon the prefecture, is the Seishōnen
Hogo Ikusei Jōrei (Ordinance for the Protection of Youth) or the Seishōnen Kenzen
Ikusei Jōrei (Ordinance for Healthy Youth).
14 Matsui Yayori, feminist and senior editor at the Asahi newspaper, states that she invented
the term kaishun during demonstrations against Japanese corporate sex tours to Korea in
around 1973 (Matsui Yayori in Buckley, 1997b: 153).
15 The 1993 Japanese translation of Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander, eds, Sex
Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry (Virago, 1988) had a considerable impact
amongst feminists and others already engaged politically with the conditions and the
legal status of prostitution in Japan.
16 See more about Hirano Yūji’s activism at http://www26.atwiki.jp/childrights.
17 In 1960, the police had introduced a Shōnen Keisatsu Katsudō Yōkō (Youth Policing
Policy), revised in 1996, which promoted rigorous preventative guidance of “pre-
criminal” (guhan sh nen) individuals.
3
COMPENSATED DATING AS A
SALARYMAN SUBCULTURE
Though compensated dating was hastily interpreted as a form of schoolgirl effron-

tery, in terms of cultural production it would have been more accurately described
as a risqué subculture for company and government employees led by male intel-
lectuals and fashionable cultural figures. For these people it was a distinctively male
subculture that delighted in playacting at the boundaries of teenage prostitution,
vicarious loitering around incestuous sentiments, and male privilege. Its principal
pleasures, that is, were indirectly political, based to some extent on the liberat-
ing bravado of covertly ridiculing feminism and contemporary Euro-American
political values.1 A national population of approximately 4.5 million middle- and
high-school girls2 managed to publish between them nothing but one amusing cof-
fee-table comic book—editorially directed and heavily padded with photographs
of the author. This was a comic-strip parody of kogyaru types and classroom life
titled Joshi k sei Goriko (High-School Girl Gorilla-Babe).3
Wishful ground reports on the arrival of girl prostitution in members-only
internet meeting rooms (kaigishitsu) engaging in chat about girls, and in weekly
magazines—or what is sometimes colloquially referred to as the “male press”4—
appeared several years before the topic began to circulate through the most
universal face of the mass media in television and broadsheets, and later in more
specialist media genres in film, comics, and novels. Teenage girls had no detecta-
ble access to the mass transmission of images of themselves, and their engagement
with the creation of these images was limited to posing for cameras in an impro-
vised outdoor theater otherwise known as street fashion.5 This gross imbalance of
power between schoolgirls and intellectual and cultural professionals constituted
the invisible social relations of deviant girl subculture.6 In the same manner in
which Dick Hebdige has queried the power relations propelling British subcul-
tures, in order to understand the dynamics of deviant schoolgirl culture, “We
must ask which groups and classes have how much say in defining, ordering and
40 Compensated dating as a salaryman subculture
classifying out the social world … it should be obvious that access to the means
by which ideas are disseminated in society (i.e. principally the mass-media) is not
the same for all classes” (Hebdige, 1979: 14). Except in the most managed and
schematic sense of involvement, such as appearing as the faces in readers’ photo-
graphs, girls were excluded from the process of making images of girls. In fact,
the way in which girls appeared in the media could be described as a “regime
of representation” (Hall, 1997: 259) that corresponded to their economic and
physical dependency.
Vicarious dating
An article printed in the men’s weekly Sh kan Post in 1989 titillated readers with the
headline, “Suddenly a 14-Year-Old Middle School Girl Said, ‘Will You Gimme
Some Pocket Money, Mister?’” (Sh kan Post, 4 August 1989). In this investigative
story, readers are invited to vicariously experience going to a Kabukicho telephone
club to find a teenage date
It was a full house at 3.45 pm—students, salarymen and everyone else all sitting
at phones competing to see who would pick up the phone fastest. I picked
this one up: a tiny little voice said “Hello” and that she was 16 years old, and
that she was a high-school girl. She was calling from a public phone box, and
asked if I would give her some money to play with her friends. After arranging
a date this reporter strained his eyes to spot her at the arranged meeting point
at Hachiko square … [But] whichever angle I looked at her from she looked
more like a middle school student than a high school student.
(Sh kan Post, 4 August 1989: 217)
Her greeting is cited in the text: “I came a bit early. Hey, are you going to give me
some pocket money then?” And then our narrator’s inner thoughts again
Money again! I anxiously asked myself what would happen right after I said
“Yes, here you are.” If anyone were to say at this point that this reporter was
beginning to feel a little bit uncomfortable I could not honestly deny it.
[Later] in the café she tells me the truth is that she is fourteen and a virgin, and
she nicks cigarettes out of my pack and drops them into her bag.
The text continues with our odd couple’s dialogue:
“Hey my friend told me that when you go to a hotel together you get twenty
thousand yen, so, err, did you just come to sit in a café with me today or
what?” She was smiling like a little devil. Things were obviously negotiable.
Whatever else was going on I was the one being made a fool of by this point.
Compensated dating as a salaryman subculture 41
My throat was dry and my heart was racing. I called the waitress, “Excuse me,
can I have some water?”
This liaison ends neatly with the information that our journalist gave her 1,000 yen,
by which the girl is disappointed, but decides to forgive him because she declares
he’s a “nice old man.” As the editors advertised in bold print, “If we wrote any
more than this we would get arrested!” (Sh kan Post, 4 August 1989: 217), though
advice could nevertheless be offered to readers about instigating an adventure of
their own:
The best time to pick up calls are rainy days and late at night, about eleven.
You get quite a lot of likely ones. As you might imagine, you should chat
about things in a lighthearted, cheery sort of way. The going rate is between
twenty and forty thousand yen, and a present, like some sort of accessory, will
probably go down well too. To go back to a hotel with her will cost about
thirty to fifty thousand yen, but housewives are satisfied with a bit less. If they
ask for “pocket money” it seems as if any amount is fine. It might just be that
for readers seeking excitement, telephone clubs are a golden opportunity to
play, but, if, like the journalist in this magazine, you wind up meeting a mid-
dle school girl, self-restraint and self-admonishment are going to be essential.
During the mid-1990s, several websites served as portals for excited discussion about
telephone-club adventures. Café Gentlemen chat room, founded on niftyserve by a
young pharmaceuticals firm employee in 1995, and Zenkoku Terekura Tsushin Patio
(United Telephone Club Exchange Patio), founded in 1994, were the main ven-
ues for sharing thoughts about compensated dating and deviant schoolgirls, though
chatting slowed following the arrest, in October 1997, of a Fujitsu employee caught
introducing schoolgirls to a fellow member. One frequenter of these sites pointed
out that the men who met in the internet clubs used nicknames to talk to one
another and were able to talk openly about subjects they could not raise with their
colleagues at work. The previously cited interviewee, who was in his low for-
ties, suggested that employees of technology and computer firms were especially
frequent users, and that many of these men seemed to be lonely and at loose ends.
A direct point of comparison can be made between these girl enthusiasts and the
sort of men identified 70 years earlier as the mostly “ogling” punters of the dis-
reputable taxi-dance halls of prewar America, which served “unprepossessing men,
living a lonely life in the furnished rooms section of the city” (Cressey, 1932: 121).
Crude expressions of the revitalized interest in girls in school uniform were also
evident in an expanding number of porn novellas, including: School Uniform Slave
Rape (Seifuku Dorei Rape, 1995); A Lover In Uniform (Seifuku no Aijin, 1996); Taste
of a Uniform (Seifuku no Aji, 1995); Uniformed Eve (Seifuku no Eve, 1996); Uniform
Secret (Seifuku no Himitsu, 1995); Uniform Lust (Seifuku no Yokub , 1995); Madam in
School Uniform’s Shameful Secret (Seifuku Reijo Hajirai no Himitsu, 1996); and Uniform
Rape College (Seifuku Rape Gakuen, 1995). According to the estimates of adult video
industry insiders, “about 30 percent” of porn movies produced in 1996 were about
high-school girls, this proportion doubling to “about 60 percent” in 1997 (Obi
and Kakino interview, 6 January 1998), before falling off in favor of the less legally
problematic category of “young wives” (hitotsuma, wakatsuma) in 1998.
In his study of taxi-dance halls and their “peppy” teenage dance instructresses
who occasionally dabbled in “clandestine prostitution,” Paul Cressey (1932: 266)
also identified another type of customer drawn to this environment: the “slum-
mer,” a man of older years and considerable social status who took to visiting
taxi-dance halls out of “idle curiosity or a desire for social helpfulness,” in addition
to which, under “the cloak of anonymity in the taxi-dance hall they may seek to
experience something of the thrill and fascination of unconventional life in the
city” (Cressey, 1932: 124). A similar attitude of “knowing connoisseurship” was
tangible among the culturally sophisticated professional men drawn to the seedy
world of telephone clubs, lonely single men, and garish, promiscuous teenagers.7
Novelist Murakami Ryū stated that among the men he met while carrying out
background research for his film script on compensated dating, Love & Pop, most
claimed to be happy and contented men with families. These men told Murakami
that they did compensated dating “because it was cool” (Murakami, 1998: 292).
On Christmas day in 1997, I sat in a conference room in the offices of the pub-
lishing company Shōgakukan, with four high-school girls who had been brought
there to wait for a departmental editor-in-chief to come back to the building later
that evening. These girls were all research contacts of a freelance journalist who
made her living from writing about deviant girls, and if things went according to
plan they were going to have dinner and sing karaoke with the editor-in-chief,
who had suggested to his staff that he “liked schoolgirls.” They were a fashionable
surprise Christmas gift. Reports of schoolgirls being presented as gifts became rela-
tively common during 1996 and 1997. The employment of schoolgirls as amateur
companions was a brief and grittily risqué adjunct to the institutionalized use of
hostess clubs with attentive hostesses as settings for corporate entertainment and
courting clients (Allison, 1994).
Discourse in men’s magazines

While some men tested compensated dating in person, considerably more experi-
enced this dalliance in its legal, literary form. The great majority of the flamboyant
debate about schoolgirl prostitutes was centered in the weekly magazines written
by and for older male readers, from a typically prurient but unsympathetic per-
spective. From news about teenage fashion, such as “Pursuing the Trend of the
Ganguro—High School Girls from Distant High Schools” (Gekkan Gendai, March
2000: 321), to articles berating female selfishness that were essentially continuous
with earlier denunciations of single working women, such as “The Compensated
Dating Generation Arrived in Our Company! Selfish, Rich … etc.” (Spa!, 21 May
1997: 36), to the voicing of silly fantasies about making women pay, such as
“Reverse Compensated Dating Has Started among OLs in Their Thirties” (Sapio,
9 May 1997), men’s magazines prospered by layering more and more meanings
onto this laden subject. The portly, patriarchal monthly journal Ronza weighed in
with a special issue dedicated to sending a message “To Our Daughters Who Do
Compensated Dating” (Ronza, April 1998). A list of illustrious older critics, includ-
ing a sample of the small coterie of veteran female writers, filled 50 pages directed
at a middle-aged male readership, with an imaginary putting right and scolding
of “daughters.” The burgeoning literature of compensated dating conformed to
Foucault’s critique that modern sexuality is a mainly discursive pleasure: “Not only
will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your
desire, your every desire, into discourse” (Foucault, 1978: 21).
Broadsheets and magazines took a particularly critical interest in uncovering the
“elite” and establishment status of the perpetrators, in articles such as “Elite Company
Employee Charged with Compensated Dating” (Sunday Mainichi, 8 February
1998) and “Section Chief That Gave a High School Girl to His Supervisor on His
Birthday” (Sh kan Asahi, 24 October 1997). Investigative reportage in AERA maga-
zine described exclusive hotel lounge parties for wealthy businessmen, to which
flocks of schoolgirls had been introduced to mingle with the guests, and perhaps to
retire with them to nearby private rooms (Hayami, 1996a: 65). Following the pass-
ing of the Child Solicitation and Child Pornography Prevention Act in May 1999,
broadsheets gloried in reporting certified human-rights infringements by establish-
ment figures such as Satō Toshiyuki, the Foreign Ministry senior official arrested for
paying junior high-school girls to watch him perform indecent acts. Teachers, police
officers, SDF personnel, priests, and civil servants were the frequently named targets
of broadsheet scorn for corrupt authorities.
Talk about girls tended to dwell on the personal experiences of male readers
and writers. Gritty accounts of adventures involving telephone clubs and schoolgirls
recounted by fellow men were a staple item: for example, “The Middle School Girls
I Met at a ‘Dating Club’” (Sh kan Bunshun, 23 May 1996: 155) and “The Diary of
Idiotic Men Doing Compensated Dates” (Shinch , February 1998: 212). A com-
mon angle was the sometimes jokey demand for more citizen-like behavior on the
part of irresponsible men: “The Underlying Sickness of Infantilized Men and the
Children for Whom Calling Prostitution ‘Compensated Dating’ Is Common Sense”
(Economist, 7 January 1997: 90) and “The Role and Responsibility of the Fathers
of Ultra-Dangerous Daughters” (President, July 1997: 264). “Fathers” were a com-
mon target of articles, being the ghost audience in the writer’s mind. “It would not
be surprising if some of the daughters of Dads reading Sunday Mainichi were doing
compensated dating,” wrote Murakami in Sunday Mainichi itself (24 November
1996: 51). In the late 1990s to early 2000s in particular, journalists used “daughter”
(musume) and “father” (ot yaji) with increasing frequency, in many cases using these
words as alternate terms for men and young women. They were terms that invoked
a vicarious paternal ownership by “fathers” of wayward “daughters,” bringing male
readers into a closer relationship with the topic of deviance.
The theme of girls and compensated dating raged in cultural and literary
criticism, where it served, in many cases, as a topical talking point, through
which the interesting personalities of the male writers could be drawn out and
showcased. “Nakamori Akio’s Culture Newspaper,” a regular section in Spa!
magazine hosted by the ex-outsider otaku critic Nakamori (see Kinsella, 1998:
311), featured a debate between the compensated dating journalist Fujii Yoshiki
and novelist Murakami Ryū, under the title “High School Girls are a ‘Love
and Pop’ Big Problem” (Murakami and Fujii, 1996: 150–152). In January 1997
Murakami Ryū was paired up again, this time with journalist Kuronuma Katsushi
in Bungakkai, to discuss “High School Girls and the Danger of Literature”
(Murakami and Kuronuma, 1997). The names and photo-portraits of these men
feature as the banners and illustrations on the page. Both in droll conversa-
tions on the couch with the literati, such as Murakami Ryū versus Miyadai
Shinji on “High School Girls Doing Compensated Dates” in Sunday Mainichi
(24 November 1996: 50),8 and in laddish journalism, such as “The Problem of
Pretty Revolutionary Girls Experienced with Flirting, Bloomer Sailor Shops,
and Telephone Clubs, Told with Naked Confessional Genius: Kamida Uno’s
Declaration for the Conquest of Japan by Uniforms” (Spa!, 19 October 1994:
124), it was not girls precisely but the wit of their media interlocutors while
opining about them that was the center of attention.
“Lifestyle information” magazines

In the 1990s, a compelling interaction evolved among porn publishers and edi-
tors, fashion magazines for high-school girls, and men’s weekly current affairs
magazines. This interaction says much about our topic of enquiry—the subjec-
tive center of schoolgirl subculture—and also demonstrates something about how
content moves between the sliding doors that separate different sections of the
news and entertainment industry targeted at, and largely read by and relating to,
different sections of society. The exchange among these different types of maga-
zines can be traced back to the 1980s, but began to bear the weight of providing
evidence for burgeoning national news stories about promiscuous schoolgirls
from 1992. Several of the major porn publishers—notably Eichi Shuppan, San
Shuppan, Tokyo Sanseisha, Million Shuppan, Asuka Shinsha, Tatsumi Shuppan,
and Biyokuya Shobo, which together manage the production of school uniform,
bondage, and Lolita-complex masturbation material for men—launched versions
of a new kind of magazine for raunchy teenage girls in the early to mid-1980s.
By the early 1990s Elleteen, Pastelteen, and Popteen, still produced in the editorial
offices of major porn publishers, became a significant point of origin for salacious
reports about schoolgirl promiscuity, which were exported rapidly cross-industry
into men’s weekly magazines. This arrangement supported observations made by
Miyadai Shinji of television news reports on the “social problem” of girl prostitu-
tion, which functioned as a category device to allow pornographic material about
teenage girls to be rechanneled and broadcast to a mass audience.9 Around the
same time, in the early to mid-1990s, oddly fishy “lifestyle information” (seikatsu
j h ) magazines for high-school girls found a larger and more respectable schoolgirl
readership, some of whom were enjoying their first exhilarating taste of “slumming
it.” I have more to say about the unkempt and disheveled “lumpen” (runpenpppoi)
elements of schoolgirl style in Chapter 7.
Asuka Shuppan launched Popteen in 1980, shortly followed by Elleteen by Fujimi
Shuppan. Though officially published by the general publisher Kadokawa from
1992, and claiming its first female chief editor from the late 1990s, Popteen con-
tinued to be produced in the offices of this predominantly porn publisher. The first
issues of Popteen contained a mixture of girls’ comics—some with sexy titles such
as “After School Scandal”—serialized stories, and photos of half-dressed “hunky”
boys. In the second issue of Popteen, in an article titled “I Want to Change the
Way Girls Think About Their Lives” (Popteen, January 1981), editors argue that
virginity is not really about morality but about a girl’s self-confidence. Another
article tells its readers how to become a groupie and have sex with stars and musi-
cians (Popteen, January 1981: 11). Until the early 1990s Popteen featured a crude
and lusty bonhomie reminiscent of the tone of men’s porn magazines; photographs
of lumpen teenage couples squatting or embracing; and readers’ letters about sex-
ual escapades. The thick section of advertisements for sex services and telephone
clubs, carried in its back pages, suggested that this was a friendly support magazine
targeted at dropout schoolgirls and young women working in or toward the sex
industry. Through the course of the media saturation with promiscuous schoolgirls
and the kogyaru style, Popteen made an intriguing transformation from a niche pub-
lication to the hippest and most widely read girls’ fashion magazine in the country,
featuring, by the early 2000s, icons such as Ayumi Hamasaki as cover models and
a ghettofabulist title on its cover. See Popteen in Figure 3.1.
In December 1993, shortly after the scandal of schoolgirls selling their uni-
forms to uniform fetish dealers had broken in the news,10 a Popteen headline
provocatively complained: “Don’t Call Me a Bloomer-Sailor High School Girl!”
(Popteen, December 1993: 57). This five-page article, accompanied by a pho-
tograph of a schoolgirl running away from the camera, is told in the mode of
a confession by several schoolgirls, who tell the readers about how they earn
money through date clubs, telephone clubs, and selling parts of their uniform.
The article lists the prices schoolgirls can expect to receive for items of their
school wear (sailor uniform = 20,000 yen, pants = 1,000 yen) and the location of
bloomer sailor shops. The putative schoolgirl confessor explains, in her dumbed-
down teenager argot, how it is not that complicated, sleazy, or intimidating to
go to a date club. She advises readers that the staff running the date clubs just
look like ordinary university students, and that though some customers they
meet on dates might get a bit pushy and insist on having sex, this is not really a
big deal, just something that a clued-in girl would reasonably expect to happen
now and again in this line of work (Popteen, December 1993: 59). This article
is prefaced by a disclaimer, which carefully discloses that no written evidence of
these schoolgirl confessions exists:
FIGURE 3.1 Popteen cover, November 2002 issue. The lead article is on “Ayumi
Hamasaki: a woman second to no man” (“Ayumi Hamasaki: otoko mae
no onna”)
Source: used with kind permission of the Popteen chief editor.
Popteen is a magazine read by teenage girls. Everyday the editorial receives tens of
letters about the bad things, the risky things, and the good experiences teenagers
have had, but we have never received even one letter saying “I’ve sold my knick-
ers.” Even though it is obvious that the numbers of real bloomer sailor schoolgirls
is low, we still thought that was a bit strange. No doubt it is very difficult for
bloomer sailor schoolgirls to speak openly … We struggled to make contact with
those schoolgirls who are doing it for real and here is what they reported.
(Popteen, 1993: 58)
A few pages further on, the editorial board of Popteen states in large type how this
confessional report from schoolgirls had made them sad, and therefore how angry
they were when they recently received a telephone call from the director of a tel-
evision show asking Popteen editors to introduce him to these schoolgirls (Popteen,
1993: 61). In the guise of this unconvincing condemnation, the editors thus impart
to their readers the more relevant information that girls who are prepared to talk
about their sexual experiences in letters sent to Popteen editorial stand a fighting
chance of getting on a television show. The gritty, pseudo-documentary style of
this type of feature bears obvious similarities to articles about schoolgirls appearing
in men’s magazines. A senior member of the Publishing Industry Research Center
(Shuppan Kagaku Kenyūjō), who has been analyzing the content and distribution
of girls’ magazines since 1972, confided that in his opinion the editors of Popteen,
Elleteen, and Pastelteen had made up most or all of their readers’ letters and confes-
sions themselves:
What was published in the girls’ magazines was already outrageous stuff … and
when it was reported in the weekly magazines, things really took off. Maybe
there were some schoolgirls sending letters in, in the beginning, but then the
editors learned how to copy them, they started writing most of it themselves
… Readers couldn’t tell what was real and when it had gone beyond that—
the editing was too good.
(Sasaki Mitsuaki interview, December 2002)
In 1992, Popteen’s official monthly circulation rose to 500,000, while Elleteen’s rose
to 200,000, before falling off in the following years (Shuppan Nenp , 1994: 172).
This boom in the circulation figures of H-kei (“sexually oriented”) girls’ lifestyle
magazines in 1992 to 1993 reflects the increasing interest of teenage girls them-
selves in these stories. As the market for sexual girls’ lifestyle magazines opened,
other porn publishers launched competing magazines, also replete with confes-
sional stories and advertisements for telephone clubs in their back pages. Million
Shuppan launched Egg (April 1997); Eichi Shuppan launched Happie (September
1997); Toen Shobō launched Heart Candy (May 1997); and Bauhouse launched
Street Jam (October 1997). Bauhouse is a satellite of Eichi Shuppan, whose Lolita-
complex porn magazine Beppin School and high-schooler fetish magazine Porno
World were produced in offices adjoining the editorial offices of Street Jam and
Happie. Eichi Shuppan is itself a satellite of the adult video company Uchū Kikaku,
and this company and its kogaisha offshoots were frequently in trouble with gov-
ernment censors—Bejean was blacklisted by the Tokyo Government in November
1997, and at one point in 1990 even attracted the scrutiny of the FBI (Hashimoto
interview, Street Jam editor, 30 November 1997). Porn magazines and videos scat-
tered about the editorial office of Heart Candy in summer 199811 hinted at the
peculiar overlap between the editorial culture of specialist porn magazines and
their new teenage progenies. Gossip about the temporary break in publication of
Egg magazine in March 2000 claimed that the exhausted editors had “exceeded
their physical limits,” while “super high school cover girls” had been “harmed”
and others had reappeared in adult videos. Steering this comical disarray, female
editors were accused of being recruited from “cabaret clubs” (kyabakura; Sh kan
Bunshun, 8 October 2000: 170). In addition to Egg, Million Shuppan launched a
topical new porn magazine about kogyaru for men, titled Super Loose: The Kogyaru
Specialist Magazine (Kogyaru Senmon Zasshi).
The sensitivity of men’s magazines to news from the erotic underground (ero
anguro) is reflected in the frequency of investigative reports on red-light districts
and in regular columns, such as the “Sex Underground Frontline Report” (F zoku
Saisentan Rupo), a double-page column in Sh kan H seki. From the mid-1990s
a regular column printed in Sh kan Bunshun magazine, “Excerpts From The
Dames Press” (Shukujo no zasshi kara), dedicated to catching news of trends among
women, began to turn its attention to more titillating sound-bites garnered from
the confessional readers’ letters printed in Popteen, Elleteen, Pastelteen, and later even
from the more respectable Cawaii!.12 Published as good coin, readers’ letters taken
from these porn magazines, often including the purported age or school year of
their authoresses, stimulated a flurry of interest among weekly magazines.
Building on the interest provoked by its reprinted letters, and the recent breaking
of “compensated dating” into the news media sector,13 Sh kan Bunshun magazine ran
a six-part series titled “The Horrifying Performance of School Girls” (Joshi ch k sei
no susamajii sein ) from May to June 1996. The journalist of this investigative drama,
Kuronuma Katsushi, became a key author and specialist on the subject of schoolgirl
deviancy over the following years. While Kuronuma’s headline series assumed the
position of respectable and concerned opposition to schoolgirl prostitution, letters
printed elsewhere in the same magazine illustrated the editorial schizophrenia that
was characteristic of men’s magazines on this subject. On 2 May 1996, headline
stories in Sh kan Bunshun included an episode from Kuronuma’s series titled: “The
Lust of Girls Swilling around the Voicemail Introduction Services” (Sh kan Bunshun,
2 May 1996), while a letter by a “middle school student” reprinted from Pastelteen
and paraphrased as “Sizzling Sex underneath the Cherry Blossoms” (Sh kan Bunshun,
2 May 1996) appeared in the same issue. On 16 May the banner read “Prostitution
Called ‘Compensated Dating’” (Sh kan Bunshun, 16 May 1996), while elsewhere
in the same issue a reader’s letter by a teenage girl, titled “Groping Tales” (Sh kan
Bunshun, 16 May 1996), talked about pleasurable experiences of being groped
on trains. On 30 May the banner ran “The Reason Why Little Yumi Will ‘Sell’
Herself” (Sh kan Bunshun, 30 May 1996), while a letter reprinted from Elleteen, “Last
Year’s Four-Person Shocker” (Sh kan Bunshun, 30 May 1996), broadcast the tangi-
bly improbable confessions of a 16-year-old girl about a class orgy conducted on the
way home from Disneyland. Confessions and personal accounts voiced by a teeming
anonymous pool of saucy girls formed the primary source of credibility underpinning
frontline investigative stories.
Editor-contributors of the minor media watchdog journal Tsukuru criticized the
moral contortions of men’s magazines:
After they have profited from published articles saying “It’s incredible what
these girls will do!” they’ll print an editorial apology in the next issue stating that
they regret the possibly exaggerated terms of their article on schoolgirls and that
henceforth the magazine will be refraining itself from any further involvement.
This cycle of exaggeration and regret has become a distinct pattern.
(Tsukuru, January 1995, introduction)
What is more, Tsukuru editors opined that these magazine articles had an advertis-
ing effect, and stimulated a market for sex services staffed by schoolgirls: “Magazines
started publishing articles saying ‘Look at what the high school girls are doing these
days!’ and it was precisely because they did that, that it did indeed become a new
variety of part time work for school kids” (Tsukuru, January 1995, introduction). For
Tsukuru editorial writers it was “clear,” as it had been for Stanley Cohen observing
English news about delinquent youth four decades earlier, “that people who denounce
deviance may at the same time have a vested interest in seeing deviance perpetuated
at least temporarily, until the phenomenon loses its ‘sales value’” (Cohen, 1972: 141).
From the mid-1990s, editorial proscriptions of oversexed schoolgirls wander-
ing out of school greedily claimed the emerging kogyaru street culture as further
evidence substantiating these stories. Though never easily aligned in other news
sources, in weekly current affairs magazines kogyaru style was celebrated as the
visible sign of schoolgirl availability for compensated dating. Rather than trailing
in the distant wake of girlish tastes, kogyaru style was hotly pursued by weekly
magazine editors and writers as though it were a compartment of their own
cultural activity, and as a topic complementing reportage on sexual deviancy.
Photo-shoots of emergent personalities and singers linked to kogyaru fashion
appeared simultaneously with reportage on compensated dating—and both of
these appeared at the same time as, or prior to, their appearance in the new kog-
yaru fashion magazines. The earliest of the new kogyaru magazines was Cawaii!,
launched in March 1996. Sh kan Bunshun, however, was carrying a photo-special
on Naomi Campbell, a black British model linked to kogyaru tastes more than a
year earlier, on 15 December 1994. A similar photo-special on Amuro Namie—
later to be dubbed the kogyaru idol and considered to be an early pioneer of
kogyaru style, leading the way in tanning, dieting, platform boots, and eyebrow
plucking—was carried in the 29 June 1995 issue of Sh kan Bunshun magazine.
Sexy photo-specials, featuring young models and tarento and placed at the front
of weekly magazines, was a standard device. It was a device that was in fact
held to scrutiny in 1994, when the Osaka branch of the international NGO End
Child Prostitution and Pornography in Asian Tourism (ECPAT) launched a cam-
paign against what it defined as “child porn” published in the weekly magazines
(sh kanshi), especially Sh kan Gendai and Sh kan Post.
Dime magazine, for trend-conscious older male readers, also featured articles on
high-school-girl fashion and trends, which were similar in content to articles placed
in magazines targeted at schoolgirls. On 1 January 1998, for example, Dime featured a
six-page report on the latest trends in print club (purikura) sticker designs, nail art, fake
tattoos, and currently fashionable shoulder bags. The kogyaru models used to display
these items were Takahashi Mai and Konishi Mika, two high-school girls currently
popular as amateur models in girls’ kogyaru magazines. Men’s magazines were involved
not only in close scrutiny of but also in the selection and defining of kogyaru culture.
The readership and impact of men’s weekly magazines were considerable. From
the beginning of 1995 to the middle of 1997, Sh kan Bunshun sold an average
of 654,000 copies per week; Sh kan Post sold an average of 855,000 copies; and
Sh kan Gendai sold another 728,000 copies. Combined with another six or seven
weekly titles that sought (rather wishfully) to distribute about one million copies
a week before returns of unsold stock (henpin), this sector had a combined pri-
mary weekly readership, excluding magazine sharing, of approximately five million
(Shuppan Shihy Nenp , 1998: 364).
After 1996, however, sales revenues and circulation figures of magazines and
comics in general began to unravel quickly. For the first time in the postwar
period, publishing industry expansion had leveled off. The sales of men’s weekly
magazines in particular slowed down sharply in 1992, and reversed in 1994 and
1996 (Shuppan Shihy Nenp , 2002: 2–3). Editorial anxiety about the future of
publishing during this precipitous period was one of the contexts in which the
tremendous swell in the number of articles about deviant girls appeared in the
mid-1990s. Pressure to curb falling sales and the fear of falling behind in the neck-
and-neck competition with similar titles may have catalyzed editors to cross the
boundaries of journalistic integrity in search of gripping “current affairs.” The
marked temporary rise in the circulation figures of all three of the highest circula-
tion men’s weeklies (Gendai, Post, and Bunshun) between 1992 and 1996 was most
probably linked to the continuous flow of “investigative reports” about sexually
available schoolgirls in the pages of these magazines in the same period. See a
graphic display of the tight competition between the leading weeklies at the water-
shed moment of the publishing industry in Figure 3.2.
Writers chase the girls

When journalists paid girls to talk to them, preferably about sex, the distinctions
between media research (sh zai), social documentary, and child solicitation (jid kai-
shun) became blurred. Narrated and subtitled interactions among probing experts,
fascinated audiences, and taciturn girls exemplified the primacy of interpretation,
Shukan Bunshun
1,000,000 Shukan Post
Total average weekly circulation
900,000 Shukan Gendal

800,000 Shukan Shincho
700,000
600,000
500,000
400,000
300,000
200,000
100,000
0
1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008
Year
FIGURE 3.2 The race for sales between weeklies: Gendai, Shincho, Post, and Bunshun
Source: Shuppan Shihy Nenp (from “ABC Zasshi busu hakkōsha repo-to” tables printed toward the
end of each year’s volume).
of journalization, to the constitution of compensated dating. In the light of serial-

ized high-circulation diaries, furtive couplings between actual unnamed men and
girls were alluded to in some reportage as merely a secondary and rather pathetic
mimicry of the glitzy media stories: “Men started approaching schoolgirls on the
streets and trying to chat them up, with the notion ‘these are those high school
girls they’re all talking about these days,’ in their heads” (Tsukuru, January 1995,
editorial foreword).
In an episode of the educational series Directions of Learning (Ky shitsu no
Yukue: tsuka Eiji no Hy ron), aired by NHK on 4 October 1997 at 8 pm, the
host—cultural creator, critic, and popular anthropologist Ōtsuka Eiji—invited
the general public to join him and the journalist Kuronuma Katsushi on a research
(sh zai) trip to meet delinquent schoolgirls. After a synopsis of the sociological
topic in the studio, Kuronuma is shown talking to two overawed schoolgirls
on a park bench in Kobe. Kuronuma asks them about their sense of morality,
to which they give shy and uncertain responses. The camera zooms in closer,
and in an apposite illustration of the circular relationship between writers and
their subjects, Kuronuma shows the girls copies of some of the articles he has
written about schoolgirls doing compensated dating, apparently in an attempt
to provoke a response from them. Viewers at home or in the office are able to
savor the uncouth confessions squeezed out of these two girls, and to experience
vicariously the intervention of an officially chaste writer nevertheless cornering
schoolgirls to talk to him about sex.
The techniques of dating and finding journalistic case studies overlapped.
Journalists and editors “flattered,” “flirted” (nampa), and tried to “catch” (tsukamaeru)
girls on the street. Some girls they met regularly, and other girls were introduced:
“At times I can get in touch with girls through other friends, and other times I go
out onto the streets in Shibuya or Ikebukuro to find them” (Uchida interview,
23 December 1998). Attractive younger journalists, men and some women, exer-
cised an element of emotional duplicity to soften up the girls:
To develop relationships with high-school girls, you have to be patient. The girls
would rather go shopping with their friends than meet me, they often let me
down and don’t show up for appointments. When they do, the rule is “Never
get angry.” Normal journalists would not be able to meet schoolgirls very easily
or naturally; magazines need people like me that can act as intermediaries, people
who can calmly listen to the girls and develop a friendship with them.
(Matsuoka interview, 23 December 1997)
This hip-looking journalist estimated that he had earned between five and six mil-
lion yen writing commissions on schoolgirl trends for men’s magazines between
summer 1996 and summer 1997. But the girls also had to be paid: “Typically girls
get paid about three thousand yen to meet a journalist like myself for a couple of
hours, though recently I’ve become well-trusted, so I don’t have to pay every time
anymore” (Matsuoka interview, 23 December 1997).
Writers tended to try to keep good relationships with lists of schoolgirl informants
so that they could select and call on the appropriate girl to talk on a commissioned
topic in time for their deadlines. They tended to introduce their teenage contacts
to other writers, foreign researchers, film directors, and novelists as a professional
favor, so that the same girls were in effect rather well recycled. The cultivation of
girl informants meant that not only did a small coterie of journalists and freelance
contributors begin to specialize in the new market for articles about schoolgirls,
but a gaggle of “about fifty” girls, located in the Tokyo area, effectively became
“professional high school girls” (pro joshik sei; Matsuoka interview, 23 December
1997) who were able to earn relatively lucrative cash payments for meeting writ-
ers and producers. Though one “free writer” contributing articles on kogyaru both
for girls and about girls for a range of magazines surmised that by 1997 “almost all
girls have talked to an interviewer or journalist at some point” (Uchida interview,
23 December 1997), this journalist had to pay girls if she wanted them to show up
to an appointment with her:
Pro high-school girls don’t need to do compensated dating, they get enough
money working for the magazines! They probably don’t get more than fifty to
sixty thousand yen a month, but they get fame and recognition too, which is
also valuable.
(Uchida interview, 8 November 1997)
Professional schoolgirls14 had several other avenues for earning money by meet-
ing media professionals. Of four schoolgirls I talked to while they were waiting to
have a group dinner-date with a senior editor on Christmas Eve in 1997, one had
worked regularly over the previous two years for several girls’ lifestyle information
magazines and for a boys’ comic, Young Sunday, and had earned about 3,000 yen a
visit for her input. Another girl had met camera crews from News Station on the
streets and had been interviewed about her relationships with men by a female uni-
versity professor. A third girl had also appeared on the Fuji television show Waratte
ii to mo (It’s Good to Laugh!) in school uniform, after being “recruited by an old
man” who paid her 2,000 yen. All four girls had been to girls’ magazine editorial
offices in an attempt to have their photographs taken and published, and several
complained that they had gone in to editorial offices and done work for money,
but never received it from the editors in the end.
Girls received financial inducements from journalists keen to get them to talk,
and transcribed encounters with schoolgirls tended to collapse soliciting and ethnog-
raphy into a single process. In a report on “Patrolling the streets with high school
girls” (dacapo, 1997: 84–87), a chatty journalist from the older men’s magazine dacapo
advises his readers that they are going to investigate whether “the information about
high school girl behavior disseminated in the mass media” is true, by spending a
day in Shibuya with an “active, cutting-edge 15 year old schoolgirl.” First of all the
journalist notes that the girl seems to be a little dispirited (blue iru) about walking
around Shibuya with an old bloke, but that “for her it is work,” because the reward
for her cooperation will be a visit to 109 department store to buy her a dress from
aruba (Alba Rosa; dacapo, 1997: 84–85). Though clear that “this one” is not involved
with the unspeakable world of compensated dating, the journalist nevertheless notes
the discomfort of his girl guide on being seen in his company by her friends, who, it
is implied, might take him for a male customer. Despite the tone of moral propriety,
what the journalist describes nevertheless has the undertone of an anodized compen-
sated date between a grandfather and a young girl.
Assessing the making of his investigative series for the weekly Sh kan Bunshun
in his follow-up book Enjo K sai (1996), Kuronuma Katsushi explained how he
carried out his research by intercepting calls from schoolgirls calling in to voicemail
services (dengon dial)—a variant of telephone club (terekura) in which customers
access voicemail from home. In order to observe girls’ behavior “as no one else
sees it,” Kuronuma posed as a customer and as far as possible avoided telling the
girls he met that he was a journalist (Kuronuma, 1996b: 11–12). After he had fin-
ished the series and was about to have the mobile phone he had used for finding
girls switched off, Kuronuma recalls how a girl whose voice he did not recognize
phoned and asked if he would like to talk to her, because she had heard from a
friend that he would pay a fee just for doing an interview. Kuronuma confesses to
readers his disturbing insight that, from the perspective of schoolgirls, solicitation
and research were not easily distinguished: “If I had my mobile phone switched
back on I’d encounter school girls who treat this research as a form of compensated
dating again” (Kuronuma, 1996b: 211).
In another account of the same type of gray area, novelist Murakami Ryū tells
readers how, when he carried out some research on the behavior of schoolgirls as
preparation for his novel Love & Pop, he tested the motives and behavior of the girls
he met by deliberately offering them up to 30,000 yen to spend. Murakami professes
that he was disappointed to discover that the girls he met were “not so sophisticated
at all” and seemed at a loss as to how to deal with this amount of money, noting that
when “I told them quite clearly ‘I’ll give you 30,000 yen so buy what you want,’
they all went ‘What!? Really?’” (Murakami and Katsushi, 1997: 288). Comparing
notes with Kuronuma Katsushi, both men admitted to moments of becoming smit-
ten with their research subjects: “High school girls are extremely charming, my head
started spinning at times too” (Murakami and Katsushi, 1997: 293).
Nagazawa Mitsuo, f zoku (red-light) journalist and author of AV Joy (Adult
Video Actresses, 1996, see an English language review and analysis of this book in
Inaga, 1999), nevertheless lampoons the putative sexual innocence of Kuronuma’s
research methodology in a review of Kuronuma’s book Enjo K sai, and makes the
provocative claim that only a full conflation of research with sexual participation
could possibly produce authentic ethnographic insights. Nagazawa protests, “I am
certain that meeting girls in assorted cafés to have chats over coffee is meaningless.”
Unless a journalist is prepared to join the “nameless scores of men who meet girls
without showing a proper business card, and then go to an anonymous room to give
them money for sex,” there is little possibility of getting close enough to them to
write a book about their sexual psychology. In a final trounce, which reflects, at least,
the glib fluency in critical self-awareness within male literary discourse, Nagazawa
comments about Kuronuma’s book that “as an ‘I’ novel it is extremely interesting,
and I read it with sympathy for the author” (Nagazawa, 1996).
A number of years in advance of Kuronuma Katsushi, the cult sociologist
Miyadai Shinji had availed himself of telephone clubs to find self-selected devi-
ant subjects to interview. The Choice of the Girls in Uniform (1994) draws heavily
on transcriptions of terekura interviews carried out at the end of the 1980s, and
depositions in voicemail boxes (dengon dial). The boundaries of Miyadai’s engage-
ment with fieldwork as a terekura client are left undefined, but later he describes his
technique as one of “deep interviews” through which he is able to “build a special
relationship” with girls. Miyadai eschews objective distance, and claims that dur-
ing follow-up interviews in cafés he sometimes criticizes his subjects harshly, and
talks to them “in a very direct and unforgiving manner, leading them to become
depressed, introspective and even tearful by the time the interview is over.” The
result, he suggests, is that he has an impact on his subjects and sometimes gets
phone calls from his interviewees “at three in the morning,” telling him “things,
like they had just refused to get in a taxi with a man who was going to buy them”
(Miyadai, 1994: 276). Public whispers that Miyadai’s embroilment with schoolgirls
did not seem to be entirely academic probably served to authenticate his public
appeal as a sociologist with dirty hands and a connection to real life.15
Several years after the muffled scandal had surfaced and dissipated, Miyadai sug-
gested to me that it was in truth his own involvement with compensated dating,
rather than scholastic ethnography, that formed the basis of his widely broadcast
work on the topic:
I did do compensated dating with a high school girl, which became an impor-
tant touchstone. Because I was emotionally connected to her I felt a desire to
protect her, and to represent her opinions. She used to look at news reports
on schoolgirls, and read my own work and tell me where I was wrong. She
critiqued my work, which I think until that point had been more like an “I”
novel [i.e. self-referential] … which was a great help. I saw her for about four
years. Now she works in Tokyo for a computer software company, and we
still meet three or four times a year. She was quite clever and she began to
develop ideas about why girls and older men were getting into compensated
dating relationships, which she passed on to me. At that time [in the early
1990s] I felt as if high-school girls had almost as much anti-establishment
power as the zenkyoto[16] generation.
(Miyadai interview, 26 April 2003)
In this comment Miyadai Shinji makes the claim, astounding at second examina-
tion, that the legitimacy and perhaps veracity of his sociological work on schoolgirl
sexual deviancy is proven less by the rigor of his own sociological analysis and
methodology than by his personal relationship with a single authentic schoolgirl.
The scholar effectively posits himself as a kind of ghostwriter of the relevant and
experienced subject.
Pseudo-ethnography
Precise transcriptions of the utterances of schoolgirls, or young women claiming
to be high-school girls (nanchatte k k sei), became the principal mode of evidence
in both newspaper articles and popular anthropological surveys. Known only by
diminutive nicknames or numerical stand-ins: “a fifteen year old,” “Meiko and
Kei” (Shokun!, November 1996: 224), or “A*ko, T*ko, Y*mi, and H*e” (Views,
April 1996: 26), the protocol for protecting informant anonymity also protected
writers from the requirement to provide even proximately verifiable evidence of
their sources. Rather than appearing as whole individuals, girl informants in pho-
tographs and footage were most frequently sampled as parts: as pairs of sturdy calves
rooted in loose socks, or decapitated, pixilated, or cropped blotches of flesh and
uniform. Sound bites of doughty young female voices were sprinkled through
journalistic and television reports. On television shows, where girls sometimes
appeared in person, so to speak, their comments occurred as scripted parts of enter-
tainment broadcasting. During “dramatized and ritualistic interviews” (Cohen,
1972: 42), which took place on television, girls were asked to answer questions by
studio audiences, anchormen, and guest specialists. An episode of the TBS show
Japan: what a weird place! (Koko ga hen da yo, Nihon), hosted by Beat Takeshi, on
8 October 1997 at 9 pm, exemplified the favored style of exchange. The show’s
audience of foreigners fluent in Japanese were invited to direct questions to a panel
of guest kogyaru, offering volleys of such queries as “Aren’t you ashamed of doing
compensated dating?” The social and financial rewards reaped by schoolgirl guests
of television shows for well-timed personal disclosures apparently offset the public
humiliation they underwent.
Lively demand for real girls’ voices inspired increasing numbers of older female
writers to attempt to recover their own inner teenager, while female editors took
to donning Burberry scarves or tartan miniskirts that connected them to the semi-
otics of kogyaru style. One journalist in her thirties claimed to be thick with her
schoolgirl mates more than a decade after graduating:
Ever since I was at university I had a few friends still in high school, they were
more fun and interesting. So I already knew a bit about high-school girls’ lives
before the high school girl boom, then suddenly the high school girl thing
picked up, and that part of my life became my work. I wrote my first article
about kogyaru in about 1994 for Spa! magazine.
In two novels written by older novelists, Sakurai Ami narrated the imagined
experience of being 14 (Tokyo: Gentōsha 1997), while Ida Makiko recorded the
voices of similarly young women in the f zoku (red-light) underworld in Fourteen
(J yonsai, Tokyo: Kōdansha 1998). Sakurai was the pseudonym of a seasoned and
well-known investigative journalist in her forties who had migrated from investi-
gative journalism about compensated dating to fiction on the same topic, targeted
at teenage female readers. She became the best-selling author of a series of novels
about schoolgirls, written in the first person under the pseudonym Sakurai Ami.
As Sakurai admitted, readers were encouraged to assume that the novelist was the
same person as Ami—the schoolgirl narrator of Innocent World (1997)17—and that
this was therefore the autobiographical, nonfiction text of a teenage girl meander-
ing through sibling incest, gang rape, and compensated dating:
Some readers do think that Ami and I are the same person—they think that I
am in the same generation as them. I’ve never once stated how old I am, so
they are able to imagine whatever they want, so … yes, I think that some of
them believe I am the same age as them.
(Sakurai interview, 15 March 2003)
In an “Afterword” to the novel, the influential guest critic and close friend of the
author, Miyadai Shinji, chooses to go along with this sleight of hand in an accolade
to the “rarity” of Sakurai’s novel, which demonstrates that “girls have begun to
acquire language” (Miyadai in Sakurai, 1997: 219). The reference to unverifiable
case studies, largely indistinguishable from literary characters, was then reproduced
in English-language versions of the same style of material. The British broadsheet
The Guardian, for example, offered as good coin the sightings of “Mikako, a pouting
15-year-old with a two-pack-a-day nicotine habit and an even costlier addiction to
French and Italian designer labels” (“Teenage Kicks,” 30 October 1996: 4). In 1999
another article in The Guardian pins information on “one un-named middle-class
Tokyo high school student turned hooker, interviewed in trend-spotting magazine

Sapio” (“Schoolgirl to Sex Object,” 8 July 1999: 8).
Slower reading reveals that the import of comments made by girls speaking to
researchers tended to be quite mundane, incommensurate with the excitement
they aroused. The pleasure of these oral transcriptions perhaps derived less from
what was said—or, as editors were prone to intimate, had been left unsaid—than
from the aural effect of their untrained voices: slang, glottal, frank and real.18 The
height of broadcasting about schoolgirls in the later half of the 1990s coincided
with the rapid escalation of telop, a technology which allowed for the simultaneous
subtitling of speech and narration on television, so even understated comments
appeared transcribed on the screen in bright colors, sometimes pulsing, blinking
and jiggling to be seen. According to Roland Barthes, a photo-image framed by a
caption is a “rebus that fuses words and images in a single line of reading” (Barthes,
1977: 16). Telop intensified the systematic use of a compositional rebus of words
and images found in news-making. Telop tended to be liberally applied to variety
and games shows, and to the news and documentary coverage of schoolgirls—add-
ing a written journalistic element that narrativized and gave selective meanings
to these images. People processed and presented in this manner became the sub-
jects of rapidly assembled media collages on the verge of becoming animations.
Television reportage on schoolgirls—which adopted the established investigative
path of transcribing the voices of girls on telephone club lines and deposited into
voicemail boxes for introductory services—also captured and amplified the grainy,
faltering sound of these intimate self-explanations, and exaggerated their naïve
argot in bulging phonetic subtitles.
Teeming voices pasted alongside repeated visual images of schoolgirls on screen
and page had the effect of camouflaging the large-scale cultural and intellec-
tual production undertaken to gather, edit, and distribute these human fragments.
Amplification and repetition of the expressions of “real”—and hopefully really devi-
ant—schoolgirls gave the impression that girls were speaking for themselves, fighting
their way into the limelight to record their thoughts for posterity. But rather than
being a democratic or, at worst, populist impulse in which all concerned eyes and
ears were bent to the ground in a posture of sincere preparedness simply to listen,
coverage represented a costly and professional social excavation enterprise.19
Not only the blunt language and masculine tones (see Chapter 4) but even the
silent pauses and fidgety exhalations of girls were faithfully transcribed in telop and
print. Through mediated transcriptions girls came to embody a virtual social presence.
Strenuous attempts to record girls’ idiom, and with it a sense of earthiness and exuber-
ance, recalled the careful prioritization of oral culture within national ethnographic
work throughout the twentieth century. The high-definition spectacle made of the
materiality of girls voices corresponded broadly to the returning vogue for oral folk
culture more generally in the late twentieth century. As with new folklorism in which
“the ‘voice’ in its reductive singularity here stands for the heterogeneity of all voices”
(Ivy, 1995: 16), discussants and commentators on schoolgirls rarely distinguished
between the words and attitudes of different girls. Cloaked in their anonymity,
schoolgirls appeared as one homologous chattering unit. Nameless frank-speaking

girls appeared as fleeting reincarnations of the pragmatic and unsullied folk of Japan,
while the role of writers and producers in soliciting and scripting their testimonies
reproduced that of educated ethnologists transcribing the stories and customs (f zoku)
of the common people.20 Through their courtship of girls, writers indulged, often
against their own declared better judgment, in a “clandestine restoration of subjective
essentialism” (Spivak, 1988: 279) that projected its expectations onto schoolgirls. A
journalist’s story of a young acquaintance of his who was unable to make the meaning
of schoolgirls she witnessed in the media commensurate with her own lived experi-
ence illustrates the external production of the schoolgirl personality:
One third-year high school girl I know is about to graduate in three months’
time, and she comes to me to help me do my research because it is only by
meeting journalists that she can fully grasp and savor her own sense of being
a high school girl. She urgently wants to do some kind of full-color photo-
spread special or something, because she wants a permanent record of having
once really been a high school girl. She wants to capture some of her real
high-school-girl-ness before it disappears forever.
(Matsuoka interview, 23 December 1997)
This young woman recognized her special value as an actual schoolgirl in the late
nineties but could find no meaning or reality in the label attached to her other than
the possibility of attracting media capture of her image.
Notes
1 David Leheny discusses the polarization of “international norms” and local Japanese politics
in the legal debate around compensated dating in Think Global Fear Local (2006: 49–113).
2 In 1996 there were just over 2.25 million (2,213,163) middle-school girls and about the
same number (2,263,214) of high-school girls (Population statistics, Ministry of Public
Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications).
3 Shimao Maho, Joshi k sei Goriko (High-school girl gorilla-babe), (Tokyo: Fusōsha 1997).
4 Current affairs weekly magazines (sh kanshi) formed an informally recognized “male
press” (oyaji zasshi) that included most of the high-circulation weekly titles: Sh kan
Bunshun, Sh kan H seki, Sh kan Gendai, Sh kan Shinch , and Sh kan Post, as well as
fortnightly and monthly magazines such as Dime, President, and dacapo, all produced for
a primarily male readership.
5 Examining the Meiji period, Miyako Inoue argues of an intriguingly similar situation,
whereby “in the case of schoolgirls, their voices were heard only by being represented
and cited by those with access to the tele-technology of writing and print media,” to
which they had little or no access themselves (Inoue, 2006: 73).
6 See Stuart Hall on Representation: “Power it seems, has to be understood here, not only
in terms of economic exploitation and physical coercion, but also in broader cultural or
symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or something in a certain
way—within a certain ‘regime of representation’” (Hall, 1997: 259).
7 In relation to delinquency specialists in prewar Japan it has been noted that: “Like
the delinquent act itself, the investigation of delinquency afforded participants a
pretext to transgress their ‘normal’ identities and orthodox social values” (Ambaras,
2005: 82).
8 Murakami Ryū and Miyadai Shinji, “Enjo kōsai ni hashiru joshikōseitachi.” Sunday
Mainichi, 75:3 (24 November 1996): 50–54.
9 “When there is a piece on compensated dating on the news on television it is not to say
‘Look, we’ve got to change society,’ it is simply to enjoy talk about sex as entertainment.
Information about murder, rape, and suicide are circulated in the news media quite freely;
so long as these are labeled ‘reportage,’ the media has an excuse to circulate these topics as
normal viewing” (Miyadai interview, Shibuya, 5 February 1999).
10 Sociologist Miyadai Shinji brought this topic, already a source of rumor in men’s magazines,
into the mass media in 1993, in “Bloomer Sailor Shop High School Girls” (Miyadai,
“Buruserashop no joshikosei,” Asahi Shinbun evening edition, 9 September 1993).
11 I visited the Heart Candy editorial office several times during autumn 1997, and
accompanied Heart Candy editors and their part-time teenage editorial assistants on their
street presence and photo-gathering campaigns on Saturdays. In this period the editorial
staff and cameramen of competing magazines targeted at schoolgirls tended to converge
on Shibuya on weekends to collect photographs and socialize with girls.
12 Two kogyaru magazines were launched by respectable companies. Cawaii! was published
by the esteemed ladies magazine publisher Shufu no Tomo, and Tokyo Street News
(“Stonew”) was published by Gakken, whose main business was in educational books.
13 “My article in AERA [15 April 1996] was the first mention of compensated dating in
the serious media, in an Asahi publication. The schoolgirls were already using the term
enjo to talk about selling their pants to bloomer sailor shops—I suspect the full term enjo
k sai was invented by the media” (Hayami interview, Shibuya, 16 April 2003).
14 These “pro joshik sei” were professional only in the sense of earning small sums of cash
by acting as representatives and conduits of schoolgirl information, unlike the small
number of “professional delinquent girls” (Ambaras, 2005: 147) of the Meiji period,
who were said to have built careers on the back of deviant activities.
15 Suspicions about Miyadai Shinji culminated in a televised accusation about an illicit
history of compensated dating with schoolgirls that was broadcast on the 29 March
1997 episode of Asahi television’s monthly late-night talk show Asa made nama terebi.
Asano Chie, an ex-student of Miyadai, wrote several articles criticizing his relations
with women and analytic approach to compensated dating, which were published in
the journal Gendai Shis in 1997.
16 Zenkyoto is a reference to the later 1960s student struggles with universities. The
“zenkyoto generation” is a reference to radical left-wing youth of this period.
17 An English-language translation of Innocent World was put out by Vertical, Inc. (New
York) in 2004.
18 The means of presenting schoolgirls provides a wonderful example of cultural studies theorist
Stuart Hall’s critique of media representation: “what is visually produced, by the practices of
representation, is only half the story. The other half—the deeper meaning—lies in what is not
being said, but is being fantasized, what is implied but cannot be shown” (Hall, 1997: 263).
19 Miyako Inoue makes a remarkably parallel observation of the attention paid to “schoolgirl
speech” in the first decade of the twentieth century, for which she argues there was “no
sovereign origin or authentic identity.” Rather, it “emerged in the incessant citations,
mediations, and disseminations of fragments of voices heard and reified as such by those
who had access to the public sphere of print media” (Inoue, 2006: 72–73).
20 In Illusory Suburbia (1997) Miyadai Shinji titles one of his chapters “Telephone Club
Ethnology” (Terekura minzokugaku), in a formalization of telephone club research.
Professional representatives of schoolgirl consciousness shared the exterior position of
ethnologist Yanagita Kunio, who “committed himself to the impossible task of trying
to speak for the folk outside the language of power and reason that had concealed them
from view. He misrecognized his task, failing to see that the misfortune of the folk—the
interminable misfortune of their silence and their failure to secure representation for
themselves—lay precisely in the fact that as soon as a person attempted to convey their
silence, he passed over to the side of the enemy” (Harootunian, 1988: 420).
4
KOGYARU CHIC
Dressing as a delinquent girl
Kogyaru was a new term for journalists in the mid-1990s, traceable to a Spa! maga-
zine article, “The Lure of the Kogyaru,” published in 1993 and promoting a new
generation set to replace the nightclubbing “body-conscious girls” (bodikon gyaru)
of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The earliest published article on kogyaru sets out
to discover and define a “post body-con generation” but has only a vague notion
of a kogyaru beyond this. At this point she is not connected to loose socks, school
uniforms, or sexual deviance, but rather to stripping away the artifice—uncom-
fortable high heels, and body-shaping underwear—of grown-up working gyaru in
their twenties, to pursue a more “casual, natural, and healthy look” (Spa!, 9 June
1993: 11). The first publicly broadcast depiction of a kogyaru was in a session titled
“La kogyaru night” (Za kogyaru naito) produced for Asahi Television’s live late-
night show M10 (Magnitude), aired 10 August 1993. Za kogyaru naito presented live
examples of prototype kogyaru seated alongside specimens of older gyaru in their
twenties and a third group framed as the natural enemies of kogyaru and gyaru—
the “ikeike gyaru” (lively girls). Kogyaru were presented as the latest precociously
confident versions of the apparently fearsome and materialistic gyaru office ladies
and college students (joshi daisei) that occupied urban folklore of the 1980s.1 The
all-male specialist panel—labeled the “Kogyaru rinri iinkai” (Kogyaru morality com-
mittee)2 in a spoof of local government cultural watchdog committees—identified
kogyaru by their flared miniskirts, blue mascara, pink rouge, tendency to carry
pokeberu (pocket bell) pagers, and preference for Fine magazine and club nights at
Gold and Eros.
From 1996, a connection began to be made in journalistic material between
the emerging sassy kogyaru style, or “long hair, brown contact lenses and narrow
eyebrows” (Hayami, 1996a: 64), and shocking news stories about high-school girls
reportedly doing a new style of amateur prostitution which was being called “com-
pensated dating.” The sexy kogyaru street style, with its telltale signs of plucked
Kogyaru chic: dressing as a delinquent girl 61
brows and acting like an adult, converged with white loose socks and school skirts
rolled up into miniskirts, worn with mustard-colored Burberry scarves.3 This com-
posite of luxury brand and school uniform became the outfit of deviance imprinted
on the public imagination over the remaining years of the twentieth century. It
was made ubiquitous to public space and communication through an extraordi-
nary production cycle of photo-journalism, television broadcasting, filmmaking,
art, comics, and animation, focused on the breathtaking immorality and chutzpah
of ostensibly wayward schoolgirls.
Teenage women in the kogyaru style, hanging around in Ikebukuro and
Shibuya, didn’t use the word kogyaru, however: they used the rather cooler mon-
ikers ko (kids), gyaruko (little sister/babe), or gyaru (girls), to talk to each other.
Despite its heavily constructed emergence, kogyaru fashion and posing became
a powerful street fashion that began to thrive on media stereotypes of gauche
and lumpen prostitute schoolgirls, and the play and work opportunities offered
through capturing the attention of media, academic, and government bodies.
Within a few years, girls ran away with the baton, particularly in the shift to
ganguro style in 1999, which was ignored or excoriated in editorial offices previ-
ously fixated, riveted in place by kogyaru news. The treatment of ganguro in the
mass media is examined in detail in Chapter 6. Kogyaru style bore continuities
with the iconoclastic and pragmatic posture of urban female subcultures and their
attendant journalistic parodies, stretching from those of indentured factory girls
and komori (baby-carrying) nurses passing their hard labor with ribald songs and
jokes in the provinces in the nineteenth century, to prewar café waitresses avail-
able for after-work appointments and the would-be promiscuous modern girls of
the 1920s, to the pan pan prostitutes of the Occupation period who correspond
to liberated and burlesque kasutori (“dregs”) culture. The kogyaru pose and its
journalistic interpretations were rooted in a chain of subcultural styles based in
the experience and imagination of lower-class Japanese and East Asian women,
whose livelihoods or public personae were often sexualized, and also in many
cases linked to hostessing or the sex-services industry.
Changing clothes (kigaeri)

In a pattern that recurs at intervals through girls’ subcultures in Japan, kogyaru style
had two quite distinct but interchangeable sets of apparel. In common with bodikon
(“body conscious”) office ladies (OLs) and platform dancers in the 1980s, cosplay-ers
(dressing in costume and make-up to emulate anime characters) of the 1990s, and
especially gothic Lolitas of the early 2000s, the moment of switching appearances
has often constituted a pleasurable and conspicuous performance.4 Kogyaru school
uniforms (seifuku) were worn in a customized style. School skirts were turned into
ad hoc miniskirts by rolling up the waistband to hike up the skirt hem. Instead
of smooth and tight knee-high school socks, kogyaru legs wore baggy, oversized
white socks reminiscent of 1980s style legwarmers, which crumpled around their
ankles. Loose socks (produced by Solid Harmony from 1994) were worn with black
62 Kogyaru chic: dressing as a delinquent girl
regulation school loafers. Gyaru-ko (sisters/babes) also wore baggy school-style sweat-
ers, sometimes so large that the sweaters fell close to the hemlines of their improvised
miniskirts. In spring 1996, the streetwise Okinawan pop singer Amuro Namie
touched on and helped glamorize the kogyaru street style in a Morinaga ice cream
advert in which she dawdled in school uniform and loose socks. In winter 1996 and
1997, doughty kogyaru wore mainly Fendi or Burberry scarves—the latter usually
the trademark black-and-mustard-colored check—tucked into their school blazers.
At this time some sported Ralph Lauren undershirts under their school blouses, too.
Accessories that played games with teenage sensitivity to the public ranking of each
middle and high school came in and out of vogue, leading to an anti-authoritarian
mix-and-match approach to official school uniform that incorporated some of the
signature items of better high schools. In 1997, for example, Showa Daiichi Kōkō
school satchels became a sought-after item for girls from all high schools. Schools in
the Tokyo region found it increasingly difficult to insist that students adhere to school
uniform regulations (fukus shid ; McVeigh, 2000b: 70–75), if the schools had them.
(This, too, was not a new problem: suspicions about fake or “wannabe” schoolgirls
donning the schoolgirl’s identifying “purple-brown skirt” (ebicha shikibu) and dating
male students in Ikebukuro Park surfaced in the first years of the twentieth century.)
The kogyaru penchant for wearing school uniforms involved a complex subterfuge in
which rule-breaking was partly disguised as conformity, making it especially difficult
for teachers and parents to detect and discipline offenders. High-school students some-
times acquired used items bought secondhand from “bloomer sailor shops” (burusera
ten) otherwise selling pre-worn items to male uniform fetishists, or swapped with
friends to bolster their own uniform-like uniforms with sought-after school insignia.
By the 2000s the high-school uniform had become not just mixed-up but in some
cases entirely “fake” (nanchatte). A subset of fashion apparel serviced by labels such
as East Boy and Elle emerged, which specialized in mock school uniforms. While
Tokyo Metropolitan public high schools (t ritsu k k ), not generally high in the
rankings, had no official uniform in the 1990s, and lower-ranked private high
schools had introduced relatively relaxed rules about clothing in the capital, the
majority of girls attending these schools nevertheless did wear a full school uniform
assembled themselves from a range of fake school neckties, tartan skirts, blouses,
sweater, and blazers.5
Uniform mixing affected adult fashion, too: trend-conscious older men and
women could be seen sporting kogyaru-style Burberry checks and check-pattern
skirts. The customized school uniform flowed into art and design: in April 2003
the sophisticated style magazine H, targeted at an older readership, placed a young
idol dressed in a weather-worn designer version of the sailor-suit uniform in
a photo-shoot, also featured on the cover accompanied with the cover banner
“Our Alternative Way” (“Watashitachi no orutanatibu weii,” H, April 2003).
Overseas, the impact of trend-setting kogyaru “Japanistas” was evidenced in the
spread of Burberry checked patterns, and was documented in American fashion
magazine Harpers Bazaar (“Tokyo Glamorama,” Harpers Bazaar, October 2000:
311–315 and 338).
In summer 1998 I had the opportunity to spend some evenings with a group
of kogyaru who had taken to gathering on a pedestrian plaza in front of a shopping
mall in Kichijoji, West Tokyo. These stylish girls were in the habit of carrying an
alternative outfit in their black school bags. Intermittently, girls in kogyaru-style
blouses, miniskirts, and loose socks excused themselves from the group to trot off
and get changed in the public toilets in the mall, from whence they reappeared
with some aplomb a short spell later, dressed in tight one-piece dresses akin to
cocktail dresses (an “adult look” in favor at that moment), bangles, faux tropical
accessories, and sometimes platform sandals (atsuzoku sandaru) and dramatic false
eyelashes. Adapting school uniforms, applying face stickers, face glitter, and make-
up, and changing into casual wear were all pseudo-clandestine activities with high
visibility. Girls were witnessed rolling up their school skirts, applying make-up,
and making other transformations while in transit—in the narrow space between
the doors of coupled train carriages, in department store stairwells and toilets, and
in train station toilets.6 Along with an often-caricatured impression of blunt kogyaru
mobile phone conversations, beginning with the indelicate “Where arh’ yer now?”
(“Ima doko?”), their public changes of outfit (kigaeri) became the stuff of scandal and
urban myth.
The “adult look”

The alternate apparel of kogyaru who had shed their uniforms was mature, semi-
classical, and showy. It gave the girls the overall appearance of glamorous models
ready for a night out in a casino or a filmed nighttime scene. This gyaru style was
sometimes described as showy (o share) or lingerie style (shitagi-kei), otona-fu (adult
style), or o’ne San-kei (big sister style). Kogyaru wore slender 1970s-esque full-
length coats with fur collars, over miniskirts and slinky dresses, leather micro-shorts
and tights, or tight-fitting ladies’ trouser suits. The chief editor of Cawaii! magazine
explained its mood in the following terms: “They’ve wanted a grown-up culture
for a few years, but until now there were no magazines for them. They are into
having love affairs, playing, drinking, going out on the town at nighttime, and
buying expensive things” (Ogino Yoshiyuki interview, 12 November 1997).
In the summers of 1997 and 1998, the kogyaru look bared more skin and
incorporated retro-style platform sandals, flower prints, flared pants, and cropped
halter-neck tops. In winter 1998, the kogyaru outfit lingered on with calf-hugging,
knee-high platform boots, worn with bare tan legs or tan tights and knee-length
pastel-colored duffel coats. At its height the kogyaru look was that of girls dressing
up as sophisticated women out on the town for the evening. The chief editor of
Cutie magazine (certainly not associated with any gyaru culture but rather with a
core indie/cute/urahara [Harajuku backstreets] readership) disparagingly identi-
fied a desire to solicit the male gaze as the defining principle of the kogyaru look:
“they want to look cute to men and adults” (Arai Hiroshi interview, 5 November
1998). (Read more about sh joppoi [sh jo like] cute looks in Cutie magazine in
Kinsella, 1995.)
Kogyaru styles created the impression of inappropriately sexualized young girls.

Their look, in combination with their loitering at night, body gestures, and fashion-
ably coarse chatter, even suggested that they were actively soliciting customers. It was
a highly provocative style that fed on external attention and flourished precisely at
the interface between schoolgirls and the news media or institutional professionals on
the search for stories about compensated dating. This was a particular type of atten-
tion that kogyaru learned to cultivate. “Loose socks” and “miniskirts” barely hiding
a girl’s underwear bore all the essential attributes of the sexualized waifs otherwise
visible principally in men’s pornography and Lolita-complex animation. Charmingly
fallen proto “loose socks” appear on the nubile character of Miya Chan in the early
male-oriented Lolita-complex comic Scrap Gakuen (Azuma Hideo) in 1986. (See
an illustration in Kinsella, 2002: 226.)Kogyaru in customized uniforms absorbed and
mimicked aspects of the looks of desirable schoolgirl teasers created in male-oriented
visual culture. A similar type of mimicry of the mimic pertained in nineteenth-
century America, where apparently “it was possible for a black man in blackface,
without a great deal of effort, to offer credible imitations of white men imitating
him” (Lott, 1993: 113). (The persistence and dynamics of mimicry between camps
and across race and gender boundaries is explored in depth in Chapter 8.)
Rather like the b s zoku bike gangs of the 1980s, who boisterously pressed jour-
nalists for appointments in which their deviant performances would be observed,
photographed, and reported, being a kogyaru was a pastime that played blatantly
with the media narrative about underage prostitution and compensated dating.
The fun kogyaru had with their dressing up and improvised tarty performances is
reminiscent of the emphasis that anthropologist Satō Ikuya placed on the gener-
ally overlooked pleasures of deviance, and its “playlike” rhythm and quality (Satō,
1991: 3). In the 1980s Satō Ikuya argued that
This close, almost inseparable, relationship between the mass media and
b s zoku activity may give one the impression that the activity is fabricated
to a considerable extent by the mass media to exploit the desire of youths in
motorcycle gangs for self-display. One may also consider that motorcycle gangs
are merely imitating the schemes of action suggested in the media reports.
(Sato, 1991: 73; this is an English language edition
of the original text, Satō, 1984)
While professionals representing various academic and institutional bodies seemed

unable or disinclined to recognize this subcultural game, sociologist Fukutomi
Mamoru noted that one of the complications in carrying out the large-scale survey
on compensated dating that he supervised in summer 1997 was that: “Enjo k sai has
become an arena in which to play a ‘stylish’ and contemporary role” (1997 AWF
Survey, March 1998: 82).
There was a fine line between looking sexy and mischievous and looking simply
like a teenager prostituting herself. As the chief editor of Cawaii! pointed out: “No
one wants to look literally like ‘a girl who does compensated dating,’ they want
to look just sexy enough to get adult attention” (Ogino interview, 12 November
1997).7 Kogyaru style became synonymous with compensated dating, and was will-
fully misread not as having tricky fun but as literal and highly visible evidence of
sexual deviance.
Flash and cheap clothes

Several other elements in the flow of kogyaru looks and behavior—scruffiness,
lewdness, the flaunting of money and brand-name products—compounded the
impression of uneducated young working women with frankly prostitute-like
garish tastes and social habits. Kogyaru style at times involved the pursuit and con-
spicuous display of real and fake brand-name items and a mock nouveau riche
(narikin) aesthetic. The interest in brand-name handbags, more prominent early in
the evolution of kogyaru style, is showcased in a Cawaii! article identifying Prada,
Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Versace, and Fendi as the top six names to own in
the cult of “Cheeky Pride in Foreign Brands” (“Kaigai burando namaiki gōman,”
Cawaii!, May 1996: 20–21). The materials used in kogyaru clothes and accesso-
ries were generally cheap imitations of expensive materials, including fake fur,
leather, metallic lamé, or silky acrylic shirts in prints reminiscent of Hermès silk
scarf designs. The original Hermès designs already involved conspicuous symbols
of wealth and status, such as trompe l’oeil shining gold chains, pendants, anchors,
and heraldic and military equipment. The gaudy look was accessorized with tanned
skin, elaborate and multicolored “nail art” manicures, temporary tattoos, and hair
tinted brown (chapatsu).
Subsets of kogyaru style known as saafu (surf) and roko (“Hawaiian local”), and
tropical prints and accessories, conjured up a hazy impression of luxury tourism in
Hawaii, Bali, the South Seas, yachts, and penthouses. Stylistic self-aggrandizement
was connected to current ideas like “respect,” “pride,” and “getting” what you
want (geto suru). By coupling themselves with the signs and symbols of a classy
lifestyle, the materialism embedded in girls’ style provocatively asserted a sense of
entitlement. In this way the uppity kogyaru mode was on a parallel with materialist
ambitions scribed in rap culture from the United States, so it was hardly surprising
that Lil’ Kim and her survivalist fighting lyrics were easily exported to Tokyo in
this period. While the “moneyed” theme in schoolgirl subculture was interpreted
as visible evidence that girls were acquiring funds through compensated dating and
were afflicted with a regressive and tasteless adoration of consumption, evidence
suggests that the luxury displayed was more signified than real. Kogyaru play with
material ambition in fact brought back into the limelight the imitative nature and
play with class stereotypes that inflect street fashion.
The type of “fancy” outfits assembled in kogyaru style were closely allied to
the wishful “love of finery” researchers have detected in Victorian servant-class
subculture (Valverde, 1989: 183). Kogyaru style also bore more than a superficial
similarity to the passion for “doing it in style,” with shiny, bright, and grandiose
ornamentation, that was favored by the English working class until at least the
1950s, according to early culture studies writer Richard Hoggart. Hoggart goes
on to explain that the aspirations that imbued English working-class style were
based not so much on any actual encounter with wealth as on a lifestyle in which
“posh folk are hazily assumed to pass their every day” (Hoggart, 1957: 148). In
Japan, the class economics underlying styles of female consumption became highly
visible from the late nineteenth century on, as both a new youthful and feminine
industrial working-class and the middle-class urban consumer economy expanded.
As historian Hirota Masaki reports:
Young women of the “barbarous” classes fantasized about and aspired to the
lifestyles of the “civilized” classes. Accordingly, they made numerous efforts to
imitate these lifestyles. But since the actual conditions of their daily lives were
far inferior, they ended up constantly deprecating themselves and became
haunted by a sense of inferiority.
(Hirota, 1999: 217)
Early ethnographers observed a “wave of custom transmitted by imitating the

upper classes” (cited in Harootunian, 2002: 179) in the 1920s, the period when
Kon Wajirō collected his detailed data and made his hand-drawn diagrams docu-
menting the emerging material culture, fashions, and lifestyle of ordinary men and
women in the capital.
The center of girls’ fashion in Tokyo in the 1990s revolved around local labels
and outlets. For kogyaru these were clustered in Shibuya and in Tokyū’s cluttered
and teen-oriented 109 department store (known colloquially as maruky ). Favored
local brands such as Love Boat, Vivitix, and Alba Rosa were sometimes mixed with
both fake and real items bearing the brand logos of international brands such as
Vuitton and Prada. In the case of real items, this was usually a small but visible acces-
sory such as key fob, purse, or make-up bag. Throughout the 1990s, the price of
clothes items reviewed in kogyaru magazines (kogyaru zasshi) was typically lower than
10,000 yen (about $100), and regular editorial features provided ideas about how to
assemble outfits for less money. Popteen featured a regular review of “Good value
fashion” (negoro fashion), with each item typically priced at between 1,900 and 7,900
yen; or, for example, Cawaii! featured an article on where to buy cheap sandals,
one-piece swimsuits, and shorts for 4,900 to 8,900 yen (Cawaii!, July 1997: 15–16);
while Tokyo Street News (sutonyuu) encouraged its readers with “Buy cheap coor-
dinates!” (Yasukau kooridinate), all below 10,000 yen (Tokyo Street News, December
2002: 34–41). As the chief editor of Cawaii! observed: “Girls like cheap things as
well as brand-name products. They don’t want to look the same as everyone else so
they buy non-brand goods to get variety” (Ogino interview, 12 November 1997).
Lumpen girls
Though the number of high-school girls going on to university, instead of leav-
ing school for work or moving on to two-year junior colleges, increased rapidly
from 19928 (see Figure 1.2) and no significant shift occurred in the percentages
of pupils dropping out of high school at this time, girls who were into the kog-
yaru lifestyle squatted in public doorways and stairwells as if they had run away
from home (iede) and were homeless. Being low class, down and out, dirty, and
generally runpenppoi (trampish)9 was an antiquated element in the mixed threads
of the style and behavior that indicated the depth of the historical connections
underlying kogyaru style, and which connected scruffy kogyaru to the fashionable
“lumpen”or “tramp” subculture born of the conflicted combination of “dire pov-
erty with leisure” in the 1930s (Silverberg, 2006: 209). See the stained school skirts
and grimy blouses worn with South Sea Island type accessories by girls in Kichijoji
in Figure 4.1. In a society with relatively austere attitudes toward neat appear-
ances and personal cleanliness, being a disheveled and unwashed young woman
required a quite particular audacity. Dirt suggested an unwholesome life outside of
the biopolitical management of the maternal home, and was combined with other
shocking and coarse trappings borrowed from male behavior and communica-
tive style. Kogyaru squatted in the streets with legs open in a style reminiscent of
lower-class East Asian men, and of the workerish “hard school” postures (koha) of
yankiis and boys’ bike gang (b s zoku) members during the later 1970s and 1980s.
Figure 4.2 shows drawings of motorbike gang member postures made in the early
1980s by anthropologist Satō Ikuya. Compare these to the unladylike squatting
postures of girls on the street in 1998 depicted in Figure 4.3. Greeting each other,
FIGURE 4.1 Tropical accessories and grimy skirts and blouses worn by kogyaru girls in
Kichijoji, summer 1998
Source: photograph by Maggie Lambert.
FIGURE 4.2 An anthropologist’s drawing of the stylized koha “tough school” postures of
male gang members in the early 1980s
Source: used by kind permission of the anthropologist recorder Satō Ikuya. First published in his
B s zoku no esunografii (1984: 241), and reproduced in the later English translation, Kamikaze Biker
(1991).
FIGURE 4.3 Picking noses and unladylike squatting by kogyaru girls on the street in
Kichijoji, Tokyo, summer 1998
some girls abandoned dominant patterns of feminine speech for low tones and
masculine grunts of acknowledgment, “ossu” and “ohh.” Looking ugly and pulling
gross expressions became a popular thing to do for the camera, and framed on print
club stickers, this habit became known as yabapura (Miller, 2003).
Accompanying sloppy attitudes, girls were reportedly using coarse and mas-
culine and sexually lewd language to address each other and the over-listening
world. A great deal of media attention was paid to capturing what became
known as “kogyaru language” (kogyaru-go) or, more loosely, as gyaru-go: “If you
listen to the voices of the girls as they roam around Shibuya, they will horrify
you with their toughness and terrible energy, as they rudely calculate everything
with an almost flamboyant brutality” (Hayami, 1996a: 62). Many of the terms
ascribed to kogyaru in lists published in current affairs magazines—for example,
the phrase “ch beri guu” (super very good) alighted upon early on—would
appear in fact to be revived forms of rather dated male slang. Published kogyaru-
go included the following coinages: iketeru (fly, good), ikemen (good-looking
man), ch kawa (super cute), gekikawa (hyper cute), onikawa (devilishly cute),
raburabu (loved up), mecharabu (deep in love), enko (compensated dating), uri
(prostitution), geto suru (to get something you really want), buya for Shibuya and
bukuro for Ikebukuro, yabai and yabukanai (risky, not cool), teman (female mas-
turbation or “fingering”), ch puri (kissing on a print club sticker), uzai (boring),
ch za (very boring), baibingu (using a vibrator), and gyakunan (reverse flirtation
“nanpa,” meaning a girl picking up a boy). Some of these terms may have been
invented by schoolgirls, but evidence also points at male cultural producers and
editors as the source of this gutsy and sexual slang.10 Indeed, concerning the kog-
yaru-go dictionary Shibuya Hatsu! Heta Moji Book (Direct from Shibuya! The Bad
Writing Book) published by Ishikawa Masataka, journalist Fujii Yoshiki concurs
that so-called “high-school girl words” and “kogyaru language” were a fiction
invented by the mass media (Maruta, 2000: 210). The excitement stirred around
gyaru-go, linked to kogyaru from the second half of the 1990s, shares remark-
able continuities with the also much-recorded “schoolgirl speech” attributed to
jogakusei in the first decades of the twentieth century. Miyako Inoue describes
citations in text as the point of origination of a “metapragmatic category” of
“schoolgirl speech” that helped give tangible form to “the schoolgirl herself,”
a new social category generated by “a never-ending process of citations, cir-
culations and dispersions, of fragments of female voices in the newly formed
publicity of print media” on the part of “Japanese male intellectuals around
the beginning of the twentieth century” (Inoue, 2006: 70). The continuities
between the treatment of schoolgirls in the 1910s and 1920s and the treatment
of high-school girls in the 1990s is extraordinary, and raises questions about
the endurance of patterns in social reportage. Whatever its origins kogyaru-go is
reminiscent of the playfully masculine speech accredited to modern gaaru, for
instance using the personal pronoun (“ore”) and other witty and syncretic café
waitress lingo of the 1920s (Silverberg, 2006: 64, 99). This also bears a connec-
tion with the linguistic bricolage that the art historian Andō Kōsei suggests was
the foundation of satokotoba, the dialect spoken in the premodern Yoshiwara
brothel district (Silverberg, 2006: 99, 298).
Media inspection of the dirty theme connected to more extreme yamanba fash-
ions, and by the end of the century reporting on sloppy girls was condescending
and literal. In May 2002, the popular TBS primetime television show Gakko e ik
(Let’s Go to School!) introduced a new slot titled “Dirty Girl Busters” (Oogyaru
baasutazu) that lampooned the stained and disheveled look. Each week its celebrity
young male hosts broke into the rooms of teenage girls suspected of being “Dirty
Girls,” frequently yamanba, and ridiculed their slovenly habits. Though attracting
some prudent internet discussion about the extent to which dirty girl busting was
actually “staged” (yarase) and not authentic documentary, the “Dirty Girl” feature
did not appear to attract criticism specifically for its nosy invasion into the personal
lives and rooms of anonymous young women.
The class reaction

Attitudes toward kogyaru among their peers generate an impression of the class sen-
timents lurking in reactions to the style.11 Kogyaru looks fascinated a minority but
enraged and repelled the majority of their teenage classmates. First and foremost,
their peers confirmed that the kogyaru look was, if nothing else, sexy:
“They are sexy and have a good time.”

“They have got no modesty whatsoever.”
“I like it, but the stuff that shows off everything for all to see is horrible.”
This was linked to a suspicion that kogyaru behavior was culturally inappropriate:
“You should be free to wear what you want, but they try to grab attention
from other people, by exposing a lot of skin.”
“They wear showy clothes that don’t suit their age.”
“They look like they’re going to get skin cancer.”
and, in fact, the feeling that kogyaru were immoral:
“They’re disgraceful.”
“They’ve got no decency.”
Kogyaru style was garish …
“I like that stuff that stands out.”

“The colors they wear are too heavy.”
“I’m too childlike to wear that glitzy stuff.”
“They have no taste.”
and dirty:
“They are sloppy, not like the ones that get a lot of media exposure.”
“They all look the same, and they’re messy.”
Kogyaru apparently also talked and acted coarsely:
“Though it costs a lot of money to send them to high school, they don’t act
worthy of it.”
“I hate their tone of voice when they speak.”
“They make a racket.”
“They can’t use words properly.”
“They clutter up the pavements, and they’re noisy.”
“When I hear the way they speak I am ashamed.”
“The way they talk is awful.”
Other young people thought that they acted stupid:
“They all have the same make-up on and the same clothes, not one of them
has got any individuality, in short, they’re rough.”
“They all look identical, it’s grotesque.”
“Dumb.”
“They’ve got no individuality, they’re idiots.”
“They look stupid.”
“They’re all identical.”
“They look a bit thick.”
In an “educationalist society” (gakureki shakai) in which social class is refracted through

a tiered system of educational accreditation, to be “thick” can also imply poorly edu-
cated and poorly raised, and, by implication, “poor” in social rank and status.12
In response to the question “Do you like or dislike the behavior of kogyaru?”,
young women were more cautious in their condemnation, suggesting that, “I can’t
just say whether I personally like or don’t like it,” and that “It would depend on
the person.” Three young women between 15 and 21 years old gave encourage-
ment to the subjects under discussion in suggesting that:
“To put it simply, they have a will of their own.”

“They’re relaxed.”
“They are frank and open.”
But about two-thirds of this small sample of 36 teenage girls and boys, all of whom
were middle- and high-school students at the peak of kogyaru style in 1995 to 1998,
also said that kogyaru were rough and uncultured:
“Crude.”
“Boring, trash, criminal people.”
“They’re scary.”
“When they gather up into gangs they are scary, and when I can’t get past
them, they force me to look up at them from somewhere down below.”
“They don’t give a damn about disturbing other people.”
“They have no respect for adults.”
Several responses implied that kogyaru behavior was a kind of performance:
“They look like they are just playing.”

“They don’t even understand themselves and yet they are acting like they are
adults.”
What is more, others commented that they thought that the kogyaru they saw on
television had been duped by a manipulative media system:
“They got invitations and it went to their heads, it’s absurd!”

“There is no way I would ever appear on one of those shows!”
Being a kogyaru was perceived as an uninhibited, tasteless, and destructive posture.

It was a style other teenagers distanced themselves from, not least because of their
discomfort with how the kogyaru look seemed to play into media portrayals of trol-
lop schoolgirls. The feeling of their peers when they saw schoolgirls presented in
the media ranged from distance:
“I did not really understand it, but some of it looked like fun to me.”
“I was just watching it for the sake of it, didn’t think much about it.”
“How ridiculous.”
Silly—it seemed very remote from me.”
To contempt:
“What rubbish—haven’t you got anything better to show?”

“It is contemptible but still interesting to watch.”
“I don’t know why they make those kind of programs.”
“It looked like adults condemning schoolgirls for their appearance.”
“All they ever put on television is high-school girls.”
Kogyaru fashion brought into daylight a more closeted vein of bawdy and working-
class girls’ culture and experience in Japan. It was not for the faint-hearted, and not
a look with which most girls had fun being associated. In practice most school-
girls compromised with a nod toward full ensemble, by donning what some girls
ironically categorized as the “have to” (sho ga nai) of wearing “loose socks.” As far
as compensated dating was concerned the peers of kogyaru offered no voluntary
connection between the “adult” looks of the style and dating for cash and the
majority claimed to have learned about compensated dating through the media.
Of these 36 high-school children and freshman university students, most had heard
about “compensated dating” from the media. In response to the questions “Do
you remember when you first heard the term ‘compensated dating’? How did
you hear about it?” Nine out of 12 male and gender-undisclosed respondents said
they could not recall where they first heard the term; two out of this 12 said they
could remember and that they first heard the term on “television,” and one male
respondent said he witnessed a compensated date in Chiba prefecture and “knew
what it was.” Among female respondents, four out of 24 could not remember
where they first heard of it; one out of these 24 first heard the term from “a friend,”
and 19 out of the 24 said they first heard about it from a “drama,” the “news,” or
the “media.” While only one out of the total of 36 respondents recalled first hear-
ing about compensated dating from “a friend,” the majority, comprising a higher
proportion of the female than male respondents, indicated that they first heard of
it through watching television.
Kogyaru magazines and their editors helped to transmit this raucous ladette13
aesthetic to girls. In Popteen magazine in the first half of the 1990s, there is a
distinctive emphasis on the earthy fun of ordinary life. Readers’ photos show teen-
agers playing pranks on each other, cavorting with their toddlers, and embracing.
Unsophisticated young couples squat on the ground in the yankii school dropout
manner (Popteen, December 1993: 175). Egg magazine also featured a great number
of photos of readers’ pranks—teenagers with chopsticks up their noses, and rows of
lads or lasses pulling moonies. This bawdy and anti-bourgeois taste was incubated
in the physical carnivalesque of porn magazines, the editorials of which connived
to launch a new range of sexy and fun magazines for girls.
“Life information” magazines for sexy schoolgirls

Young women in the kogyaru style did not produce their own magazines or fan
material where their photo-culture could be displayed, but they were closely
tracked and courted by a new cohort of self-designated kogyaru magazines, launched
principally by small publishing houses during the period from 1995 to 1997. In this
decade the established mode of girls’ fashion magazines faltered. Earlier magazine
content, summarized by one statistician of the women’s magazine industry as “girls’
magazines for seeing idols and dreams,”14 was led by magazines such as Seventeen,
Petit Seven, and Olive, which used professional models for their covers and photo-
shoots; employed sometimes white and frequently haafu (half-Caucasian) models;
and focused on feminine self-betterment through make up, clothes, food, and
travel.15 Outsiders to this stable constellation were the upcoming category of “street
magazines” (sutoreeto), such as Cutie and Tokyo Street News, that focused on photos
of readers in their own made-up fashions, and a less ideal and more individualistic
attitude to appearance and style. Through the early 1990s minor titles moved into
the major circulation league, pushing smaller publishing companies like Takarajima
Sha into the industry center and allowing Cutie and Sutounyuu (Tokyo Street News)
to be stocked in chain convenience stores across the country.16
More intriguingly, a different group of magazines for young women, catego-
rized within the industry as “lifestyle information” (seikatsu j h ), also began to turn
major in the early 1990s. Popteen and Elleteen had been extremely low-circulation
magazines, previously launched by otherwise porn publishers Asuka Shuppan and
Fujimi Shuppan: a magazine under the title Popteen was first published in 1970.
Early issues of these lifestyle information magazines printed in the 1980s had an
ambiguous appearance, but the volume of sex-related editorial advice, sex-related
adverts and information (fusawashii j h ), and fishy covers, such as one featuring a
cute schoolgirl in a beret sucking on an enormous bread baguette (Popteen, May
1993: front cover), give the overall impression that these were friendly support
magazines for young women working in f zoku (the sex services) or H-baito (part-
time sex-services work) and aware of the sex industries. A typical article published
even in 1993 focused on “Sex that women can feel.”17 The same issue also included
a free pull-out page of cute hand-drawn-style stickers.
By June 1998 Popteen had transformed into the highest circulation high-teen
street fashion magazine, selling around half a million copies per issue, and in 2000
it was officially sold by the small and manga and porn-based publisher, Asuka
Shinsha, to the large and more respectable media organization, Kadokawa Shōten.
Close on the heels of the newly successful Popteen, other porn publishers launched
their own versions of the new brand of “kogyaru zasshi.” Million Shuppan started
regular monthly editions of Egg in April 1997, Toen Shobō launched Heart Candy
in May 1997, Eichi Shuppan launched Happie in September 1997, and Bauhouse
launched Street Jam in October. Shufu no Tomo Sha, in this case not a porn
publisher at all,18 tested out Cawaii! (z kan-go) in March 1996. Tokyo Street News
became one of the iketeru (hip) street magazines of the mid-1990s but apparently
able magazine editors were said to have been forced to allow the title to drift away
from tanned-skin street styles and to gradually lose readers, until the title was folded
in May 2002, after coming up against a wall within the publishing house, Gakushu
Kenkuyūsha (“gakken no kabe”) itself (Sasaki interview, December 2002), which
was otherwise a respectable educational publisher.
By June 1998 most of these magazines had disappeared again, having lasted in
many cases less than a year, leaving the winning team—Cawaii!, Egg, and Popteen—
to divide up the now well-formulated schoolgirl readership. The ability to work
with the kogyaru idea—namely, girls in a hammed-up and sometimes sleazy style,
paired with blunt and carefree attitudes to life—allowed marginalized porn pub-
lishers, quite accustomed to operating beyond the censure of the industry-wide
Publishing Ethics Committee (Shuppan Rinri Kyōkai) and skirting around cen-
sorship issues, to make new inroads into the wider publishing market. The wider
context of this shift of porn inward from the margins was a cross-publishing industry
decline, which affected both more established and asexual “cute” girls’ magazines
(later renamed “mid-teen” magazines) and, later, the new kogyaru or “life-informa-
tion” magazines (later relabeled “high-teen” magazines by the Publishing Research
Center), which suffered waning sales by the 2000s. In 1998 to 1999 there was a
6.3 percent decline in the total circulation figures of girls’ magazines, argued to be a
result of the decreasing size of the youth population (Shuppan Shihy Nenp , 1999:
168). While streams of news articles about deviant schoolgirls almost certainly
helped to revive the sales figures of the male-oriented current affairs and specialist
magazines, it also became the basis for a thoroughgoing competitive reorganization
of the girls’ magazine publishing industry.19
Kogyaru magazines (kogyaru-muke zasshi) maintained open editorial offices.
Editors actively encouraged schoolgirls to drop into the editorial offices to play
(asobi ni kuru), or come by after school to help editors with editing articles and
reviewing products. Figure 4.4 shows young and trendy editors wearing some of
the trademark kogyaru Burberry motif, and two schoolgirl visitors in their self-
compiled nanchatte (fake) school uniforms lounging on the sofa by the office’s
specially installed print club (purikura) machine.20 Comical photo-shoots of high-
school girl helpers, editors, and the chief editor featured within the pages of Cawaii!
magazine itself, strengthening the sense of a real connection to real schoolgirls.
Kogyaru magazines published reader questionnaires, invitations to debut on the
readers’ photos pages, and invitations with maps encouraging readers to drop into
the editorial offices on their way home or onwards to cram school (juku), after
school. In late 1997 the chief editor of Cawaii! magazine estimated that on most
FIGURE 4.4 School tartan-clad members of Cawaii! editorial team at teatime in

November 1997. In the bottom right corner are two schoolgirl visitors in
their own versions of a girls’ school uniform.
days about ten girls would come to the office, along with a trickle of high-school
boys, too. In the editorial office girls could chat to each other and to editors or
play on the print club machine—both of which helped create more content for
the magazine pages. Chief editor Ogino Yoshiyuki observed: “The girls I see in
the editorial are very heavily made-up; it’s obviously a big thing for them to come
here. They want to be seen as adults, to show their teachers they are grown up”
(Ogino interview, 12 November 1997).
Heart Candy magazine went a stage further in this approach to cultivating and
capturing the mood of schoolgirl amateurs in its editorial office. Of eight edi-
tors, only one was full-time, the ostensibly 23-year-old female chief editor, Otani
Yoshiko. The part-time editors were a motley assortment of high-school dropouts
and after-school part-timers, each of whom served as a model, informant, editorial
subject, and, most significantly, as the living face of the magazine on weekends,
in canvassing sessions on the streets. Schoolgirl editors received about 900 yen per
hour for this service. During my visits (in late 1997 and early 1998) they were to be
seen silently prowling along the rows of gray desks in extremely short gray “school
skirts,” taking on the role of delinquent anorexic muses. Another magazine based
in a porn publishing house that had a high-school girl on its payroll was Street Jam,
produced by Bauhouse.21 One editor described how she became attached to the
editorial office:
The schoolgirl can hardly work at all as she has no editorial skills, but she’s
there as more of a mascot, really. It is cool and it makes the magazine popular
with the girls to have her there. She got bullied a lot at school because she was
too cool and was connected with our magazine, so in the end she chose the
magazine. She’s pretty dependent on the magazine now, though.
(Hashimoto interview, 1997)
Schoolgirls were intercepted on the streets by the cameramen and editors of girls’
magazines who made a living from both proscribing and documenting kogyaru
style. Magazine editors carried out extensive competitive canvassing, and scoured
for reader participation and photo-content for their “street magazines” (sutoreeto
zasshi) on weekends throughout the key years of 1996 to 1998. Canvassing typi-
cally took the form of setting up trestle tables and asking young passersby to fill in
magazine questionnaires. If they looked promising they might be invited to also
pose for a readers’ snap. It was especially during street recruitment sessions that
high-school girl editors were helpful: they reinforced the impression that kogyaru
magazines were “for girls by girls.” The young and teenage editors of Heart Candy
magazine gathered early on a Saturday morning at Shibuya’s Center Gai pedestrian
street, and waited with cameramen for the throngs of young men and women to
arrive. Disheveled Heart Candy staff faced stiff competition from better-financed
magazines such as Cawaii! and Egg, able to disburse minicars laden with advertising
paraphernalia for their promotional exercises and to provide their canvassing staff
with matching insignia jackets.
Minor magazine staff also arrived uninvited at high-school festivals, which had
revived marginally during the late 1990s as places where fashionable kogyaru types
could check out students at other high schools and meet people. As one edi-
tor pointed out, however, there was a conflict of interest between the schools
and the magazines. The appearance of school insignia in “lifestyle” magazines was
perceived as a potential threat to the school’s reputation, and a girl whose photo
appeared in a kogyaru magazine ran the risk of losing the favor of teachers and a
future place at college: “I’m sure the teachers must be opposed to us going to their
festivals. We don’t go to the good private girls’ schools at all! Only state schools
and low-ranking private schools” (Ōtani interview, 2 October 1997). By summer
1997, as kogyaru style advanced, the majority of schoolgirls were giving a nod in the
direction of the style by wearing “loose socks” and possibly rolling up their skirts a
few inches above the knee. High schools concerned about damage to their school
reputations by the work of willful pupils parading the school colors and insignia on
provocatively customized uniforms actively prohibited girls from wearing kogyaru-
style uniforms, lightening or streaking their hair (chappatsu, messhu), and having
their photos published in kogyaru magazines.
Photo subculture
A fundamental awareness of being pursued and gazed upon by the mass media
and its audiences was transcribed into kogyaru culture: its activities were organized
around cameras. Posing for photographic capture became the bread and butter
of kogyaru play and irony.22 It was evidenced in the cultural substrate of graffiti-
style Polaroid snaps; readers’ photos and amateur model photo-shoots in kogyaru
magazines; print club stickers; and the vogue for carrying mini cameras, print club
sticker albums, and large make-up mirrors. Figures 4.5 and 4.6 show a group of
high-school girls in West Tokyo, Kichijoji, enjoying putting on their style on the
street and having a moment of spontaneous irony about having their photographs
taken by specialists again as they pose with their own disposable cameras.
Photo-media proliferated initially in the form of new fun cameras marketed
in kogyaru magazines. In October 1997 Cawaii! published a kogyaru graffiti-style
advert for a Fotorama 90 Ace instant polaroid camera, and in July of the same year
the same magazine published an advert for a Konica ch mini (super-mini) dispos-
able camera. In addition to small disposable and Polaroid cameras that girls could
carry around and use to take photographs of themselves, polaroid cameras able to
produce tiny photographs (chibi pora), similar to stickers, entered the market in
response to print club. In 1996 print club stickers began to replace the market for
teen-style disposable cameras. Print club sticker machines, launched by the patent-
holding company Atlus in collaboration with the games company Sega in 1995,
were stationed, mainly in games arcades, from 1995 (Koyama Hideyuki, Sega Ltd,
telephone interview, 10 December 1997).
Interest in the new photo-stickers was sluggish, but in February 1996 a con-
cerned Sega team managed to secure a feature on print club sticker machines on
the Monday night cult television show SMAP x SMAP. Promotion of print clubs
by the beautiful boy-band anchors of this show helped alert young viewers to the
new photo-booths and predated a summer sticker craze. By summer 1997 there
were 45,000 print club machines installed across Japan, produced by Sega (50 per-
cent of the market), Neo-print, and Dai-ichi Kosho (Koyama Hideyuki, Sega Ltd,
telephone interview, 10 December 1997).
Print club machines generally charged customers 600 yen for one small sheet of
20 miniature instant photo-stickers, which embedded the faces of the posers into
backgrounds and scenes. Pulling faces, making slapstick gestures, and painstakingly
adding comments to the pictures was part of the fun of using the machines (read
more in Miller, 2003). While the first purikura boom took place in 1996, print
club machine retailers revived flagging interest in the period of transition from
ganguro (black face) to bihaku (white beauty) looks in the period from 1999 to 2000.
Second-generation purikura machines focused on introducing technology to make
more girls look more beautiful: faces were made to look smaller, eyes bigger, and
small blemishes and skin imperfections were erased by the machine software to give
girls a smooth, actress-like pale complexion. In this way the industry and the tech-
nology undermined the earlier impulse, encouraged by porn publishers, toward
FIGURE 4.5 A spontaneous joke about photos by schoolgirls gathered at a plaza near
Kichijoji station in summer 1998
FIGURE 4.6 A public display of putting on make-up, at a plaza near Kichijoji station in
summer 1998
raw (nama), grotesque (yaba), and imperfect poses. Titles of machines which hinted
at this goal include Biteki Kakumei (Aesthetic Revolution) by Namco; Gensōbisha
(Illusion Beauty Photo); and Cinderella by Ai Em Es and 8-beam by Atlas. The
annual turnover for the print club industry as a whole for the 1996 to 1997 period
was estimated to be something of the order of 50 billion US dollars (Nakamura,
18 February 2003).23
Print club stickers could be attached to notes and letters, collected in albums
and daily schedules (tech ), distributed among friends, and used to cover pencil
boxes, diaries, address books, mirrors, and electronic gadgets such as mobile phones
and laptop computers. Print club stickers contributed to the sense of open social
exchange and self-advertising that was associated with kogyaru:
There’s been a sort of verbal revolution in Shibuya, people talk to stran-

gers, communication has somehow got loosened up. The girls use purikura
stickers like business cards. If they’ve seen someone’s purikura in a maga-
zine they might call over to them and exchange stickers. Quite a lot of
the boys and girls on the street in Shibuya are recognizable, because their
photos have been in magazines. Magazines have a strong influence on how
school kids communicate.
(Ōtani interview, 2 October 1997)
Girls’ magazines also hosted pages of readers’ print club stickers and articles
that reproduced snapshots and Polaroid photographs heavily embellished with
comic-style slogans and parodies of the sitters, typically already posing in various
slapstick and cheeky guises. The mood of many of these “pora aato” (Polaroid
Art) pictures was one of gutsy burlesque that put together snaps of youthful love
and lust, and of less-than-straight-laced young parents playing with their babies.
These tended to be positioned toward the back pages of kogyaru magazines. Egg
carried a page of readers’ photos titled “Bakappuru” (Idiot Couples) and a little
column on “Kongetsu no hitotsuma” (Young Housewife of the Month). The
strategy of publishing photos of families and couples, often larking about or
being lewd, continued in the vein of a similar column, “Netsuai Kapuru” (Hot
Couples), published in Popteen in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, which
featured yankii (Yankee)24 teenagers necking and squatting. In August 1998, for
instance, Popteen published a photo-special of readers pulling faces, their features
contorted and squashed under nylon tights in the “Stocking Head Competition”
(Kaomen stocking taiketsu).
While the fragments of readers’ lives captured in these snaps tended to frame
an uncultured and gregarious lifestyle, readers’ snaps and photo-specials with
amateur models, positioned toward the front of kogyaru magazines, emphasized
the sleekness and glamour of single kogyaru.25 Published interviews suggested
that kogyaru wanted to become dancers, singers, actresses, or idols, graduating
from media exposure as kogyaru to attempt to climb up the rungs of the enter-
tainment industry:
The girls all compete with each other over how much exposure they can get
in magazines; that is how their status is measured—by how many other peo-
ple have heard of them. About 80 or 90 percent of girls want to be models,
singers, actresses, or some type of talent, especially the girls trying to get their
photographs in magazines all the time.
(Uchida interview, 23 December 1998)26
The proliferation of kogyaru styles and posturing at the base camps of the hier-
archy of media production later crystallized in the emergence of the so-called
karizuma (“charisma”) category in 1999 and the 2000s. Fashionable boutiques, aes-
thetic salons, and hairdressers, especially those in 109 department store in Shibuya,
became identified in girls’ magazines as karizuma outlets—places where the glam-
orous female staff (karizuma ten’in) were specially trained to bring out the charisma
(i.e., the star-quality) of their young clients.27
Amateur models
Rather than using professional models, the new kogyaru magazines used only
schoolgirl amateurs, albeit competitively hand-picked girls whose appearances sat-
isfied the requirements of editors. Egg magazine, originally given a trial run in
1995 as a magazine for men (see Chapter 3), focused on recruiting a combination
of new second-rate stars and models “from the street” and publishing their photos
alongside photo-shoots of minor television talents. In November 1996 this failing
magazine, published under the logo “Hyper Idol Station,” was strategically rein-
vented as a teenage street fashion magazine for girls: kogyaru target readers were
asked to send in their provocative and crazy print club stickers and snaps showing
them affecting sexy and entertainment-oriented poses (poosu). From May 1997
a newly successful Egg adopted a new slogan—“Get Wild and Be Sexy”—for
teenage girl readers: it turned monthly and was officially registered as a “lifestyle
information” magazine.28 Earthy realism, humor, sexual slapstick, and a carefree
attitude to life—visualized in layers of joyful and self-parodying snaps sent in by
readers, “yabapura” (ugly or gross photos), and blunt sexual innuendo in readers’
poses—created the tone, which became a recognized part of the “realistic” (riiaru)
kogyaru attitude. In October and November 1997, amateur photos of girls with
vibrators and splayed legs, alongside pornographic DVDs which had presumably
leaked over from the paraphernalia of neighboring offices, were scattered around
Heart Candy and Sweet Jam editorials, and were seen as inspirational material for
schoolgirl helpers. As Sweet Jam chief editor Otani suggested: “They like anything
to do with sex” (Ōtani interview, 2 October 1997).
For editors there were clearly defined ranks of photo-exposure that could be
awarded to girls hanging about magazine editorials or submitting their images for
a dokusha debyuu (“reader debut”). Exposure in a kogyaru magazine began at the
entry level of having a small reader’s snapshot in print: for models whom the edi-
tors found more interesting, this could be promoted to a large snapshot. After this
was the readers’ print club page, teeming with small stickers of comically distorted
faces framed by print club machines. The next level involved becoming the model
of a reader’s make-up make-over article or a similar single-page item. Finally, girls
such as Aki (popular in 1997) or Buriteri (an extra-dark-skinned ganguro gyaru
made famous in 1999) could appear in individual photo-specials. Fame in a kogyaru
magazine was presented to girls as a “debut,” and as a route forward into a new
career as a model or tarento (talent). Debut also incorporated the entrepreneurial
goal of magazine editors to become the stakeholders of new media stars: “Editors
feel that the kogyaru boom is nearly over and the next stage is to try to produce
individual stars from among the most popular schoolgirls” (Hashimoto interview,
30 November 1997).
Only rarely did girls receive payment for lending their energies to becoming
models for magazines. However, connections with editors also provided intro-
ductions to television producers, researchers, freelance writers, and other media
professionals who frequently did pay girls to appear on television shows or become
guides and informants of kogyaru life and tastes. The role of “professional school-
girls” is explored at more length in Chapter 3.
A history of feminine burlesque

As with glamorous visions of working women presented in early women’s maga-
zines in the 1910s and 1920s, kogyaru titles also offered young women liberated and
alternative visions, of who they might aspire to be become.29 Kogyaru magazines
also encouraged their readers to be pragmatic, energetic, unhampered by rules, and
engaged with the pleasures of the present moment. Egg magazine carried the slogan
“Bakushō” (Burst Out Laughing) on its cover, while an editor of the short-lived
kogyaru magazine Street Jam suggested that if the editorial board has a message to the
girls, it is “Play now while you can, because you won’t get the chance when you
become adults” (Hashimoto interview, 30 November 1997). Sociologist Miyadai
Shinji promulgated a more sophisticated version of this idea in his writing on
pursuing satisfaction, or “mattari”—the acquired art of living comfortably with
a post-revolutionary, “never-ending everyday life” (owarinaki nichijo)—which he
largely credits schoolgirls with pioneering. Miyadai suggests that, by leaving behind
illusions about family, work, and school, and conventional attitudes to sex, trend-
setting schoolgirls have been able to embrace “intensity” (ky d ) and “enjoy the
here and now” (Miyadai, 1997c: 260–263).
The coterminous proscription and description of kogyaru culture in the media
was reminiscent of the “gaudy legacy of escapism, titillation and outright sleaze”
which historian John Dower suggests was left behind by the lowbrow kasutori
culture of the early postwar years. Audacious, earthy kogyaru were presented in a
manner similar to “the denizens of kasutori culture [who] also exhibited an ardor
and vitality that conveyed a strong impression of liberation from authority and
dogma” (Dower, 1999: 148). In the work of the kasutori literati was a return to
humanity, with “impermanence, a world of no tomorrow, the banishment of
authority” (Dower, 1999: 155). Recognizing impermanence and living for the
moment with heightened energy and appetite were also attitudes that underscored
descriptions of independent “modern girls” (modan gaaru) in the 1920s. Fashionable
young women in the gaaru posture were described as “brightly breezy,” “highly
animated,” and “shockingly fond of double entendre and other erotic come hith-
ers” (Silverberg, 2006: 52). Du jour novelist Kataoka Teppei expressed his notion
of gaaru presentism in a short story published in 1928: “Boyfriend A to the modern
girl: My philosophy is this: Today is today. Tomorrow is tomorrow. I want to
be totally swept away by what I am feeling the very instant that I am feeling it.
Modern girl to Boyfriend A: I’m with you 100 percent” (cited in Barbara Sato,
2003: 65). Journalists documenting the modern girls of the 1925 to 1930 period
described them as independent and sexually promiscuous young women with a
taste for masculine and shockingly frank speech.
A few decades earlier still, a fondness for unfeminine sexual double entendres
and lewd jokes and gestures had also been observed in the repartee of both young
female factory hands and komori child-minders. In 1898, educational reformer
Miwada Masako recorded her opinion that factory girls
tend to be crude in their personalities. Working all day long away from their
parents, they tend to sing vulgar songs and engage in obscene talk. Unless
someone teaches them ‘women’s morality’ (joshi sh shin) it is natural that they
will be confused and tainted with vice.
(Quoted in Tamanoi, 1998: 222)
In a similar period of emergent industrialism, girls from the poorest families, par-
ticularly drawn from economically depressed areas such as Niigata, Gifu, and
Toyama, were contracted as komori to take charge of the youngest offspring of
hard-working rural households. But the long-suffering komori, generally forced
to tend to and entertain the infant strapped to her back outdoors and away from
the parental home in all weather, was described with increasing horror as part
of a workforce of resentful and delinquent urchins. One 1893 account described
how the komori “sing vulgar songs, damage carts and horses, and even make fun
of people passing by them. One cannot even mention their behaviour, which is
too crude, nor their language, which is too rude” (quoted in Tamanoi, 1998: 70).
The coarse and jolly behavior credited to kogyaru echoed these earlier accounts
of the behavior of local Japanese women of the lower orders, and also correlated
closely with what might be considered an international archetype of the prostitute
character. Writing on kogyaru in their ganguro phase in 2000, male photographer
Ōnuma Shoji penned: “In one day, I witness in one blast their materialism, their
sexual desire, and their appetite for food” (Ōnuma, 2001: introduction). This
description—if not projection—of unbridled physical desires bears extraordinary
similarity to comments scribed by the earliest formal student of modern pros-
titute behavior and phrenology, the Frenchman Parent-Duchalet. Researching
new urban prostitute populations in the mid-nineteenth century Parent-Duchalet
observed that they were “filthy, and spoke in a harsh voice” and showed a “lack
concern for the morrow,” while having an “energy of body and spirit that is truly
remarkable” (quoted in Bell, 1994: 48–49).
Produced subculture
The intensity of their interaction with reporters and camera crews and the organi-
zational centering of kogyaru activities within the editorial offices of high-school
girl magazines hint at the extent to which this subculture, while full-fledged
and entirely “real,” was also a highly professionally produced formation. It was
the more experienced editors, camera men, and assorted contract employees of
girls’ magazines, from ten to 30 years older than the schoolgirls, who composed
the headlines and the content, and helped promote the stylistic cleverness of
kogyaru looks and references. The position of girls’ magazines operating as the
self-designated headquarters of a new high-school street culture contained within
it a further interesting turn, since several of these editorial offices, in particular
Popteen, were also instrumental in producing, in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
the earliest reports of a new kind of schoolgirl prostitution, helping to propagate
the entire cycle of broadcasting and journalism about promiscuous schoolgirls
which ensued through the 1990s.
Early studies of youth culture by Stanley Cohen analyzing Mods and Rockers;
of subculture by Dick Hebdige thinking about Punk and Rastafarianism; and, in
a Japanese context, by Satō Ikuya looking at b s zoku motorbike gangs in Japan in
the 1980s each investigated how a subculture or social deviance, depending on who
defines it, can be fed and amplified through media attention. Performance leading
to publicity can obscure and divert the element of revolt against a system embed-
ded in deviance, and become a central feature of subcultural activity. Considering
Rave in the UK in the 1980s, cultural theorist Sarah Thornton attempted to dis-
entangle the “labyrinthine web of determining relations … between social groups
and the media, ‘reality’ and representation” (Thornton, 2000: 181). Thornton
observed that by the 1980s and in the case of Rave, “commercial interests have
planted the seeds, and courted discourses, of moral panic in seeking to gain the
favorable attention of youthful consumers” (Thornton, 2000: 189). The situation
of kogyaru in Japan verifies and exceeds this description, in that it was both a moral
panic in the format of news and a subculture in the format of fashion—both of
which were instigated and documented by editors employed in the same produc-
tion units. Boundary-pushing attempts to entertain readers with salacious stories
about errant schoolgirls published in porn magazines in the late 1980s and early
1990s had, by the mid-1990s, become a series of systematic and tightly interwoven
media relationships that could be relied upon to generate processed and attractive
images and fashion news about both kogyaru and compensated dating. Eventually it
was not schoolgirls but male readers, flattered in the role of cutting-edge voyeurs,
who were most targeted and stimulated to keep on consuming fashionable images
of kogyaru through provocative documentation and discourses.
Notes
1 Since the 1980s gyaru has operated as an opposite to the more ideal sh jo (girl) in
contemporary language, which tends to label women from a largely “patriarchal”
perspective—sh jo implying obedient and innocent (Shamoon, 2012: 10). The term
gyaru has insinuated sexual, pushy, self-aware, and dressed to impress one another and
to appeal to male tastes (Kinsella, 2005: 145–147).
2 This was a comic parody of actual “morality committees” (rinri iinkai) that meet to
discuss the moral health and cultural environment of minors in each local government
jurisdiction every month or two, depending on the timetable of each prefectural
government. The men on this “morality committee” panel included journalist Yoshii
Fujiki, a “Doctor Nakashima,” Suzuki Hirohisa, and otaku talent Taku Hachiro.
Amusingly, it transpired during a short documentary interlude within the show—in
which veteran female journalist Kikuchi Yōko is seen asking girls walking into Shibuya
Center-Gai “What are kogyaru?”—that in the sample she encountered and asked this
question only one woman had ever heard of the term.
3 For more detail on the history and main styles of the customized school uniform in
modern Japan, see Kinsella (2002).
4 Theresa Winge discusses the “transition phase” of “Lolis,” or Lolitas (Winge, 2008:
56–57).
5 An interesting article about nanchatte, accompanied by a photograph of five high-school
girls who attend the same high school but each wear a different self-assembled uniform,
appeared in the Asahi Shinbun on 15 March 2003.
6 An enduring association between schoolgirls and urban commuter trains extends back
to the beginnings of the twentieth century (Freeman, 2002). In the 1900s the term
“Trainology” (torenoroji-) came into vogue with university students, used to describe
the science of watching, judging, and molesting young women on commuter trains
(Tanaka, 2007: 45–47). In Tayama Katai’s classic short story Girl Watcher (1907), for
instance, Tayama describes Tokyo of the 1900s as follows: “Society was advancing
with each new day. Suburban trains had revolutionized Tokyo’s transport system. Girl
students had become something of a force, and nowadays, even if he’d wanted to,
he wouldn’t have been able to find the old-fashioned sort of girl he’d known in his
courting days” (Tayama, 1981: 36–37). Scenes in which schoolgirls are featured on or
near trains are also ubiquitous to culture produced about high schoolgirls in the 1990s.
Anno Hideaki’s film Love & Pop (1998) about compensated dating, for example, begins
with a theatrical scene of a schoolgirl in uniform, straddling the tracks of a toy train set.
7 Prewar investigative journalist Satō Hachiro makes a similar observation of
schoolgirls in the late 1920s/early 1930s, namely that they pursue “the delinquent
girl as fashion, performing brazen acts for their shock value and walking the streets
essentially proclaiming that their chastity was available for the taking.” (Satō [1931]
cited in Ambaras, 2005: 149).
8 Between 1992 and 2002 the number of girls going on to university doubled. In 1992 it
was 16.1 percent, and by 2002 this figure had increased to 33.8 percent. Source: Fujin
Hakusho [–1999] and the Josei Rōdō Hakusho [2000–2002], Monbushō.
9 Photographer Ōnuma Shoji makes mention of a girl stranded in the city center at night,
after the last trains had departed, ruefully describing herself as “runpenppoi” or “like a
beggar” (Ōnuma, 2001).
10 In March 2003 I asked six fashionable young women, waiting to meet their friends in
cafés in Shibuya, to read through this list of about 40 so-called kogyaru terms. All the
women I asked to be my respondents were in their early twenties and all had been high-
school girls in the period between 1995 and 2002. While they recalled kogyaru speech
and style with amusement, as something that reminded them of their schooldays, none
of them agreed that they had previously heard most of these terms before, or in their
high-school days.
11 In autumn 1997 and summer 1998 I distributed a four-page self-completion questionnaire

survey, titled Wakai hitotachi: media to pop-culture ni tsuite no kans (Young People:
Impressions of the Media and Popculture), to 36 respondents from a range of locations
around the Tokyo region and Saitama prefecture. Half of these respondents were first-
year students at Nihon University in summer 1998, and another seven respondents were
high-school students and members of an after-school club in Chichibu City, Saitama
prefecture. Care was taken to distribute the survey to a range of teenagers from across
the capital region, including different social and geographical backgrounds. There were
nine male, 24 female, and three gender-undisclosed respondents between the ages of
15 and 22 years old. All respondents had been middle- or high-school students, or
just about to graduate from high school, at the peak of media coverage on kogyaru
and compensated dating in 1996 and 1997, and most had been the high-school peers
of participants of kogyaru style. All of the surveys were completed anonymously, but
each group of respondents received some encouragement and a verbal overview of my
research in advance.
12 Genda Yuji comments on the depth of the significance of education that “the weight
given by society to educational achievement and the inferiority complex many Japanese
have on this subject remain as deeply rooted as ever” (Genda, 2006: 10).
13 A “ladette” is coarse, heavy-drinking, and generally laddish young woman (Lads and
Ladettes in School, Jackson, 2006).
14 “Yume wo miru onna zasshi” (Sasaki Toshiharu interview, at the Shuppan Kenky j ,
December 2002).
15 For more on these magazines, see Lise Skov and Brian Moeran, eds., Women, Media and
Consumption in Japan (Richmond: Curzon, and Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
1995).
16 A magazine is able to get conbeni (convenience store) distribution when its sales start to
exceed approximately 25,000 copies per issue. It is an important breakthrough point
that helps to promote further sales (Sasaki interview, December 2002).
17 “Onna ga kanjiru sex” (Popteen, May 1993: 11).
18 While considered a rather respectable publishing company on account of its relatively
conservative main title, Shufu no Tomo (Housewife’s Companion), in fact Shufu no
Tomo Sha (Housewife’s Companion Publishing Company) had already experimented
with creating a sexier magazine for teenage girls. In June 1984 Shufu no Tomo launched
Girls City (Gyaru Shitei), which featured the cover slogan “Crazy Love” (nech rabu
rabu) and pictures of cute perky young teenage girls teamed up with editorial headlines
such as “I want boys” (Gyaru Shitei, June 1984). After becoming embroiled in National
Diet discussions about morality, this title folded within the year, but insiders suggest
that its format (sexy fun for girls) may have been a prototype across the industry, which
reemerged with more success in the kogyaru magazines of the 1990s (Sasaki interview,
December 2002).
19 Zealous editors and highly competitive magazine publishing in the prewar period had
created an early precedent for the inclusion of salacious and covertly sexual “confessional
articles” (kokuhaku kiji) in women’s magazines in an attempt to “lure new readers”
(Sato, 2003: 87) from other titles. Shufu no Tomo magazine and company, later the
publisher of Cawaii! magazine had made an early mark with thrilling articles on birth
control (1919) and wearing Western clothing (1923).
20 While 70 percent of state high schools in the Tokyo Metropolitan region required
pupils to wear a uniform in 1993, a significant number did not, including the majority
of metropolitan high schools (t ritsu k k ). However, the fashionable status of uniforms
encouraged many if not almost all female students to experiment with adding to and
exchanging items of their official school uniform. Drooping, oversized white school
sweaters, worn with natty bows and neckties, tended to be an indication of the nanchatte
spirit at play in the late 1990s.
21 Bauhouse was an entrepreneurial offshoot, sheltering beneath the offices of the more
established porn publisher Eichi Shuppan, which publishes a rather well-known otaku-
oriented Lolita-complex title, Beppin School, a revival of the earlier Beppin magazine,
which, along with Bejean, had come into conflict with the FBI in the 1990s and ceased
publication under that title. Eichi is itself a branch of the Uchu Kikaku pornographic
consortium and a major porn AV producer.
22 Ikuya Satō suggests that there was an “almost symbiotic relationship between bosozoku
youths’ preoccupation with media presentation and the media’s curiosity about them”
(Satō, 1991: 96). For kogyaru, too, performing for journalists allowed them to enjoy a
“heightened sense of self” and to feel a sense of “celebrity” (Satō, 1991: 94).
23 Each machine cost the games arcade about 1,350,000 yen, and was then expected to
make an average profit of 30,000 yen a week. Interestingly, a larger part of the profit
generated by print club machines for Sega and other makers was not from sales of the
machines to arcades—about 40 percent of the profits for Sega until 1997—but from
ongoing sales of the photographic seal paper, which each arcade was then obliged to
keep purchasing from Sega and other producers (Koyama Hideyuki interview, 1997).
24 Yankii is a school-dropout subculture and style with links to the b s zoku of the 1970s
and 1980s.
25 Or, as the chief editor of Cawaii! magazine put it, “The look in [kogyaru] fashion mimics
adult nightlife” (Ogino interview, 12 November 1997).
26 This image of schoolgirls as oriented toward contemporary careers, bypassing
educational-credentialism by using their wit and style to become models, actresses, and
dancers, is also touched on in film, for example, scenes in Bounce Kogal (1997) in which
high-school kids train as dancers by night.
27 US fashion magazine Harpers Bazaar photographs and relabels the apparently trend-
setting 109 shop assistants as “Japanistas.” See “Tokyo Glamorama” (Harpers Bazaar,
October 2000: 311–315 and 338).
28 After investigations into inappropriate exposure of minors to “harmful” materials at Egg
editorial it was closed in July 2000, to be relaunched the next month with a new editor
and a new publisher—Taiyō Tosho. In fact the original publisher, Million, is part of
the Taiyō Tosho group, and Taiyō Tosho itself is the most important industrial rival
to Uchu Kikaku and the Eichi Shuppan group of pornographic enterprises, which also
launched Heart Candy and Happie kogyaru magazines—through the Bauhouse label.
29 Writing on women’s magazines in the prewar period Barbara Sato highlights that by
“linking women and consumption on a personal level, mass women’s magazines acted
as a positive force encouraging women to become producers of the emerging urban
culture” (Sato, 2003: 89, and more broadly 76–113).
5
THE SURVEILLANCE OF
FINANCIAL DEVIANCY
One of the core images of the media narrative on deviant schoolgirls in the 1990s
was that of a schoolgirl grasping a wad of 10,000-yen notes in her small hand (see
Figure 5.1). Girls protecting and totting up their cash became continual themes
in drama and journalism.1 Sexual experience and experience with money became
intertwined taboos in imagery and reportage. In fact, money and brand-name
goods came to stand in for prostitution to such a degree that cash began to take on
a sexual aura, while new purchases, especially handbags and brand-name pouches,
were cast in the role of erotic bodies. One of the devices used to structure report-
age by magazine editorial and television crews was to ask girls to tip the contents
of their bags or purses onto a square of red cloth laid on the ground, to show the
camera their personal possessions. Reporters looked especially for cash, personal
organizers, lists of phone numbers, brand-name wallets, cell phones, and expensive
cosmetic pouches and cosmetics. Merely the appearance of these items on a page or
screen was enough to stimulate ideas about precocious acquisitiveness and prostitu-
tion. Just as cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall suggested of sexualized newspaper
representations of black British people, such as athletes and known personalities,
in the 1980s to 1990s, so in this reportage on girls, “what is visually produced, by
the practices of representation, is only half the story. The other half—the deeper
meaning—lies in what is not being said, but is being fantasized, what is implied but cannot
be shown” (Hall, 1997: 263).
Through the lens, these examinations bore resemblance to miniature sex scenes
in which the jumble of sexual bodies on rumpled sheets had been exchanged for
shiny brand-name objects caught in flagrante on the rumpled red cloth. Views
magazine featured this handbag investigation technique as early as 1996, and
duly listed the contents of one schoolgirl’s bag as a “make-up pouch, a system
date book, mobile phone, and a wallet containing condoms” (Views, 26 April
1996). The theme of passion-bordering-on-sexual-attraction for new brand-name
FIGURE 5.1 A full-page illustration of the history of compensated dating shows a barefoot
girl in school uniform walking on the shore with cash in her hand
Source: reproduced with kind permission of Spa! magazine.
90 The surveillance of financial deviancy
accoutrements crossed over into English-language reportage, too. Mayumi

Ohshima, “29, a Tokyo home-maker” was cited in the Wall Street Journal, for
example, saying, “The economic slump doesn’t matter. Tonight, I’d like to sleep
with this bag beside me” (“The Japanese Paradox,” 23 September 2003).
This school “pocket-inspection” style of surveillance recurred across both the
entertainment and news media. For example, a 1997 episode of the popular vari-
ety show Japan: What a Weird Place!, hosted by Beat Takeshi, showed its domestic
studio audience a documentary insert of high-school girls and their accessories
filmed on the streets. Footage showed the production team asking girls in kogyaru-
style school uniforms to empty out their bags on the pavement and to explain
their contents. Through the camera, audience attention was focused on expensive
items such as mobile phones, brand-name pouches, and … a Hermès bracelet. The
owner of this bracelet in question was asked to calculate the total value of all the
items in her bag and replied succinctly, “About four hundred thousand yen.” The
interview ended at this point and the audience is left to imagine and presume.2
In televisual and photographic representations of compensated dating, it was
getting money as much as offering sex that lay at the center of the scandal. Television
producers plumped up their footage by excavating red-light districts in search of
young women in school uniforms. See resident duo Hamada Masatoshi and come-
dian Shōfukutei Shōhei, of the late night show Hamasho, meet a girl dressed in a
classic sailor-suit uniform in a f zoku establishment in October 1997 in Figure 5.2.
On the screen telop lettering relays to viewers that she could earn as much as
“80,000 yen!” with one client. The woebegone state of the young woman—who
appears to be nursing a broken arm in a sling—is not commented upon.
A weekly talent photo-shoot (gravura) situated at the front of the weekly cur-
rent affairs magazine Sh kan Bunshun presents another visually coded example of
this ubiquitous receiving motif. For its 27 November 1997 issue, Bunshun com-
missioned Nakama Yurie, a 17-year-old media talent with an otherwise demure
image, to pose as a well-heeled quasi-schoolgirl figure interacting with anonymous
businessmen. Nakama is shown in school-regulation style knee-high socks and
school loafers, serving waffle biscuits to grateful male office workers on the roof
of an uptown building. In another full-page shot, Nakama reappears as a slip of a
girl dressing up as an adult (otona-kei), in a women’s business suit. She is clutching
a shiny cardboard Chanel shopping bag, suggesting an expensive purchase, and
reclines in a posture of gratitude and supplication against the wall of a bank-like
edifice. Facing her and with his back to the camera is a virile suited male figure
with whom she appears to have just concluded a secret exchange (Sh kan Bunshun,
27 November 1997: 5–7).
Money-grubbing schoolgirls also became fashionable references in advertis-
ing and product design. In 1998, Fila marketed a snowboard called Sexy Ranger,
designed by Hideyuki Tanaka. The “sexy ranger” depicted is a sassy schoolgirl
character in kogyaru micro-shorts uttering the slogan “Money, that’s all I want.” In
photo-stills, film, and television, girls frequently appeared counting up sums, wait-
ing in anticipation for wallets to be opened, or handling handfuls of bank notes.
The surveillance of financial deviancy 91
FIGURE 5.2 Hosts of the late-night show Hamasho visit a “soapland” and find a girl in
school uniform
Source: photograph from television screen, October 1997.
In this compulsion to see people meet and exchange goods, money and sex were
made almost interchangeable subjects. What compelled was not witnessing sex acts
precisely but witnessing evidence of a novel and illicit market for exchange—money
for a schoolgirl’s time—which reconfirmed in a new epoch Luce Irigaray’s influ-
ential feminist proposition that the “virginal woman” is “pure exchange value,”
so much so that she herself appears as nothing more than a “semblance” or image
of an actual woman. A fixation with virginity and “newness” in girls is the symbol
and betrayal of a preoccupation with male social networks, prestige, and exchange
in the capitalist market place. While mothers are symbols of use value, Irigaray
asserts that young unattached women, ultimately represented as virgins, are in fact
signifiers of exchange value alone:
The virginal woman, on the other hand is pure exchange value. She is nothing but
the possibility, the place, the sign of relations among men. In and of herself,
she does not exist: she is a simple envelope veiling what is really at stake in
social exchange.
(Irigaray, 1985 [1977]: 185–186)
Branded goods and indebted girls

While on the one hand schoolgirls were accused of being motivated by the
desire to own brand-name accessories and handbags, other strands of discussion
treated schoolgirls themselves as the desirable accessories. Critics proposed that
joshi k sei (high-school girl) was a word that had become attached as a suffix to
other products as a kind of living brand. The schoolgirl’s uniform evidenced her
brand status according to some journalistic accounts: “My Lady high school girl,
that will nevertheless never be queen, feels the importance of the brand value of
her uniform” (Hayami, 1996b: 223). In an interesting scene in Anno Hideaki’s
1998 film Love & Pop, the quiet schoolgirl Hiromi has become inexplicably fix-
ated by a topaz ring in the glass display cabinet of a department store. As Hiromi
gazes down at the ring with her friends and they make admiring sighs of appre-
ciation, their circle of entranced faces are portrayed using a fish-eye camera lens,
as if from the ring’s viewpoint, creating a sense that the ring is willful and has
power over them.3
This means of portraying girls, suggesting that their subjectivity is manipulated
by the brand identity of the expensive products they wear or want to get, continues
the vein of 1980s discourse on consumer society. And indeed, a dominant explana-
tion made of the apparently excessive materialism of schoolgirls in the midst of an
economic recession in Japan was that they were the offspring of the 1980s brought
up in homes flush with credit. Unlike the rest of the population that was learning
to knuckle down to an extended period of parsimony and financial restraint by the
mid-nineties, kogyaru, it was suggested, were the last flame of the high-spending
ambitious eighties: teenagers who had been raised in high-spending households
of that bubble period and were determined to maintain the lifestyle of disposable
wealth. The ambitious notion that the materialistic activities of schoolgirls could
recharge the deflating economy and that their “cultural power” (hatsugenryoku)
could generate business became a thread winding through the compensated dat-
ing debate. One writer for dacapo (an older men’s magazine) marveled, “It is in
a sense absolutely true that what the girls’ networks do, and what they know,
are moving the whole of society” (dacapo, 1997: 92). One self-defined veteran of
paid dates with schoolgirls suggested to me that “since they were small they have
received money and presents. They have learned that they simply receive” (Shibata
interview, 4 October 1997). Ogino Yoshiyuki, chief editor of Cawaii! magazine,
explained likewise that:
I can’t prove this but when those girls were in elementary and middle school
it was the bubble period. They got their money without working, from their
parents, and the experience was imprinted in their minds. So now their par-
ents are poorer but the girls are used to having a lot of money, and they expect
it. The feeling is very much “I’ve got to be rich, I’m gonna get money.”
(Ogino interview, 12 November 1997)
Subtle and reflexive stylistic reactions to the issue of money that were embedded
in gyaru fashion were not often presented as potentially legitimate expressions of
feminine social awareness, but instead framed with blunt and forceful repetition as
symptoms of a blind, unintelligent, and risible greed.
Worthy girls
More critical veins of social commentary, sympathetic in varying degrees to
female emancipation, attempted to counter the dominating stereotype of selfish
and materialistic girls by interjecting other ideas about their class backgrounds
and socio-economic circumstances. In an interview published in 1997, Murakami
Ryū pointed out that in his experience chatting (sh zai) with girls, “They did
not particularly want Chanel goods, foreign holidays, or a good-looking boy-
friend.” Investigative journalist Kuronuma Katsushi, the interviewer, agreed with
Murakami that the girls he had talked to thought that “Chanel was just snob-
bery.” Encountering contemporary schoolgirls for the first time in the mid-1990s,
Murakami tested their spending habits by acting out a scene in which:
I told them quite clearly “I’ll give you thirty thousand yen so buy what you
want,” [to which] they all went all “What!? Really?” One girl would not
spend all the money—she got very sensible things. She was a wise shopper. I
asked about brand name goods and she said “they’re expensive and meaning-
less.” She got a dress for about four thousand yen, then three pairs of loose
socks because “there’s no choice.” There was still ten thousand yen left but
she gave it back to me and said she was tired.
(Murakami and Katsushi, 1997: 289)
For the two most constant interlocutors of schoolgirl deviance, investigative jour-
nalist Hayami Yukiko and sociologist Miyadai Shinji, money was merely a link in a
chain of motivations. For Hayami, juvenile consumption was a personal challenge:
“Lying beneath the surface of desires, felt as ‘I want money’ or ‘I want brand name
goods,’ is a game-like mentality in which the girls challenge themselves to see how
much capital they can make” (Hayami, 1996a: 63). For Miyadai, money was not
an end but a route to socializing:
Even in cases where the sex is exchanged primarily to get money, the money
is required for staying out on the streets at night, not for anything else. So why
do they need money to go out? That is where the real question lies. Saying
you just need money is not in itself about materialism. It may look superficially
like materialism, but really it is going shopping to dispel loneliness.
(Miyadai, 1997a: 13)
These reformist commentators were sympathetic to young women’s and girls’

culture, and preferred to interpret compensated dating sympathetically as a key
moment in grass-roots girls’ resistance. Read more about the hopes placed on girls’
resistance in Chapter 9.
Gyaru: a history of material girls

Young women living by their own means in the city have been felt to be an
unsettling and wayward element, suspected of financing their own needs rather
than remaining loyal to family or employee interests in the modern imagination.
Historian Sheldon Garon corroborates the longevity of this perspective: “Japanese
authorities similarly feared the emergence of a huge class of hedonistic women,
as daughters left home to become factory workers or housemaids in the rapidly
modernizing society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Garon,
1998: 102). Complaints about the worrying fondness of young women for luxury
and their concomitant tendency to turn their noses up at marriage to poor suitors
had been voiced in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. As one rural lad
complained in 1927 of young women who had left the village to work in factories,
“Even when they come back to the village from the factories, they’ve turned com-
pletely high-class. With their hair done up and perfumed and all, they won’t even
look at us” (Ramseyer, 1996: 135).
In the immediate postwar period, decadence and pleasure-seeking individual-
ism was linked to the treasonous behavior of the Japanese girls known as pan pan:
the military prostitutes and companions serving the Occupation forces. A police
sweep-up of unlicensed prostitutes in the first five months of 1947 led to 17,871
arrests, including those of many “ordinary” working women (Garon, 1998: 198).
A survey of their motivations, which set the mold for subsequent police surveys
into female deviancy, found that only 47 percent of these women were motivated
by financial hardship, while 24 percent were motivated by “curiosity” (Garon,
1998: 197). As with purportedly promiscuous café waitresses of the prewar cities,
the authorities grew suspicious that the pan pan or yami no onna (streetwalkers) of
the Occupation era were choosing to engage in prostitution in a deviant manner.
They became controversial figures presented as using their bodies, and a quickly
assembled facility to communicate successfully in “panglish” (Dower, 1999: 135),
to obtain coveted samples of American glamour from their customers—lipstick,
nylon tights, and colorful clothes (Dower, 1999: 137).
From around the early 1980s, self-serving and materialistic gyaru behavior was
regularly lampooned in current affairs reportage and television broadcasting, leaving
a trail of media terms and caricatures of young women, from burikko (Kinsella, 1995:
222–225), yellow cabs (Hirota, 2000), oyaji gyaru (old bloke girls), otachidai gyaru (a
platform girl, at Juliana’s disco in the 1980s), and bodikon gyaru (body-conscious
girls, in tight stretchy miniskirt outfits) to the “female university students” (joshi
daisei) portrayed in Tanaka Yasuo’s 1981 novel Somehow Crystal and the implic-
itly feminine “new breed” (shinjinrui) of 1985 to the early 1990s (Hirakawa, 2000:
60–62; Kinsella, 1995: 292–293). While cute girls of the 1980s—which are associ-
ated with the cute pop-idol business and idols like Matsuda Seiko or large teenage
girl groups such as Morning Musume—were supposed to stage the sh jo ideals of

sweetness and innocence, in fact, as Ōtsuka Eiji evidences in his Native Ethnography
of Girls (Sh jo Minzokugaku, 1989), virginal sh jo had also been viewed as essentially
materialistic. Sh jo were for a few years presented as the unconscious model citizens
of a postmodern consumer society.4 In the Structure of the Girl (1993), which reviews
the changes in girls’ fashion and ambitions over the course of the 1980s, Yamane
Kazuma writes that, rather than naively hoping to meet a rich man and marry him,
girls in the gyaru mode used all their guile to make sure that they got that husband.
Inflation and the rapid rise in house prices meant that these young women viewed
a salaried husband as their principle means of attaining financial security, making
them simultaneously more ambitious and worldly and yet more dependent on a
lifestyle of service and dependency (Yamane, 1993: 86–87): “Originating with the
economic-supremacism of the 1980s, gyaru were bewitching young women who
utilized their looks like weapons, and infested cities with their combination of anti-
social and infantile behavior” (Yamane, 1993: 35).
Tanaka Yasuo’s much-cited and emblematic novel Somehow Crystal (1980) por-
trays the snobbish and individualistic lifestyle of a female university student whose
sense of cultivation is based on numerous careful and expensive consumer pur-
chases. Ōtsuka Eiji later argued that one of the key sentences in this best-selling
novel is: “When I’m in my thirties I want to be a woman with the kind of mood
that suits a Chanel suit.” “That is to say,” spells out Ōtsuka, discussing the lead
character, “that her femininity is merely molded by the outlines offered by brand
name goods” (Ōtsuka, 2001: 97). Tokyo Decadence (1989) is a film about the osten-
sible psychology of such materialistic young women also associated with the ‘new
breed’ (shinjinrui). The lead character, who is earning money as high-class call girl,
is asked to look down at the city spread below from the windows of a luxury hotel
room while she strips. Her client disparages her as “OL trash” far out of her depth
in the specialist S&M sex trade.5
High-school girls identified as kogyaru were initially introduced in the media as
the junior versions of the apparently avaricious and “prostitute-like” gyaru reigning
over the 1980s. Accumulating criticism of the materialism of young women typi-
fied as gyaru (Bardsley, 2005: 113–115; Kinsella, 1995: 243–250) found a new edge
in news about schoolgirls willing to prostitute themselves to get funds and brand-
name products, and less than willing to be chaste daughters preserving themselves
for marriage and a husband. Long-running suspicions about a frustrating female
reluctance to marry and raise children (Schoppa, 2006: 150–182; Ueno and Ogura,
2003) unless they could find the ideal suitor—wealthy, in a stable and prestigious
career, helpful, and liberal in his views and expectations of his wife—deepened
in the twenty-first century. Otaku critic and author Honda Tōru (Moeru Otoko,
2005) has argued that a system of “love capitalism” (renai shihonshugi) whereby
men who were not handsome or did not have well-paid and regular employ-
ment were being systematically excluded from dating and marriage had become
fully instituted (Galbraith, 2009a: 4–5). The men he represents as suffering from
“relationship inequality” (renai kakusa) can be broadly correlated with the growing
body of male part-timers and “working poor” who console themselves with two-
dimensional “virtual wives” and submerge themselves in moe culture and its endless
stream of sexual and kindly girl characters. Since 2008, the Revolutionary League
of Himote [rejected men] (Kakumeiteki Himote Dōmei) has organized spoof-but-
serious street demos to ‘Smash Valentine Day’ and run an internet-based campaign
to promote the rights of those himote [rejected men] arguing that “being ‘himote’
[sexually rejected] is a class problem” (Interview with the spokesperson, Mark
Water, 3 August 2013).
Preventing girls from nighttime loitering

Over the twentieth century, the management of teenage women drifting into the
sex industry as “amateur girls” (shir to girls) has been a key theme of legislation and
police monitoring in Japan. The image of apparently “bright and cheery” schoolgirls
undertaking compensated dating to fund their own activities resonated with embed-
ded hostilities with deep historical roots toward unlicensed or “hidden” prostitutes
(kakushi baika); (Sone, 1999: 175). Compulsive attention to the vaudeville of school-
girls doing compensated dating indicated the spectacular reemergence in the 1990s of
one of the most hoary and historically entrenched tension points in modern Japanese
society: the potential of young women utilizing their sexuality, and perhaps the sex
industry, too, to forge independent livelihoods and solo lifestyles which remove
them from financial dependence and service in the family. Sitting on the delicate
structural conjunction of class and gender, the anxiety about girls losing their purity
is especially sensitive in respect to those “ordinary girls” (futsu no ko) originating in
good middle-class families who ought not to either want or need to resort to earn
money to support independent lives. A hint about the ubiquity of the postwar myth
of the “ordinary girl” can be found in the title and topic of Uchida Shungiku’s manga
book The Illusory Ordinary Girl (1987).
Throughout the twentieth century, Japanese law has effectively tolerated pros-
titution managed within recognized businesses (f zoku eigy ), but has prevented
schoolgirls and amateurs from operating their own deals on the streets and online.
In the context of a society featuring the widespread use of indentured female labor
in factories and in brothels, and one in which many fathers took up their legal right
to sell their daughters into the early decades of the twentieth century, voluntary or
casual prostitution instigated by women for their own profit rather than to supple-
ment “household income” (Hunter, 1993: 2) has long been considered a deviant
market associated with problematic female independence.
The Youth Law (Shōnen Hō) was first introduced to deal with youths aged
14 to 17 years (Amabaras, 2005: 106) in 1922 and revised in 1948 and once again
2000—when it became the New Youth Act (Shin Shōnen Hō)—and again in
2010. Its primary concerns regarding delinquent girls were and continue to be pre-
venting young women from “nighttime loitering” (shinya haikai), “running away
from home” (iede), and “self-injurious activity” (jish k i), each largely under-
stood to be closely bound up with amateur prostitution. The 1956 Prostitution
Prevention Act (Baishun Bōshi Hō) sharply increased the legal punishment of indi-
vidual women attempting to carry out freelance sex work, although it was less able
to control juveniles below the age of criminal prosecution (Leheny, 2006: 66–67),
isolating teenage girls became the principal focus of police monitoring and regula-
tion thereafter.
In the later postwar period, police regulation of juvenile female deviance and its
relationship to wanting money became systematic in the same period as increasing
media reportage about materialistic young women. In 1976, annual police white-
papers (Keisatsu Haku Sho) and crime reports (Hanzai T kei Sho) started to include
a section tabulating the rates of female sexual deviancy, and the degree to which
deviance was motivated by money. In the second half of the 1970s, the so-called
“third wave of deviancy” emerged (Satō, 1991: 203). Its characteristics were the
spread and “generalization” (ippanka) of deviant behavior from lower-class and
underprivileged children to the “normal” (futs ) offspring of the middle classes, and
the increased involvement of teenage girls in sexual deviancy. Deviancy scholars
noted that:
Previously, one could tell at a glance, from their appearance and aura, the sort
of girls that would get guidance for sexual deviancy. Generally they would be
the “dropout” students getting reprimanded by their school administration
from a relatively early grade. A few of them would be from broken homes,
and had been handicapped by the way they had been raised … Recently,
however, that image has changed. The number of so-called “ordinary” girls
getting guidance for sexual deviancy has become conspicuous. Most of those
put under guidance for sexual deviancy don’t have a guilty look; they look
bright and indifferent.
(Kiyonaga, 1999: 102)
A police survey carried out in 1997 of girls receiving guidance (h d ) for sexual
deviancy and shoplifting similarly found less distinction by socio-economic back-
ground than might be envisaged of petty criminal youth (Ishibashi et al., 1997).
From the mid-1970s girls brought into police custody for guidance (h d )6 have
been routinely asked to respond to a questionnaire that asks them to indicate their
motive for sexual deviancy (generally understood as attempts to prostitute them-
selves) by selecting from among the following answers:
Because of “interest (or curiosity)” (ky mi [k kishin] kara)

Because of “liking a particular man” (tokutei no otoko ga suki de)
Because of “wanting money for leisure” (asobukane ga hoshikute)
Because of “liking sex” (sekkusu ga suki de)
Other reasons (sono hoka)
The numbers of girls answering that they voluntarily (mizukara susunda) engaged in
sexual deviance (sei no itsudatsu k i) and that their motivation was “wanting money
for leisure” has received close attention, and has been itemized and displayed in tables
in police research and annual reports, indicating, again, a special sensitivity toward
young women voluntarily earning money. Police figures of girls apprehended for sexual
deviance were highest in the 1980s and had decreased by the 1990s, but the rate at
which apprehended girls claimed during surveys filed while in police custody to be
motivated by “money” increased to around 50 percent. Some scholars of deviancy
have interpreted this response as indicative of a shift toward “absolute prostitution”
(Watanabe, 1997: 12). While previously, and until the 1970s, juvenile prostitution
could be said to have been motivated by poverty and “wanting money to live” (sei-
katsu shikin hoshisa), and was therefore associated with girls from poor, single-parent,
and otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds, in the 1990s it was motivated by the desire
for luxury and fun (Watanabe, 1997: 10–13). Aside from utilising absolute and ahis-
torical definitions of poverty, Watanabe Kenshi’s interpretation is not easily sustained.
The police survey on the motivation for sexual deviancy has a fixed range of possible
responses, and “financial need” is not listed. The only multiple-choice answer that
includes mention of money at all is the answer “money for leisure” (asobukane ga hoshi-
kute). It is quite possible that respondents wanting money for any number of reasons,
perhaps more meaningful than the concept of “leisure” implies, would have selected
this as their most closely matching answer. Institutional and legal prongs of the regula-
tion and surveillance of young women finding ways to get money have supported the
culture of suspicion visible in journalistic and television reportage.
Slaves to fashion
Intriguingly, the rather circuitous idea of aspiring young women being enchanted
but simultaneously curtailed and trapped by luxury goods echoes the role of
fashion and make-up as tools of bondage in the lives of women of the “bar-
barous classes” (Hirota, 1999: 217) indentured as overseas karayuki as well as
domestic geisha and prostitutes. For these women, whose earnings depended on
attracting men with expensive clothes and accessories, the conspicuous acces-
sories that have been associated with personal greed and vanity have often been
precisely the type of luxurious and garish items—lipstick, nylon tights, face-
powders, make-up bags, brand-name fashions—that have been essential props of
their trade. Women indentured to brothels in nineteenth-century Japan found
it all the more difficult to work off their debt and leave their employers because
they incurred extra expenditures purchasing clothes and other items essential to
trade. A prostitute
had to purchase clothing, cosmetics and treats, to serve her guests, and char-
coal to warm them; she had to spend money on hairdressing, visits to the
bathhouse, and doctor’s fees. Many a brothel keeper deliberately ordered
expensive items to keep his workers in debt.
(Tsurumi, 1990: 183)
One overseas karayuki working in the prewar period explained, using her own
arithmetic, how it was that her entire income was eaten up by maintaining her
appearance:
Of course, clothing expenses differed according to the item, but a yukata

[light-weight kimono] would cost about one yen, while a kimono made of
various types of crepe or brocade would cost about ten yen. A Hakata obi
[waist band] was about two yen.
[The] cosmetics we had to have were a paste of white powder and lipstick. The
white facial paste was ten sen per bottle and lasted for about one month. In addi-
tion to these, we also had to buy underwear and tissue papers, so all together we
spent about ten yen per month on cosmetics and related items. If you subtract
the cost of clothes, cosmetics, and other things, there was nothing left.
The brothel bosses would cut a deal with one of the owners of the dry goods
and sundries store, encouraging them to sell us kimono and cosmetics we
didn’t even need.
(Yamazaki, 1999: 165–166)
The history of women beholden to their outfits, donned to seduce and excite the
imagination of their clientele, pertains to specific moments in capitalist societies
around the world. The correlation of girls for sale with consumerism in con-
temporary Japan is reminiscent of the increased circulation of luxury goods in
nineteenth-century Europe. One category of Victorian English prostitutes were
known as “dress-lodgers,” on account of the fact that they did not own the fin-
ery and accessories they wore to ply their trade. In fact they were chaperoned to
prevent them from running away while still wearing their borrowed finery, whose
value was many times higher than their earnings (Valverde, 1989: 180). The fin-
ery was on sale in this prostitution, not merely an unadorned body. Of the close
interaction between market exchange and the marketing of female sexuality in
turn-of-the-century Paris, Walter Benjamin argued that “the commodity wants
to look into its own face. It celebrates its incarnation in the prostitute” (Rauch,
1988: 87). Contemporary Japanese journalistic imagination and girls’ street styles
themselves reached backward and re-invoked a classic symbolic embroilment of
promiscuity and materialism.
The slavish conditions of young female labor

While lacking even notional degrees of financial power and civic status for much of
the twentieth century preceding the introduction of legal moves toward a gender-
equal (danjo by d ) society in the late 1990s and 2000s, the sort of young women
who might be called “girls,” the majority between the ages of about 14 and 25
years old, have nevertheless left their families and homes and entered the modern
public sphere in large numbers as workers. In Japan it was not the flat-capped,
taciturn working men employed to extract coal and forge metal who might be
envisaged in an industrial Europe, but filial daughters—girls—who formed the core
of the emergent mass industrial labor force organized around the textiles industry.
In 1909, women comprised 62 percent of the total factory labour force (Bowen-
Struyk, 2009: 12). The female majority in the factories and “lumpen proletariat”
continued through to the 1930s (Garon, 1998: 13). From the last decades of the
nineteenth century, their primary occupations were manual labor in the silk and
cotton industries, domestic service, and prostitution. Economic upheaval across
the countryside stimulated a “burgeoning trade in young female bodies from the
Meiji period onward” (Aoki Yayoi in Buckley, 1997b: 25). Several million young
working girls formed a migratory (dekasegi) labor force, moving about the coun-
try for extended periods and returning only periodically to their families. In The
Pitiful History of Factory Women, a pioneering account of female workers published
in 1925, the female industrial labor force is presented allegorically as the mother
of the nation:
The “mill” pulls the stock made by the father into yarn, and weaves it into
cloth, with which it dresses children. The latter has a specifically “maternal
nature,” that is to say it is a labor of love. If in reality farmers are the fathers of
the race, then the “mill” must be the mother of the race.
(Hosoi, 1954 [1925]: 20)
Female factory hands were also described in ethnic and gendered terms as the
“flowers of the people” (hito no hana), devoting themselves to national produc-
tion—a feminine self-sacrifice motivated by filial loyalty to their parents (Faison,
2007: 14.) By 1902, the combined workforce, largely female, of cotton and silk
mills was 182,960, and this rose to 454,122 by 1919. Another significant des-
tination for young working girls was weaving workshops. In 1900, weaving
establishments alone officially hired 828,407 women (Tsurumi, 1990: 174). While
typically between 10 and 20 years old, in some regions the majority of these girls
were 14 years old or younger (Tsurumi, 1990: 178). In 1898, a government survey
showed that among Nagano silk workers, 1 percent were under 10 years of age;
16 percent were under 14 years old; 47 percent were between 14 and 20 years; and
the rest in their early twenties (Tsurumi, 1990: 86). A further government survey
carried out in 1909 showed that 85.2 percent of textile industry employees were
female (Odaka, 1993: 17; Tsurumi, 1990: 10). Access to a cheap and plentiful labor
force of young and teenage women, whose earnings were largely diverted back to
their fathers, has been recognized as a significant element in the stimulation of a
modern capitalist economy in Japan.7
Another group of girls were sold by their relatives to brothels on fixed con-
tracts of between two and six years, in exchange for lump sums in cash known as
“advanced loans” (zenshakkin), ostensibly borrowed against their daughters’ future
earnings. Girls typically had to work beyond the terms of their contracts in order to
pay back debts they owed the brothel owner, and after long years of bondage appear
in many cases to have become institutionalized into a brothel livelihood. From the
1880s in particular, tens of thousands of teenage girls were sold into bondage on
fixed-term contracts of between approximately two to six years (Tsurumi, 1990:
60–61). Evidence from legal and court records suggest that by the 1920s and 1930s
licensed prostitutes (of the legal age of 18 years or older) were somewhat freer
and able to leave their masters midway through their contracts (Ramseyer, 1996:
109–134). Nevertheless feminist historian Suzuki Yuko argues that the conditions
of female labor of prewar Japan overall were those of de facto slavery: “While on
paper it looked as though the women had entered into a contract of their own free
will, it was an open secret that binding debt and working under surveillance meant
the actual conditions were those of slavery” (Suzuki, 1996: 91).
Suzuki has been categorized as a feminist on the radical fringe for her asser-
tion that there was a definite continuum between the coerced nature of female
sex work under prewar Japanese law and the more widely acknowledged status
of wartime comfort women as “sex slaves.” The rarely voiced issue of modern
female slavery and the “slavish” conditions of female employment, which lingered
as far into the present as 1956 and the abolition of legal prostitution, comprise the
second secret history lurking behind the more confined controversy of the system
of wartime comfort women. In her work on colonization and female sexuality
in Imperial Japan, Sabine Früstück has argued that the use as comfort women in
Japanese military brothels of incarcerated Asian females—many of school age—and
overseas Japanese prostitutes “was an extreme form of the colonization of sex and
was closely intertwined with debates about and practices of the control of prostitu-
tion in civilian society at the time” (Früstück, 2003: 41).
The sequential colonization of Korea and the Chinese mainland in the first
half of the twentieth century expanded Japanese trade and also stimulated a
flow of sexual labor abroad to brothels established at Japanese business outposts.
Government statistics indicate that by 1910 there were 20,000 registered overseas
Japanese prostitutes. This was approximately half the number registered in Japan
(Yamazaki, 1999: xviii), and probably only a proportion of the unknown actual
figures. Collectively known as karayuki-san, girls traveling overseas to find work as
maids, plantation workers, and prostitutes in the period stretching from the 1870s
to 1930s were recruited particularly from Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Osaka, and Kyushu
(Morikura, 1999: 330). Interestingly, the age range of hard-working factory girls,
domestic maids, and daughters sold into prostitution of the prewar period corre-
sponds to that of idolized sh jo, sexualized kogyaru, and, indeed, café maids. The
deformed (deforume) and stylized representation of the bodies, outfits, and uniforms
of working girls and serving maids are ubiquitous in the imagery of contemporary
pop culture and animation. Furthermore, the theme of bondage and suffering by
young girls is visible though rarely noticed in contemporary art by and about girls.
See depictions of suffering and bondage in Aoshima Chiho’s art in Figure 5.3. A
delayed but vocal critique of the consumption and violent dismemberment of girl
figures featured in Aida Makoto’s art did finally erupt in January 2013, in a hostile
campaign against the exhibition in a major retrospective in the Mori Art Museum
FIGURE 5.3 Aoshima Chiho is a successful contemporary artist working with large-scale
computer-generated friezes who has depicted multicolored girl figures. See
the wan and wasted girls in bondage in “Japanese Apricot 3 – a pink dream”
(2007)
Source: reproduced with kind permission of the artist herself and Kaikai Kiki Corporation.
of pieces such as DOG (in fact already circulating in exhibitions and online from
1996). See more details on DOG series, which features naked amputated girls’
chained up like dogs, in Chapters 6 and 8.
To physically prevent girls from running away from brothels and factories, they
were housed in locked and supervised dormitories in compounds with high walls,
which operated in practice as a “detention house” system (Tsurumi, 1990: 67).
Escape brought crushing contractual penalties down on the girl’s impoverished
family, and if unsuccessful, was likely to end in recapture and punishment in the
form of violent floggings: “Chastising runaways returned by the police, company
officials pulled out all the stops. A girl who tried to escape might be shut up in
a dark cupboard for days, deprived of food, stripped naked and thrashed merci-
lessly”8 (Tsurumi, 1990: 147). An animated portrayal of such a gated compound,
in which laboring inmates are bonded by a contract designed to serve their parents,
can be seen in Miyazaki Hayao’s film Spirited Away (2001).
Young women nevertheless also found themselves gathered together and trave-
ling as overseas prostitutes (karayuki) to neighboring Asian countries, where they
relished new settings and their freedom to see new places.9 They found them-
selves socialized into new migrant female cohorts sharing experiences at the cusp
of social and economic change and urban expansion. In spurts of infrastructural
fluidity in the 1910s to 1920s, the immediate postwar years, and in the 1980s to
1990s, young women were able to loosen themselves from the “slavish conditions”
(Takeyasu, 1954: 50) designed to feed them into the expanding textiles indus-
try. As historian Hirota Masaki observes of the evidence pertaining to the prewar
period, “the girls’ youthful energy always worked to expand the interstices of the
various kinds of social restrictions and surveillance to which they were restricted”
(Hirota, 1999: 214). Women moved voluntarily into other, freer forms of for-
mally unskilled and affective labor as office clerks, café waitresses, ticket collectors,
shop girls, mannequins and receptionists, through the twentieth century. By 1924,
female clerks constituted over 10 percent of the white-collar employees of the cen-
tral Marunouchi district of Tokyo, where they earned 30 to 100 yen per month.
The quickest way to earn a living in the city without voluntarily entering f zoku
(sex industry) professions was to join the infamous new form of female employ-
ment and become a café waitress. By 1936 there were reputedly 112,000 such
young employees nationwide (Inoue, 1998: 82). Café waitresses were the cousins
of the growing troupe of taxi-dancers circulating around American cities. In the
1920s, American men, and a large number of recent immigrants, visited dance halls
where they paid to “ogle” from the wings and could also pay by the song to dance
with “peppy” young instructresses. Dancers in their late teens enjoyed a precocious
autonomy: “These young taxi-dancers, with their good incomes, the relative ease
with which they can quickly secure employment in taxi dance halls in other cities,
have become a mobile group of a new variety” (Cressey, 1932: 106).
Not only as eroticized café serving girls but also as effective and charming
employees acting as support staff and facilitators in the clerical, service, and retail
sectors, young women have deployed their support, sexuality, wit, and affective
powers to coax and hasten productive labor from co-workers and superiors in the
typically male, white-collar primary workforce.10 In addition to clerical and manual
acuity, feminine and maternal skills of seduction and nurturance have frequently
been required of young female employees, which has also positioned them as key
employees in the expanding service and communications sectors from the 1970s.11
The contemporary earnings of schoolgirls and female

part-timers
Criticism of the materialism of kogyaru and schoolgirls followed in the wake of ear-
lier critiques of gyaru and sh jo that had emphasized their role as consumers. These
descriptions obscured and diverted attention away from the role of young women
as employees, factory hands, home-workers, and service providers throughout
the twentieth century. The wider context within which these deep tensions over
female financial self-sufficiency have arisen is one in which women in general
and young women in particular have been, and to a great extent continue to be,
largely excluded from more involved and lucrative positions of power in politi-
cal and corporate management and decision-making. The 2010 White Paper on
Gender Equality illustrates that changes to female participation following the
implementation of the Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society in 1999 have been
gradual. According to statistics gathered in 2008 and 2009, 15.4 percent of lawyers,
3.8 percent of the heads of community organizations, 6.2 percent of high-school
principals and vice principals, 3.6 percent of higher management (section chief or
higher) in companies with 30 employees or more, 2 percent of civil servants direct-
ing ministries, 6.4 percent of prefectural governors, and 5.7 percent of prefectural
government employees at the level of director were women.
Economist Osawa Mari observes that, since 1975, the overall picture has been
one of an expanding flexible and part-time labor force, which is increasingly
female in composition and flanked by other emergent forms of “so-called part
time” (iwayuru paato) employment (Osawa, 1993: 82–83), including dispatch or
subcontracted employees (hakken and keiyaku), home-workers (itaku), and casual
employees (arubaito), the majority of whom are now men (Osawa, 1993: 80–81)
(see Figure 1.3). While several generations of young men have been channeled
into low-paid and insecure employment (Yamane, 1990; Genda, 2006; Toivonen,
2011), women have simultaneously been electing to stay at work more and to
delay, or avoid entirely, the domestic and unpaid labor viewed as largely con-
comitant with marriage. Despite the perception of teenage girls as a sign of pure
consumption, 40 percent of the labor force was female from the last decades of
the twentieth century. By 2004, this figure had risen slightly, to 41 percent (Josei
Rōdō Hakusho, 2005: 7), and approximately 75 percent of young women worked
directly after leaving school or college.
According to statistical calculations of the female ratio of the total wages earned in
Japan in 2006, women received approximately one-third (0.366) of total male wages,
due in large part to the lower-paid “part-time” employment contracts through which
the majority of women were hired (Cabinet Office, 2010: 6). Women have long
been at a somewhat higher risk of falling into poverty than their male counterparts
at all ages, and especially over the age of 50 (Cabinet Office, 2010: 12). The issue of
female financial dependence and suppressed earning power is a moot one.
On average, young women began work at an earlier age than their male coun-
terparts, who stayed in education longer. Women also worked to similar schedules.
In 1994, women worked for an average 19.6 days per month, while men worked
for 20.1 days per month (JIWE, 1995: 20). In other words, women, including
those raising children and caring for elderly parents, worked on average only
one hour less per day than men. In 2004, 69.4 percent of women aged 20 to 24
worked, compared to 70.8 percent of young men in the same age category; and
73.5 percent of 25- to 29-year-old women worked, compared to 94.4 percent of
men of the same age (Josei Rōdō Hakusho, 2005: 9). Young women participated
in the labor force almost as much as or as much as young men.
Young women of high school and college age participated in the labor force at
a higher rate than young men although they received lower hourly wages. In 2001
a national survey of 500 high school, college, and university students found that
57.4 percent of high-school girls in Tokyo and neighboring prefectures had part-
time jobs, through which they earned a mean wage of 795 yen per hour, receiving
an average of 18,000 yen in wages per month. Figures were similar for high-school
girls working in the Kansai region. Meanwhile, 89 percent of female college stu-
dents worked while they studied, and earned an average of 39,000 yen per month,
at an average wage of 961 yen an hour (Engokai, 2001).
A 2003 survey indicated that in the Tokyo area 57.4 percent of high-school
girls worked an average of 46.3 days a year, while 40.6 percent of boys worked an
average of 37.2 days a year. Supermarkets and convenience stores absolutely rely on
high-school girl labor to run their stores and shops” (Nakamura interview, 22 April
2003).With minor variations by region, male and female college and university
students invested approximately the same number of hours in part-time jobs, but in
the Tokyo region female students worked a little more than their male counterparts.
While 81.2 percent of male college students worked, for an average of 100 days a
year, 89 percent of female college students worked for an average of 108.1 days per
year (Engokai, 2001). Market researcher Nakamura Yasuko suggested that “school-
girls don’t impact on politics but they work hard, so they can buy things.
Petty consumption of the type criticized as a form of hollow materialism was
in fact symptomatic of these young women’s underlying structural poverty. The
average monthly wage of a female employee in 1994 was 203,000 yen. This was
62 percent of the average wage of a man (JIWE, 1995: 16), and barely enough to
meet the cost of independent living. For female university graduates, the average
monthly wage for women between the age of 20 and 24 was 204,800 yen; for
women between 25 and 29 this rose to 234, 600 yen. For female high-school grad-
uates, this figure was 154,500 yen for 18- to 19-year-olds; 171,700 yen for 20- to
24-year-olds; and 199,600 yen for 25- to 29-year-olds (JIWE, 1995: 19). The wages
of these younger women were nevertheless considerably higher than those of the
female workforce as a whole, approximately half of whom were part-time workers,
officially employed for 35 hours a week or less. Between 1990 and 2003 the number
of female employees categorized as “part time,” “casual” (arubaito), or “other” (sono
hoka) rose to just under half of all female employees while those women enjoying
the financial benefits—an annual bonus payment, a pension, sick leave—of full-time
employment status fell from 61.9 percent to 50.7 percent of the female labor force
(Josei Rōdō Hakusho, 2005: 82) (see Figure 1.3). While a gradually higher propor-
tion of women worked as part-time employees through the course of the 1990s and
2000s, the earnings of that smaller proportion in full-time contracts rose higher and
began to come closer to those of male colleagues (see Figure 1.4).
The absolute poverty of female workers has forced them to maintain long-term
dependent relationships with their parents as “daughters” (musume), and to find
themselves caught between either financial dependence on husbands after marriage,
or financial insecurity and poverty living alone. Regardless of the fascination stimu-
lated by the image of teenage girls clutching wads of cash, it was in fact male, elite,
management-track employees of large companies who received the highest salaries
and substantial cash bonuses. In the contemporary period, the wages of high-school
girls have been lower than those of almost any other social group, bar those of
women re-entering the labor force after childbirth and raising children. Evidence
of the type of clothes and accessories that schoolgirls bought in the nineties sup-
ports the general picture that most schoolgirls had relatively modest sums of money
at their disposal. Nevertheless girls posed with handfuls of cash flipped toward the
camera and pursued the sartorial posture of conspicuous and faux luxury. This mode
of kogyaru glam which is so well-rooted in girls’ culture is examined in Chapter 4.
Notes
1 This particular recurring cultural twitch of depicting women handling money—their
own earnings—is probably rooted historically in the special sensitivity towards the
sale of daughters to brothels and factories for advance cash loans and wages paid to
their fathers or guardians, rather than to the young women themselves. We can see it
surfacing in cultural imagination in, for example, Imamura Shōhei’s film Insect Woman
(Nippon konch ki, 1963). In the final scenes toward the climax of the film, Tome, the
long-suffering rural-born daughter of a coarse and incestuous father, has become the
owner of a brothel, and is depicted compulsively counting and hiding the money she
has finally managed to earn for herself.
2 Koko ga hen da yo, Nihon!: Hen na joshi k sei, TBS, 8 October 1997, 9 pm.
3 In fact it is the second film based on a novel and script by Murakami Ryū in which
young women find themselves driven to prostitution, or close to it, in order to buy a
pink topaz ring. Murakami first used this idea about an irrational attachment to exclusive
accessories which have become linked to the search for personal identity, in his novel
T pazu, which became the script for the film Tokyo Decadence (1992).
4 John Treat touches on the association of sh jo with childlike consumption and quotes
Ōtsuka Eiji: “What name are we to give this life of ours today? The name is shōjo” (full
quote in Treat, 1995: 281–282).
5 It is worth recalling again here that all of these authors—Ōtsuka, Tanaka, Yamane, and
Murakami Ryū, are men.
6 See a detailed explanation of police guidance in Leheny (2006: 96–102).
7 As Japanese economic historians and British economic historian, Janet Hunter, point
out: “By categorizing the earnings of the young female workers in the early textile mills
as kakei hojoteki (supplementary to the household income), Yamada [Moritarō] identified
the ‘premodern’ agricultural household as a basis of Japanese capitalism, and at the
same time called attention to one of the most critical issues of all discussions relating to
women’s position in the workplace” (Hunter, 1993: 2).
8 Mariko Tamanoi and Patricia Tsurumi detail aspects of the sexualized nature of both
the labor itself and the system of labor discipline imposed on young girls. See Tamanoi
(1998), Tsurumi (1990), and Faison (2007).
9 In Sandakan Brothel No. 8, the groundbreaking interviews with an elderly former
karayuki sold into prostitution, she confides that: “When I went to the South Seas I was
able to play in the ocean for the first time. After wading through the water we would
stroll along under coconut trees or through flowers as red as blood. Ohana, Tsugiyo and
I would say to each other, ‘I’m so glad we came to the South Seas. Maybe I’ll never go
back to Japan’” (Yamazaki, 1999: 61).
10 Yuko Ogasawara provides evidence of the nurturing and supportive role expected but
not always elicited from female employees in the office, in Office Ladies and Salaried Men
(1998).
11 Skills in girlish charm and “affect” embedded within emotional labour (kanj r d )
and assigned to young women in Japan (Kinsella, 1995; McVeigh, 1996) correlates
to the recent theoretical focus on the labor of the “multitudes,” which is “material or
immaterial, intellectual or corporeal” and both “produces and reproduces social life”
(Hardt and Negri, 2000: 402).
6
GIRLS AS A RACE1
“Witches” (yamanba) and “black faces” (ganguro) in

the press
Between summer 1998 and summer 1999, kogyaru suntans began to get darker. The
personality of the style veered from that of the slatternly coquettishness of drop-out
schoolgirls toward that of moody punk divas. Girls involved in this climactic phase
of Shibuya, Center Gai street fashion used self-tanning cream and tanning salons
to tan their skin nut or chocolate brown color. Dark skin was highlighted with
pearlescent and milky-colored eyeshadow and lipstick, which, until the beginning
of the decline of the look in late 2000, was used to paint white rings over the eye
sockets and around the mouth. White-socketed girls redefined their eyes with dark
eyeliner and false eyelashes cemented with lashings of mascara.
In the press, the terms “nega-film,” “nega-make” (photo-negative make-up),
and “panda-make” were used to describe the faces of gyaru with tanned skin with
white rings around the mouth and eyes. Girls became referred to unanimously
as “black faces” (ganguro),2 and girls sporting its most extreme affectations were
called “witches” (yamanba). Racial innuendo joined, and to some extent displaced,
sexual wordplay in paying court to kogyaru fashion. Three girls in particular, nick-
named Buriteri, Akoyoshi, and Fumikko, received brief media fame as the darkest
witches on the streets. In addition to “black faces” and “black face girls,” a range
of hyperbolic temporary terminology, such as “mega-black” (gonguro) and “mega-
girl” (gongyaru), was concocted to emphasize the tonal violence of the style.
Interestingly, the unflattering moniker yamanba is an antique term for the
archetypical hags that appear in Japanese folklore and Nō theater, and in ukiyoe
illustrations of the plots of the latter. The yamanba is a hag or witch of prodigious
strength who lives as a bitter recluse in the mountains (Copeland, 2005: 15–31).
The superhuman power of the mountain witch was sometimes made available
108 Girls as a race
to assist men (Tamanoi, 1998: 122). In some stories she was once an ordinary
woman who ran away to the mountains after being abused, and who will kill and
eat unfortunate men who stray from the mountain path. In other depictions she is
punished and mutilated.3 As a resonant symbol of female anger, lust, and noncon-
formity, the yamanba has been adopted as a proto-feminist figure by some women,
such as the novelist Ōba Minako writing in the 1970s.4 In the male press, the word
yamanba, in particular, embodied a barely disguised slur, which accurately reflected
the common editorial sentiment of abusive animosity toward this self-involved and
ostensibly frightening stage of gyaru fashion. Except in jokes and parody, however,
“witch” (yamanba) was not the word chosen to describe girls’ style inside the pages
of kogyaru magazines such as Egg, which became specifically dedicated to the radical
and tanned look from 1999.
Journalists protested that black faces and witches were an affront to the tastes of
their male readers. “Big Survey of Aesthetic Taste: Teenage Witch Girls Should
Be Worried!” warned Spa! magazine (1 September 1999: 136). Sh kan H seki
demanded, “We Want to See the Real Faces of Our Black Face Daughters!”
(14 April 2000: 54). The same slough of weekly magazines (sh kanshi) targeted at
male readers that had connected radical girls’ fashion to casual prostitution a couple
of years earlier now complained that black faces and witches were trying to sell
themselves but were repelling male customers. “Cabaret Clubs Have Become Lairs
for Those Ugly Witches” grumbled the Sh kan Post (8 October 1999: 63), while
Focus magazine protested, “Are We Going to Have Even More of These Witch
and Black Face Porno Videos!?” (8 March 2000: 24). Despite the unequivocal sex-
ual rejection through which these articles framed their judgment and damnation of
this particular girls’ street style, editors nevertheless maintained a proprietary com-
mentary on the latest developments in gyaru land for their apparently nosy readers.
They offered ground reports, such as: “Pursuing the Trend of the Ganguro—High
School Girls from Distant High Schools” (Gekkan Gendai, March 2000: 321) and
“Why Did Black Face Magazine Egg Close Down When It Was Selling 450,000
Copies a Month?” (Sh kan Bunshun, 2000).
Though rooted in the wily rump of the self-consciously male press (e.g., Sh kan
Bunshun, Sh kan Post, Sh kan Gendai, President), caustic derision of black faces and
witches became a prototypical position enthusiastically taken up by other sections
of the public. Ganguro was received less as style than as cultural travesty. During
fieldwork observation carried out in winter 1999, Toshio Miyake noted that
“More and more these girls flaunt themselves, regroup on the streets, and adopt
provocative attitudes, by which they expose themselves to verbal abuse from pas-
sersby, physical violence, the prurient winks of older men, and getting headhunted
by scouts working for the sex industry.” 5 In an article published in the respectable
organ Bungei Shunj , and thought suitable for translation and abridgement for the
Japan Echo, female writer Nakano Midori ridiculed the risible aesthetic faux pas
committed by black faces and witches. “In all honesty,” she confided, “I have seen
very few girls sporting the style that bring me even close to thinking, ‘Without that
makeup, she must be a beauty, what a waste’” (Nakano, 2000: 62–63). Pursuing
Girls as a race 109
this attack, Nakano suggested that stupidity was the key to the style: “Nothing
about it is pretty, elegant, or stylish; the main effect, I would say, is to frighten.
These girls almost seem to be wearing placards that say, ‘I’m stupid.’ Meeting
someone who so overtly insists on her own idiocy tends to scare people. It over-
powers them” (Nakano, 2000: 62–63). The allegation that witches and black faces
were ugly and stupid circulated widely and formed a base stereotype, underlying
more intricate considerations of their hygiene and racial origins: “From Kogyaru
to Witches, Platform Boots, Black Face, Idiot-ization: Kogyaru on the Darker and
Dirtier Program” (Spa!, 1 July 2003: 26). On television shows, much play was
made of “moron black faces” (oobaka no ganguro), and taciturn specimens were
filmed replying to probing questions from anchormen with the single ignorant
monosyllable “… eeeh” (“I dunno …”).
Photographic projects on ganguro carried out around the turn of the twenty-first
century, seemed to share a similar instinct to present black faces and witches as
pitiful and déclassé. In Ōnuma Shoji’s published portrait of black faces in summer
1999, the viewer is invited to discover how the girls’ faces seem to be disheveled
and lopsided beneath their bedazzling first appearances. Ōnuma focuses on unflat-
tering details: the way in which tan foundation cream is sliding off hot, oily skin, or
the way in which skin rashes can be seen protruding through layers of lamé glitter.
These surface details seemed to imply that, rather like Impressionist portrayals of
French prostitutes, ganguro is a style soaked in an aura of cheap and failed glamour.6
Yamanba (witches) and ganguro (black faces) as primitives

and animals
Interpreting the brown skin cultivated first by kogyaru, and subsequently pursued to
extremes by ganguro and yamanba, provided the occasion for a particularly perverse
squall of journalistic pontification on the zoological, racial, and ethnic origins of girls.
Rather than reading black face as a style, that is, as a clearly deliberate instance of sarto-
rial communication,7 it was merrily interpreted as a form of animal coloring or tribal
decoration. Writers excitedly reported that girls were dieting and tanning at the same
time by reallocating their dinner money to pay for sessions in tanning salons. Girls
who could not afford tanning salons were said to be using oil-based magic markers
for eyeliner and coloring in their faces with dark-brown marker pens (Sh kan Playboy,
1999: 5). An irreverent vein of reportage in the male press adopted a mock-scientific
tone and colonial language to claim that radical girls were a kind of species prone to
natural selection. The Modern, for example, presented: “Professor Kashima Explores the
Heisei [1989~] Jungle In Search of ‘Uncharted Regions of Everyday Life’ 3: ‘Platform
Boot Witches’ No Longer in the Lead in Shibuya” (Gendai, 2002).
The notion that the energy and desire associated with kogyaru and black faces
was in some way primitive and animalistic circulated through men’s magazines
and on into girls’ magazines themselves. One freelance female writer specializing
in producing articles about kogyaru for the press and television, as well as working
with kogyaru magazines, confidently imagined that
110 Girls as a race
they are like primitive people who don’t use words or language or books,
people who just exist by means of images, their appearances and their body
adornment. If they want something they just take it, they are material animals,
they are not interested in culture or society, they are only interested in money.
(Uchida interview, 8 November 1997)
Another article in the liberal weekly AERA described the sexual exploits of the
“Terrifying Tiger Girls” (Hayami, 1996a: 62). In other articles a connection was
insinuated between black face girls and witches and Africans or Southern people:
“Is It the Influence of Global Warming, Evolution, or a Passing Trend? Probing
the ‘Latinization’ of Japanese Youth! Witch Girls in Monster Make-up—Lax about
Time and Appointments, Kissing and Arguing in Public, Relaxed about Sex”
(Spa!, 9 February 2000).
Smug references to the lifestyle, ethnicity, and skin color of black faces and
witches bled into one another in a way that illustrated the continued comingling,
at least in low- and middle-brow journalism, of anthropological ideas about culture
and biological conceptions of race. For tanning their skin and adopting new atti-
tudes, hair color, and clothes, girls were indiscriminately accused both of African
mimicry and of actually being, or becoming, tribal, primitive, black, or an indeter-
minate new ethnic breed. As Jennifer Robertson has remarked in her work on the
eugenic movement in Imperial Japan, these types of essentially Lamarckian ideas
about the possibility of acculturation into a racial way of being were quite typical
of prewar racial consciousness internationally. In the Japanese case in particular,
“race” (jinrui) and “ethnic group” or “people” (minzoku) were—and, in the con-
text discussed here, continue to be—viewed as largely interchangeable concepts.8
Further commentary about the race, tribe, and skin color of girls was sometimes
entwined with a derogatory and evolutionist commentary about dark-skinned girls
that implied they were a kind of species or animal.9 Classified in a rather heavy-
handed manner as dark-skinned primitives and animals, girls daring to wear black
face and yamanba style were subjected to a racist criticism.
In a photographic portrait of black face girls titled Tribe (Minzoku), by Ōnuma
Shōji, girls in particularly flamboyant outfits, lamé face glitter, and face stickers are
presented alongside girls lying under the blue ultraviolet rays of sunlamps, in a way
that maximizes attention to their colorful appearance and alien skin tones. In a short
afterword by Tad Garfinkel, the girls are variably described as primitives and ani-
mals: “Like all the animals walking on the continent of Africa they have their own.
Just like Giraffes and Ostriches. Shibuya is a Safari! They shout out loud and clear
‘We are a tribe!’ Well done! That’s right! You are the Japanese gypsies” (Ōnuma,
2001). A review of this book, posted on the website of the Gendai Nikkan10 news-
paper, suggests that it is a photographic testimony to “a sudden change in kogyaru
DNA that led to the birth of a new subspecies (ashu) of the Japanese race (min-
zoku).” Less explicit intimations that either kogyaru or black faces and yamanba could
be approached as a kind of tribe of anthropological interest were present in the
widespread tendency to present “uninitiated” readers with labeled anatomical line
Girls as a race 111
drawings of girl specimens, or with elaborate vocabularies of girls’ slang presented

as a foreign language. The explanatory anatomical diagram of comic artist Koshiba
Tetsuya’s lead character, and dictionary of “kogyaru terminology” (kogyaru y go), that
appear on the inside back covers of collected volumes of his popular men’s comic
series about a kogyaru, Tennen Sh jo Man (Wild Girl Man), typified this colonial-
style instruction. Another extensive vocabulary of kogyaru language was published
in the sedate older man’s magazine dacapo (dacapo, 1997: 88–89).11
The editorial board of the men’s entertainment magazine Dime invented the term
gyanimal to describe “girl-animals” in an article titled “Gyaru + Animal = Gyanimal
Breeding.” The article proposes that girls wearing animal prints, gold lamé, metal-
lic fabrics, and other brightly colored items were trying to attract and snare men
(Dime, October 1998: 10). A column by a specialist of girls’ cultures asserts that in
his opinion “this fashion is very similar to an animal rutting season,” in that “lip-
stick in wine red color is in vogue, and that is precisely the same color as the vagina
of a female monkey in heat” (Dime, October 1998: 11). Positioned alongside this
animal-behaviorist commentary is a full-length photograph of a model dressed as a
gyanimal. On the next page the model is stripped of all trace of temporary tanning
cream and the animal-print micro-skirt. This pale and plainly dressed incarnation,
who resembles a non-descript office lady or clerk, is presented as an anti-gyanimal,
and as Dime editorial’s own “ideal girl.” On the next page, writer Mori Nobuyuki
(author of the Tokyo High School Girl Uniform Fieldbook, which we will turn to later)
makes the only slightly less risqué suggestion that kogyaru fashion comprises a collec-
tive “warning color, which, like the bright markings of tree frogs, says to potential
predators ‘I have poison. Eating me is dangerous!’” (Dime, October 1998: 11).12
An innovative article about ganguro and yamanba fashion published in the Weekly
Playboy applied a mixture of racial science, native anthropology (minzokugaku),
colonial fantasies about Africa, and contemporary politically correct ideas about the
social inclusion of ethnic minorities (Sh kan Playboy, 2000: 198–201). Pithily titled
“Yamanba Girls Must Be Classified as National Cultural Property Before It Is Too
Late,” and subtitled “Is There a Danger of Shibuya Street Girls Becoming Extinct?”
the writer intimates that the girls are a kind of aboriginal tribe or ethnic minority
that may, like an endangered species of animal, “become extinct.” The article is
accompanied by a pyramidal diagram (Sh kan Playboy, May 2000: 200) titled “The
Shibuya Hierarchy,” which illustrates in ascending order the evolutionary stages of
gyaru (at the bottom), through gangyaru and gongyaru to yamanba, who are presented
as a kind of dark-skinned female über race reigning over earlier evolutionary forms.
In Figure 6.1 gender difference literally shades into racial difference.
Sh kan Playboy goes on to argue that by pursuing black identity, black faces, and
witches have arrived not so much at a semblance of contemporary black culture as
at the primary stage of human evolution, which is rooted in Africa and based on
the principle not of money but of “black magic” (Sh kan Playboy, May 2000: 201).
However, making a case for the enlightened tolerance of this primitive girls’ ethnic
group in modern Japan, the article ingeniously cites “an African think tank” which
has calculated that “in view of the falling birth rate, in order for Japan to maintain
112 Girls as a race
FIGURE 6.1 The “Shibuya gyaru hierarchy” published in (Weekly) Shukan Playboy
Source: published with kind permission of Weekly Playboy Japan (WPJ). Weekly Playboy, 2 May 2000,
p. 200.
its current level of economic development in the twenty-first century, it will have
to admit up to six million foreign workers a year” (Sh kan Playboy, May 2000:
201). This article captures the imaginative association of primitive African tribe,
the native folk of Japan, and contemporary girls’ culture, and elides them into one
continual formation. The writer concludes that:
As Japan entered modernity it underwent homogenization. Holding dear the

illusion that homogeneity = good, Japan lost the ability to activate (katsuseika)
the people (minzoku) … the yamanba may be a warning to Japan. Will the girls’
culture be protected or will it be eliminated? The future of Japan rests on this
question.
(Sh kan Playboy, May 2000: 201)
Sh kan Playboy’s ham statement that the future of Japan is bound up with com-
ing to terms with the ethnic status of girls is considerably less preposterous than it
seems. The intriguing dissolution of gender sociology into an anthropology of an
exotic and potentially brown-skinned folk has thematic precedents emerging from
the turn of the twentieth century which gained a further complexity by association
with black Americans in the immediate postwar years. Ethnic and folklore portray-
als of girls had become prominent in nonfiction writings on girls, and in culture,
art, and animation, produced from the 1980s on. A detour through the twentieth
century to reconsider the folklore sources of Girls Studies and the treatment of cul-
turally nonconformist girls as a race, will help illustrate the fuller backdrop behind
Girls as a race 113
both Playboy’s layered joking and the chameleon-like attitude toward hair, skin,
and eye color in girls’ fashion as well.
A girlish place: the Japanese folk maiden

Japanese national ethnic and racial identity has had a complex relationship to
gamine femininity. As with several other areas of the non-white world that suc-
cumbed to—or represented—the promising possibility of colonization, Japan has
been dreamily characterized within European and American Orientalist literature
and art as an attracting and supplicant society, that is, as a feminine society. The
femininity of the Orient was repeatedly visualized in the human form of an ador-
ing, dependent, and young maiden, fated to become the love object of a European
man. Literary descriptions of Japanese women created by writers such as Gustav
Flaubert, Pierre Loti, and Lafcadio Hearn established the mold for this bewitching
archetype.13
At the turn of the twentieth century, Lafcadio Hearn (Japanese name Koizumi
Yakumo)14 posited the existence of a spiritual connection between women and an
authentic premodern Japan that could be traced through oral folk culture. Prior to
his life in Japan, Hearn had lived in both the Caribbean and the American South,
where he had already developed an interest in capturing the voices and illiterate
consciousness of his female servants. In Japan, Hearn collected published folk tales
and had them spoken aloud by his Japanese wife, Koizumi Setsu (Takata, 1933:
9–10).
Elements of Hearn’s broader quest to discover “the minds of entire peoples”
(Mordell, 1964: 11) in the form of an authentic folk culture, mediated by women,
were developed and theorized in the widely read (Ivy, 1995: 59) writings and
transcriptions of Yanagita Kunio.15 Visions of an archaic and rustic Japanese folk,
derived mainly from Yanagita’s earlier records published before the 1930s, contin-
ued to have a powerful influence on sections of postwar imagination and have been
revisited especially since the 1980s.
In The Tales of T no (T no Monogatari, 1910), Yanagita anchors an account
of the prehistory of Japanese people in folk tales about mountain gods from the
Tōno region. Later, Yanagita postulated that there were once tribes of mountain
people (yamabito) who had lived in the mountains and were the true natives of
Japan (Tamanoi, 1998: 122). Women played a central role in the ecology of the
mountain natives. Not only do many of the Tōno tales, retold by Yanagita, revel in
the physical strength, endurance, and supernatural powers of a range of mountain
women (such as iko) and witches (yamauba, a variation on yamanba), but in 1925
Yanagita suggested that many of these descendents of primal Japan were ordinary
(and implicitly contemporary) women who had fled to the mountains from low-
land (and implicitly modern) towns.
During the 1930s, Yanagita turned his focus toward a less archaic and less exclu-
sive conceptualization of a Japanese “common folk” (j min), who were animated,
according to Peter Dale, with the “natural consciousness of the primeval Japanese”
114 Girls as a race
(Dale, 1986: 208). Citing the worship of miko, the young female shamans attached
to Shinto shrines,16 as his principal model, Yanagita suggested that among the com-
mon folk of Japan, the sacred powers of women (imo no chikara) and girls (im to no
chikara) had been feared and revered (Tamanoi, 1998: 125–128). More pressing was
Yanagita’s suggestion that it was the uneducated daughters of the rural folk, the poor
girls most disdained by urban society, who were best positioned to inherit the wis-
dom of their parents. The very continuity of the Japanese national folk community
rested upon the antique and uneducated consciousness of these rural girls (Tamanoi,
1998: 131–132). From the 1930s Yanagita’s school of anthropology (minzokugaku)
produced increasingly bucolic and modern images of the countryside, attended by a
national folk and their native daughters.17 In broadly the same period that Yanagita
established his records of folk, Japan volk theories were rising to prominence in
German intellectual work and in North America the Harlem renaissance and negro
spirituals formed the cornerstone of a new interest in recovering folk consciousness.
As with unassuming and fresh young women from remote prefectures in urbaniz-
ing Japan, black folk in the South were thought to be repositories of a “purity and
simplicity” of an older American folk (Dyer, 1986: 84).18
From the 1970s, the tendency to ponder the nature of authentic Japanese
emotions and folk consciousness, and treatises arguing that these were bound up
with the essentially feminine psychology of the nation, became prominent once
again. Psychoanalytic theory about the principles of nurturing and of dependence,
notably Doi Takeo’s well-read Anatomy of Dependence (1981) and Kawai Hayao’s
Psychiatry of the Maternal Society of Japan (1976), emphasized the feminine psyche
of the Japanese people. According to Ueno Chizuko’s explanation, the increas-
ingly active idea of late postwar Japan as an “ahistorical, benign, pacifist, and,
accordingly, feminine” (Ueno, 1997a: 21)19 place has developed in the context
of the deindustrialization of the Japanese economy and the planned shift towards
the “soft economy” of services and information technology. The decline at the
twilight of the 1960s of a critical political movement demanding that the national
political leadership take responsibility for Japanese military involvements allowed
for the coy recovery of romantic images of Japan “as feminine, animistic and, as
it were, ontologically inert” (Dale, 1986: 45). In the guise of a historically inno-
cent and feminine ancient East Asian community, the pattern first established in
nineteenth-century European fantasies of the Orient as a culpable maiden resur-
faced, rewritten as a culturalist argument for a cooperative, postindustrial, and
postcolonial Japan.
Kawai Hayao followed his work on the “maternal principle” with a popular
analysis of Japanese folk stories about maidens and young brides, published in
1982. Kawai concludes the volume with the proposition that there is a particular
type of Japanese maiden archetype, which can be interpreted as the model of
the new Japanese ego, which is feminine: “Her activity includes both passive
and active aspects so that it is quite difficult to classify.” Kawai dares that “Such
a wonderful feminine image can be found only in Japanese fairy tales, so it must
epitomize the consciousness of the Japanese, regardless of sex. Realizing that fairy
Girls as a race 115
tales always compensate for a culture’s formal attitude and that they thus predict
the future, this image might be seen as the future orientation of the Japanese
mind” (Kawai, 1988: 181). In this work, ancient oral folk tales are turned into
a predictive metaphor with an unexplained but apparently specific relevance to
late twentieth-century Japan. This description of Japan’s future is weighted with
the undertow of a prophylactic command, namely, that girls will become more
decisive in Japan, though this will serve not social change but, rather, the con-
tinued vitality of the ancient society. Elements of the idea of a feminine Japanese
male identity developed using the Jungian psychoanalytic concept of collective
“archetypes” also crop up in Honda Tōru’s Moeru Otoko (2005) in which he
argues that all men have a feminine aspect and girlish (memeshii) tastes which are
suppressed deep within them, but in men who have passion (moe) for cute girl
characters this “maiden circuit” (otome kairo) is unearthed (Honda, 2005: 16–17).
During the mid-1990s, the project of national feminization embarked upon by
institutionalized spokespersons such as Kawai provoked criticism by the emergent
neo-conservative movement. Writers such as Hayashi Michiyoshi, and those asso-
ciated with Tsukuru Kai,20 aired priapic doubts about the future political direction
of a society symbolized by female power. Hayashi argues passionately for turning
back the current of “gender-free society” and for the “rehabilitation of paternal
power” (fusei no fukken).21 In the 2000s politically incorrect criticisms of gender
equality (danjo by d ) voiced by older critics had spread across a more youthful
internet-based anti-consumerist discourse, propagated by defensive male blogs
and segments of two channel (Kitada, 2012: 72–84), which formed a tissue con-
necting otaku and neto uyoku (rightist internet) culture remotely.
From the 1980s on, self-exoticism or the “neo-Japonesque” (Ivy, 1995: 54–63),
hosted knowingly or unawares in the bodies of young women, reverberated
through popular culture. In the well-analyzed “Discover Japan” national railway
advertisement campaign, and in journalism about deviant girls and ostensibly delin-
quent young women, girls were awarded both native and alien status. From 1970
to 1984, Japan Railway (JR) urged urban citizens to travel into the countryside
on trains to find the authentic premodern heart of Japan (Ivy, 1995: 29–48). Both
“Discover Japan” and the “Exotic Japan” campaign, with which it was replaced in
1984, disseminated images of a native homeland that was “paradigmatically popu-
lated with young urban women” (Ivy, 1995: 35). Marilyn Ivy provides a crisp
account of the sociological strategy of these campaigns, which sought to engage the
participation of young women by portraying them as a vital point of contact with
authentic and rural Japan (Ivy, 1995: 40–44).
Girls Studies
A new para-discipline of Girls Studies emerged in a number of books, published
from the late 1980s on, which sought to investigate the concept and lifestyle of
sh jo and gyaru. Girls Studies was concerned with explaining both contemporary
girls’ cultures, such as cuteness, and the so-called gyaru subcultures, such as bodikon
116 Girls as a race
(body-consciousness) and oyaji gyaru (bloke girls), of female college students and
office ladies. With the exception of the work of the female scholar Honda Masuko,
editor of Girl Theory (Sh joron, 1988),22 Girls Studies was pioneered by male scholars
and tended to relate contemporary girls to the context of national and ethnic his-
tory. Further works in the field include Ōtsuka Eiji’s Native Ethnology of Girls (Sh jo
Minzokugaku, 1989); Yamane Kazuma’s Morphology of Girls’ Handwriting (Hentai
Sh jo M ji, 1989); Honda Masuko’s The Alien Culture of Children (Ibunka to Shite
no Kodomo, 1992); Yamane Kazuma’s Structure of the Girl (Gyaru no K z , 1993);
Masubuchi Sōichi’s Cuteness Syndrome (Kawaii Sh k gun, 1994); and Kawamura
Kunimitsu’s The Body of the Maiden (Otome no Shintai, 1994).23 Hovering between
academic analysis and popular nonfiction writing, the majority of these ethnolo-
gies function less as academic studies than as the ur texts of cultural professionals,
journalists, and otaku critics picking up interesting analyses on which to hang jour-
nalistic content to offer to readers.
In 1989, a young journalist, trained in cultural anthropology and connected
to what at the time was still a largely underground network of reclusive young
men producing Lolita-complex (rorikon) comics and d jinshi (self-published works),
published a book titled The Native Ethnology of Girls. Ōtsuka Eiji’s book launched
his journalistic career, and through the 1990s and 2000s he gradually became
exceedingly well known as one of the self-aware public intellectuals based in, and
to some degree, pioneering otaku and rorikon subculture.24 The main argument
of The Native Ethnology of Girls is that there is a continuous anthropological line-
age from the ancient miko shrine maidens to contemporary Japanese teenage girls.
Although formally arguing against the notion that girls are aliens encircled within
the Japanese race, Ōtsuka nevertheless invokes the general gist of this idea in his
assertion that girls are a distinct and ancient tribal group: “The aliens that have
carried with them an inscrutable culture: in order to comprehend children it may
be necessary to first of all dispose of the notion that they are foreigners based in a
different culture” (Ōtsuka, 1989: cover). See the cover image of Ōtsuka’s book in
Figure 6.2.
Ōtsuka presents aspects of girls’ lifestyle of the 1980s—cuteness, morning hair-
washing, idol singers, girls’ comics, school uniforms, cute handwriting—as part of
a tribal or ethnic system of culture. Ōtsuka connects contemporary girls’ culture to
that of Yanagita Kunio’s common people (j min), arguing that, through the trans-
formation of a rural peasant society into an urban consumer society, “Modernity
has changed the Japanese folk (j min) into girls (sh jo)” (Ōtsuka, 1989: 246). Girls
have begun to create a new urban folk culture for consumer society, which can
replace the lost folk traditions of Japan’s rustic past. Ōtsuka invokes Yanagita’s belief
in the “power of women” (imo no chikara), and suggests that it is that power which
is witnessed recurring in Lolita-complex culture: “Girls that don’t undergo a rite of
passage themselves are able to facilitate the passage of other people. The illusion of
men like myself who talk about such things as the sacredness of girls, may be based
in our sense of complete dependence upon ‘female power’” (Ōtsuka, 1989: 242).
The logic of Ōtsuka’s thesis is that active urban young women—a group that has
FIGURE 6.2 The curious cover illustration of Ōtsuka Eiji’s Native Ethnology of Girls
(Sh jo minzokugaku, 1989), which depicts the small girl as eerily exotic
national native
Source: reproduced with the kind permission of the author Ōtsuka Eiji.
118 Girls as a race
historically represented a toxin undermining holistic national ideas predicated on

pure and traditional Japanese femininity—can, after all, be folded back into native
Japan. Instead of traveling back to a hometown, girls themselves have come to
represent living nativism in the midst of the metropolis.25
Honda Masuko also reminds readers of the ancient practice of female shaman-
ism, in a poetic treatise about the magical and aesthetic qualities of girl children.26
In floral language Honda describes girlhood as “the quivering” (yureugokumono), an
aesthetic trace of a “different world” (ikoku) that is not absolutely real. Girls, Honda
proposes, are complicit in their own marginal status and in the segregation of girls’
aesthetics and pastimes (sh jo shumi) from the rest of modern culture: “Finally, the
door to the fluttering world is closed to everyone except for girls. Behind the door
girls hide their bodies and in this locked chamber they dance in their glittering
dreams” (Honda, 1992: 181). Rather than nativizing girls, Honda’s most persistent
metaphors for girls’ culture are a locked dormitory and a faraway land. Incarcerated
girls are otherworldly beings that are implicitly foreigners: “Theories of the eve-
ryday order can not even formulate the words required to discuss this gypsy-like
sensibility” (Honda, 1992: 180–181).
Honda’s girls cannot be categorized according to a gender because they are sex-
less and androgynous creatures who bear no sign of femininity or female labor on
their bodies. Instead of “little women,” Honda argues that girls are timeless creatures
of “combustible flesh” (Honda, 1988: 37). Honda’s subject is a transcendent spirit
that flutters and slips out of all attempts to confine and name it: “we sink into a
deep silence under the spell of ‘total girl’ (zettai sh jo)” (Honda, 1988: 37). In the
prewar period Kawabata Yasunori had developed a similar notion of the “eternal
girl” (sei sh jo), who was a pure, natural, and sexless being. Ueno Chizuko argues
that Honda’s idealization of girls as sh jo merely confirms male fantasies and strength-
ens the tendency to essentialize young women (Ueno, 1988: 90–91). In response,
Honda asserts that girls are simply too liminal and ambivalent for their essence to
be fixed by men (Honda, 1992: 11). Honda’s vision, which can to some extent be
considered the theoretical crystallization of cute and asexual girls’ culture of the 1980s
(Kinsella, 1995), is one in which independent girls are backed up against the edges of
human existence, hiding behind bedroom doors, where they temporarily evade the
clutch of what threatens them, but from which there is nowhere else to run.
Girls as national folk icons in art and animation

Female artist Mariko Mori picks up the theme of the Japanese girl as national post-
modern shaman in her photographic portrayals of a mystic native place, centered
on the presence of sacred girl characters. Nirvana, a 3-D animation presented at
the Venice Biennale in 1997, featured Mori (an ex-model) posing as Amaterasu,
the goddess of Japanese creation, seated within a computer animation of a lushly
colored primal Japanese landscape. In another animation, Shaman Girls’ Prayer
(Miko no Inori, 1996), Mori, wigged in white and wearing white contact lenses,
Girls as a race 119
proposes herself as a futuristic Japanese female creature with shamanic powers,

which, in this piece, allow her to interact telepathically with the then advanced
technology of Kansai International Airport. Alongside impressions of traditional
Japanese-style architecture and aesthetics, schoolgirls transformed into mytho-
logical Shinto spirits, miko shamans, and rustic maidens in kimonos have became
exceedingly common in boys’ and mens’ comics, animation, and computer games,
such as Takahashi Rumiko’s Inuyasha (serialized in Sh nen Sunday, 1996~) and
Samura Hiroaki’s Blade of the Immortal (Mugen no J nin, serialized in Afternoon,
1994~). Intellectual Azuma Hiroki describes these National folkloric themes in
animation as the construction of a “psuedo-Japan … steeped in Japanese conceits”
(Azuma, 2001: 17–18). Susan Napier presents another example in her analysis of
the animation Wicked City, Twin Dolls (1995), which “pits the evil sluttish female
(still wearing her high school student uniform), against the virginal twin dolls in
their shrine-maiden robes” (Napier, 2001: 352). In Miyazaki Hayao’s animated
films, little girls are the heroic defenders of ancient Japanese tribes and their lands.
Aspects of the rural arcadia, common folk, and mysterious animistic characters of
Yanagita’s earlier writings seem to reemerge in Miyazaki’s fantastic folk anima-
tions.27 Princess Mononoke (1997), for example, is a wolf-child who wears a red
mask with markings and a cape of white fur attached during her battles with armies
invading the countryside. In this oversized mask, a white tunic, and a dark blue
skirt, Mononoke most closely resembles a small girl dressed half in official school
uniform and half as a tribal primitive. A pure-hearted yamato native, close to ani-
mals and the Japanese forests and mountains, she barely communicates in human
language and presents the psyche of an asexual and natural animistic sh jo.
Equivalently successful in communicating to a more high-brow domestic art
audience, artist Aida Makoto has continually returned to the image of a schoolgirl as
a key symbol of the nation. In a painting entitled Azemichi (Path through the Paddy,
1991), for example, Aida Makoto presents the back view of a schoolgirl in sailor
uniform walking between rice paddies. A central parting, dividing the girls’ hair into
two bunches, forms a vertical line at the center of the painting, which is continued
into the line of the footpath she is walking. The girl traverses and is incorporated into
an archetypical site of traditional Japan: the fertile rice field (see Figure 6.3).
From the late 1990s the images of schoolgirls and kogyaru portrayed as the reviv-
alists and vandals of national culture appeared in art. Slutty misdirected kogyaru
are juxtaposed ironically with national cultural symbols such as bonsai and pine
in Masuyama Hiroshi’s collage work in the late nineties.28 Aida Makoto presented
uniformed kogyaru wielding swords to commit dignified and happy self-immolation
in Harakiri Schoolgirls (1999). See kogyaru types “with austere values like a Samurai”
(Interview with Aida Makoto, 30 June 2010) in Figure 6.4. While designer Tanida
Ichiro created a computer graphic image of a robot kogyaru in a heroic pose in
front of cherry blossoms in 1996, female artist Tabaimo presented a critical image
of a vandal schoolgirl squatting and defecating the national flag in Japanese Zebra
Crossing (2000).
FIGURE 6.3 Aida Makoto’s Azemichi (path between rice fields) (1991)
Source: used with kind permission of the artist Aida Makoto © and Mizuma Art Gallery. In the Toyota
Municipal Museum of Art collection. Photograph by Miyajima Kei.
FIGURE 6.4 Aida Makoto’s Harakiri Schoolgirls (Harakiri Joshikōsei) (1999)
Source: used with kind permission of the artist Aida Makoto © and Mizuma Art Gallery.
122 Girls as a race
Bestial and racial metaphors and similes in portraying girls

At its perimeters Girls Studies collapses into comic parodies of a “science of girls.”
Between 1981 and 1984, a cram-school student waiting to re-sit his university
entrance exams carried out fieldwork on schoolgirls in uniform at 100 high schools
in and around Tokyo. Mori Nobuyuki and his two accomplices had two rules,
“Don’t call out to a high school girl and don’t take her photograph” (Mori, 1985:
132). The Tokyo High School Girl Uniform Fieldbook (Tokyo Joshik Seifuku Z kan),
which is updated and reissued each year, became a classic resource of Lolita-complex
subculture and was described by well-known otaku critic Nakamori Akio as an
example of “cultural anthropology” (bunka junruigaku), demonstrating the social
interaction of the specialists of contemporary cultural anthropology with the writ-
ers of wolfish and knowingly lowbrow entertainment for men. Mori, however,
chooses to contradict Nakamori, and states that in truth his inspiration came from
his boyhood fascination with illustrated picture books about birds, fish, and insects.
The humor on which the book’s entertainment value rests is its deadpan categori-
zation of schoolgirls as a species of naturally occurring national fauna. Akasegawa
Genpei, a ubiquitous figure of the postwar avant garde, jokes in an appended review
that he “had realized that high school girls in Tokyo were breeding. But I had not
realized that they constitute a separate species” (Mori, 1985: 208).
The reactionary attitude of the book toward girls gained critical attention from
unexpected quarters when The Japan Uniform Manufacturers Association (Nihon
Hifuku Kōgyō Kumiai Rengōkai) lodged complaints against the Fieldbook, which
they claimed “treats schoolgirls as objects” (Mori interview, 20 March 2003). The
observational approach and detailed line drawings of specimens included in Mori’s
Fieldbook bear a resemblance, as comrade Nakamori Akio suggests to him, to the
style of urban folk studies, or modernology (k gengaku), pioneered by Kon Wajirō
during the 1920s.29 What is more, Kon Wajirō himself apparently noted a similarity
between his own methodology, which prioritized intense visual observation of his
urban subjects, especially the “wandering shape of the modern girl” (Harootunian,
2000: 186), and that otherwise used by “botanists and zoologists” (Harootunian, 2000:
186). Precursors of the zoological approach, used particularly for discussing women
who were objects of lust, are evidenced again in 1949, with the publication of the
article “Zoo without a Cage” (Josei Kaiz ) by a specialist scholar and journalist of
pan pan, Kanzaki Kiyoshi, who, in “describing the conditions in Ueno Park and its
environs … conducted himself like a zoologist taxonomizing a lower form of life”
(Kovner, 2009: 785). Mori Nobuyuki’s zoological taxonomy of schoolgirls in his
annual Fieldbook exploits the dehumanizing humor of this attempt to frame women as
primarily biological phenomenon rather than as social beings.
In an essay that comprises a part of the more respectable end of girls studies titled
“Girls Adrift in the City,” Seo Fumiaki mixes girl shamanism with a Darwinian
metaphor, to argue the premodern qualities of postmodern girls: “A long time ago
girls were believed to be a living thing with a special sense of eternity. Girls may
have retained an element of that history today, like the stumps of tailbones” (Seo,
Girls as a race 123
1988: 174). It is precisely the prehistoric qualities of girls that excluded them from
modern society which equip them to take the lead in postmodernity, suggests Seo:
“What today’s cities are imbued with is the reverse-logic of unstructured space,”
but “it looks as if girls have penetrated it” (Seo, 1988: 173).
A few years later in the Structure of the Girl, freelance scholar Yamane Kazuma
noted that changes in girls’ behavior during the 1980s led them to drink, smoke,
and begin walking about on the streets at nighttime. Bold girls began to meet
foreigners in nightclubs and to gather in Roppongi (an affluent district of Tokyo)
on “streets that brimmed with stateless power” (Yamane, 1993: 60). Rather
than either native folk or fauna, Yamane compares gyaru of the 1980s to the less
Teutonic races (minzoku) of the Southern Hemisphere: “The active mode of girls
today is similar to that of Latin people in the South. The figure of a gyaru in a disco,
clad only in a mini-skirt, a tight-fitting outfit, or even literally half-naked, sweat-
ing as she dances furiously away, suggests scenes from the Rio carnival. Southern
people are extremely cheerful, happy-go-lucky and hedonistic. Sexually liberated
too, they act almost as if they had never experienced suffering. Southern people
thoroughly enjoy their lives and Japanese gyaru today are beginning to proximate
the culture of the South” (Yamane, 1993: 61). Yamane goes on to suggest that as
a country in the Northern Hemisphere, Japanese society is correspondingly gov-
erned by the erstwhile European and Protestant principles of “industriousness” and
“self-denial.” In the midst of this industrious culture, unproductive girls’ culture is
an alien element, as a “Southern race” within.
Incidental and casual references to schoolgirls as animals in mass formation crop
up throughout quasi-academic studies of girls’ culture, and the theme also reap-
pears in film and the visual arts. In his essay “Girl as Subject,” for example, Kohama
Itsurō suggests that the cliquey habits of girls are essentially those of “pack animals”
(guntai d butsu) who “exhibit their eroticism not as individuals, but as a solid col-
lectivity.”30 An example from contemporary art of the idea that girls form indistinct
hoards might be Aida Makoto and Matsukage Hiroyuki’s Gunj zu (Ultramarine-
scape, 1997), a four-panel collage of girls in blue uniforms gathered on a train
platform, which the title hints, can be viewed as a kind of seascape but which also
puns with a possible “female army” (gunjo). The image of schoolgirls as a “numer-
ous and undifferentiated pack, devoid not merely of humanness and individuality”
(Dower, 1986: 93)—both in major films, such as Sono Sion’s 2002 Suicide Circle,
in which a line of happy schoolgirls brought together through a collective trance
jump onto railways tracks in front of an oncoming train, and in more hermetic
otaku and porn-linked journalism—was interestingly close to journalistic wartime
racial stereotypes of the Japanese “race” propagated in Allied media.
A history of defending the racial purity of the fertile

Japanese woman
Lafcadio Hearn’s interest in the folk consciousness of traditional and non-European
societies was continuous with his sympathetic fascination with what he thought
124 Girls as a race
of as the distinctive and unsullied character of the Oriental and darker-skinned

races.31 While Hearn’s romance with exotic races and Japanese folk (j min) can
be situated within the wider international undercurrent of anti-modernism, less
forward-thinking and outsiderish Japanese intellectuals committed to moderniza-
tion were simultaneously developing a system for codifying the racial superiority
of the Japanese race and the inferiority of other non-European and dark-skinned
races. Scientific racism came to dominate the social and natural sciences of Europe
and America during the same decades in which the Meiji government sought to
import modern Western learning to aid Japanese enlightenment and militarization
(Dower, 1986: 204). In Europe and America, fascination with encounters with
American Indians and black African people converged with the popular fascina-
tion with newly discovered primates, the gorilla and the orangutan, in colonial
regions. Meiji intellectuals such as the preeminent Fukuzawa Yukichi subscribed to
the theory that humanity was arranged in a natural hierarchy, in which yellow peo-
ple occupied a middle position, while black and dark-skinned people occupied the
bottom position, next to apes (Russell, 1996: 24). The circle of associations between
yellow and brown skin, human primitives, and apes was strengthened through the
prewar and wartime period, both in Japanese cartoons of its Asian neighbors and
colonial subjects as dark-skinned—and sometimes as fat-lipped and unintelligent
(Dower, 1986: 210)—and in the “simian image” (Dower, 1986: 86–87) of Japan
itself, which became ubiquitous to wartime coverage of the Japanese in America and
Britain. While the inclination to rank and characterize race according to skin color
fluctuated according to other political affiliations, and varied over the duration of
Japanese colonial expansion, occupation, and recovery (Dower, 1986: 218–219),
John Russell suggests that the simple notion of black people as an ape-like and
subhuman species, which found an early root in modern Japanese imagination, was
still in circulation in late postwar popular culture (Russell, 1996: 19). Nakasone
Yasuhiro’s infamous comments in 1993 about the “mongrelized race” problem
weakening the moral cohesion and work ethic of the United States (Dower, 1986:
315) also illustrate that blackness and signs of so-called racial mixing continue to
be associated, in certain powerful circles, with anti-social and subhuman behavior.
Those most closely associated with black people and culture in postwar Japan have
been women and girls working as prostitutes, and wayward young women with
their own motivations for choosing to identify with black American culture.
Notwithstanding the particularly invariant and fetishistic characterizations of
black people of African descent, conviction in the fuller idea of a racial hierarchy
determined by skin color was ambivalent, and often muted, within Japan in the
twentieth century. Rather than skin color, theories of the Japanese race (yamato
minzoku) developed in the Meiji period and expanded through the prewar, cen-
tered upon blood and bodily reproduction through sex. Popular eugenic writings
promoted physical exercise to increase the size and vigor of Japanese bodies, and
“racial hygiene” (minzoku eisei), to prevent the blood and genes of sickly specimens
and other inferior races from polluting the yamato racial stock. Maintaining the
purity of the “bloodline” (kett ) of the nation, primarily through the continuous
Girls as a race 125
interbreeding of racially pure Japanese, positioned the sexual and reproductive

activity of young Japanese women at the frontline of national racial integrity.32
Furthering racial purity became closely entwined with an ongoing program for
the protection of the reproductive, maternal body, and with the stigmatization and
racial rejection of young women appearing to flirt with or engage in sexual rela-
tionships with non-Japanese. Defensive “ethnic national endogamy” (Robertson,
2002: 192) required Japanese girls to dedicate themselves to their future Japanese
husbands alone, making virginal schoolgirls the natural and mythological partners
of heroic young kamikaze pilots setting off on their missions during the Pacific
War (Dower, 1986: 232). Ironic references to both virginal schoolgirls and valiant
Imperial Japanese soldiers continue to crop up throughout avant-garde genres. For
a contemporary example, see Aida Makoto’s brutal comic about the pair in Mutant
Hanako (1999). In this excoriating parody of war narratives loyal Japanese daughter,
Hanako, gains superpowers to save Japan from full colonization at the eleventh
hour through undergoing a physical purification ritual ordained by the Emperor
directly: which is sexual penetration by the “phimotic penis” of a pure-blooded
Japanese man: an injured young kamikaze pilot.
Early concerns with improving national health and the prevention of sexual dis-
eases were focused on prostitutes, children, and soldiers. As sexually active young
women, prostitutes were perceived as the greatest threat to the sexual health of
Imperial soldiers in particular, and to the genetic and racial purity of the popula-
tion in general (Früstück, 2003: 22). A eugenic program that regarded Japanese
girls as the bodily vessels of national ethnicity concomitantly regarded unlicensed
or casual prostitution as the main vector through which unsuitable racial mix-
ing might take place. Through the system of licensed prostitution under police
surveillance, prewar governments sought to segregate chaste and pure-blooded
Japanese girls and mothers from women working in the brothel trade. Military
doctors checked comfort women both for signs of venereal disease and for signs of
racial purity (Früstück, 2003: 38). Prostitutes bearing features considered to be the
signs of racial purity were assigned to have sex with a higher rank of Imperial sol-
dier, while those without such features were assigned to the lower ranks. Director
Harada Masato draws a link between colonial and contemporary prostitution in
the 1997 film Bounce Kogals!, in a scene in which the runaway schoolgirl Lisa has
a compensated date (enjo k sai) in which she is paid to sit in a hotel room with an
old man who forces her to listen to him reminisce about his job in the Imperial
Army, examining the bone structures and evaluating the racial quotients of com-
fort women (ianfu). In August 1945, government fears that Japanese women would
be raped and impregnated indiscriminately by the imminently arriving Occupation
army, or that they might become the “concubines of Blacks” (Lie, 1997: 256–257),
informed the rapid assemblage of special brothels dedicated to American service-
men stationed in Japan (Dower, 1999: 126–130). Impoverished and often homeless
young women were invited to serve the nation by volunteering to be part of what
was conceptualized as a “blockade” (b hatei) of prostitutes’ bodies, providing sex to
foreigners and thereby heading off the threat of generalized racial mixing.
126 Girls as a race
Despite government attempts to enforce national objectives, both Japanese

women expatriated from military brothels in China and Korea and young women
stranded without a means of survival flowed onto the streets of a destitute Japan
and began conducting business for themselves (Garon, 1998: 197). Girls who slept
with white and black American soldiers were nicknamed pan pan, and became
emblematic figures of early postwar society (Dower, 1999: 132). Liaisons between
young Japanese women and American soldiers preoccupied the prurient and
painfully emasculated Japanese male imagination of the early Occupation period,
forming through trauma the blueprint for a profound conflation of the notions of
libertine young women, national military defeat, and the threatening presence of
a foreign (sexual) power.33 In particular, a “classical association” (Cornyetz, 1996:
444) developed in postwar imagination between black men, blackness in general,
and women viewed as prostitutes.
Girls as race
Interestingly, “race hates did not go away” after the Pacific War, comments John
Dower, “rather they went elsewhere” (Dower, 1986: 11). One unexpected place
where traces of an imperial system of racial categories did resurface inside postwar
Japan is at the ongoing friction points of gender and generation, where distinc-
tively racialized discourses and humor about public enemies within—from youth
“tribes” (zoku) to “new breed” (shinjinrui) to “gyanimals”—have emerged. The dual
and interchangeable categorization of girls as either the saviors of Japanese folk cul-
ture and national ethnicity (mostly called sh jo) or an inferior racial subclass within
the nation (mostly called gaaru or gyaru), as happened in reaction to ganguro and
yamanba style between 1999 and 2002 especially, illustrates the continued proxim-
ity of ideas about ethnicity and national culture, with politically incorrect scientific
ideas about biological races. This dualism is mobilized and demonstrated in Aida
Makoto’s extremely edgy series of nihonga paintings titled DOG (1999–2003), in
which a pneumatic and naked young Japanese girl with all of her limbs apparently
recently amputated and wrapped in bandages sits or stands on her four stumps, while
tied up by a dog-chain and dog lead, but shows nothing but simple joy and serenity
in her expression as she/it partakes in classical national nature scenes, such as “moon
viewing” (tsukimi). While uniformed schoolgirls imagined as docile, obedient and
simple have been eulogized as core folk citizens, actual girls perceived as falling short
of these ideals, who are less docile, aesthetic or benign, have tended to provoke a
slippage of the categories of description from folk to race or species. Girls imagined
as subraces within the Japanese nation have at best been tolerated as amusing buf-
foons and have at worst become the targets of a single and indivisible vent of gender
and racial derision. Racial structures of categorizing assertive and independent girls
and young women highlight the extra vein of paranoid anxiety about defending the
Japanese race that haunts the conflicted interaction of Japanese men and women.
Deep feelings about the necessity to bodily reproduce a distinctive Japanese race in
order to maintain national political autonomy have contributed an explosive power
Girls as a race 127
to gendered power struggles as well as an explosive power to shock through ethnic

parodies and sexual play engaged in by young women in contemporary Japan.
Notes
1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley, eds,
Bad Girls of Japan (New York: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 145–160, under the title “Black
Faces, Witches, and Racism against Girls.”
2 In keeping with previous translation policy, “black face” is translated here as two words,
so as not to conflate it directly with the American term “blackface.” See Nina Cornyetz,
“Fetishized Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan,” Social Text
41 (Winter 1994): endnote 2.
3 One well-known image of a yamanba being tortured is found in Yoshitoshi Tsukioka’s
Hag of Adachigahara (1885).
4 See Ōba Minako’s short story “The Smile of the Mountain Witch,” in Mizuta Lippit
(1982), 182–196.
5 Miyake Toshio, “Black is beautiful: Il boum delle ganguro-gyaru,” in La bambola e
il robottone: Culture pop nel Giappone contemporaneo, ed. Alessandro Gomarasca, (Turin:
Einaudi, 2001): 111–144.
6 As Judith Walkowitz testifies, the similarities in the representation of ganguro and
those of London’s “fallen women” (prostitutes) a century earlier is more than passing:
Victorian women felt to be sexually dangerous also tended to be presented as “ déclassé
and racially degenerate” (Walkowitz, 1992: 249).
7 Sartorial communication in the mode of rebellion, that is, as introduced by Dick
Hebdige in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979).
8 “Like their international counterparts, Japanese eugenicists tended to collapse biology
and culture, and, consequently, held either explicitly or implicitly Lamarckian views on
race formation and racial temperament” (Robertson, 2002: 196).
9 John Russell suggests that black and simian imagery were explicitly regarded as
interchangeable within Japanese culture until the late 1980s (Russell, 1996: 24).
10 Sourced online at www.bookreview.ne.jp/list.asp, accessed in 2002.
11 By contrast, researchers Maruta Kōji and Fujii Yoshiki found little trace of a genuine
“schoolgirl language” and concluded that it was a fiction invented within the mass
media (Maruta, 2000: 210).
12 Miyadai Shinji speaks out against the tendency to caricature schoolgirls as a species in
his own more universalist and sociological approach (Miyadai, 1994: 283).
13 An outline of the relationship between sex and femininity and Orientalism appears in
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978: 166–197).
14 A literary serialist with an extensive American readership, Lafcadio Hearn (also known
as Koizumi Yakumo) moved to Japan and between 1891 and 1904 published a series of
articles and books on Japanese fairy tales, ghost stories, and provincial life.
15 A key intellectual figure, Yanagita Kunio was the founder of minzokugaku, a Japanese
variant of folklore studies.
16 Carmen Blacker provides a chapter on miko shamanism in “The Ancient Sibyl,” in her
book The Catalpa Bow, 104–126.
17 D.P. Martinez affirms the diffusion of this image of simple and “selfless” rural women in
her work on domestic tourism of the 1950s, constructed around the “diving women”
(ama) of Mie prefecture. Martinez suggests that early postwar tourism reproduced
images of native Japan in which “the women were often slim and soft-spoken and wore
kimono, and the peasants were happy and simple and liked to drink” (Martinez, 1990:
101).
18 See Richard Dyer’s subchapter, “Black as Folk” (1986: 79–89).
19 Ueno Chizuko devotes space to this topic in “In the Feminine Guise” (1997a).
128 Girls as a race
20 Tsukuru Kai is a shorthand reference to the Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho wo Tsukuru Kai,
the Democratic History Association founded in 1996. Tsukuru Kai proposes that there
should be a positive emphasis on “national people’s history” (kokumin no rekishi) and
national cultural achievement, and a less negative portrayal of Japan’s wartime history in
the school curriculum. Members also tend to oppose feminism and gender equality, and
to favor the normalization of Japan’s international relations. See one critique of Tsukuru
Kai in Kayama Rika’s Petite Nationalism Syndrome (Pucchi Nashonarizumu Shokogun),
(Tokyo: Chūōkōron Shinsha, 2002).
21 See Hayashi Michiyoshi, “Fusei no fukken wa dekiru! Kawai Hayao shi e no hanron,”
Shokun! (December 1997).
22 The cover of this book features a photograph of a naked barely pubescent girl, shot in
fine-grained monochrome over a black background.
23 See another detailed overview of Girls Studies (sh joron) in Shamoon (2012: 3–8).
24 By the 2000s, otaku subculture, grounded in the first instance on producing and
critiquing Lolita-complex culture and comics (manga), had also deepened into a nucleus
of free, or non-institutional, social and cultural theory. Otaku intellectuals (otaku interi)
exhibited a distinctive mode of highly creative and emasculated male intellectualism.
Cultural theorists and artists with obvious or oblique connections to the otaku hub
include: the writers Asaba Michiaki, Ōtsuka Eiji, Azuma Hiroki, Miyadai Shinji,
Nakamori Akio, and Mori Nobuyuki, and the artists Murakami Takashi, Yanobe Kenji,
and Aida Makoto.
25 Miyadai Shinji maps the history of telephone chat lines and part-time work in the
sexual services from the 1980s through to the 1990s in a chapter titled the “Terekura
Minzokugaku” (Anthropology of Telephone Clubs), in Miyadai, Maboroshi no K gai
(Illusory Suburbia), (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Sha, 1997).
26 Honda’s preliminary essay on this subject is expanded in The Alien Culture of Children
(Honda, 1992). An English translation of Honda Masuko’s core ideas appears in the
essay and chapter “The Genalogy of hirahira: liminality and the girl” (in Aoyama and
Hartley, eds, 2010: 19–37).
27 Shiro Yoshioka points out however that Miyazaki’s nostalgia and search for a Japanese
past and a more wholesome rustic ecology, though resonant of Yanagita Kunio’s T no
monogatari “is not Yanagita’s static and unchanging notion of tradition: it is diverse and
dynamic” (Yoshioka, 2008: 261).
28 See samples of Masuyama Hiroshi’s work in Nicholas Bornoff “Sex and Consumerism:
the State of the Arts” (Lloyd, 2002).
29 Read more on modernology and Kon Wajirō in Miriam Silverberg,“Constructing the
Japanese Ethnography of Modernity,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 51:1 (February 1992):
30–54.
31 Kohama Itsurō, “Shutai to shite no shōjo,” in Sh joron, ed. Honda Masako (Tokyo:
Seikyusha, 1988), 97–98.
30 In the decades prior to relocating to Japan, Hearn had lived in poverty in Cincinnati and
New Orleans, where he was married, briefly, to Althea Foley, a young mulatto woman.
Under “anti-miscegnation laws” Hearn’s marriage to Foley, conducted in 1874 in the
home of a local black woman by a black priest, was not legally recognized. Rumors of his
illegal “interracial” marriage caused Hearn to lose commissions as an essayist. During the
late 1880s Hearn lived on the Caribbean island of Martinique, where he collected folk
stories told by local creole women. Based on his experiences in Martinique, and shortly
before moving to Japan, Hearn wrote a novel in the form of an imaginary autobiography
of a “Creole negress,” titled Youma: The Story of a West Indian Slave. Unsurprisingly,
Hearn was said to have “excelled in writing about women of mixed races” (Mordell,
1964: 187), and the issue of racial “miscegenation” became a permanent preoccupation
of his imagination (Gale, 2002: 4). Lafcadio Hearn also took an appreciative interest in
American minstrelsy, and described the all-black performance and audience of a minstrel
show he visited in Cincinnati in an article titled “Black Varieties,” published in the
Cincinnati Commercial in April 1878 (Mordell, 1964: 144–145; Lott, 1993: 48).
Girls as a race 129
32 Jennifer Robertson reports that the “central focus of the Japanese eugenics movement
concentrated on the physiques and overall health of girls and women,” who were
perceived anew as “the biological reproducers of the nation” (Robertson, 2002:
198–199).
33 Joanne Izbicki discusses both the perceived impotence of Japanese men and the
simultaneous overt sexualization of Japanese women in Occupied Japan, stalled between
defeat and an invitation to freedom. See Izbicki (1996: 109–153).
7
GANGURO, YAMANBA, AND
TRANSRACIAL STYLE
Male imagination and writing about young Japanese women as amorphous racial
and ethnic agents is the context in which the weight and wit of kogyaru, ganguro,
and yamanba style revealed itself. Weekly news magazine (sh kanshi) headlines and
television anchormen’s reports reacted in tones of exaggerated horror, but even a
cursory backward glance through the decades of girls’ comics, literature, theater,
and fashion magazines demonstrates that girls’ culture and fashion in Japan has
been riddled with wayward racial affiliations and pseudo-ethnic expressions since
its advent in the early twentieth century. What is more, a look through both near-
contemporary and historical writings and social policy on young women shows
that maintaining a stock of sexually chaste and pure-blooded ethnic Japanese
girls—and insulating them from the temptations of foreign travel, foreign female
behavior and fashion, and racial miscegenation—has been a longstanding con-
cern. This is so much the case that a complex antiphony has evolved between
ideological, literary, and aesthetic proscriptions of virginal, obedient, gentle,
and maternal ideal girls, chartered predominantly from within the educated male
camp, and what might be called the “anti-Japanese” tendency of girls’ culture.
Across the span of girl genres, dynamic girl characters with invented and hybrid
ethnicities have emerged. Young women displaying commitment to either the
closeted and fan-ish sphere of girls’ communications and comics, or to extrovert
and cosmopolitan modes of female performance, have in turn been singled out
and stigmatized as racial and cultural traitors to Japan. The continual surveillance
of girls’ mores and fashion by an eagle-eyed “male press” (oyaji zasshi), which
has taken upon itself the task of charting and disciplining the signs of feminine
bonding, evolution, and contrariness, has simultaneously provided a rapt national
audience and receptive stage for entertaining cultural digressions undertaken by
the more brave-hearted of young women.
Ganguro, yamanba, and transracial style 131
The much-commented-upon aura of sexual inexperience and purity that

underpinned prewar sh jo and postwar cute cultures, respectively, was in reality a
posture with both sexual and racial coordinates. Preppy prewar girls’ culture (sh jo
shumi) and asexual and individualistic postwar cute culture have, with some minor
exceptions, been implicitly bourgeois, European, and white in orientation. In con-
trast, both prewar gaaru (and modan gaaru) culture and contemporary gyaru culture
(emerging from the 1980s) have been characterized as assertive, brazenly sexual,
and oriented toward exotic, urban, and tourist locations and also toward white
and black American music and style, from jazz to hip hop. If the eventual value
to women of the exaggerated display of either untouchable and guileless virginity
or overbearingly frank and precocious sexuality has remained unresolved—and if
girls’ culture in Japan has been cleaved accordingly into two main streams rooted in
the different life experiences and habitus of the broadly upper-middle/professional
and the working/agricultural classes—then the element which has remained con-
stant across and throughout the different modes of girls’ culture, and which serves
to articulate it, finally, as a single movement, has nevertheless been the constancy
of its turning away from traditional Japanese femininity, ethnicity, and idealized
female Japanese looks.
While in the prewar and early postwar years consumer culture, borne on white
faces and bodies, provided the most consistent alternative and non-Japanese model
of female lifestyle and qualifying ethnic looks, from the 1980s, brown-skinned
non-Japanese cultures became more important as hip hop, rap, and black American
street style became the default anti-system culture, initially in the US and Europe,
and later in other parts of the globe. Domestic criticism of the political legitimacy of
white America served to strengthen an alternative interest in a stylistic nod towards
black America. Despite criticism of what has been interpreted as a peculiarly direct
attempt to ape foreign racial looks, the desire to associate with non-Japanese cul-
ture and people that swirls through girls’ culture has most commonly resulted
not in sincere and heavily constructed “passing” but in the circulation of entirely
invented and local pseudo-ethnic looks and postures. In her work on racial “pass-
ing,” in North America Sara Ahmed also suggests that racial mimicry has not
in general erased the point of origin that is still discernable. Rather, for colored
women, dressing and wearing make-up in order to resemble white women, this
“passing” has “mobilized both identities” at once, creating new transitional catego-
ries and possibilities.1 Furthermore, an interesting phase in the type of transitional
ethnicity created through racial bricolage took place in gyaru styles in the second
half of the 1990s. Kogyaru, ganguro, and yamanba fashion in Japan appeared to be as
pointedly unspecific about the origin and realism of its “racial looks” as was black
American culture on the other side of the Pacific. The rejection of naturalized
and exclusive black, white, and yellow features in the American rap, hip hop, and
R&B scenes, which was accessorized with wigs, colored contact lenses, high-life
bling, and dandyish dressing, displayed a certain homology with glamorous and
multicolored transethnic girls’ styles in Tokyo.
132 Ganguro, yamanba, and transracial style
Caucasian looks and the “sweet trickle of upper-class

affectations”
From the turn of the twentieth century, well-heeled and newly fashionable
daughters enthusiastically identified themselves not merely as physical but as spir-
itual “virgins” (shojo—similar to but not to be conflated with sh jo), as far from
the clutches of male desire and control as could be imagined. For these hopeful
pioneer schoolgirls, sex was difficult to differentiate from enforced female servi-
tude and even the sale of daughters to brothels. By idealizing their emotions and
their virginity these girls did not merely express a neurotic and narcissistic physi-
cal squeamishness, they asserted their right to political and material independence
and struggled to enforce their new identity as young women who would not
be contracted out as indentured factory girls, domestic servants or brides. It was
an ambition rooted at once in gender emancipation and class aspiration since
involvement in industrial labor identified girls as part of the “lower strata” (kas )
(Faison, 2007: 5).
The nascent sh jo culture of girls’ literature, magazines, and fashion, in which
prewar schoolgirls’ had the relative privilege of immersing themselves, tended to
portray schoolgirl virgins as transcendental, transnational, and romantic beings,
rather forlornly awaiting the physical and spiritual debasement of a (good) mar-
riage. Honda Masuko locates some of the roots of the association between
extra-territoriality and girls’ spirituality in the influential and widely read seri-
alized stories of prewar sh jo author Yoshiya Nobuko.2 Yoshiya introduced a
large vocabulary of foreign words, such as the names of flowers (“hot house
freesias”), fabrics (“crepe”), and colors (“mahogany”), into her girls’ stories,
channeling a “sweet trickle of upper-class affectations”3 toward female readers,
which encouraged them to fantasize about freedom in terms of the aesthetic
luxury of upper-middle-class society and “the sparkle of the rose-tinted West”
(Honda, 1992: 172). Within these short stories about the joy and liberation of
friendships between girls and the schoolgirl days before facing marriage “sen-
timental power is covert resistance” argues scholar Hiromi Tsuchiya-Dollase
(2003: 34). Nakahara Junichi’s well-known cover illustrations of delicate and
ethnically ambiguous girls with enormous, doleful eyes and pale skin, made for
Girls’ Friend (Sh jo no Tomo) and other girls’ magazines, indicate the kind of
imaginary fusion of European and Japanese looks that became ubiquitous to
fashionable appearances in prewar Japan. Nakahara’s pictures of fantastical waifs,
with button noses and long slender limbs, maintained a remarkable consistency
from the 1930s through to the 1960s. They testify to the relative duration and
uniformity of this putatively Eurasian model through the core Shōwa decades.4
In his much-debated serialized novel, Chijin no Ai (Naomi, 1924), Tanizaki
Junichiro illustrates, through the transformation of his character Naomi from
an illiterate teenage café waitress from a poor family into a stylish dilettante
wife, how the dynamic for expressing female independence through an aes-
thetic association with Western societies was also cleaved by the class origin of
the girls in question and the type of “West” to which they were allied. Naomi,
hailing from common stock, is portrayed as a weak student who fails miserably
to advance in learning French but as a social butterfly of dance halls and jazz
music linked with prewar “Americanization.”4 Coarse Naomi is portrayed as
unable to acquire European manners and language but a good match for the
more vibrant and less literary America. As Naomi gains in outrageous confi-
dence and power, the shocks this elicits in her abandoned husband are expressed
through his sighting his young wife, barely recognizable in Western dress and
under a mask of white make-up. In the final pages of the novel, Naomi has
become the narrator-husband’s tyrannical mistress who, “getting the amah to
help, applies white make-up to her entire body” (Tanizaki, 1986: 236). She
appears as a hybrid creature, “as a Westerner who is not Western” (Silverberg,
2006: 56).5 For the narrator who is her husband Joji, and the Japanese gov-
ernment (which forced the temporary discontinuation of Tanizaki’s serialized
novel) this story of an uncouth café waitress discovered in the most lowly of
occupations but quickly adapting to the opportunity to dominate and abuse her
middle-class husband and sponsor, represented a picture of rigid gender and
class relations overturned. While skin-lightening and cosmopolitan cultural
bricolage rooted in prewar girls’ subcultures attracted the ire of conservatives,
it was in some degree part of a larger trend towards grassroots cultural syncre-
tism taking root in public culture and public space in Japanese cities. For young
women adhering to aspects of what became known as Naomi-ism however,
sampling “Western” (seiy ) culture and fashion became closely bound up with
exhilarating new routes and ways of cosmopolitan life.6
Novelists, intellectuals, and figures of the twentieth century avant garde have
regularly decried the ethnic artifice of muddleheaded young women vainly attempt-
ing to become “Western.” However, European culture and Caucasian physical
features were in fact connected to elite social ranking and superior physiological
health from around the period of the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. In practice,
the ongoing criticism of fashionable young women adopting European affecta-
tions was a selective criticism of girls of the lower classes coveting the trappings
of, among other things, upper-class status. Along with a range of other beautifying
activities, such as exercise, modern young ladies of leisure (o’josama and jogakusei)
were encouraged to lighten their complexions with a range of new cosmetic prod-
ucts. As historian Kawamura Kunimitsu explains:
With make-up and cosmetic fluids girls were supposed to achieve the appear-
ance of noble women and regal daughters. The message of the make-up
adverts was that age and signs of aging and labor are bad and pure white skin is
good. In order to keep their skin white women were expected to keep away
from direct flames and heat and keep out of the sun’s rays, implying that they
could not work in open fields or on the seashore.
(Kawamura, 1994: 30)
Ochiai Emiko underlines that in women’s magazines the main models of femi-
nine beauty until the mid-1960s were white women, mostly Hollywood actresses
or models.7 Thus, regardless of recurrent ideological antagonism toward the idea
of “Westernization,” pale skin and a selective, local notion of Caucasian beauty
became the institutionalized norm of ideal female appearances in middle-class
postwar culture. Whitening lotions and sun parasols became closely, and perhaps
surprisingly coherently, co-figured and naturalized with more conservative and
ethnocentric Japanese looks, primarily straight black hair.8 A different and more
quirky kind of Western fashion and white model began to appear in the context of
the later 1960s to 1970s,9 but in the 1980s, Eurasians or “halfs” (haafu) became the
models of choice in the majority of girls’ fashion magazines organized around the
theme of cuteness.10 As the orientation toward European culture and whiteness lost
ground as a radical alternative to proscriptions for a pure and bourgeois notion of
Japanese femininity, the appeal of brown skin, black music, and exotic cultures—
which were neither traditionally Japanese nor coded as white and unpleasantly
superior—increased.
The “black connection” (b-kei ) in girls’ culture

During the 1980s girls’ style moved into two major currents, which represented dif-
ferent strategic responses to the escalating discourse about, and sexualization of, girls
in the media. Innocent, cute style (sh jo-kei) tended to be as covertly European and
white in orientation as it was extrovertly asexual.11 American and black American
culture simultaneously became a source of interest for the assertive young work-
ing women and college students who became known as gyaru. The impressionistic
influence of black American taste on gyaru fashion, such as in the brightly colored,
skin-tight outfits and heavy gold jewelry of the bodikon (body-conscious) style of
the mid-1980s, occasionally excluded easy combination with the asexuality of
cute style. More typically, however, the geographical and racial currents under-
lying the two streams flowed alongside and crossed one another, catalyzing the
repeated eruption of seemingly paradoxical postures: sexual but innocent, Japanese
but exotic, or exotic but asexual (robotic). In a similar pattern to the previous selec-
tive assimilation of what was considered to be European beauty into girls’ culture,
the growing attraction to black American culture was expressed in hybridized and
localized versions of “black style” (b-kei) fashion. Attempts at the close physical
emulation of black Americans in form not dissimilar to the powdered and whitened
body of Tanizaki’s Naomi, which for a period involved blacking-up and hair braid-
ing, remained the more exclusive pursuit of a subculture of hip hop fans and b-girls
(b-gyaru).12 While European affectations combined with a preference for “white
beauty” (bihaku) tended—though not always—to also serve as a defensive warning
sign of higher social status and refinement, black cultural influences have been coded
in opposition, as a release from what is verbalized as the hypocrisy and snobbery of
middle-class Japanese values and aesthetics. The earthier focus of “respecting” (risu-
pekuto wo suru) other people and being “real and right” (riaru de tadashi) of Japanese
hip hop, which later flowed into kogyaru and ganguro culture, corresponded to a
more philanthropic and anti-elitist perspective on society.
Black looks and black American music became components of kogyaru culture in
the second half of the 1990s. Singers, such as Bobby Brown, Eternal, and Whitney
Houston, and British model Naomi Campbell became popular, and were bolstered
by a revived interest in American soul and gospel singers, such as The Weather
Girls. Fine, the only magazine with a crossover readership of boys and girls, grafted
newer b-kei and kogyaru tastes onto its older themes of surfing and hip hop. Amuro
Namie, whose time as the number one singer and de facto kogyaru idol spanned
from spring 1996 until her marriage in winter 1997, was herself considered racially
exotic. Okinawan rather than mainland Japanese, and one-quarter Italian, Amuro
Namie’s racial difference was supplemented with tanned skin, lightened hair,
plucked, arching eyebrows, and b-gyaru inflected sassiness. Music manager Komura
Tetsuya claimed to have modeled Speed, the band in which Amuro Namie first
debuted, on the American soul group TLC, and black American back-up singers
later accompanied Amuro on stage on tour.
Black cultural interests were reflected in the titles of the individual boutiques
in “maruky ,” the 109 department store in Shibuya, in the late 2000s: Jam Sweet
Jungle, R&E, Funky Girl, Songeur, Coco Bongo, MCC Zone, and T.D. Mix. LB-O3
gave out gold and shiny shopping bags bearing the mock-homey slogan “Butter
Bitch Style,” and LB-03 and Shake Shake specialized in a fairly exclusively black
look, sustained with posters of dark-skinned black models, displayed inside the
boutiques. Both of these outlets sold glittering ghettofabulist-style jewelry, sexy
sportswear, and stretch terrycloth sports pants and jackets in the style of American
“black brands,” such as Baby Phat. Raunchy tops and cutaway shorts in stretchy
lace, denim, leather, and animal prints seemed to draw, through convoluted
sources, upon the bombastic, fancy fashions of Kingston, Jamaica. B-kei boutiques
selling domestic cuts for local sisters also acted as points for distributing flyers for
b-kei and hip hop bars, DJ events, and hip hop and R&B club nights.
Early articles promoting black looks in kogyaru magazines were blunt and
literal. Egg featured a “ragga mix” photo-shoot in which girls with dreads posed
for reader snaps (Egg, January 1996: 63–69) and a photo-article titled “Homeboy
into the Real World: Whatsup?” involving a black man with an Afro hairstyle
(Egg, September 1995: 109–111). Cawaii! magazine promoted “foreign tastes”
(gaijin teisto) and showed, through a photo make-over article, how its readers
could borrow some of the kinked locks and dusky looks of half-Japanese girls,
in an article titled “All Right, Girls! Let’s Try Mode of Half!” (Cawaii! issue 6,
September 1996: 39). In 2001, Egg magazine exhorted readers to care about
“God save the black revolution!!” in a fashion special on sexy black clothes and
a sexy black look, all linked to “extreme black power” (ky retsu na black power).13
However, the source of sassy foreign ethnicity in girls’ fashion was not limited
to black American culture. The names of the 109 boutiques not already listed
above reflect the loosely Hawaiian, Polynesian, Caribbean, and Latin American
imagery that also infused kogyaru and ganguro fashion: Love Boat, me jane, Sneeze
Dip, Jess Eye, Kona Blue, Rocky American Market, Esperanza, Lip Service, Cafe La
Mil, Nabana, Papaya Grab, Chup, Yellow Boots, Pinky Girls, Dolce Vita, CRYX
SPS, Dune, XO XO Kiss Kiss, FDP, elles, Zazou, Material Girl, Coco Lulu, Lib,
Ji-maxx, Deep dish, Galsville, Pink Pink, Egoist, Chiara, Rojita, Majoreena, Love
Boat Drug Store, Kapaluah, Raer Girls, Love Girls Market, and Shoop. The highly
sought-after local brand Alba Rosa produced Hawaiian prints and clothes with a
tropical beach theme during the late 1990s.
From the late 1990s, female R&B performers were an increasing presence in
the developing interface between Japanese hip hop and incoming soul influences.
Singers such as Misia, Utada Hikaru, and Rima sang over hip hop beats (Condry,
2000: 177). At the height of ganguro fashion, and in its wake in the early 2000s,
girls’ culture became increasingly oriented around soul, and a sexy diva look. Shops
gave out flyers for new albums from upcoming black American soul singers, and
established rap and soul singers such as Ms. Dynamite, Destiny, Lil’ Kim, Angie
Stone, India Aries, and Beyoncé. In 2003, HMV free-paper Dextra featured an
interview with Ai, touted as “Japan[’s] First B-girl.” Released by Def Jam Japan, Ai
lounges confidently in a half-cocked gold leather flat-cap, and tells readers where
her musical influences came from: “Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner,
Kool & the Gang. My mama only listens to old songs. She’s like a SOUL LADY.
And,” says Ai, “recently I’ve been listening to Alicia Keys.”14
In 1998 the highlighted or dyed light brown hair of the slightly cocky kogyaru
style, began to make way for heavily highlighted silvery blond big hair arranged
in shaggy hairdos, in some cases teased or back-combed and piled up into bouf-
fant arrangements. This powerful assemblage was overlaid with colors: metallic
lamé face glitter on the cheeks and around plucked, arching brows; glittering face
stickers in the shapes of teardrops, stars, and hearts; and equally well-encrusted
fingernails and painted nail extensions. White make-up on brown skin was acces-
sorized with any of a range of generally theatrical props, from ubiquitous clusters
of artificial tropical flowers strung on bracelets, necklaces, and hair slides to colored
contact lenses, temporary tattoos, cowboy hats, and bulky ethnic jewelry. During
the late 1990s kogyaru loose socks and black loafers gradually gave way to unwieldy
platform (atsuzoku) sandals and knee-high boots that dramatically increased the
height of girls, giving them the stringy-limbed appearance of anime heroines.15
The suggestive “adult” look of kogyaru style moved toward bright, flared trousers,
skin-tight hot pants, micro-miniskirts, and jumpsuits that were somewhat reminis-
cent of the costumes of 1970s stars of funkadelia on stage.
From 1999 an older deck of girls’ magazines that had been marginalized by
gyaru-kei street culture and the rise of the new kogyaru (formally categorized as
“street” or “life information”) magazines—Popteen, Egg, and Cawaii!—began to
promote a return to “white beauty style” (bihaku-kei). Compounding the social
ostracism that greeted tanning, hair-lightening, and larger-than-life theatrical
ganguro gyaru styles in the domestic news media, Olive, Cutie, and Peewee maga-
zines pushed for a renewal of more conventional and demure European-esque
girlishness. The 1999 debut of singer Utada Hikaru was wishfully interpreted as
a sign of the return to popularity of pale-skinned Japanese beauty. The 1970s

girls’ attitude and comic genre known as otomechikku (“maiden chic,” punning
with “automatic” and so being “maidenatic”) was momentarily revived, along
with the eccentric late figure of Sonoko Suzuki, a then frail veteran model,
campaigner, and retailer of whitening make-up. Despite photo-shoots of the
twenty-first-century “maiden” (otome) and sweetly docile post-kogyaru girlie
(gaari) girls, the influence of ganguro and b-kei style continued to reverberate
through an increasingly diverse and sophisticated girls’ clothes culture with a
deep and self-evident connection to the style and sexuality of hip hop and R&B.
See a girl with braided hair in Figure 7.1. Through the mid-2000s, street social
life, coalescing in Shibuya on weekends, witnessed a reworking of key phases
of girl gang styles of the 1990s, but from more individualistic and self-conscious
perspectives.16 The kogyaru, ganguro and yamanba became archetypes of urban folk
mythology whom were nostalgically invoked through the following decade. See
the 2010 spoof “Gyaru sensei” in Figure 7.2.
Dark skin and sexual defiance

The universal institutionalization of the enlightened, middle-class ideals of
schoolgirl purity (junsui) and asexuality in postwar educationalist society (gakureki
shakai) made prostitution and female sexual promiscuity conversely attractive
to avant-garde creators, from Terayama Shūji to Imamura Shōhei, and later in
Lolita-complex material. The laughter of sluts, and their tears, became a sign of
immanent resistance (in the mode of, say, Tosaka Jun or Bahktin)17 to (over)man-
aged mass society (kanri shakai). The repeated recollection of the taboo culture
and history of unfortunate lower class women signaled a rejection of forcefully
universalized middle-class social organization. As sex was gradually claimed and
recalled to girls’ culture, too, during the 1980s, it met with heavy criticism and
resistance from government agencies. Gals City (Gyaru Shitei), launched by Shufu
no Tomo in June 1984, was one of the industry forerunners of kogyaru magazines
of the late 1990s, and featured the indicative cover slogan “Nechū raburabu”
(Crazily Loved Up). Publication of Gals City was terminated within a year, fol-
lowing a debate in the Diet about the unacceptability of its “loved-up” innuendo.
Producer ambition for the theme of independent young female sexuality, which
reached full fruition in the shape of kogyaru style in the 1990s, fused with skin
and color experimentation. In ganguro style, the interest in dark skin and racial
confabulation became more intense, representing what a latter-day sociologist
might characterize as the “consolidation and accentuation of deviant values”
(Young, 1971: 44). Its haughty extremism was eventually vaunted as ruling out
much combination with experiments in sexual appeal to men. Nevertheless, the
emergence in summer 2004 of a few young boys dressing in skirts and shaggy
bleached hair-dos in a partial homage to ganguro yamanba, initially dubbed the
Centre Guys18 and later evolving into gyaruo, confirmed that the style was not
without sexual charge and aftershocks.19
FIGURE 7.1 A girl wearing braids outside McDonald’s in Shibuya in 1999
FIGURE 7.2 In “Talking with Girl Teacher,” Gyaru-sensei transmits her worldly wisdom
to an “18-year-old dry-cleaning shop assistant”
Source: printed with kind permission of Tokyo Graffiti magazine. Tokyo Graffiti (March 2010): 100.
In the context of the strong marketing of black skin, hair, and brown flesh as
the human embodiment of “wild animalistic sexuality” in the North American
entertainment industry (Hooks, 1992: 69), it is scarcely surprising that the broader
interest in black American and diasporic culture20 became bound up with the rejec-
tion of the code of Japanese sh jo innocence. Ganguro culture developed its own
trope of proud and sexual body language, within which reverberations of the dole-
ful stares of Motown stars, the beseeching outstretched arms of the Supremes, and
the fronting poses of contemporary hip hop and R&B could be faintly discerned.
A photo-shoot for Egg magazine (January 2000: 66–67) depicted ganguro in braids
on location in Bali, posing with jubilant, open-mouthed grins, squatting amidst
a gaggle of local dark-skinned children. Unlike previous generations of young
women on the fringes of the hip hop or the Roppongi-district clubbing scene, and
associated with the sexuality of black American men,21 kogyaru and ganguro were
linked to the contemporaneous new school of female soul divas—Lauren Hill and
Macy Gray. These performers were received as models of colored beauty, and as
wise, confident, and charismatic young women in control of their own sexual
power. Like displaying a sexual preference for black men, acquiring a brown skin
and black attitude became a means to becoming more confidently physical and less
willing to acquiesce.
Despite comments that “misguided Yellow Negroes are foolish, childish
consumers” (Wood, 1998: 63) from North American observers of b-kei and
gyaru styles in Japan, early signs of feminine alignment with black American
experience and culture predate its visibility in street and music fashion. Prewar
feminist and key author of girls’ literature Yoshiya Nobuko, for example, saw
parallels between the political situation of black Americans and that of Japanese
womanhood. Yoshiya prayed, “God, may I have the ability to write a power-
ful story about the abolition of prostitution, just as Harriet Stowe wrote Uncle
Tom’s Cabin for the freedom of slaves” (cited in Tsuchiya-Dollase, 2003: 111).22
Jazz music linked to new venues for socializing—taxi-dance halls and cafés—
formed a significant soundtrack to prewar gaaru culture in the 1920s. Female
libertines in Tokyo and Osaka fell into the exploratory mood of jazz.23 During
the 1960s, several female authors began to experiment with the idea of an Afro-
Japanese fraternity. Photo-journalist and “yellow-skinned woman” Yoshida
Ruiko released Hot Harlem Days in 1967, and claimed a close affinity with black
American people (Russell, 1996: 28). Hishoku (Colorless), by Ariyoshi Sawako,
was published in the same year and imagines a life in which the author marries a
young black serviceman and goes to Harlem to live with him. Initially resisting
the undisciplined habits of her black husband and relatives, familial and racial
loyalty provoke her to eventually declare: “I’m a negro, too!” (“Watashi mo
neguro da!” Ariyoshi, 1967: 406). During the 1980s, the pairing of adventur-
ous and sexual Japanese women with black American men became the central
theme of best-selling novels by Yamada Eimi. In spite of the arch and gauche
stereotyping of black personalities for which these novels have been criticized,24
Nina Cornyetz points out that they nevertheless work to create a sense of
“self-as-black” (Cornyetz, 1996: 453). It is a mode of “passing” that is fully

realized in the half-Japanese and half-African-American protagonist of Harlem
World (1990). In the words of an Asahi Shinbun article which saw ganguro style
as a deliberate strike against the presumption that all Japanese nationals will have
black hair and pale skin, high school students into R&B, reggae, and ganguro
“simply jump over the wall dividing different skin color and hair color” (Asahi
Shinbun, 22 November 1999, evening edition).25
Interestingly, Japanese female fascination with Afro-Japanese unity was almost
mutual: during the 1970s, ostensibly Japanese and Chinese codes of masculinity and
martial arts became an important dimension of black cultural visions of an inter-
national colored solidarity. Kung fu movies such as Enter the Dragon (1974) placed
black American (Jim Kelly) and Chinese (Bruce Lee) stars together, in a homage
to Oriental intellectual and military ingenuity that was reaffirmed in the seminal
album Kung Fu Meets the Dragon (1975) by Jamaican reggae artist Lee Scratch
Perry. Afro-Asian characters in contemporary US culture have emerged mainly in
and around the fringes of hip hop and contemporary black American art. The Wu
Tang Clan, from New York, made the mythical band of fighting monks featured
in many kung fu movies their name and theme. The Chinese element infused hip
hop with the impression of a spiritually superior, mysterious, indomitable, alien
force. The band’s design company is called Kokujin, which means ‘black people’
in Japanese. Wu Tang Clan later produced the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s film
Ghost Dog (2000), about a contemporary black American who studies antique texts
on the mindset of a retainer and practices his samurai sword skills to gain dignity
in his circumstances as hitman dependent on criminal gang orders. In the con-
temporary period this trajectory, which North American scholar Vijay Prashad
has described as “polyculturalism” (Prashad, 2001) in Afro-Asian Connections, is
continued in the widespread practice of commissioning tattoos ostensibly spelling
out important principles—love, trust, loyalty—in Chinese or Japanese ideogram
and syllabury. While Japanese women visualized black American men and later
women, black American men visualized self-realization through formal cultural
traditions in China and Japan.
Contemporary Afro-American artist Iona Brown introduced her view by
placing ganguro gyaru fashion and black American kung-fu sensibility together,
in a series of photographs and paintings, produced in the early 2000s, titled
A-cubed, or African Asiatic Algorithm. Meanwhile literary Japanese visions of
comradely physical bonding between Japanese women and black American
men were reenacted and updated in Yamamoto Masashi’s budget ganguro film
Limousine Drive (2001), which depicts a belligerent ganguro, Eri, flying to New
York to find her two-timing chiima26 boyfriend, Nao. Along the way the foul-
mouthed and common-as-muck Eri bounces between beds and strikes up a
friendship with a shaggy, kind-hearted black American man, after climbing
into his limousine cab for a ride. The down-at-the-heels gyaru, sticking to her
miniskirt and platform boots, is depicted as a survivor who is in her element in
Manhattan, rolling with the punches in a multiracial Lower East Side. The film
concludes with a love scene in which Eri presumptuously announces to her new
friend, “You can fuck me now.”
Regardless of the self-elected and fantastical quality of the moments of sexual,
political, and stylistic communion between Japanese girls and black Americans
from the 1960s through the 1980s, Japanese girls’ culture and black Anglo-
American culture have more broadly shared certain logistical characteristics. The
proximity of their cultural responses and social experiences may have encouraged a
trans-Pacific affinity. Girls’ culture has mobilized around the strategic exaggeration
of aspects of domestic cultural stereotypes of young women. In cute style of the
1980s this exaggeration took the form of a challenging refusal to comprehend adult
talk, and what has been described as an asexual narcissism, painstakingly extrapo-
lated from the idealized innocence and chastity of eligible Japanese girls (Kinsella,
1995). In gyaru culture, girls accused of being prostitutes and decadents from the
1980s flaunted crudely exaggerated signs of sexual availability and shallow mate-
rialism. Girls’ culture has stretched and played upon the artificial texture of the
perfect girl27 and propelled a resistant mode of hypergirlishness (either overly pure
or over-sexualized) through the streets and train stations. Black culture and style in
North America and in Britain has displayed a similar modus operandi, in that the
stereotyped features of black youth—typically criminality and sexual potency—
have been seized and exaggerated, to create larger-than-life effigies of the essential
black character—gangsters and pimps. Acting black and acting girlish have also
underpinned the entertainment provided by black Americans and teenage girls,
respectively, and have done so in increasingly transnational contexts. A defensive
social strategy in style has been coterminous with commercial self-styling. Leading
hip hop artists NWA (Niggers With Attitude) titled their top-selling recording
“Niggaz4Life.” In case any doubt remains about their policy, the group’s mem-
bers also categorized themselves as “professional niggers” (Lhamon, 1996: 282).
Matsuda Seiko, the most emblematic cute idol singer of the 1980s, had made an
almost identical statement a decade earlier, when she declared: “I am a professional
pseudo cutie.”28
Transracialism and syncretic girls’ culture

During the 1990s alternative responses to the problem of stereotyping and stigmati-
zation became more prominent in black American and Japanese girls’ style. Rather
than capturing—and inflating to intimidating extremes—the narrow and restrict-
ing characterizations of black people or of girls, both of these cultures produced
more diverse and articulate self-images that confounded easy racial and sexual
categorization. Leakage at the point of contact between these two cultural forma-
tions continued, but what spread were not simple, arch-racial characters but more
fractured and creative self-articulations. In the same period, kogyaru and ganguro
style was as apparently unspecific about being “black” as was commercial black cul-
ture itself. Both of these cultural foci were more creative than defensive, showing
more commitment to strong make-up, colored wigs, hair extensions, changeable
skin-shades, and colored contact lenses, than to particular racial looks. The refusal
of naturalized ethnic boundaries within gyaru culture illustrates the continuity in
North East Asia of a sensibility of growing disdain for “over integrated concep-
tions of culture which present immutable ethnic differences as an absolute break in
the histories and experiences of ‘black’ and ‘white’ people” (Gilroy, 1993: 2). Paul
Gilroy has consistently pointed to this shift in contemporary culture, and in Against
Race (2000) he notes, again, that there has been a global movement towards “the
deliberate and self-conscious repudiation of “race” as a means to categorize and
divide humankind” (Gilroy, 2000: 17).
American entertainer Lil’ Kim debuted in 1996, at 17 years old, with an ostenta-
tiously pornographic rap album, Hardcore, and became simultaneously “notorious”
for both her bombastic lyrics and sexual outfits and for breaking the rules about
what colored women should be. Angry web debates generated within the black
American community pursued her disinclination to stick to brown skin and black
Afro hair.29 Lil’ Kim has appeared encrusted with glittering jewelry (“bling”), and
“ghettofabulist” cutaway colored leather bustiers and low-rise chaps, with fringed
boots. Besides developing a reputation for skin-lightening and matching her con-
tact lenses and wigs (red, blue, purple, yellow, green) to her make-up and outfits,
she has performed as a brown-skinned, ginger-haired, blue-eyed girl, and a beige-
skinned, blue-eyed Venus with flowing blond Renaissance hair (see The Notorious
KIM, album cover, 2000).30 In 2003, Lil’ Kim’s La Bella Mafia album and cover
received major promotion in Tokyo record stores. Since debuting in 1999, blond-
haired and blue-eyed American singer Christina Aguilera has adopted something
of Lil’ Kim’s theatrical tastes and appeared in sexy cutaway outfits, colored contact
lenses, and a range of hairpieces and wigs.
Kogyaru fashion—premised on sexy micro-shorts, platform boots and san-
dals, flared hipster pants, glamorous accessories, and luxuriant brown and
streaked tresses—was eventually part of the same global fashion conversation
as the low-rise hipster chaps, sexy revealing tops, tanned skin, and sensual
exuberance of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé, Mariah Carey,
Jennifer Lopez, and others based in North America. The “cultural syncre-
tism” (Hebdige, 1987) of ganguro style—premised on tanned and colored skin;
white-, blond-, caramel-, and later orange-dyed tresses; colored hair extensions
and contact lenses; theatrical platform boots and cowboy hats; tight-fitting
glamorous outfits; and lamé glitter face paint and face stickers—was conversant
with the sassy and colorful performances of Lil’ Kim, Bjork, Christina Aguilera,
Nivea, and the bigged-up aplomb of the ghettofabulist style. While ganguro
derived some of the quirks of its style from local modes of blackface min-
strelsy,31 it also displayed a strong connection to the global direction of girls’
fashion. The racial punkery of yamanba and radical ghettofabulist style with
transracial looks were created at a subcultural level that hit the ground running
in Japan and the US, and, in the words of Franz Fanon, “introduced invention
into existence” (Fanon, 1986: 218). Rather than being the ignorant mimicry
of black or African racial looks for which ganguro style was lampooned, the
suturing of elements of black culture within gyaru and ganguro fashion—and the
experimental interest in combining racial colors, as if ethnicity, too, was sub-
sumed within make-up and fashion—brought Japanese gyaru culture into close
communication with the international focus on mobile and transracial style and
politics. See the transethnic looks flaunted by pop-singer Ayumi Hamasaki in
Figure 3.1.
The rejection of either race or national ethnicity as meaningful categories in
contemporary social life has also been expressed in the ascendance of beige models
and entertainers32 in North American, British, and Japanese commercial culture
and advertising. Processed, commercial formulations of transracial body aesthetics
resulted in ambivalent racial features and beige skin, suggesting racial fluidity and
reunion. Regardless of nationality, the majority of female performers of the sec-
ond half of the 1990s had light brown skin and dark brown eyes. The best-selling
American singer, Mariah Carey, of Irish-American and African-Venezuelan parent-
age, appeared with flowing fawn-blond locks, and has light brown skin and brown
eyes. Brown-haired and brown-eyed American singer and muse Britney Spears
wore a golden-brown tan, dark eye make-up, and long flowing blond tresses.
Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez typically wore her hair long and blond, and has
light-brown skin and dark brown eyes, inherited from her Puerto Rican parents.
Stars who did not inherit light-brown skin made use of other exotic features. Black
female rapper Foxy Brown, who debuted alongside Lil’ Kim in 1996, made play
of her part-Chinese ancestry and “slanted-eyes” in the lyrics of her 1999 album,
Chyna White. Amuro Namie, the key female icon of kogyaru culture between
1995 and 1998, appeared with flowing blond or light reddish hair and tanned
golden-brown skin. Komura Tetsuya produced Amuro’s band with the image of
the female American soul group TLC in mind. Ayumi Hamasaki, who debuted in
April 1998 and replaced Amuro Namie in pole position, most frequently appeared
with a light tan and ash-blond hair. Thus from the mid-1990s, tanned brown
skin and cascading blond and caramel tresses were characteristic of gyaru culture
in Japan, and the sensual aesthetics of female stars in the American entertainment
industry alike. Characters with light-brown skin and transracial features were also
adopted by animation studios and toy manufacturers. A designer Japanese fashion
doll, “Momoko,” launched by PetWORKs Doll Division in 2001, drew on the
tanned brown skin and ethnic juxtaposition of ethnic shades in kogyaru and ganguro
style. Bequeathed with a supine body, mature face, almond-shaped eyes, button
nose, and arched brows, Momoko came with black, milk tea, or white-blond hair
and olive skin or red hair combined with a dark tan and blue eyes. From 1998
Disney also focused on creating beige transnational heroines in successful anima-
tions such as Mulan (1998),33 in which the heroine is putatively Chinese with rather
brown skin.34
In America, a recent Korean immigrant and artist, Nikki Lee, made demon-
strating the possibility of transracial performance the theme of her art. In the
early 2000s Lee’s work, which has circulated widely and appeared alongside
African-American art in the Brooklyn Art Museum, consisted of dressing up
and “passing” as a member of other ethnic subcultures. Lee suggests that an

extensive process of undercover ethnographic work precedes the photographic
portraits she has made of herself in situ with an African-American hip hop
crew, a circle of Hispanic-American friends, an exotic pole dancer, a Japanese
school girl, a drag queen, and among Japanese hipsters living in New York.
Lee claims to go undercover and enter undetected the ethnic culture she later
emulates, before finally arriving at a semblance and taking photographs of her-
self in situ, with her new friends. Lee’s photographs demonstrate the plasticity
and performativity of contemporary racial looks, but they also, perhaps less
intentionally, demonstrate the peculiar status of Oriental girls in European and
North American imagination, as fluid postracial creatures able to move across
racial and cultural borders.35 Homi Babha has suggested that the rise of a “trans-
national and translation sense of hybridity of imagined communities” (Babha,
1994: 5), which is captured in the commercial production of a mode of global
ethnicity, is based on the actual experiences of increased human mobility and
labor migration across national borders in the contemporary period. Looking
at gyaru style in Japan it may also be based on virtual access to styles and
movements in other societies made possible through the mobility of cultural
professionals and the world wide web. Sympathetic cultural interactions can
take place in the absence of much grassroots physical mobility or direct social
encounters.
Ethnic transformation and performance

Cynical undercurrents within cute style of the 1980s matured into a rudely forced
and almost camp parody of stereotyped feminine cuteness in gyaru and kogyaru
style, for which the ritual of laborious and sometimes precarious changes of outfit
and make-up sessions, in public—on trains or in WCs—were central activities.
Clever teenage talk of “becoming a girl” (gyaru ni naru), or of not yet having
achieved that status (mada gyaru ni nattenai), and the porterage of large mirrors and
ostentatious make-up pouches, all supported the impression of a mocking perfor-
mance of gyaru girlishness.
The intensity of the parodic and theatrical mode of kogyaru and ganguro style
lent it an increasingly camp flavor. Comic self-mockery was captured well in
a photo-story comic-strip titled Yamanba!, serialized in Popteen magazine in
the 2000s. Yamamba! featured a teenage model known to readers as Aja, who
appeared with copious white hair bunched up into bedraggled pigtails and a
grotesquely over-made-up face, including blue eye sockets, large chunks of face
glitter, and eyelashes slathered with thick white mascara. In this photo-strip Aja
pulls foolish and forlorn expressions and undertakes various unladylike and slap-
stick stunts, such as throwing herself in front of men on the street, in a comic
attempt to get a boyfriend. Indeed the “drag” sensibility of ganguro and yamamba
attracted the attention and support from the sidelines of queer media personali-
ties. Hiromi, the transgender talent and gyaru pop-star from Osaka, became a
teenage girls’ idol and appeared in features and advice articles in kogyaru maga-
zines in the late 1990s.
The performative and the comedic elements of gyaru culture overlapped seam-
lessly with the extensive pre-existing culture of male cross-dressing as girls, and
allowed an easy entry into skits parodying kogyaru and yamanba for cross-dressing
professional male entertainers. In a celebrated series of transvestite photographic
portraits of 33 eminent figures (ch meijin) of the literary establishment (bundan)
and the world of cultural criticism (rondan), printed in the lowbrow men’s maga-
zine Sh kan H seki in the mid-1990s, sociologist Miyadai Shinji appeared in
drag as a kogyaru (Kamikura, 1998). (See Figure 8.3 and more discussion of this
transvestite pose in Chapter 8.) In 2002, television comedian Gori began a series
of weekly skits in drag as a colorful and loopy yamanba—Gorie—for the popular
variety show, Suij (Wed@10), broadcast on Channel 10. The impulse to join
in with raging gyaru street styles was felt at the grassroots level, too. A theatrical
skit performed by gay bar staff at their community cabaret show “Gaku Gay Kai
2002,” held in Shinjuku Bunka Center (28 December 2002), was titled “My Fair
Lady the Fake,” and made a comedy of a plain queen who wanted to learn how
to become a sexy, cool kogyaru. Gorie’s yamanba alter ego was reputedly popular
with high-school girls, and he appeared in drag as a fashion model on the cover
and in the photo-shoots of the leading ganguro and gyaru magazine, Popteen, in
March 2003. See Gorie goofing around in Figure 7.3. Through male enter-
tainers’ appropriation of girls’ street styles and poses, male cultural professional
interpretations of girls’ fashion were fed back into girls’ culture itself, joining
the larger feedback loop of male-oriented media commentary and visual culture
provoking and appearing even to prescribe girls’ street fashions. Related forms of
tongue-in-cheek transracialism and ethnic hamming that mocked societal anxie-
ties about racial boundaries also appeared in British and North American culture.
White Jewish comedian “Ali G,” performing in character as an illiterate black
hip hop journalist dressed in blinging ghetto-wear, was also popular in the early
2000s. Da Ali G Show was broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK from 2000, and
moved to the US in 2003.
Summary
In the flamboyant polycultural tastes of kogyaru, and the dark-skinned, white-
lipped, blue-eyed mischief of ganguro and yamanba, the trajectory of female
cultural imagination and experience, which had crystallized around sexual and
ethnic ambivalence, reached a climactic standoff with the mass media and its
audiences. Ganguro (and kogyaru) style illustrates the delicate interaction of street
subcultures with the wider political and diplomatic field within which they are
figured. It was the more remorseless of the critics who appeared to appreciate
the wider experiential origins and meaning of ganguro and yamanba style most
precisely. Said one writer who preferred not to beat about the bush: “The effect
is such that it makes me want to ask, ‘Are you a prostitute from some foreign
FIGURE 7.3 Television comedian Gori in drag as a gyaru
country, or what?’” (Nakano, 2000). Rocked in the cradle of a society liter-

ally and literarily dominated by male cultural and intellectual production, girls’
street fashion, managed by young, hip magazine editors, secreted a silent, sty-
listic response that echoed, contradicted, confused, and incited the barrage of
male journalism and broadcasting peremptorily accusing girls of sexual and racial
dilettantism. Radical girls’ style is demonstrably rooted in the same ideological
framework as that of its critics, and responds closely to the racial preoccupations
of that parent culture. This correspondence recalls a formative cultural stud-
ies observation that “the latent function of subculture is this—to express and
resolve, albeit magically, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved
in the parent culture” (Cohen, 1972: 23). Peculiarly racialized sartorial gestures
worked to a baroque acme by ganguro and yamanba—and in unnamed future
forms—constitute an intimate and knowing reply to the fearful and reactionary
fantasies about the dangerous and exotic behavior of girls that saturated national
communications from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s.
Notes
1 Mobilizing dual ethnicity leads to a kind of “transformative politics,” according to Sara
Ahmed (1999: 96).
2 For Yoshiya Nobuko, presenting the young female characters of her stories as “socially
inexperienced” and innocent was a tool for humiliating and critiquing the hypocrisy
and injustice of marriage and female oppression (Tsuchiya-Dollase, 2003: 190).
3 “The sweet trickle of upper-class affectations” is cited from Honda Masako, Ibunka to
shite no kodomo (Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 1992: 172).
4 Nakahara’s role as chief cover illustrator for women’s magazines and his images of
not-exactly-Japanese girls were preceded by the idealistic portraits of rather Caucasian-
looking Japanese girls executed by the popular Meiji- and Taishō-period artist Yumeji
Takehisa. See Mariko Inoue, “Kiyokata’s Asasuza: The Emergence of the Jogakusei
Image” (1996). Nakahara’s more fantastical and feminine images later became a powerful
influence on the style of early girls’ comics in the 1960s and 1970s, and the return to
vogue of his, by then, rather quaint illustrations in the early 2000s was one sign of the
newly self-aware regard for girls’ culture. A Nakahara Junichi retrospective exhibition
was held in Sogo department store in Yokohama in July 2003.
5 More specifically, Silverberg argues that “the Modern Girl, who was both Japanese
and Western—or possibly neither—played with the principle of cultural or national
difference. Seen in this way, she highlighted the controversy over adoption of non-
Japanese customs into everyday life and called into question the essentialism … that
subordinated the Japanese woman to the Japanese man” (Silverberg, 2006: 70).
6 Further, Silverberg suggests that in the internationalist cosmopolitan trajectory within
Imperial Japan of the 1930s, there was an “actively constructed aspect of syncretism,”
meaning that “the Japanese reader did not think in terms of ‘here versus there’”
(Silverberg, 1993: 41).
7 Ochiai Emiko, “Bijâru imeji to shite no onna,” Nihon josei seikatsu shi 5 (Tokyo: Tokyo
University Press, 1990: 210).
8 Brian Moeran notes that the principal postwar magazine for older married and affluent
Japanese women “affirms the importance of white skin, beauty and physical charm,
but, by making frequent use of slightly older Japanese actress models, it also emphasizes
‘Japaneseness,’ and a ‘femininity’ which is more specifically Japanese.” (Moeran, 1995).
9 One instance of a cutting-edge mode of presenting models with Caucasian features,

characteristic of the 1970s, was in a Parco department store campaign launched in
1979, in which modern families were depicted with mothers who appeared to be
semi-European—foreigners, in fact. Ueno Chizuko surmises that in Parco’s “Age
of Women” campaign, the extent of the modernization of the families depicted was
calibrated through the racial difference of the mothers (Ueno, 2000: 176).
10 Read more about “Cuties in Japan” (Kinsella, 1995: 220–254).
11 Romanized Japanese, and slogans written in pigeon French and English, became a staple
aspect of cute style; see Kinsella (1995: 224, 227).
12 Early Japanese hip hop culture, more prevalent among young men than women, was
accompanied by rather successful attempts to reproduce black looks. Although Nina
Cornyetz found that, for the subset of young women involved in the Japanese hip
hop scene in the early 1990s, skin darkening was important (Cornyetz, “Fetishized
Blackness,” 1994, p. 116), Ian Condry notes that through the 1990s a more informed
and sophisticated view of the alliance between Japanese hip hop artists and fans and their
colleagues in the US, exemplified by the rapper Zeebra, made physical emulation passé
and unnecessary (Condry, 2000: 171–76).
13 Egg (March 2001): 8–9.
14 Dextra, February 2003 (no page numbers).
15 Yoshida Mitsuro makes an early connection with the possibility of anime characters
influencing body fashion in “The ‘Space Cruiser Yamato’ Generation,” Japan Echo 6:1
(1979): 80–87.
16 Some of the increasing self-consciousness of gyaru and “girlie” (gaari) styles of the
late 1990s and 2000s may also have been compounded by the growing domestic
appreciation of the kitsch cool status of Japanese girls’ culture outside of Japan. “One
aspect of the street boom from 1994 was that there was a new awareness that pop
culture made in Japan is at the center of things, is cool, there was a new confidence
about being fashionable and Japanese and less concern about foreign culture” (Arai
Hiroshi, interview, at Takarajimasha offices, 29 October 1997). The chief editor of
Cutie magazine felt that foreign kitsch and Japanese fashion were moving in a tightening
circle: “When foreign magazines take up Japanese style as a kind of kitsch, the end result
is close to Cutie style”.
17 See the role of “laughter” and the (sexual and fecund) “grotesque body” in transcending
temporal oppression in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Boomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984 [1940]), and thoughts on Tosaka Jun’s jisaisei (presence) in Harry
Harootunian, “Perceiving the Present,” (2000: 95–201).
18 Centre Guys (sentaa gaizu) is a pun on the name of the main pedestrian and browsing
street in Shibuya, that is ‘Centre Gai.’
19 It is difficult to assess whether the boy yamanba trend exceeded the handful of boys
reported in an article published in AERA, 7 June 2004 (“Shibuya no ‘shinsei’ Center-
guy,” 53–54).
20 Paul Gilroy argues that rather than being American, as it is frequently categorized,
black culture ought to be recognized as a diasporic formation, a contact zone between
Europe, Africa, America, and the Caribbean. (Gilroy, 1993).
21 In her work on hip hop in Japan, Nina Cornyetz looks at the relatively small, perhaps
emblematic, group of Japanese women who flirted with, or sought to have sexual
relations with, black American men. Cornyetz suggests that the mythology of the
sexual potency of these men, circulating in its different historical versions throughout
American and Japanese society, gave them strategic semiotic value to young Japanese
women. Through associating with black sexuality, a Japanese woman “liberates herself
and threatens Japanese male heterosexual subjective agency” (Cornyetz, 1994: 127).
22 Harriett Beacher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), in which a little girl called Eva begs
her father to free black American slaves, was first read in English in Japan, and later
translated into Japanese in 1923.
23 Taylor Atkins records that awareness of the black origins of jazz were muted in prewar
Japan. Jazz dance halls were nevertheless linked to a suspected collapse in female sexual
morality (Atkins, 2001: 121–123; 110–111). Miriam Silverberg argues that there were
in fact other commonalities between American blues and the plaintive tones of gaaru
literature of the period, which talked of the sorrow, infidelities, and wretchedness
of a working girls’ life trapped in a hierarchy of power relations. (Silverberg, 2006:
105–107).
24 See an excellent deconstruction of the racist presumptions of these texts in Nina
Cornyetz’s “Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan” (1994).
25 “Hifu no iro ya kami no iro de shikarareta kabe wo kantan ni tobikoeteiku” says the
23-year-old university graduate who is a guest writer of the “Wakai Sedai [Koe]”
(Young Generation and Voice) Asahi newspaper column this week subtitled “Kami ya
hifu no iro de hito wo minai de.”
26 Chiima (hustler) is the slang name for the “Jack the lad” types, often seen as the male
counterparts and companions of ganguro. Chiima bear the taint of low-ranking yakuza
(gangsters) and are defined by their job—recruiting young women on the street to do
odd jobs for various sex services: date clubs, AV shoots, bloomer sailor shops.
27 “The girl has an artificial body which is constituted entirely as commercial information”
(Kanzuka, 1988: 158).
28 “Watashi wa puro burikko.” Cited in Masubuchi (1994: 46).
29 For recent continuities to this debate see discussion in online forums such as ‘Hicktown
Press’ or ‘A Fieldnegro.com’.
30 “She is frequently photographed in long, platinum blond wigs and color contact lenses.
This is all a part of her stage persona; however, her costumes suggest a rejection of certain
African-American characteristics,” points out Lori Tribbett-Williams in “Caricatures of
African-American Women” (Tribbett-Williams, 2000: 201).
31 Some explanations of ganguro and yamanba styles observed that they bore similarities
to previous forms of comic blackface minstrelsy by male entertainers, which were last
popular in Japan in the 1980s. Their brown tans and theatrical make-up were linked
to characters such as Adamosute, who painted his body brown and his lips white, and
appeared on television as a semi-naked South Sea Island type character wrapped in a
sarong. Seeing a connection between yamanba and Muta, the professional wrestler who
painted his face as a monster as part of his stage performance, the Daily Sunday begged,
“Have Black Face Girls Gone Even Further Than Muta?” (Sunday Mainichi, 2000).
32 In American English, “beige” refers to the light-brown skin and mixed racial looks
then fashionable in commercial culture. In Japan in the 1990s, light-brown skin was
combined with literally “beige” or “milk tea” hair color.
33 Saitō Tamaki suggests that Mulan is evidence of the first instance of the “Japanimation”
of Disney (Saitō, 1998: 7), but James Lull counters that “Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos,
Vietnamese and all other Asian peoples are introduced to this Chinese cultural legend
in their own countries not by film producers from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or
Singapore, but by an American multinational corporation” (Lull, 2001: 44–45).
34 A trend emerged in British style and advertising from the mid-1990s in which
Oriental girls also made appearances as futuristic human ombudswomen facilitating
transformations of British racial consciousness. On 25 February 1999, a two-page
spread advertizing Benetton, positioned in the middle of ongoing reportage on the
Stephen Lawrence murder trial, appeared in the British newspaper The Guardian.
Stephen Lawrence was a black British 18-year-old whose parents sued the police
authorities for delaying the murder enquiry into his death at the hands of local white
teenage boys. One page of the advertisement depicted a close-up portrait of an
Oriental (Northeast Asian) girl in military-style Benetton attire; the adjoining page
was taken up with a stylized poem, Kokeshi Dolls, alluding to themes of tolerance
and fluidity, by the Japanese “girl” author Banana Yoshimoto (printed in white on
black). In the context of debate about the urgent need to overcome the deep habit of
institutionally sanctioned racism in the UK, Banana and the Oriental model appear as
an angelic guide to a post-black-and-white world.
35 See Nikki Lee in action on her representing gallery site: www.tonkonow.com/lee.html.
8
MINSTRELIZED GIRLS1
There may be an interesting parallel between the intense male cultural interest
in girl characters in modern Japan, particularly in the 1980s to the present 2010s,
and the phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy in the Northeastern American states,
particularly at its peak, in the mid-nineteenth century. Though these two cultural
formations are not and could not be identical, exploring their points of similarity
does contribute an additional historical perspective from which to apprehend again
the elaborate caricaturing of girls in contemporary Japan. It is a perspective that
levers beneath the entrenched and naturalized form of contemporary girl-gazing
and suggests that it constitutes a quite particular historical formation that is neither
ethnically unique nor essential to a native Japanese cultural system.
Between the 1830s and the 1880s, white vaudeville entertainers, including a high
proportion of Irishmen, blacked up with greasepaint or burnt cork and adorned in
comically outsized “Negro” costumes, performed songs, dancing, comic dialogues,
japery, and narrative skits to white audiences. Staged minstrelsy was accompanied
by the circulation of plantation songbooks and minstrel theatrical reviews, as well
as classic abolitionist novels. Black impersonation became a source of employment
for hundreds of entertainers and critics; indeed, the earliest social scientist of Japan,
Lafcadio Hearn, also published reviews of minstrel shows to pay his rent. Minstrelsy
was, argues Eric Lott, the “the most popular entertainment form of the nineteenth
century” (Lott, 1993: 142). It was a racial system of cultural communication—based
on “fantasizing the black self” (Lhamon, 1996: 282) deliquescing into a “‘coon’
construct” (Gottschild, 2003: 283)—that was integral to the emergence of American
film and popular culture. Structural traces of minstrelsy that have persisted to the
present day in popular entertainment include rock and roll and hip hop.2
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, most girl impersonation by male writ-
ers, directors, and artists in Japan has been mediated and reproduced through the
press and the camera lens. Reportage, novels, films, animation, pornography, and
152 Minstrelized girls
comics featuring girls dominate the content of contemporary Japanese culture to

such a degree that the epochal expansion of the media industries in the 1980s and
1990s is eventually inseparable from the driving attraction to sh jo (girl) fanta-
sies and narratives. Like the audiences of mid-nineteenth-century America who
often mistook blackface minstrels for black American people—“often, in the minds
of many, blackface singers and dancers became, simply, ‘negroes’” (Lott, 1993:
20)—audiences in contemporary Japan have tended to confuse visual and written
material about girls with female children and teenagers (onna no ko) themselves.
Caricature and sexualization

Both American blackface minstrelsy and images of girls staged in modern Japanese
culture have wooed a characteristically rapt audience—an audience that had devel-
oped an apparently boundless appetite for the repeated spectacle of would-be
black male bodies and would-be girls’ bodies capering across the screen with great
energy, and contorted into lubricious and suggestive postures throughout. Lascivious
behavior combined with a childlike innocence characterizes both blackface min-
strels and those “two dimensional figures of pubescent females who are eroticized”
(Shigematsu, 2000: 132) which constitute the templates of moe and Lolita-complex
material. T.D. Rice’s immensely popular “Jim Crow,” a character that persisted
through the late 1830s and 1840s, was “a figure full of childish emotion grotesquely
cavorting across the stage” (Engle, 1978: xvii). Blackface performers wore oversized
collars and shoes to achieve an “infantilizing effect” (Lott, 1993: 143) that was not
dissimilar to the chubby limbs, stump-like feet, oversized heads, and flaring capes and
flounces that signal the deformed (deforume) mode of animating characters. See an
example of this deformed way of drawing girls in Lolita-complex cultural material in
Figure 8.1. Minstrels with “fat lips, gaping mouths, sucks on the sugarcane; big heels,
FIGURE 8.1 A d jinshi image of an infantilized girl with dumpy limbs in bondage in a
doggy chain
Source: printed, unpublished Lolita-complex computer graphics (Michiru Y. 1993).
Minstrelized girls 153
huge noses, [and] enormous bustles” (Lott, 1993: 143) elicited an infantile sexual
pleasure from their audience that bears a close comparison to the polymorphous
“excitement” caused by the site of composite digital characters with protruding moe
features, such as enlarged feet and leg bases, maids’ outfits, tails, thick tufts of colored
hair, big ears, and bells.3 See a poster of Dan Emmet and his colleagues in blackface
in 1844 in Figure 8.2. In the case of both minstrel performers and the girls featured in
men’s comics, the “male press” (oyaji zasshi), and Lolita-complex subculture in Japan,
displays of exaggerated physical abandon have hinted at a masturbatory pleasure.
Minstrel songs loaded with sexual innuendo were accompanied by lewd gestures on
stage. In one poster advertising the Virginia Minstrels in 1843, four clownish figures
sit with legs wide open and grasp their banjos and tambourines with phallic joy and
intent (Lott, 1993: 138). Voyeuristic interest in female sexual pleasure has been a
common theme of eroguro (erotic-grotesque) men’s comics since the1970s (Allison,
1996: 50–79). While the “cute girl who is desired/attacked/stimulated and brought
to ecstasy” (Shigematsu, 2000: 127–163) has found a new more childlike body style
first in Lolita-complex material and later in moe genres from the early 2000s. As with
lascivious intentions of journalism about young, working women (gyaru)4 and uni-
versity students (joshji daisei) in the 1980s, and so-called prostitute schoolgirls (baishun
sh jo) in the 1990s, the potential for black male sexual misdemeanor was the spirit of
the minstrel production.
Energy and transforming bodies

The fascination with not just sexually potent but unnaturally plastic bodies, bod-
ies with ambivalent or alternating signs of gender, that can be found in its most
distilled form in Lolita-complex material (Azuma 2001; Galbraith, 2011), bears
similarity to the dramatic switching of skin color and racial characteristics on
stage within blackface minstrelsy and popular “coon” stories. Eric Lott argues
that “the primary purpose of early blackface performance had been to display
the black “body” as a place where racial boundaries might be both constructed
and transgressed” (Lott, 1993: 140). Gender transgression is a dominant theme
within Japanese comics and animation for general audiences, as well as more
specialized tropes of Lolita-complex and moe material, including the subgenre of
hermaphrodite Lolitas that sprout penises (Robertson, 1998: 201–203; Kinsella,
1998: 314–316) and the wave of cross-dressing male jos ko characters of boys’
comics and animation popular in the 2000s, such as Yubisaku Milk Tea (serialized
in Manga Action, 2003–2010). The plot device that dictated that the pugnacious
Ranma½ (by Takahashi Rumiko, 1987~) would turn into a shame-faced girl if
he came into contact with cold water, and into a boy again on contact with hot
water,5 is similar to the staged buffoonery with flour, paint, and coal dust that
provided cues for early blackface minstrels to stage uproarious transformations
from black to white and back again. Multiple and energetic, spiritual and bodily
transformations overwhelmed animated characters in the 1990s and 2000s and
blackface minstrels in the mid-nineteenth century, who
FIGURE 8.2 Theater poster showing a heavily caricatured Dan Emmet prancing to banjo
music (1844)
Source: original owned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
“exhibited a functional unruliness” that, in one commentator’s words,

“seemed animated by a savage energy,” nearly wringing minstrel men off
their seats—their “white eyes roll[ing] in a curious frenzy” and their “hiccup-
ping chuckles” punctuating the proceedings (Ethiopian 22). Here was an art
of “performative irruption, of acrobatics and comedy, ostensibly dependable
mechanisms of humorous pleasure.”
(Lott, 1993: 140)
The “performative irruption” that Eric Lott identifies in blackface minstrel shows
bears some comparison with the sometimes farcical, repetitive, and conspicuous
interruptions that clog the narratives of comics and animations in which charac-
ters undergo “transformation” (henshin). Transformations can take place when the
characters (and the style in which they are drawn) abruptly regress into a more
comic, diminutive and infantile mode, and also when spiritual, magical, or sexual
changes transform an ordinary character into something more powerful. During
transformation characters may become more pneumatic, powerful and sexual, and
sprout new sexual body parts. Azuma Hiroki argues that since the popular recep-
tion of Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995~), anticipating the “excitation” affect (moe)
of composite parts has become more important for viewers than either attachment
to whole characters or their meaning in the narrative:
On exposure to certain characters, designs, or character voices, the same pic-

ture, or voice, will start to circle around in their skull, as if the connectors in
their brain had been snapped, as if they were possessed. Not a few otaku talk
about the experience in those terms.
(Azuma, 2001: 129)
In moe and Lolita-complex subculture, as in blackface minstrelsy, it is the unsettled

mixture of intimidation and desire for the bodies on view that has stimulated a
psychological compulsion in the spectators.
Identification with girls

Minstrelsy projected through sketches of homely Southern characters influenced by
a “Herderian notion of folk” (Lott, 1993: 5), satisfied a desire and nostalgia for the
popular sources of national culture. Anti-slavery novels converted to the stage, such
as Harriet Beacher Stow’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Mark Twain’s Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn (1884), presented a “romantic racialism” in the form of gentle,
child-like, even “feminized” slave characters (Lott, 1993: 33). Sympathetic but
condescending, reform-minded and literary components of minstrelsy might bear
loose comparison with sympathetic meditations about the marginalization, sexual
exploitation, and emancipation of schoolgirls in Japan, such as the films Bounce
Kogals! (1997) and Gaich (Vermin, 2001). By the early twentieth century, pas-
toral, uncomplicated, feeling black folk were widely believed to be the necessary
antidote to an overmechanized, industrial America. As W.E.B. DuBois suggested:

“American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black
men seem the soul oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dol-
lars and smartness” (DuBois, 1994: 7). Eighty years later, at the beginning of the
collapse of the “bubble economy” Ōtsuka Eiji argued for a deep and healing con-
nection between Japanese girls—“Modernity has changed the Japanese ‘j min’ into
‘girls…” (Ōtsuka, 1989: 246)—and the bygone culture of an older and rural com-
mon folk (j min), “As you can see from taking a look at the type of things serialized
in men’s weekly magazines, somewhere deep in their hearts they are all waiting for
a girl savior to rescue them” (Ōtsuka, 1989: 248).
For their part, blackface performers, who sometimes fancied that they identified
with black Americans, constituted the earliest practitioners of American bohemian-
ism, such that “there was a utopian or emancipatory moment in their often clumsy
courtship of black men” (Lott, 1993: 51). Blackface performers such as T.D. Rice,
credited with inventing the stage character Jim Crow, and transcendentalist con-
temporaries such as Walt Whitman, made much of their bonding experiences with
black Americans. Being close to young women has been an important source of
identity and cultural cachet for bohemian and leftwing cultural practitioners in
Japan. Meeting schoolgirls and aligning with the mood of assertive girl power,
though not generally with feminist organizations, was particularly important for
men involved in writing about and drawing schoolgirls and kogyaru in the 1990s,
who were sensitive, if not wholly self-conscious, about the question of their own
authenticity.
Risk-taking male figures of postwar music, dance, and art scenes, from transgen-
der singer and actor Miwa Akihiko and buto dancer Hijikata Tatsumi (Munroe,
1994: 192) to artists Morimura Yasumasa, Aida Makoto, and Nara Yoshitomo,
have made female drag integral to their work. Aesthetic comments about carrying
the spirits of their own perished, sold, or miscarried “sisters” within them have
been voiced by figures from Hijikata to Nara.6 Leading artist of the Japanese art
scene, Aida Makoto, has regularly cross-dressed, posing as a girl for his official uni-
versity graduation photograph, and presenting himself as the photographic model
for both the man and the woman of a couple making love in his piece Double
Fantasy, Double Fantasy (Aida, 2002: 3). In an attempt to get around his disdain
for wedding ceremonies and as a mockery of female ambitions to marry in white,
Aida and his wife Okada Hiroko both wore white dresses to their wedding (Aida
Makoto interview, 30 June 2010). A series of transvestite portraits of 33 eminent
figures in the literary and publishing establishment first printed in the lowbrow
men’s magazine, Sh kan H seki in the late 1990s, illustrated the extent of the risqué
transvestite urge in established avant-garde circles.7 See Miyadai Shinji posing as
one of the deviant kogyaru types that are the subjects of his sociology in Figure 8.3.
The frequency of female impersonation increased across mass entertainment, pri-
marily television from the late-1990s. Serious and carefully constructed studio
photographs of male drag performances of girls represented the more covert and
classy lacunae of an expanding field of female-dress, from jos ota (cross-dressing
FIGURE 8.3 Miyadai Shinji posing as a kogyaru schoolgirl for a series of cross-dressed
portraits of famous male cultural figures first serialized in the weekly
magazine Sh kan H seki in 1987
Source: used with kind permission of the photographer Kamikura Yoshiko.
otaku) mixing in cosplay subculture at comic festivals and on Akihabara pedestriani-

zations, to readers of jos sh nen (boy’s cross-dress) comics for boys, or the teenage
boys dressing as cute starlets for popular television variety show skits. In the mid-
2000s novelist and critic Kotani Mari observed: “Today sh jo has become a form
of cosplay that anyone can adopt” (Kotani, 2007: 60).
Aida offered the following explanation of the ease with which transvestism
entered into his lifestyle as an artist: “In puberty I was quite comfortable with
cross-dressing. I wasn’t going to become homosexual but I felt that I hovered on
the borderline between man and woman. Sometimes I think it would have been
good if I had been born a woman and think ‘Why was I born a man?’” (Aida
Makoto interview, 30 June 2010). High-school girl sociologist Miyadai Shinji also
rooted his familiarity with girls in his childhood development: “By the time I
realized it I was already half-girl really” (Miyadai, 2000: 318). Female (cross)dress
(jos ) in the 2000s appeared to interact with and mimic female fashions and street-
style. Figure 8.4 shows an anonymous older man in drag as a coquettish uniformed
kogyaru in miniskirt at Yoyogi Park in 1997. In the 2000s, transvestite skits also
became a regular component of male television performance. Leading male talents
and pretty boys (ikemen), such as Sugiura Taiyō, Fujiwara Hiroshi, comedian Gori,
as well as the Japan middle-weight kick-boxing champion Nagashima Yūichirō,
all regularly appeared in make-up and female outfits for mixed-gender audiences.
From April 2008 to March 2010, Sugiura Taiyō became the resident and cross-
dressed presenter of the variety show Moshi mo no shimuyure-shon baraetei oshikishi
katsu (Could it be Simulation Variety Voting Show) broadcast on TV Asahi on
Monday evenings at 11:15 pm. In this show an audience of a hundred “ordinary
men” was asked to select the most desirable talent, and choose between either a
male talent dressed as a woman (jos ) or a female talent, also dressed as a woman.
The cross-dressed male talents invariably won the audience’s vote, a situation that
provoked accusations of rigging, but that was used to “prove” the humorous jest
that men make cuter and sexier girls than do women themselves.
In 2002, television comedian Gori began a series of weekly skits in drag as a
colorful and loopy yamanba “Gorie” for the popular variety show Suij (Wed@10),
broadcast on Channel 10. In 2003, Gorie appeared as a cover girl on Popteen,
by then the number-one schoolgirl magazine—his transgender transethnic mock-
ery of fashionable and city-smart teenage girls was welcomed by the editors of
girls’ street-fashion culture. (See Gorie in Figure 7.3.) The beautiful schoolboy
lead Honda Yū (Nishijima Takahirō), of Sono Sion’s film Love Exposure (Ai no
Mukidashi, 2008), pursues the life of a street hoodlum and sexually repressed per-
vert specializing in shooting snapshots up the skirts of passing girls, until switching
for the second half of the action into female drag to appear as the black-cloaked
Sasori, the violent feminist avenger from the 1970s cult film series Female Prisoner
Scorpion. Only by passing as this dandy and militant female lead, and cosplaying as
Sasori, can he seduce and start a relationship with the man-hating schoolgirl Yoko
by demonstrating to her that he is on her side. See Yoko, and Honda disguised as
Sasori in Figure 8.5.
FIGURE 8.4 An older man (with grey hair in plaits) dressed as a fashionable kogyaru in a
tartan miniskirt attempts to make small talk with actual young women in
similar garb at the entrance to Yoyogi Park in 1997
FIGURE 8.5 A boy in love and in drag in Sono Sion’s Love Exposure (Ai no Mukidashi,
2008)
Surce: used with kind permission of the director, Sono Sion.
One vein of criticism posits that the mainly male producers and audiences of
Lolita-complex material tend to identify closely with the female victim and her-
oine rather than with the phallic aggressor, which is typically represented not
as a man but as an object, machine, or demon (Shigematsu, 2000: 130–131).
Depictions of perverse sexuality and explosive, unruly energy that are projected
onto girls in stories in boys’ comics, the male press, and Lolita-complex culture
contain a powerfully anti-authoritarian instinct—an instinct which relishes and
identifies with infantile images of physical chaos and sensual liberation that work
against order and responsibility. In a similar vein, the young American men of
European descent who flocked to see minstrel shows may have felt their own
sentiments represented in the laborious struggles of the blackface characters on
stage to overcome their exaggerated and comical torments. W.T. Lhamon, Jr,
suggests that “the minstrel show was a struggle over the settlement of youth’s
chaotic energy, in which youth projected themselves as blacks in order at least
in part to rouse and engage the hypocrisies of their fundamentalist opponents”
(Lhamon, 1996: 278). Youth’s chaotic energy also describes perfectly the com-
plex pack excitement of a crowd of young male idol otaku (that is male fans of
commercial pop-idols), clapping, waving, chanting, and snapping photographs
of cute pop-idols in staged idol concerts which were arranged for otaku fans
through the 1990s and became institutionalized in daily choreographed perfor-
mances of idol bands like AKB48 in Akihabara from 2005.
Lynching and bondage

Nevertheless, as Setsu Shigematsu goes on to suggest,
a male reader may identify with a girl insofar as he momentarily “sees” from
her perspective, and may momentarily imagine what it must be like to be her
by recognizing her facial expressions (of fear, agony, ecstasy), yet, this may not
necessarily lead to a consistent desire to be sympathetic toward her.
(Shigematsu, 2000: 137)
Cycles of “fascination and affirmation” of blackness in America, and of girls’ behav-

ior in Japan, have been followed by periods of “abusive travesty.”8 Less empathetic
aspects of blackface, in which the blackface comic and white spectator shared jokes
about a mute third party, constituted an “implicitly triangulated, derisive struc-
ture” (Lott, 1993: 142), which also describes quite effectively the contemporary
structure of male cultural activity about Japanese girls. Having brought into being
the image of powerful female bodies, frequently armed with weapons or magic,
the same animated and journalistic cultural material has tended at certain points
to humiliate its creations, reducing them from erotic heroines or femme fatales
into absurd, infantilized effigies and humiliated, weeping girls, displayed “tied up,
pinned down, and with naked buttocks exposed” (Allison, 1996: 73). Torture,
bondage, and rape form the bread and butter of the acclaimed and extreme oeuvre
developed by the influential pink and horror film director Satō Hisayasu. Satō’s
early film Secret Garden (Lolita Vibe-Zeme, 1987) features a schoolgirl with steely
sukeban 9 chutzpah who encounters a homeless man and becomes his accomplice in
the rape and torture of his other school-uniform clad victims, whose death throes
are photographed. While the film is substantially focused on the torture of these
girls, Satō suggests that the message of the film also lies with its schoolgirl lead:
I wanted to make a reaction happen with the girl lead character; my thinking is
projected into her proactive character. There is blood, but at the very end there
is a reversal and the girl revolts against her partner, the man, to save her soul.
(Satō Hisayasu interview, Shinjuku, 16 June 2010)
Elaborate fantasies of torture, dismemberment, and bondage have been a persistent

theme in modern Japan’s male cultural material about girls and in American min-
strel songs alike. Minstrel songs tended to fetishize turning black men into things,
and having them “roasted, fished for, smoked like tobacco, peeled like potatoes,
[or] planted in the soil” (Lott, 1996: 150). Blackface minstrel songs talked of brutal
revenges meted out to those who coveted their master’s victuals: “Gib me a knife
sharp as a sickle, To cut dat nigger’s wizen pipe, Dat eat up all de sassengers; Apple
jack wid venison sauce.”10 Throughout the nineteenth century, minstrel shows
were performed against a backdrop of increasing violence against and lynching of
black Americans. Between 1882 and 1927, more than 3,500 blacks were “chased,”
“hunted,” “catched,” and lynched by mobs of up to several thousand white “on-

lookers” (Finkelman, 1992: viii). Lynching took the form of a live show: “Once the
excitement was on, abundant rumors were available” (Southern Commission, 1931:
41). “Gory details” of the torture, burning, and sexual molestation of those black
bodies were also printed at length in local papers (Southern Commission, 1931: 38).
Japanese material about girls has tended toward fantasies of disablement through
terror, bondage, and dismemberment.11 In men’s eroguro comics, women appear tied
up in ropes, with eyes pulled open, teeth clenched, and sweat beading on their flesh
(Allison, 1996: 53). Schoolgirl characters in pornographic Lolita-complex anima-
tion produced in the first half of the 1990s, such as Twin Angels (Inj Seisen tsuwein
enjerusu), Legend of the Overfiend (Urotsukid ji), and La Blue Girl, are subject to intimi-
dation, trickery, bondage, and rape by tentacular demon penises, robotic arms, rape
machines, and devilish old men. Artist and original script writer of the manga, Legend
of the Overfield, Maeda Toshio suggests that aside the theme of human selfishness,
the hard-core rape and tentacle porn with which this manga and animation have
become synonymous, are “fantasy ‘service’ [extras] for the male readers, men are
hen-pecked and their wages are increasingly equal to women’s so they like the rape
scenes as they restore their sense of power” (Maeda Toshio interview, Sagamihara,
18 October 2012). Infantile caricature within Lolita-complex material has tended to
include emotional and physical disablement, visualized in features such as foreshort-
ened limbs turned into chubby stumps. Artist Aida Makoto presents an aestheticized
expression of this trope in a series of nihonga paintings produced between 1996 and
2003. In this series, titled DOG, beautiful naked girls in dog collars and chains stand
on limbs that have been amputated and bandaged at the wrists and knees to reduce
them to the likeness of pet puppy dogs with stumpy legs (Aida, 1999: 3–4, 34–36).
So habitual is the image of a dismembered female form that the artist himself pays
no specific attention to the violence of the amputation, musing that “Maybe I want
to cut off my legs, or become a girl and frolic in a waterfall, at the level of fantastic
imagination” (Aida Makoto interview, 30 June 2010).12
Change in the gender order

American minstrel fever reached its peak in the 1840s, in the aftermath of depres-
sion and in the midst of the anti-slavery movement. It was a period in which a new
stratification of classes was emerging and young working men moving to American
cities felt anxious about the status of being white, and more specifically about the pos-
sibility of losing power to the point of becoming equivalent with black workers. The
sliding ground of labor, in which the relative value and conditions of white and black
labor appeared to be migrating, was visualized in minstrel vaudeville: “Underwritten
by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear, the minstrel
show continually transgressed the color line even as it made possible the formation of a
self-consciously white working class” (Lott, 1993: 8). The girl cult has been particularly
virulent in Japan from the 1980s to the 2010s: the underground classic comic anthology
Bish jo Sh k gun (Pretty Girl Syndrome, 1985), and Masubuchi Sōichi’s social critique
Kawaii Sh k gun (The Cuteness Syndrome, 1994), refer quite literally to “girl sickness.”
For male employees threatened by the dismantling of the much-celebrated system of
secure graduate employment and the rapid loss of jobs in manufacturing and construc-
tion, and in many cases already entering the service sector as a less-privileged, contract
labor force, labor force feminization has been experienced as a forced transition with
no markers. Structural changes involved the loss of blue-collar jobs and the substitution
of part-time for full-time employees. Within the male cult of girls, we see an unstable
mixture of hostile resentment and a wishful identification with the potential power-
position and glamour of ascendant girls.
To what degree can we usefully consider sh jo and gyaru as theatrical terms to
describe performed, or “minstrelized,” Japanese girls? To stretch the comparison fur-
ther, can the cute, child-like, and sometimes comically inept sh jo be equated with
the sentimental and reassuring appeal of the humble and simple-minded “southern
darkie,” and the disconcertingly cocksure gyaru be equated with the much resented
uppity “black dandy”? Interestingly, gyaru in Japan in the 1980s to 2000s, and ambi-
tious black men migrating to Northeastern cities in mid-nineteenth-century America,
caricatured by cultural phenomena such as Zip Coon, were both described as con-
ceited, air-headed “dandies” (Lott, 1993: 131–134). See an image of Zip Coon in his
conspicuously displayed expensive-looking fashions in Figure 8.6. Lyrics of the Zip
FIGURE 8.6 Cover of the “Zip Coon” song sheet (1834)

Source: original owned by the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library.
Coon song published in 1834 poke fun at the absurd ambitions of a “Coon” who
presents himself as “a larned skoler”13 and expects to be “the bery nex president” of
America (Zip Coon song sheet, 1834). Popular farces featuring Zip Coon as a planta-
tion master reigning over “de white trash” played on anxieties about a reversal in the
racial order, much as the comic and frequently vindictive stories about assertive and
manipulative oyaji gyaru (bloke girls) and ruthless, materialistic schoolgirls reflected
deep anxieties about a change in the gender order in Japan. See an image of a gyaru
schoolgirl in Figure 8.7. (Notice the intriguing similarities in loose posture, conceited
and dim-witted expression, and fashionable flouncing attire and accessories, with that
of the nineteenth-century portrayal of a Zip Coon character in Figure 8.6.)
Like the ridiculous “black dandy” in the US, Japanese bodikons, yellow cabs, and
kogyaru were portrayed as impudent upstarts who put on airs and took liberties.
Their ambitions were associated with the threat of racial and gender self-better-
ment, respectively. While caricatures of thrusting gyaru and prostitute schoolgirls
were lampooned in press reportage, television broadcasting, comics, animation,
and nonfiction writing, the number of girls rejecting places in inferior two-year
junior colleges for women in favor of entering four-year universities and graduate
schools climbed rapidly in the 1990s, after several decades of stasis.
FIGURE 8.7 A d jinshi of a gyaru schoolgirl titled Orange (Orenji, 2002)

Notes
1 A version of this chapter was published in Japan Forum 18:1 (2006): 65–87, under the
title “Minstrelized Girls: Male Performers of Japan’s Lolita Complex.”
2 W.T. Lhamon, Jr, argues that, from the 1830s to the present day, minstrelsy “in its
broad sense has proved to be the secular ritual by which the ever-emerging compact of
the Atlantic world has imagined and kept intact a querying, dialogical self” (Lhamon,
1996: 282). Michael Rogin provides a detailed treatment of the role of Jewish immigrant
entertainers in early Hollywood blackface performance.
3 Azuma Hiroki discusses the peculiarities of the animal excitement caused by moe features
in D butsuka suru postmodern (2001: 66). Also available in English as Otaku: Japan’s
Database Animals (2009).
4 See critical writing on the sexualization of working women in Hirota Aki (2000),
“Image-makers and Victims: The Croissant Syndrome and Yellow Cabs,” U.S.–Japan
Women’s Journal, no. 19: 83–121.
5 See further discussion of Ranma½ in Susan Napier’s Anime: From Akira to Princess,
Mononoke (2000: 48–62).
6 “My mother told me one day when we were in the car when it was raining that she
had had another child, that she had had a girl who was miscarried, before she had me.
Then it all made sense. I think that I carry the soul of my sister that died before she was
born inside me. I understand the girl inside me” (Nara Yoshitomo in conversation with
Sharon Kinsella, 24 April 2003).
7 Men (and their date of birth) who cross-dressed for Kamikura Yoshiko’s Tamayura
(Tokyo: Magazine House, 1998) include: manga artist Akatsuka Fujio (1935); art
director Asaba Mitsumi (1940); sociologist Miyadai Shinji (1959); artist Akiyama
Yūtokutaishi (1935); columnist Asatō Izumi (1956); novelist Abe Jōji (1937); comic
artist Ebisu Yoshikazu (1947); priest Uesugi Seijin (1946); novelist Kamewada Takeshi
(1946); novelist Shimada Hisahiko (1961); editor Suei Akira (1948); photographer
Sugimoto Hiroshi (1948); politician Suzuki Kunio (1943); musician Chikada Haruo
(1951); literary critic Tsubouchi Yūzō (1958); photographer Tsuzuki Kyōichi (1956);
illustrator Minami Shinbō (1947); mah-jong player Yamazaki Kazuo (1953); and literary
critic and academic Yomota Inuhiko (1953).
8 Lhamon (1996: 282).
9 Sukeban is a leading girl in a yankii (Yankee) gang, sometimes the male gang leader’s
moll. Sukeban types and fashion-sense comprised a deviant dropout version of cute styles,
mostly linked to the later 1970s and 1980s. Pop singer Matsuda Seiko’s nemesis and
principal competitor, Nakamori Akina, tended to associated with this more hardened
school-dropout subculture.
10 Meaning: “Give me a knife as sharp as a sickle, to cut open that nigger’s throat that ate
all the sausages, apple jack, and venison sauce” (White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Song
Book, Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 1848).
11 Itō Seiu’s ink drawings and watercolors of young women tied up with rope and
disemboweled with knives and swords, executed in the 1910s and 1920s, drew some of
their influences from certain late nineteenth century woodblocks designed by Yoshitoshi
and Hokusai. The themes of this trope of stylized female bondage and torture influenced
postwar eroguro (erotic-grotesque) comics and contemporary bondage photography (turned
to art in the opus of Araki Nobuyoshi), and reappeared in pornographic Lolita-complex
animation. Interestingly, comic artist Koshiba Tetsuya includes a flashback to Yoshitoshi
Tsukioka’s Hag of Adachigahara (1885) in a scene depicting the rape of a cocky kogyaru
schoolgirl, in the manga book Compensated Dating Extermination Movement (Koshiba, 1998).
12 See a longer interview transcript below:
Sharon Kinsella: If you feel feminine or like a woman, does that mean that when you
paint or draw a woman you are in a sense drawing yourself?
Aida Makoto: When I draw an amputated dog, it’s not only a male viewer looking
at that dog. But there is also a part of me that looks from the girls’
side. I think a part of me empathizes fantastically. I’ve never been a

macho sort of man, in fact I have been called womanish (memeshi). I
notice now how it is very like me (boku rashii) … that way of drawing
a woman … Recently I’ve been making a work of forty middle-
school girls playing in a waterfall, and as I was drawing that I started
to feel as if I was each girl herself. So that perhaps creates a distinctive
atmosphere, but also because of that unpleasant reason, it is not the
same as the line of vision as a man wanting to possess the girl. Maybe
I want to cut off my legs, or become a girl and frolic in the waterfall
at the level of fantastic imagination.
13 Meaning: an educated scholar (gakusha, interi).
9
SCHOOLGIRL REVOLT IN MALE
CULTURAL IMAGINATION
The intensifying feeling expressed online and in film and art of the later 1990s
and 2000s was that many young women in Japan were disenchanted and openly
operated in a different moral universe from the rest of the nation. The drama of
female disaffection from men, often portrayed as their abusive or tyrannical fathers,
was produced over and again in literature, art, film, and media discussion in the
1990s to 2000s. In this period, the spread of the concepts of “old man hating”
(oyajigirai) and “old man stink” (oyaji kusai) reflected the increasingly public display
of hostilities between camps divided by age and gender and crystallized around the
archetypes of the girl (young/female) versus the oyaji (“old bloke,” old/male). Even
a cursory consideration of films and novels originating in Japan but also popular
abroad (listed here with dates of their original Japanese release)—from Yoshimoto
Banana’s Kitchen (1988) and Tsugumi (1989) to Kirino Natsuo’s Out (1997) and
Grotesque (2003), to Miike Takashi’s horror film Audition (1999) based on a novel
by Murakami Ryū; Sono Sion’s Suicide Circle (2001~) and Love Exposure (2008);
Nakata Hideo’s Ring (1998); Nakashima Tetsuya’s Kamikaze Girls (2004) based
on a novel by Takemoto Novala; and Ogigami Naoko’s Seagull Diner (Kamome
Shokud , 2006)—and art by Aoshima Chiho, Takano Aya, Konoike Tomoko, and
even Nara Yoshitomo—attest to the deep public fascination with extreme portray-
als of female malcontent and refusal.
Kill Bill: Volume 1 cast the archetype of the ruthless Japanese schoolgirl onto the
screen of global film culture in 2003. In an animated sequence illustrating the child-
hood of half-Chinese-American and half-Japanese Yakuza queen O-Ren Ishii,
O-Ren is depicted as an 11-year-old girl obliging an old Yakuza boss by sitting
astride him in her school uniform—all the better to position herself to eviscerate
Boss Matsumoto in revenge for the murder of her parents (Kill Bill: Volume 1,
Chapter 3). The adult O-Ren Ishii’s bodyguard is Gogo Yubari, a 17-year-old
Japanese girl characterized by her inclination toward savagery and her pristine
school uniform. Gogo’s thuggish persona—perhaps reminiscent of the character
Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)—is demonstrated in a date
168 Schoolgirl revolt in male cultural imagination
scene, set at a candy-colored bar, in which Gogo thrusts an ornamented dagger

through the stomach of a goofy, embarrassed man after asking him if he “wants to
do it” with her. “Instead of you penetrating me, it is me that is penetrating you!”1
Gogo sneers over his death throes. Thus concludes a scene that delivers, in a com-
pressed and processed form, the fantasy of the schoolgirl that turned bad.
The powerful but in the end stupid and damaged Gogo captured something of
the personality recently attributed to kogyaru and yamanba in the 1990s. Meanwhile,
the central role in Kill Bill, that of an abused bride seeking justice, was inspired by
cult films made in Japan in the early 1970s. The imprint of director Itō Shunya’s
Female Convict Scorpion series (J sh Sasori, 1972), and Fujita Toshiya’s Lady Snowblood
(Shurayuki-hime 1973, 1974),2 provides a useful indication of the relatively long dura-
tion of interest in female vigilantes fighting for freedom and justice on Japanese
screens and pages.3 See a slightly hard-school (k ha) schoolgirl reject the news cam-
eras in a pink film in Figure 1.11. The thrilling martial-arts-inspired fights of angry
schoolgirls and their older sisters (o’ne san) against otaku fetishists and an abusive
patriarchy are turned into an epic in Sono Sion’s Love Exposure (Ai no Mukidashi,
2008). See the schoolgirl heroine of this film with yet another uniform to wear fresh
from the dry-cleaners and slung over her shoulder in Figure 1.10.
Though attracting little specific attention as an ongoing political fiction, images of
female oppression and revolt have taken an increasingly polar position in a range of
media since the beginning of the 1970s. Initially erupting into genre film and avant-
garde material before taking up residence in Lolita-complex and animation culture
through the 1980s and 1990s, it is perhaps the heavy stylization of animated and filmic
characters that has tended to deflect interpretation of their sublimated political presen-
tation. The girl as savior of mankind has attracted the notice of critics such as Ōtsuka
Eiji and Saitō Tamaki, however. Thomas Lamarre explores how the “only a girl can
save us now” plotline is also bound up with ways of representing styles of technology
and wider views of social progress (Lamarre, 2009: 77–85). The transfer of the theme
from these animated and pornographic characters into photo-journalism and “news”
in the 1990s brought the theme of a girl-led resistance into a more realistic meter, and
attracted a new range of critical speculation about the purportedly resistant character
of actual schoolgirls.
Intellectual and cultural work about violent or sexual female resistance has been
written and directed all but exclusively by older men. Regardless of the distinctive
presence and the plaintive themes of both privileged and bookish (sh jo bunka)4
and lower-class elements (j ky to gyaru) of girls’ culture present since the 1900s,
baroque visions of female rebellion have been a recurrent feature of a specifically
male imagination in literature and culture. The struggles of agile anti-heroines in
male culture appear to have acted out a prescient if distorted apprehension, from
afar, of a future female revolt seeking revenge for the real historical experiences of
young women in modern Japan. That is to say, it represents a fearful cultural pre-
monition of a young female rebellion against exploitation, incarceration, servitude,
and obligation. Fantasies of girls in revolt constitute an experiential voyeurism that
is shared by both fearful and sympathetic male sensibilities. This chapter explores
Schoolgirl revolt in male cultural imagination 169
the nature of this male creative domination of images of feminine—if not precisely
feminist—resistance, and asks how this projection of male-centered experience and
political subjectivity into narratives about young women may affect the develop-
ment of either an ungendered or a female-centered political imagination.
Schoolgirls as a site of resistance

One of the subtexts which persisted in journalism and discourse about compen-
sated dating in the latter half of the 1990s was that schoolgirls were engaged in a
form of “resistance” (hank ): “The High School Girl Cultural Revolution” (Spa!,
1994: 27); “Extremist Kogyaru: Is the Shocking Reality That They Are Being
Radicalized as They Dance across the Media Stage!? From Compensated Dates to
Sex Services, from Bloomer-Sailor to Adult Videos, from Street Hustlers to Gangs,
Etc., Girls that Deceive about Their Age Live in a Dark World” (Spa!, 1998: 26);
“Compensated Dating Running Wild” (Spa!, 1998: 47); “Dating in Dangerous
Waters” (Seiron, 1997: 132). Though not intentionally dealing with metapolitics,
the words—suspicious, revolution, extremist, running wild, dangerous waters—that jour-
nalistic material as a mass used tended to conjure up the impression of a dangerous
female conspiracy. In social and legal debate, and the array of comics and films
that followed in the wake of journalistic explosions, schoolgirls were portrayed as
resisting patriarchal society through a combination of sexual deviance, subcultural
nonconformity, violence, and revolutionary direct action.
The prostitution of schoolgirls was seen to represent a challenge to the social
order. One youth deviancy specialist summarized the situation as one in which “the
boundary between misdeed and deed has broken down and a phase of borderlessness
(muky kaika) has begun” (Kiyonaga, 1999: 107). Whereas for Kuronuma Katsushi, a
leading journalist and expert author on the topic, this was a “horrific performance”
(susamajii sein ) (Kuronuma, 1996a) for critical libertarian and sociologist Miyadai
Shinji, compensated dating was a perfectly legitimate “decision” (Miyadai, 1994).
From the earliest stages of reportage, schoolgirls were described as having a sense of
“pride” about how they managed their relationships and finances.5 For anti-Christian
feminists and social critics, casual prostitution was seen as a powerful rejection of the
management of young female sexuality. Feminist intellectual Ueno Chizuko sup-
ported AERA investigative journalist Hayami Yukiko’s girls use “sexual autonomy
as an act of retaliation” (Hayami in Ueno and Miyadai, 1999: 61).
While feminist engagement with the issue of compensated dating was marked
mainly by a skeptical silence, Miyadai Shinji and Ueno Chizuko joined forces with
other well-known journalists and lawyers to support the “sexual self-determination”
(sei no jikoketteiken) struggle of schoolchildren refusing physiological repression: “We
have to trust in the capacity of children for self-determination. In fact, just trusting in
it is not enough. It is the task of parents and society in general now to make a space
for self-determination” (Ueno in Ueno and Miyadai, 1999: 99).
Schoolgirls were portrayed as having utter contempt for whichever “oyaji”
(old man, man, daddy) would try to rule their lives—“girls render their customers
anonymous and have only one word for them, ‘old man’” (Hayami, 1996a: 63). It
was a violent anti-male attitude that had led girls toward crimes of retribution. The
“telephone club hold-up” (terekura g t ) of August 1994, for example, sparked a fas-
cination with the potential for female violence against men that was widely indulged
in male-targeted weekly magazines. During this incident two girls of unknown age,
but dressed in clinging outfits, took a 38-year-old male company employee to a love
hotel, where they used a stun gun to assault him. Having bound his hands behind
his back, they stuffed his mouth with sanitary wear and took some photographs of
this pose, before fleeing with his wallet. Over the next two years, compensated dat-
ing and “man mugging” (oyajigari, or “hunting men”) became entwined themes.
Girls were described doing things like “taking 70,000 yen from a man’s wallet while
he was in the bath in a hotel room, and then running” (Hayami, 1996a: 63). Scenes
of schoolgirls triumphantly getting the better of older men, absent fathers, girl-sick
nerds (otaku), and sexist schoolteachers became a key theme of literature, comics,
and film presented in a social realist or documentary style. Loathing of the male
“enemy” (teki) surfaces in films from Harada Masato’s Bounce Kogals! (1997) and
Miike Takashi’s Audition (1999), to Fukasaku Kinji’s Battle Royale (2001) and Sono
Sion’s epic film Love Exposure (2008), in which the lead character is seen practic-
ing her martial-arts kicks while chanting aloud to herself, “otoko teki, otoko teki da”’
(“men enemy, men the enemy”)—see her in Figure 1.10.
Much attention was paid to the intimidating sexual confidence suggested
by girls’ fashion and the excessive height of kogyaru platform boots and sandals.
Journalists suggested that platform boots and sandals were primarily a means to
allow teenage girls to look down on men (Miller, 2000b: 176–205). They were
described using secret codes of girls’ slang (kogyaru-go) among themselves to delib-
erately exclude men. In a magazine for older men, a Professor Yonekawa opined:
There is no need for anyone other than their friends to understand them,
and they don’t want anyone else to understand them. Perhaps for them adult
masculine society lacks credibility in such a fundamental way that they reject
all communication with adult society.
(cited in dacapo 1997: 93)
As the chief editor of Cawaii! magazine (for kogyaru) underscored, girls were viewed
as the vanguard of rule-breakers:
The number of people that feel like they just can’t tolerate the regulation and
hedging-in of their lives, no matter what, is growing. The rules seem arbitrary,
people don’t understand why rules invented forty or fifty years ago are still
being used today.
(Ogino Yoshiyuki interview, Tokyo, November 1997)
Sociologist Miyadai Shinji suggested that even for the majority who did not dress
in full-blown kogyaru fashion, simply appearing to be an “ordinary schoolgirl”
contained within it a form of silent inner irony: “The girls reject completely the
‘adult world’ which they will be forced to accept in the near future. One is made to
think that acting out the symbolic high school girl for adults is in itself a complete
‘gesture of refusal’” (Miyadai “Afterword,” in Sakurai, 1997: 217).
Films and comics about schoolgirl resistance

Film director Harada Masato first became interested in deviant girls after read-
ing about the “telephone club hold-up” in 1994: “There was a sense that a lot
more of that crime might be taking place, but went unreported because salarymen
don’t want to admit they were mugged by schoolgirls” (Harada Masato inter-
view, Tokyo, October 1997). Harada went on to direct Bounce Kogals! (1997).
In this film three stubborn high-school girls collaborate with each other to earn
enough money from compensated dates in one night to send one of them, Lisa,
to America, where Lisa believes that she can start a new life free from sexism. The
film starts in Shibuya, seething with shoppers and commuters, where a hustler (chi-
ima) struggling to pick girls up off the street for “modeling” assignments observes
Lisa going to sell her underwear to a “bloomer sailor” (burusera) shop where she
can auction her knickers to uniform fetishists. The sophisticated cashier who runs
the shop turns out to be an ex-student radical with begrudging feminist sympa-
thies, and fixes Lisa up with a more lucrative job making a schoolgirl porn movie.
But the hustler has become smitten with Lisa and begs her not to make an adult
video with the “enemy” (teki). In this film schoolgirls who have sex with men are
depicted as fools and victims, while the real heroines have self-respect and only get
their money by robbery or dates without sex. Demonstrations of graceless white-
collar male entitlement are caricatured and lampooned in the film. In one scene
a tubby, middle-aged man trots after Lisa in Shinjuku station, pulling at her arm
and demanding that she meet him because he knows that she’s “doing it.” Later,
another middle-aged customer is portrayed whining to the police that he could do
nothing to protect the schoolgirl he was on a date with from being beaten up by
the yakuza in front of him. He remonstrates that he is the innocent victim of the
incident and asks the officer in charge to erase his name from the crime report.
Lisa is eased into a series of lucrative dates by schoolgirl fixer Jonko, who
despises men and runs a compensated dating racket. Jonko’s plan is to extract as
much money from men as possible, by any means necessary except sex. On one
double date in a love hotel, Jonko knocks out the stuttering young salaryman in the
bathroom with a stun gun after he has wondered out aloud whether “it is a dream”
or not that Lisa will really consent to sleep with him. On another assignment Lisa
and Jonko become additional players at a lavish nightclub party assembled by a
wealthy civil servant. The civil servant, who, it is implied, has just taken a cash
bribe, takes the girls and a bilingual Chinese hostess to the men’s bathroom and
requests that they play a cleaning game with him. The civil servant strips down to
his undershirt and begins to verbally abuse them—shouting that they cannot think,
and that he hates Asian women and call girls—before proceeding to wipe scum
from the plug hole of a urinal on to his skin and embrace the plug fixture with his
lips. He demands that they follow his example and crouch down to clean the toilets
with their bare hands. Jonko pulls out her stun gun, and the girls wrestle him to
the floor before fleeing. In this scene the Chinese hostess kicks the unconscious
man and screams her hatred of his twisted disrespect for Chinese women. Harada
constructs several such bridges between the historic control of Asian sex workers
by Japanese men and the situation of Japanese schoolgirls, which labor the possibil-
ity of a unified Asian women’s movement.
The cause of the high-school girls is also linked back to the zengakuren student
movement of the 1960s and even communism. It transpires that the Yakuza boss
Oishima and the bloomer sailor shop owner Saki are old friends from university
days, when they had been involved in the student movement. Oishima has his bar
decorated in the theme of the French Revolution. Throughout the film, a parallel
is made between these representatives of anti-establishment politics of the 1960s
and the deviant schoolgirls, whose dignity they grow to respect. In one scene
Jonko offers to pay off a fine one of her girls owes Oishima with a compensated
date in the form of a karaoke session in his bar. Oishima and Jonko sway arm
in arm against a backdrop of tattered red flags as they sing the Internationale into
matching microphones. Harada Masato suggests that “in the sixties we did every-
thing as a team, we went to demonstrations as a group, and we were beaten …
whereas Jonko has no political stance, but she is bringing the old men down on her
own as an individual” (Harada Masato interview, Tokyo, October 1997).
Koshiba Tetsuya’s comic for men, Compensated Dating Extermination Movement
(Enjo K sai Bokumetsu Und ), published in 1998, also envisioned compensated dat-
ing as a kind of pubescent vigilante movement. In this case, compensated dating
and man-mugging (oyajigari) are drawn as strategies in a war of position between
young girls and men. While the young girls sometimes get captured and raped by
predatory males, old men sometimes get captured and tortured by kogyaru and their
boyfriends, who fight together against entitled older men who believe they can use
money to buy young girls. Comic artist Koshiba Tetsuya says that he instinctively
felt sympathetic to gyaru culture (Koshiba Tetsuya interview, Tokyo, March 1999).
In the film version of this comic (2001), violence erupts into love hotel rooms as
schoolgirls get their revenge on the twisted, misogynous transvestite character who
launched the “extermination movement” and who rapes schoolgirls and does not
pay them.
Among the litter of films about schoolgirls involved with compensated dat-
ing or violence, including Love & Pop (1998), Innocent World (2000), Limousine
Drive (2001), Adolescent (Sh jo, 2001), and The Schoolgirl’s Friend (Jogakusei no Tomo,
2001), the incongruously titled straight-to-video film Bum! (Bomu! directed by
Kashima Tsutomu, 2002) brought the idea of a schoolgirl movement into intricate
relief. Bum! tells the story of a group of schoolgirls who form a secret circle that
meets to reaffirm their mission—“girls are cool” (as opposed to cute)—on lawns
around the futurist port area of Minato Mirai in Yokohama. The film opens with
a sequence of scenes both nightmarish and slapstick, in which Kyoko, the lead
schoolgirl, is grabbed by an otaku character lying in wait for her, and is subse-
quently chased through the subway system by a relay of male commuters who
appear excited to recognize her. When Kyoko accidentally comes into ownership
of a hand gun, she finds herself obliged to loan it to her friends, who each in turn
request to borrow it to deal with their problems. One girl has been trapped into a
series of love-hotel dates with an older man, through a false certificate of debt that
he insists she must repay. A bespectacled girl uses the gun to get the full attention
of her sexist male teacher, who she claims is prejudiced against her because she is
plain and does not flirt. Screaming that “Violence is scary, isn’t it?!” (“Bōryoku wa
kowai darō!?”) while shooting apart the school statue behind him, she appears to
get her general point across.
The girls’ series of calculated acts of revenge against predatory men, which they
see reported on television as a string of horrific schoolgirl crimes, culminates in a
complicated plan to rid the lead girl of a stalker who has been taking photographs of
her and posting them on his girl-watching website. The girls bait the stalker with a
mocked-up compensated date that they correctly deduce he will want to “research.”
Using lookouts with cell phones to relay his exact movements before stalking him
with a hand-held camera, the girls finally advance on him en masse in the manner of a
guerilla cell crawling on its belly. Kyoko resolves the conflict by shooting at a sexed-
up image of herself from the screen of this otaku stalker’s laptop and destroying the
computer. In this low-budget film, voyeuristic slow-motion shots of the lead school-
girl’s bud-like mouth and glossy hair are combined with a critique of the role both of
men and the media in falsely documenting compensated dating, plus an enthusiastic
consideration of armed schoolgirls undoing this deception.
The theme of schoolgirls armed with guns, or with cell phones conceived as a
kind of strategic weapon, surfaced in a range of material. Academic researcher in
Italy, Toshio Miyake, suggested that “gyaru” are “ready to send or receive a mes-
sage as fast as a Wild West cowboy reaches for his gun. And just like cowboys many
of them are armed with two or three telephones at the same time” (Miyake, 2001).
The kogyaru-mode schoolgirl heroine of Koshiba Tetsuya’s comic book poses on
the cover holding a pistol. In a deliberate twist on this theme, a machine gun with
a flower in the barrel appeared in the arms of an anime-style cartoon schoolgirl (by
character designer Sadamoto Yoshiyuki) on the cover New Reality (Shingenjitsu)
journal in the spring of 2003. The flower in the gun barrel represented the issue
statement—“No War” against Iraq—but also perhaps suggested a parallel détente
in schoolgirl deviancy, or deviancy about schoolgirls, and linked schoolgirls visu-
ally to the anti-Vietnam movement of the late 1960s.
New Reality was a new journal drawing from the distinctive combination
of cultural and political theory produced by the younger generation of male
intellectuals linked to otaku culture (what might be retrospectively described
as the otaku interi). The image of the gun suggested a guerilla uprising, or civil
war erupting between the genders, and sometimes between generations. More
abstractly, the gun appeared to work as a sign of the immense and spontaneous
power that it was imagined girls had at their disposal, and which they might use
to overthrow patriarchal society. Weapons like the gun appear to symbolize the
idea of dormant energy, a hidden power that girls secretly possessed and might
deploy at any moment.6
In Love Exposure (2008), Sono Sion presents Yoko, a violent schoolgirl who
gets a high from smashing up the homes of happy families. In material involving
self-harm and violence, including major films such as Battle Royale (2000) and All
About Lily Chou Chou (Lily Ch Ch no subete, 2002), schoolgirls, and sometimes
their schoolboy friends, too, are depicted as both the victims and the perpetra-
tors of a more demotic and mute vein of delinquent violence. Self-destruction is
presented as a form of willful protest that strikes back against controlling guardians
and mass institutions. Vermin! (Gaich , 2001), a film that received considerable
critical acclaim, depicts the bleak story of a quiet middle-school girl who goes off
the rails. The girl barely speaks to her young single mother, who suffers from a
maddening loneliness. Secretly she drops out of school and begins to spend time
with a young vagrant man. One day the man-friend that her mother has brought
home from a bar attempts to rape her. Although she is rescued by her devoted
schoolgirl friend from next door, it is soon after this that she fills her school bag
with rows of adeptly constructed petrol bombs and burns down the home of her
friend’s more wholesome and successful family in a fit of dejection. Finally, she
hitches rides from the curbside and flees into what it is implied will be a life of
child prostitution.
In Sono Sion’s Suicide Circle (Jisatsu circle, 2001~), schoolgirls are depicted as the
mindless and bloody vanguard of a suicide offensive that threatens to undermine
the nation. The film opens with a scene in which 54 schoolgirls from various high
schools suddenly clasp hands and form a single line and jump together onto the
tracks in front of a train at Shinjuku station. Soon afterward, uniformed girls and
a few boys, chanting similar code words, throw themselves from the roof of their
high school. In a narrative that echoed the terms of the debate about compen-
sated dating, the chief of police’s own daughter kills herself and the police chief is
mocked on the telephone for his poor record in human relations by a little girl’s
voice representing the suicide club conspiracy. The police chief, as a man and as
a father, accepts that the suicide movement is his own responsibility, and shoots
himself. It then transpires that the extremely cute idols of a prepubescent girls’ band
are responsible for emitting signals during their choreographed song-and-dance
routines that instruct listeners to slaughter themselves.
In the same period, aspects of Nara Yoshitomo’s series of cartoonish paintings
of squat and dyspeptic little girls, made famous through mobile exhibitions and
picture books such as Slash with a Knife (1998), presented multiple cultic images
of the little girl as both a vengeful perpetrator and a victim. Nara’s girls are often
wounded and wrapped in bandages, and suffer from pathological under-confidence
and ironic, defeated anger. In a leap from mass pop art to academic theory, Tokyo
University Press chose to use a Nara image accompanied by the words “Punch
me harder” on a pamphlet advertising their new series: Borderless Knowledge (Ekky
Suru Chi, 2000~), and another on the cover of the first volume of the series,
edited by four key contemporary intellectuals: Kurihara Akira, Komori Yoichi,

Sato Manabu, and Yoshimi Shun’ya.7
Prostitution as a symbol of subaltern status and revolt

The themes of casual prostitution, female comradeship and lesbianism, violent
female rebellion, and uniformed vigilantism have recurred through modern
culture and have deep historical resonances. The particular history of forced,
voluntary, and indentured prostitution among women of the laboring classes,
and the movement for the abolition of prostitution, have nourished a pool of
imagination in which female liberation and feminism have been seen—at their
most fundamental—as a reaction to prostitution and male sexual control and
manipulation, as much or more than as a reaction to the drudgery of housewif-
ery and child-rearing. Fantasies of armed, surreal, or magical female resistance
have been closely configured with the ambience and visual trappings of a world
of sexual service and bondage. Yanagita Kunio considered the migration of rural
women into city employment as one the principle causes of the undermining
of national folk life. For prewar social reformers and Marxists more concerned
with the condition of society, feminine experiences of prostitution and poverty
became emblematic of the physical suffering forced upon the lower classes in
general. By the 1920s, female labor and sexual service in the extensive brothel
industry had been established as a sign of modern social life and as a core social
problem. Female exploitation and prostitution anchored both the movement for
social reform and new and competing interpretations of social reality developed
by a range of progressive social theorists. Prewar urban social scientist Gonda
Yasunosuke was drawn to observing the details of the lives of prostitutes and
café waitresses, which he also tabulated in extensive statistical surveys.8 Tosaka
Jun took the “sale of women into prostitution” (Harootunian, 2001: 122) as
an example of a critical social problem that had been masked as custom. The
prostitute as a symbol of working class oppression was also carried in the heart
of “proletarian literary imagination” (Bowen-Struyk, 2009: 10). Prewar prole-
tarian writer Hayama Yoshiki’s controversial and well-read short story, “The
Prostitute,” takes an enlightened and militant sailor’s martyrdom of a naked and
dying young women who is assumed to be a prostitute, as its theme.9
Memories and mythologies of the prostitution and servitude of young women
that correlate with this earlier political prioritization of prostitution as a sym-
bol of subaltern existence and potential occur throughout postwar culture.
Cinematographer Imamura Shōhei has returned to excavate the theme repeat-
edly, capturing in his films and a 1970 documentary on elderly karayuki (Japanese
women who traveled to China and other Asian destinations to work in colonial
Japanese brothels) the sense of a historical underclass of female drudges. In The
History of Japan according to Madam Onboro (Nippon sengo shi Madam Onboro no
seikatsu, 1970), Imamura chooses a woman in an erotic and disreputable profes-
sion as the leading character. Madam Onboro appears as an experienced and
authentic woman, suited to relaying a gritty, unofficial, and folkish account of

the history of Japan.10 In What’s Wrong with That? (Ee ja nai ka?, 1981), Imamura
presents a fictional version of the actual Ee ja nai ka? carnival riots that swept
through Western Japan (Kansai) during the year of economic and political dis-
junction prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868. A girl sold to the brothel by
her impoverished father becomes one of the conspirators in this burlesque revolt
of prostitutes, entertainers, and common townsmen. At the climax to the film
she protects the clowning men from being shot by armed government forces by
encouraging rebel prostitutes to step out of the crowd, form a human barricade,
and show their bare bottoms to the pointed rifles. In Imamura’s films lower-
class women, typically prostitutes, embody a profound and charismatic source of
human resilience.11
In the same period, young women were placed in films pursing the story
of female revenge within established genres of samurai or period drama. The
Female Convict Scorpion series, spanning from 1972 to 1977, featured women
imprisoned for crimes provoked by their mistreatment at the hands of men.
These unapologetic women—raped by their fathers or cheated on by former
husbands—humiliate, mutilate, and kill the prison warders and sexist men they
encounter in their lunges for freedom. One creative interlude in the second film
in this series (Jailhouse 41, 1972) captures the subliminal tone of the series in a
magic realist scene, in which hordes of released women in striped prison smocks
run freely in slow motion into the wide streets of the modern financial and gov-
ernment districts of Tokyo. In each volume of Lady Snowblood (1973, 1974), the
leading female of the same name outwits and slays her male enemies using her
extraordinary intuition and sword skills. In the first of these films, Snowblood
seeks and kills the men who raped and imprisoned her mother twenty years ear-
lier when she comes of age. In the second film she defects from the secret police
to join forces with an anarchist intellectual, eventually slaughtering the chiefs of
the Meiji secret police to avenge the torture and death of suspected members
of an anti-state cell. (The political story portrayed in Lady Snowblood: Love Song
of Vengeance (Shurayuki Hime: Urami Renka, 1974) is probably loosely based on
the events surrounding the death of anarchist Kōtoku Shūsei (1871–1911), who
was convicted of plotting to murder the emperor and eventually hung, with 11
other suspect-dissidents, in 1911.) Director Sono Sion pays homage to this cult
series in his 2008 film Love Exposure, featuring the lead character Honda Yu, who
cross-dresses as Sasori—the Scorpion—to get closer to his furious and anti-male
sweetheart Yoko, whom he perceives in Christian visions as Mary, an icon of
feminine kindness and forgiveness.
The pure and the prostitute-like female classes

The privileged socioeconomic status of schoolgirls, emerging with the first girls’
schools in the prewar period, was codified in their idealized attributes of virginity
and cleanliness (Kawamura, 1994: 18–40). It is probable that this early conception
of a girlish asexuality—veering waywardly at times toward androgyny and later

toward presexual cuteness and same-sex romance (Robertson, 1998; Shamoon,
2012)—was partly constructed against the sexual nature of its fearful opposite:
the experience of girls from poor, rural, and lower classes entering into factories,
workshops, domestic service, and brothels.
While prewar reformist consciousness balked at the mistreatment of lower-
class women in particular, and adopted impressions of their bleak experiences as
a means of dwelling on social injustice and revealing the sources of social revolt,
a less sympathetic and, to some extent, competing description of prostitution
and the female class also emerged in the 1920s. This description appeared in both
the prewar notion of the pampered and licentious modern girl (modan gaaru) and
in the 1990s notion of the spoiled schoolgirl involved in compensated dating
(enjo k sai). In both cases the focus of media attention appears to demonstrate
a fascination with the idea of the spread of lower-class female lifestyles across
class boundaries, resulting in middle- and upper-middle-class young women
(o-j sama, joshi daisei)—or, indeed, privileged girls attending high-ranking high
schools (jogakusei, joshi k sei)—adopting modes of sexual promiscuity, financial
independence, and perhaps political irreverence of a distinctively lower-class fla-
vor. Modan gaaru were variably identified as idle flaneurs from wealthy families
or as quasi-literate, grubby café waitresses, akin to Tanizaki’s Naomi. Miriam
Silverberg summarizes the ambivalent journalistic “composite” in the following
terms: “was the anarchistic Modern Girl a creature to be lauded as the proletar-
ian emblem of revolutionary possibility, or should she be reviled as one final
expression of decaying class, owing to origins in the wealthier strata of society?”
(Silverberg, 2006: 53).
While the center of interest of both these discourses pulled toward that
of privileged girls attending exclusive girls’ high schools, the aberrant behav-
ior, masculine habits, and erotic labor they were linked to were in fact more
representative of the lifestyle of lower-class girls. Although critical journalists
struggled to reroute the debate by identifying the real modern girls as the fac-
tory operatives and café waitresses of the prewar cities, and the real kogyaru as
the offspring of single-parent families who had been pooled into poor private
girls’ schools in the 1990s, the main focus of journalism in both periods per-
sisted in dwelling on the confusing impression of privileged and intelligent girls
adopting the devil-may-care attitude of poor girls with revolutionary affect.
Perhaps the recurring fascination with these figures that bear the rough speech,
erotic dress, and cynical attitude of exploited Asian women, along with the
self-entitlement and confidence of educated daughters, betrays a deeper con-
servative sensitivity to feminine class fluidity. The eclectic modern girl and the
rambunctious but shrewd kogyaru conjure the vision of a flash transmission of
nonconformist class attitudes across the spectrum of society, through the vector
of a generalized female solidarity.
Innocent and good schoolgirls are paired with casual prostitution in a delib-
erately iconoclastic and surreal manner in countercultural material created in the
1970s. Portraits of schoolgirls as blithely carefree whores in literature, film, and

theater ridicule the ideals of bourgeois social enlightenment and chastity that
are symbolized by the schoolgirl uniform. One scene in Terayama Shūji’s film
Throw out Your Books, Let’s Get into the Streets (Sho o suteyo machi e dey , 1971),
for instance, depicts schoolgirls in uniform sitting on a fence in an idyllic pastoral
scene and lustily singing a nonsense song with the lyrics, “When I grow up and
become a prostitute, I am going to buy me some new soap to wash the men I like
best.” The happy girls sway from side to side on a wooden fence and gradually
remove their sailor uniforms until they are topless. See a still from the shooting
of this film in Figure 9.1. In the 1970 film Third (S do), scripted by Terayama
Shūji, two schoolgirls who want to sell themselves to get money request the help
of two boys in their school. The four of them travel into Shibuya in Tokyo,
where the boys find customers and pimp the girls. “Excuse me, aren’t you get-
ting a little bored with your wife? Wouldn’t you like to have a high-school girl
for 20,000 yen?” one of the lads asks a passerby at a pedestrian crossing. The boys
tell the customers the girls need money badly for their families, and ask them to
help them out. This experiment results in one of the boys beating up a recalci-
trant customer and being sent to a youth reform institution. The deadpan and
somewhat camp humor of the sweet schoolgirl gone strangely awry is based on
rudely introducing taboo and inappropriate traces of the buried history of pros-
titution into idealized and desexualized images of normal (futs )—and implicitly
middle-class—society.
FIGURE 9.1 Carefree girls take off their sailor tops and sing about their customers in
Throw out Your Books, Let’s Get into the Streets (Sho o suteyo machi e dey ,
1971)
Source: used with kind permission of Sasame Hiroyuki at Poster Hari’s Company.
Girls fighting back with weapons

In the countercultural current that accompanied and preceded the student move-
ments during the late 1960s and early 1970s, schoolgirls and college girls were
sometimes presented by male illustrators, comic artists, and filmmakers as the
euphoric emblems of a carnal and political rebellion. Adachi Masao captures
this figure well in several of his avant-garde pink eiga (porn movies), including
A Prostitute at Fifteen (J godai baishunfu, 1970), about bored teenage schoolchildren
who ask themselves profound existential questions and decide to earn some money
by pimping one of their number. His Schoolgirl Guerillas (Jogakusei guerilla, 1969)
features five enthused schoolchildren who steal and burn the graduation certifi-
cates for their entire school grade, and seduce Japanese SDF (Self-Defense Force)
soldiers in order to steal their guns and grenades. Fully equipped with grenades,
rifles, and some farm animals, they set off into the country to barricade themselves
into a mountain holdout. The renegade schoolchildren muse about the advances
made by college students in campus occupations and plan to set up their own com-
mune based on the principle of “free love.” The naked schoolgirls defend their
encampment with a rifle and succeed in heading off a party of rescuers after taking
shots at the head teacher of their school. Schoolgirl Guerillas was released for sale in
DVD format for the first time in 2002, whereupon it instantaneously became a cult
item. Four decades later Adachi discussed this film in the context of his attempt
to integrate his filmmaking with expressing the goals of the student movement of
the late 1960s:
I was in the generation that entered university just as the Japan–US Security
Treaty was first signed in 1960. When first I started making films it was the
height of the opposition movement to the Japan–US Security Treaty (ANPO)
and I had been closely involved with that right along. So I went straight from
doing my part-time work in film production studios to the student move-
ment places, to anti-ANPO demonstrations, with so many people involved in
I thought we could win, but in fact we lost, and the Japan–US Security Pact
was concluded. The feeling of defeat, of despair was oppressive, the social
atmosphere at that time felt suffocating. For me the issue of the political situ-
ation and the issue of making films were closely entwined. From the students’
perspective, when you are up against forces backed by army and police, what
else can you do but take up weapons and fight, with violence? In my film
Schoolgirl Guerilla [1969] I wanted to convey that young people can do what
ever they like and that young people have the right to make mistakes too, and
I wanted to express that as a comedy drama.
(Discussion with Adachi Masao The Anabasis of May and
Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, And 27 Years Without Images,
2011, directed by Eric Baudelaire)
The theme of the armed and militant girl continued without interruption in the
comic and animation media as they expanded in the later 1970s, and particularly
from the 1980s. Saint Michael’s Campus Adrift (Sei Mikaera gakuen hory ki), origi-
nally written as a play by Takatori Ei in 1986,12 before becoming a film (1990), a
comic (1994), and finally an adult animation with a cult following in 2000, dem-
onstrates the continuity of the theme through diverse genres, from AMPO-period
avant-garde drama to comic, and later animation, subcultures spanning at least
three decades. Campus Adrift features a girls’ high school run officially by an order
of strict Catholic nuns, but run covertly by a sadistic military general and his army.
The school grounds become the site of a schoolgirl uprising against the military
generals and nuns after intolerable punishments involving rope bondage and incar-
ceration lead to the suicide of one of the girls.
The figure of the little girl equipped with special powers or weaponry and pre-
pared to fight bravely against abstract and fantastical unjust powers first appeared in
children’s comics such as Tezuka Osamu’s Knight in Ribbons (Ribbon no kishi, 1953),
Yokoyama Mitsutera’s Sally the Witch (1966), and Go Nagai’s Cutey Honey (1973).
Gradually, she became the pivotal figure within girls’ manga, children’s animation,
and the emergent Lolita-complex genre made by and for the appreciation of male
fans.13 Gamine female heroines of animation culture appeared in almost all the
major animations of the 1980s to 2000s, including Miyazaki Hayao’s Nausicaä in the
Valley of the Wind (1984),14 Oishii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell (1994), and Miyazaki
Hayao’s Spirited Away (2001). Girls’ comics and animation by female artists, such as
Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura (1978), Takeuchi Naoko’s Sailor Moon (1992),
and Saitō Chiho’s Revolutionary Girl Utena (Sh jo kakumei Utena, 1997), have also
featured powerful girl heroines, and have straddled and to some degree acted as
valves between girls’ culture and the preexisting traditions of presenting girls as
heroines in de facto male avant-garde culture.15 The delicate tissue and osmosis
between themes of the culture of school-age girls and themes in Lolita-complex
and the superseding moe culture are an extensive and important subject beyond the
scope of this book.
The split history of the schoolgirl’s progress16 on the one hand and on the other
the systematic exploitation, sexual humiliation, and bondage of working girls in
their teens and twenties, between 1870 and 1930 in particular, are recalled in the
mythological battle that constitutes one of the core narratives of Lolita-complex
material. The chaste behavior central to the doctrine taught to schoolgirls from
their earliest emergence was also internalized into schoolgirls own “girls’ culture”
(sh jo bunka) in which hostility to male erotic interest coupled with “spiritual
love” was taken as the basis of autonomy (Shamoon, 2012: 29–48). In this battle,
pure and rather intelligent schoolgirls use weapons and mystical female powers to
escape, ward off, and outwit manipulative and rapacious evil forces. Brave little
girls, typically in a contractual relationship—as maids, servants, daughters, young
housewives, or schoolgirls—battle for survival, and more specifically fight to avoid
becoming prisoners in violent and sexual underworlds where they may be raped
and turned into sex slaves. The battle cry of the Twin Angels (1996~) is “Virgin
power!”—retaining virginity denotes having power. This male-driven and frequently

animated return to abandoned and derelict aspects of modern female experience is
particularly clear in serialized hard-core pornographic animations such as Legend of the
Overfiend (Urotsukid ji, 1987~), La Blue Girl (Inj gakuen, 1992~), and Twin Angels
(Inju seisen 1996~).
References to scenes of sexual slavery recur not merely in the highly stylized
and hermetic Lolita-complex genre but also in animation and film produced for
multitudinous global audiences. Within Miyazaki Hayao’s feminist-tinged ani-
mated film Princess Mononoke (1997), it transpires that each of the jolly and liberated
women of Iron Town has been rescued from her previous life in a brothel by the
owner of the iron foundry, Lady Eboshi. Later, the women of Iron Town relay
how much better it is to do hard, dirty labor in an iron foundry than to work in
brothels in the cities (DVD: Chapter 9). Meanwhile, the main location of Miyazaki
Hayao’s award-winning Spirited Away (2001) is an enormous bathhouse perched
on a rocky precipice, with which the little girl and lead character, Chihiro, signs
an oppressive contract under a new name. Self-incarceration and hard labor are an
ordeal Chihiro bravely undergoes in order to liberate her parents from a curse that
has left them in the form of pigs. Chihiro’s bondage to the bathhouse in order to
save her ungrateful parents echoes the prewar history of daughters sold into bond-
age in brothels in order to save their families from destitution, while the bathhouse
itself can be read as a euphemism for a brothel, which is variably referred to as a
“soapland,” “sauna,” or “health” in contemporary and official terminology. In
this particular fantasy, the bathhouse is a gated wooden building evoking an Edo-
period teahouse or enclosed brothel quarter, and is crammed with jubilant guests
ordering victuals and various forms of intimate bathing services from serving girls.
Male writers and schoolgirl actors

Even the cursory historical review above demonstrates that the creative descrip-
tions of aggressive and sexually assertive schoolgirls that dominated the Japanese
media in the second half of the 1990s were preceded by a powerful political
romance with insubordinate and sometimes slatternly young women: it was hardly
a perplexing new and millenial phenomenon. Contemporary popular, legal, and
academic debate about the errant social attitudes of deviant schoolgirls exhibits
hallucinatory similarities to the debate about modern girls in the 1920s: the theme
of eroticized and violent female resistance has been a significant one threading
through modern journalism and fiction. From the postwar turning point of 1970,
combative and erotic schoolgirl characters have been rehearsed repeatedly in the
more specialized arena of avant-garde and otaku subculture. Although debut-
ing in the mass media in 1996 as a social debate about compensated dating, the
passionate, hyperbolic, and constructed (yarase) nature of the television news pro-
grams and weekly magazine (sh kanshi) articles on the subject meant that the
new ethnography of schoolgirls was never clearly distinguishable from parallel
and previous fictions.
Typically, highly cultivated male intellectuals, artists, writers, editors, and

directors who were several decades older than their subjects discussed with great
interest the new wave of resistance reported to be erupting among teenage girls.
The absence of manifestos, reports, or pronouncements on this subject by young
women meant that the male interlocutors of the debate about schoolgirl resistance
had to divine the position of schoolgirls for themselves. Prior to writing the novel
and film script Love & Pop (1998), novelist Murakami Ryū conducted interviews
with girls that were later published in a nonfiction volume titled If You Go Beyond
the Dream (1998). Murakami summarized the critical awareness of the girls in the
following manner: “They are not that lost. And neither are they just innocents
who know nothing at all about the world. The sharp ones see straight through the
lie that is Japan today” (Murakami and Kuronuma, 1997: 284). As Murakami goes
on to point out, contemporary teenage girls with limited social and intellectual
experience could not be expected to articulate themselves politically:
Getting brand-name goods and money are the values of the whole of Japan
right now—all the girls are doing is volunteering to join in. And they know
that what they are doing is not really about the goods as such. At 16 or 17
years old they can’t say it in words, except to say some saying like, “It runs
deep” (oku ga fukai).
(Murakami and Miyadai, 1996: 54)
Some contributors to the dialogue about schoolgirl deviancy considered themselves

supporters of the girls from the sidelines. Film director Harada Masato explained
that “the old men are the establishment and I’m against them, on the same side as
young girls. All of my films are from the standpoint of an individual opposed to
the political establishment. The kogyaru fit that stance perfectly” (interview with
Harada Masato, October 1997). Echoing Harada’s thoughts about the kogyaru stance
perfectly fitting his own, prominent social commentator and Jungian psychoanalyst
Kawai Hayao bared his own feelings: “Reflecting on the 1960s student movement
that did not get the results it wanted, I feel I want somehow to contribute to and
help the girls’ movement along” (Kawai, 1997: 148). One of the problems with
joining forces with the girls’ movement, however, was the apparent disinclination
among girls to identify themselves as kogyaru or to stand up for deviant gyaru val-
ues. The female journalist Uchida Kaoru complained that “if you ask likely girls if
they are ‘kogyaru’ they’ll say they aren’t. But I wish they would say that they were!
I wish they would defend themselves against the criticism, and be more defiant!”
(interview with female journalist Uchida Kaoru, 8 November 1997).17 One expla-
nation offered for this timidity was that radical young women were isolated. Kawai
reports the novelist Murakami Ryū’s view: “Even if youth want to oppose things
and know they ought to resist, they can’t easily find any other young people to
do it with.”18 Murakami Ryū 19 and Kawai Hayao elsewhere described schoolgirls’
involved in compensated dating as a kind of “unconscious movement of adolescent
girls” (Kawai, 1988: 147). Girls were engaged in this movement involuntarily:
They have absolutely no interest in opposition or revenge. They might even

welcome the older men that do compensated dating with them as people who
can help them out. But their actions breed a violence that has the potential to
become a destructive power. Except that the girls themselves are completely
unaware of this.
(Kawai, 1988: 143)
The notion of girls as the zombie vanguard of a comatose social revolution was
not wholly new.
All signs and sightings of the schoolgirl movement came from the directors,
writers, editors, and designers engaged by the very cultural and intellectual indus-
tries that produced the harvest of articles, television shows, films, books, and
photographs through which the movement itself was evidenced. The substra-
tum of so-called kogyaru culture—print club machines, gyaru fashion, and kogyaru
magazines (Egg, Cawaii!, Popteen)—was marketed exclusively by specialists within
publishing, retail, and entertainment corporations. As in the case of the titillating
literature about “phantasmagoric” (Sato, 2003: 66) modern girls in the 1920s, nov-
els and short stories about rebellious schoolgirls demonstrated “the interaction of
the author’s fantasies with questions of gender” (Sato, 2003: 66). The projection of
deviant agency and revolutionary ambition onto schoolgirls in published debates
(zadankai) and fiction was a contemporary reworking of the long-standing fascina-
tion of male intellectuals and writers with female class experience and sexual labor.
Revolt at one remove

On one level, the fascination with armed and avenging female vigilantes and
deviant schoolgirl culture in the 1990s was a local gendered variant of the vein of
cultural populism that crystallized within the mass of democratic and populist sen-
timent gathered in wealthy postwar societies. As Jim McGuigan has outlined in his
critique of the powerful populist compulsion underlying Anglo cultural studies,
“Radical conceptions of youth culture, including the recovery and sympathetic
‘reading’ of deliquescent expression, are sometimes tempted into romanticizing
the ‘resistance’ of disadvantaged, exploited and oppressed groups” (McGuigan,
1992: 91). The desire to see a resistant working-class youth culture in postwar
England meant that sociologists and criminologists often took a “vicarious” pleas-
ure in discussing the criminal behavior of their subjects. In his detailed study of
Mods in the media in England in the 1960s, Stanley Cohen noted instances similar
to those in contemporary Japan, whereby “instead of being denounced, [they]
were welcomed for ideological reasons. So, for example, some of the Provos and
Destruction in Art movements hailed the Mods and Rockers as the avant-garde of
the anarchist revolution” (Cohen, 1972: 142). Within postwar industrial societies,
left-wing intellectuals and culture industries have courted black, working-class,
and—in Japan—girl-centered youth cultures. This youth cultural populism has
some of its roots in the prewar investment in folk, working-class, or “negro”
cultures, and can be considered the domestic corollary of the romance between
First World intellectuals and artists and oppressed people in the Third World (or
developing world).
Gayatri Spivak’s merciless critique of the hidden dynamic underlying the other-
wise sympathetic political interpretation of lower-class and Third World resistance
movements can be quite effectively applied to the case of resistant schoolgirls in
Tokyo. Spivak argues that theorists of resistance and resistant social groups are
divorced and mutually impotent: “The banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-
knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the
intellectuals represent themselves as transparent” (Spivak, 1988: 275). In contem-
porary Tokyo, the romantic fixation with the political possibilities of an ultimate
schoolgirl subculture was in fact a narcissistic affair, one in which cultural and
intellectual producers paraded their own educated subjectivity as those of school-
girls and gyaru culture. In fact, feminist writer Asano Chie has roundly criticized
the self-interested use made of the narrative about deviant schoolgirls by leading
sociologists and investigative journalists:
For these critics, the “sex worker,” the “high school girl doing compensated
dating,” or “the Tokyo University student who does prostitution” are nothing
more than tools to further their own political goals. They use the personal sto-
ries of “high school girls who do compensated dating” and “Tokyo University
students who do prostitution,” yet they gain nothing but a superficial impact
from the girls’ words.
(Asano, 1998: 124)
Detailed and exploratory studies of the consciousness and experiences of young

women would threaten to undermine the tenuous essentialist faith in their resistant
agency, and it is for this reason that, as Asano points out, sympathetic ethnographic
accounts of female experience have tended to be as shallow and perfunctory as they
are numerous.
It may be precisely the social inexperience and lack of an independent voice
by which contemporary young girls and teenagers are characterized that has made
them such an attractive subject for the attention of writers and producers. The
muteness of school-age girls, as well as the absence of young women in their
twenties from positions of influence, has allowed for the uninterrupted, transpar-
ent, and successful projection of a narrative onto their image. In his psychoanalytic
deconstruction of the male adoration of fighting girl heroines in contemporary
animation, cultural theorist Saitō Tamaki makes a parallel observation. He deduces
that armed girl characters “transmit desire and energy to the extent that they are
vacant” (Saitō, 1998: 17). Saitō goes on to suggest that it would be appropriate to
think of these distinctively “empty” (k kyo) characters as “phallic girls” who are
not independent personalities but, rather, “girls that are identical with the penis.
Yet it is a hollow penis, hardly a functioning thing” (Saitō, 1998: 17). According
to Saitō’s analysis of animated fantasies concurrent with the journalistic descriptions
of deviant schoolgirls, fighting girls represent nothing but disembodied, disengaged

and hysterical expressions of an impotent male subjectivity.20
The paradoxical emptiness (k kyo) that Saitō suggests is fundamental to male
subcultural imagination in Japan is fundamentally related to the voyeuristic impo-
tence that lies, according to Gayatri Spivak, at the heart of modern thinking about
social resistance in its entirety. Spivak describes how “that radiating point, animat-
ing an effectively heliocentric discourse, fills the empty place of the agent with
the historical sun of theory” (Spivak, 1988: 274). By assuming the identity of
schoolgirls, effectively or literally, and speaking on their behalf, intellectual and
cultural professionals have not only been assisted by the incapacity of schoolgirls
to articulate or respond at a proximate intellectual and cultural level, but ironically
they have perhaps at the same time blocked the path of young female political
imagination. The dense, competitive, and progressive colonization of every last
facet of the voice, opinion, attitude, sexuality, and image of girls in the Japanese
media and throughout academia bears out Spivak’s melancholy complaint that the
“possibility of the collectivity itself is persistently foreclosed through the manipula-
tion of female agency” (Spivak, 1988: 283).21
Schoolgirl rebels indicated a new intensity in the recurring fear and fantasy
of female revolution, and simultaneously reflected what was perhaps a desperate
quest to find political direction and an accompanying social energy to carry it
forward. Embodied within the upswell of writing and culture about high-school
girls were the sentiments of several underexercised power generations. The per-
sistent fantasy recorded in the work of engaged but politically frustrated cultural
and intellectual producers is one in which, on their own behalf, some human
power external to existing social structures—in this case, Japanese girls—might
blast away at the awkward stump of conservative political forces and civil bureau-
cracy. Cultural producers fondly fantasized about schoolgirls as a new social force
with rational, socialist, and libertine ambitions similar to their own. The dense
male-dominated network of cultural and intellectual professionals, manga art-
ists (interi, bundan, mangaka), and amateur aficionados (otaku) who engaged in
forging cultural premonitions of violent destruction and social renewal led by
girls in contemporary Japan is reminiscent of the unstable stratum of “profes-
sional conspirators” (social agitators) of nineteenth-century Paris. According to
the summary analysis of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, professional conspirators
were composed of “democratic bohemians of proletarian origin” and “demo-
cratic bohemians of bourgeois origin,” as well as “democratic loafers,” all of
whom formed one component of “that social category which in Paris is known
as la boheme” (Marx and Engels, 1978: 317). It would seem fair to say that the
visions of resistant girl activity that have been projected on to women in contem-
porary Japan bear a distinct resemblance to characteristic modes of spontaneous,
violent, and magical foment promoted by bohemian agitators in nineteenth-
century Paris.
Notes
1 “… mada watashi o sashitai? demo gyaku ni sasarechatta mitai!” in Kill Bill: Volume 1.
2 Uma Thurman mentions the influence of Lady Snowblood during the Making of Kill
Bill documentary accompanying the DVD version of the film. The soundtrack to Lady
Snowblood sung by the vigilante heroine herself Meiko Kaji, is “Urami Bushi” (Bitter
Warrior) and was adopted as soundtrack for Kill Bill: Volume 1. Meiko Kaji is also the
lead actress of the Female Convict Scorpion (“Sasori”) series in which violent women
revenge themselves on sexist men.
3 Saitō Tamaki considers that the Disney animation Mulan (1988), which appears to have
assimilated the theme of the fighting girl already characteristic of Japanese animation,
represents a significant globalization of this character (Saitō, 1998: 7, 17).
4 See Honda Masuko’s Ibunka to shite no kodomo for a classic and formative text on prewar
girls’ culture, which emerged from the both closeted and exclusive dormitory culture
of private girls schools (Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 1992).
5 An article in Views pursues this idea, 26 April 1996, p. 28.
6 As Henri Bergson wrote of this symbol of spontaneous human energy, it will “require
an almost negligible action, such as the slight pressure of the finger on the hair trigger of
the pistol, in order to liberate at the required moment, in the direction chosen, as great
an amount as is wanted of accumulated energy” (Bergson, 1920: 35).
7 A moody-looking Nara girl on the cover is the hostess of the first book in the series,
Uchiyabure suru chi: shintai, kotoba, kenryoku o aminaosu (Reshaping the politics of knowledge:
Body, language and power), Tokyo University Press, 2000.
8 Harry Harootunian suggests that Gonda Yasunosuke’s “detailed information about the
lives of licensed and unlicensed prostitutes came out of a direct engagement with the
subjects in their milieu” (Harootunian, 2001: 167).
9 “The woman, if not an actual prostitute, is still seen as metaphorically prostituting
herself just as the proletariat metaphorically prostitutes him/herself for wages” (Bowen-
Struyk, 2009: 20).
10 Harootunian notes Imamura’s interest in the everyday life of lower-class women in
History’s Disquiet (Harootunian, 2002: 157–168).
11 The maternal, magical atavism of lower-class female characters is resonant with the
atavism of black characters in prewar American film. See “Black as Folk” (Dyer, 1986:
79–89).
12 Script published by Tokyo: Jiritsu Shōbo; comic by Tokyo: Fusion Production.
13 Kumiko Saitō investigates the emergence and differentiation of male Lolita-complex
narratives and foci from girls’ cultural material in “Contesting Ideas of Magic and
Metamorphosis: The Magical Girl Genre and Changing Ideas of Feminine Identity in
Japanese Society” (11 August 2009, unpublished material).
14 Azuma Hiroki argues that it is precisely because the producer-directors of these
animations, Oishii Mamoru and Miyazaki Hayao, consciously distanced themselves
from the sexual entendre and style of the Lolita-complex mode that characterizes other
anime that they were able to reach large audiences and be successful; see Azuma (1996),
paragraphs 2 to 5.
15 One example of the complexity of this interaction is the case of Revolutionary Girl Utena,
penned by Satō Chiho, a female comic artist, and featuring the female lead character Utena,
who identifies only as a “Prince.” The animated version of Utena, the film version (1999),
and several live fringe theater versions were produced by veteran male director Ikuhara
Kunihiko, previously involved with the 1960s and 1970s staging of Terayama Shūji’s films
and theater. Ikuhara also produced the animated versions of Bish jo Senshi Sailormoon,
making this type of fighting female heroine something of a career specialty. Ikuhara
hired one old associate of Terayama Shūji’s, “J.A. Seazer,” to produce the soundtrack of
the animated and film version of Utena, and add to its dueling scene lyrics centering on
the chorus chant “The Destiny of Total Apocalypse” (“Zettai unmei mokushiroku”).
Nevertheless, scholar Arai Hiroyuki argues that the narrative of Revolutionary Girl Utena
represents a sh jo (girl) mode of feminist thinking because the heroine, Utena, who cross-
dresses as a dashing and worldly man and fights duels with a cruel and sexist prince, seeks
to be a comrade and not the female savior of a man (Arai, 1998).
16 The modern, enlightened, and virginal schoolgirl is uncovered in Mariko Inoue
(1996). The internalization of the chastity which was central to the doctrine taught to
schoolgirls into their own “girls’ culture” (sh jo bunka) where hostility to male interest
and virginity, coupled with “spiritual love”, was taken as the basis of autonomy is
discussed in Shamoon (2012: 29–48).
17 Critical writers of the 1920s appear to have faced similar difficulties finding modern
girls who adequately fulfilled their assigned political destiny. Marxist journalist Ōya
Sōichi then claimed that only “the daughter of heroic leftist activists who had been
imprisoned countless times” was the fully modern girl. Early feminist critic Hiratsuka
Raichō expressed her hope that modern girls would perhaps eventually, show their
critical “social conscience,” in an essay titled “The Modern Girl As She Should Be”
(cited in Silverberg, 2006: 59–60).
18 Discussing schoolgirls, Hayao Kawai reported that in a recent meeting with the novelist
Murakami Ryū, Murakami made this argument to him (Kawai, 1988: 143).
19 Novelist Murakami Ryū and investigative journalist Kuronuma Katsushi have both
written books about deviant schoolgirls. In one interview Murakami proposes that
“What I was writing in Love & Pop, and what you, Kuronuma have written in your
report Compensated Dating, is that the high school girls are engaging in some kind of an
unconscious movement” (Murakami and Kuronuma, 1997: 297).
20 Saitō Tamaki’s works are now also available in English language. See Beautiful Fighting
Girl (2011), especially Chapter 6, “The Emergence of the Phallic Girls.”
21 This is also precisely the point made by Nina Power in her review of the English translation
of Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (Semiotext(e), 2012) in
which the “Young-Girl” is made the symbol of the full commodity colonization of
the face and body: “What, ultimately, would it mean to let the Young-Girl speak for
herself and not through the categories imposed upon her by a culture that heralds her
as the metaphysical apex of civilization while simultaneously denigrating her, or even
the categories that Tiqqun mobilize to take her apart in a subtly different way?” (Radical
Philosophy 180 July/August 2013, accessed at: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/
web/rp177-shes-just-not-that-into-you).
10
PROBLEMS COMPENSATING
WOMEN1
Despite similarities in the essential subject matter—compensating women for

sexual labor—compensated dating was rarely consciously connected to the other
major news story with which it ran parallel, namely the story about demands for
compensation for Asian comfort women (j gun ianfu) forced to provide sex for
the Japanese military during the Pacific War. Let us investigate how these stories
may have in fact interacted on a subterranean level by first of all returning to the
official statistics on the numbers of girls involved in compensated dating, analyzed
in Chapter 2. As we discovered, statistics on compensated dating are contentious as
a source of empirical evidence about contemporary sexual behavior, but are there
any other possible ways of thinking about the significance of the figures that were
generated?
The percentage of schoolgirls stating that they had done compensated dating in
the 1996 TMG Youth Survey carried out in Tokyo was generally expanded upon,
as though it were the most reliable statistical indicator of the extent of schoolgirl
prostitution at a national level. Specialists such as Miyadai Shinji even argued that
compensated dating was less visible but more widespread in provincial backwaters
and the Illusory Suburbia (Maboroshi no k gai, 1997b). A quick calculation of what
the implied situation would actually entail at the national level in 1996 provides
an intriguing numerical scenario. At the time the 1996 TMG Youth Survey was
conducted, there was a national population of about 4.5 million schoolgirls.2 If
the 3.4 percent of middle-school girls and 4.4 percent of high-school girls saying
that they had done compensated dating in the original count of the 1996 TMG
Youth Survey is applied to the national populations of middle- and high-school girls,
respectively, the results suggest that there were 174,829 middle- and high-school
girls involved in “compensated dating,” which at this time was largely presented as
a fashionable euphemism for prostitution. Moreover, if the registered responses of
this rather small fraction of respondents—that most of this dating activity had been
carried out within the last one to three months—are factored into this calculation,
the resulting fictional scenario might be one of 175,000 schoolgirls involved with
Problems compensating women 189
amateur prostitution during spring in 1996. This figure is substantial: equivalent to

the population of a small city, almost four times the number of registered prosti-
tutes in prewar Japan (Garon, 1998: 94), or about the same as the higher-end figure
given for the number of comfort women utilized by the Japanese Imperial Army
between 1940 and 1945, which is reckoned by historians to be about 200,000
women (Yamazaki, 1999: xxv; Yoshimi, 2000: 91–96).
The possible appearance of this spring offensive belongs not so much to the
realm of institutional youth deviance studies, however, as to that of a peculiar col-
lective sexual fantasy. It was one unfailingly transmitted to entire families in teatime
news broadcasts throughout 1996 and 1997.3 It is a fantasy that also corresponds
neatly to the cultural image of schoolgirls as an army of sexy rebels taking over
the high streets and station malls that prevailed in pop culture, film, and literature
in the 1990s and 2000s. Could this cultural fantasy be fortified and stimulated at
a subterranean level by the recently reawakened memories of wartime comfort
women? The vision of a silent and mobile army of schoolgirl prostitutes is reflected
in the literal guerilla tactics of the schoolgirl gang in the straight-to-video film
Bum! (2002); in the strange offensive action of the rank of 54 suicidal schoolgirls
in the film Suicide Circle (2001); or in artist Aida Makoto’s self-immolating kogyaru
samurai portrayed in Joshik sei harakiri (Harakiri schoolgirls, 1999; see this batallion
of schoolgirls “like Samurai” in Figure 6.4). Schoolgirls linked to military ranks
and discipline carried a distorted connection to the sexual servitude of comfort
women to the Japanese imperial forces. Interestingly, in her work on colonization
and female sexuality in Imperial Japan, Sabine Früstück has argued that the use of
incarcerated Asian females—many of school age—and overseas Japanese prosti-
tutes, as comfort women in Japanese military brothels, “was an extreme form of the
colonization of sex and was closely intertwined with debates about and practices of
the control of prostitution in civilian society at the time” (Früstück, 2003: 41).
The fact is that the first broadsheet articles about prematurely sexualized school-
girls requesting compensation from Japanese men were not about fashionable
schoolgirls strutting the streets of Tokyo in the 1990s. Articles on the nation’s
schoolgirls engaged in selling their burusera gym pants, initially published in a
trickle from 1989 to 1995, and later focusing on girls searching out compensa-
tion for sex dates, were predated by a controversial rash of articles involving new
evidence, and the testimonies of ex-comfort women (moto ianfu), about what had
happened to them when they were teenage women shipped to the garrisons of
Imperial Japan. Liberal news sources printed shocking descriptions of the experi-
ence of young Korean girls in the Pacific War—“Thirteen Years Old and Alone in
a Truck” (Asahi Shinbun, 3 September 1991)4—being brutally transported to labor
in Japanese factories dotted across the continental Japanese empire and “rounded
up” for other more ambiguous sorts of “physical work” under the aegis of the Girls
Labor Volunteers Corps (Joshi Teishin Kinrō Kai). In December 1991, the first
named Korean plaintiff, Kim Hak Soon, who had been sold to a Japanese comfort
station in China at 16 years old, filed for an apology and compensation in Tokyo
High Court. On 11 January 1992, the Asahi Shinbun newspaper stirred controversy
190 Problems compensating women
and anger by announcing in headline—“Comfort Stations, Documents Show

Military’s Involvement” (Seaton, 2006: 103).
New archival evidence uncovered by the historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki showed
that the Japanese military had systematically organized the abduction of girls to
military comfort stations. Later in 1992, the jarring testimony of a former Japanese
teacher, Ikeda Masae, who claimed to have been given orders to recruit girl stu-
dents and to have himself been responsible for sending six of his female students
from Bangsan elementary school in Seoul to become comfort women in Japan, was
reported in broadsheets in Korea and Japan. Articles with titles such as “For Five
Years Every Day Was Misery: At 16 Years Old I Was Molested by a Policeman”
(Mainichi Shinbun, 5 March 1992) and “At Fourteen My Body Was Broken”
(Asahi Shinbun, 7 August 1992) began to appear in both special reports and regular
columns dedicated to transmitting “Statements of the Reality of Sexual Labor”
(serialized in Mainichi Shinbun through to August 2004). As Ueno Chizuko has
remarked, there was a tendency within both the Korean and the Japanese media
to discuss comfort women—who were typically teenagers and often schoolgirls at
the start of their bondage—as though they were morally righteous to the degree
that they were “immaculate victims,” namely, sexually inexperienced before being
enslaved in comfort stations (Ueno, 2004: 89). In August 1993, Cabinet Secretary
Kōno Yōhei, a senior politician of the Liberal Democratic Party, acknowledged
and apologized for the system of coerced labor and comfort stations,5 marking the
beginning of the emergence of a pugnacious nationalist reaction against the inglo-
rious addition of comfort women into Japan’s official and taught national history.
Throughout this period and on into the later years of the 1990s, journalists also
posed estimates about the potential financial cost of compensating surviving com-
fort women. In 1992, reports appeared about increasing pressure from the Korean
government, under titles such as “Individual Compensation Payments to Former
Comfort Women Considered” (Asahi Shinbun, 12 August 1992). The fear of pay-
ing out from the national coffers an enormous sum of compensation money lay
behind the stream of updates on court cases involving claims to compensation. A
deep conflict and situation of counterbidding emerged between the Korean and
Japanese governments, sparked by the refusal of the Japanese government to pro-
vide official government compensation (hosh ) to comfort women. The Korean
government offered a different type of financial compensation (seikatsushien, shien-
kin) to Korean former comfort women who rejected the financial and welfare
assistance offered to them by the Asian Women’s Foundation (AWF), the Japanese
NGO established in 1997 to compensate former comfort women through public
contributions combined with indirect government funding. Estimates were lodged
about how much “life assistance money” might be appropriate.
The terms (and kanji characters) used to discuss the funding and compensat-
ing of comfort women (shienkin, hojokin) overlapped with but were not generally
identical to the language alighted upon a few years later to describe compensa-
tion (enjo) of high-school girls. Take, for example, the Yomiuri Shinbun article
“Financial Support for Former Comfort Women of Korea” (Kankoku, moto ianfu ni
shienkin), published on 7 February 1993. In other articles, however, it was precisely

the term enjo that was used to describe “compensation” to comfort women. For
instance, an article titled “Financial Compensation for Former Comfort Women”
(Moto ianfu ni kinsen enjo) was printed in the Asahi Shinbun on 30 March 1993, and
“Bill to Provide Assistance to Former Comfort Women” (Moto ianfu ni enjo hoan)
appeared in Ch goku Shinbun on 11 April 1993. The compensation indicated in
these headlines referred to the amount of money that Korean government repre-
sentatives had suggested that the Japanese government ought to pay out to each
individual Korean comfort woman: 700,000 yen for each of the 135 qualified
claimants who had come forward to make a claim at the time these articles were
printed. In March 1998, ongoing tussles between the two national governments
over the figures involved in compensation brought the topic back into the lime-
light. While the Korean government announced that 155 women should each
receive 3.6 million yen each, the Japanese government responded that the Asian
Women’s Foundation and not the Japanese government itself would compensate
each woman who came forward with a single payment of two million yen plus free
health care.
The narrative of prostitute schoolgirls willingly selling their clothes or bodies
to suited salarymen, in turn also stereotyped as institutional soldiers, interacted on
subtle moral planes with shocking disclosures in the news about the sexual slavery
of comfort women (ianfu). And on close examination it becomes clear that the nar-
rative of compensated dating is a perfect mirror inversion of the story of comfort
women. The dominant narrative on ianfu is the story of innocent young women—
many of them schoolgirls, and colonial subjects within the Japanese empire—who
had been led away against their will and brutally sexually exploited by guilty
Japanese men, and who were now finally filing lawsuits against the Japanese gov-
ernment for a national apology and compensation. Enjo k sai is a narrative, in
contrast, about greedy young women—especially middle- and high-school girls,
also under the direct jurisdiction of the Japanese state—who are guilty of voluntar-
ily selling their bodies for large sums of compensation extorted from Japanese men.
The later “compensation for sex” story slipping into the news in its earliest incar-
nations in 1994, appears to rewrite the former one. Most significantly, it served to
shift the focus of guilt from the government, and Japanese manhood in general,
to opportunist girls in the Japanese domain. Interestingly, the volume of news and
journal articles published on both “comfort women” (ianfu) and “compensated
dating” (enjo k sai), which are compared in Figure 10.1, peaked in 1996 and 1997.6
The issue of Japan’s sexual geopolitics in Asia emerged on the fringes of feminist
activism in Japan in the 1960s. Rising wages and the increase of Japanese overseas
tourism after 1964 stimulated a new Japanese market for sexual labor in neighbor-
ing countries. Between 1964 and 1970, Japan Airlines began marketing “JALPAK”
package tours to locations such as Korea and Singapore, tours that quickly became
linked with large, new sex industries providing entertainment for male Japanese
visitors (Muroi and Sasaki, 1997: 184). Following continual criticism of the “sex
tours” by Christian and feminist groups in Korea and Japan, which culminated in
200
180 compensated dating

160 comfort women
140
120
Volume
100
80
60
40
20
0
1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
Year
FIGURE 10.1 A comparison of the number of news articles containing the terms
“comfort women” (ianfu) and “compensated dating” (enjo k sai) in their
titles, between 1991 and 2006
protests against Prime Minister Suzuki in 1981 (Muroi and Sasaki, 1997: 188), the
Asian sex industry relocated to Thailand and the Philippines. Women from these
countries began to service Japanese men, and through the 1980s increasing num-
bers of these women also began to travel to Japan to work in bars and clubs.7
Producers, activists, and critics sympathetic to a feminist perspective saw clear
connections between exploited Asian women and Japanese schoolgirls. The Osaka
branch of the international NGO End Child Prostitution and Pornography in Asian
Tourism (ECPAT), founded in Bangkok in 1992, actively campaigned against Asian
sex tourism as well as domestic juvenile prostitution and pornography throughout
the 1990s. In 1993 to 1994, ECPAT organized a campaign against what it defined
as “child porn” published in the weekly magazines (sh kanshi), especially Sh kan
Gendai and Sh kan Post. As we have seen in Chapter 3, these weekly magazines
were at the forefront of bringing news about deviant schoolgirls into the mass
media. ECPAT was formative in pushing for an anti-child prostitution law that
would criminalize not only sex tourism, pornography, and child abuse by Japanese
in other Asian countries but child pornography, abuse, and prostitution in Japan as
well (Sonozaki Toshiko interview, Kansai ECPAT, 26 January 1999).
Disbursers of the Asian Women’s Fund (Aija Jōsei Kikin) saw a similar issue at
stake and released funds for extensive surveys on compensated dating that were
carried out in the Tokyo region in 1997, in addition to funding research to gather
evidence on comfort stations and comfort women in former colonies. Professor
Fukutomi Mamoru, the lead researcher of the 1997 AWF survey on compensated
dating, suggested that, by 1997 at least, the goals of the AWF were to promote
“gender equality” (danjo by d ) in the present as well as to compensate and atone
for crimes against comfort women. The AWF had thus extended its remit to fund-
ing research on “issues related to gender problems,” leading to the commissioning
of a sociological exploration of “the phenomenon of ‘men who buy’ women [and
schoolgirls]” in contemporary Japan too (email exchange via former AWF Survey
research team member Iu Miyoko at Tsukuba University, 7 February 2008).
Traces of a logical connection between compensated dating and the Pacific war,
comfort women, and broader issues of colonialism also rinsed through culture and
social discussion. In the leftist and idealistic film Bounce Kogals! (1997), militant
schoolgirls who offered companion services with the intention of getting money
from men without providing sex forge an instant alliance with a Chinese hostess,
after being insulted and humiliated by their shared male client in the restroom
of a nightclub. Later, the lead character, Lisa, walks out of a date with an elderly
Japanese war veteran who has paid her to sit and listen to his self-adulatory remi-
niscences about how he selected and assigned ranks to comfort women during the
war according to their bone structure. In another compensated dating film, Love
& Pop (1998), based on Murakami Ryū’s two-volume script, the lead schoolgirl is
yelled at by Captain EO, an eloquent and abusive customer of her dating services,
who finally throws four yen at her as she cowers in the shower, telling her that this
is her payment because that is what she would be paid for child sex in India.
Rule-breaking schoolgirls, and their immodest habits—putting on make-up
on trains, for example—attracted the ire of rightist writers with broader plat-
forms of reactionary gender and national politics. Hayashi Michiyoshi, the
author of a series of articles on traditional parental roles and a book on Reviving
Fatherhood (1996), criticized the inadequate and selfish mothering hovering in
the psychological background of girls involved in comfort-seeking behavior such
as compensated dating (Hayashi, 1999: 8). Caricatures of comfort women and
soliciting schoolgirls are featured alongside each other in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s
controversial rightist manga account of Japan’s role in the Pacific War, entitled On
War (Sens ron, 1998), which also presents, as its subtheme, a hostile and revisionist
account of various “types” of women in Japan. The opening pages of Kobayashi’s
book a panoramic scene of a rotten society, with schoolgirls in kogyaru garb grub-
bing around seedy-looking salarymen at Shibuya crossing. Kobayashi sets the
scene for his political comic on this double page: “Here is peace … festering a
little here and there, a peace based on a foundation about which no one knows.”
This scene links the “rottenness” of deviant schoolgirls to the corrupt basis of
postwar peace in the US–Japan Peace Treaty. Later in the same volume Kobayashi
portrays comfort women as similarly opportunistic and sly-looking females who
slouch with their legs open for business, and glean money from the “miserable
earnings” of common soldiers by providing each of them with as little as “five or
six seconds” of “wretched sex” (Kobayashi, 1998: 280–281). In On War school-
girls and comfort women alike are portrayed as cunning prostitutes who exploit
men to earn hard cash.8
In a 1997 article titled “Fleeing from Compensated Dating and History,”
prominent cultural theorist and critic Ōtsuka Eiji argues that the common position
attributed to schoolgirls—namely, that “selling themselves or their pants causes no

one any trouble”—effectively implies that the men who buy these commodities
don’t have any responsibility for the damage that might be caused by this exchange.
He then draws a parallel between this fixed “schoolgirl image” (joshik seiz ) who is
free to sell herself and the argument made by right-wing critics of history textbooks
that the comfort women were prostitutes engaging in a business for which only
they themselves could be held responsible: in both cases, the men who had sex
with schoolgirls and the national army that ran comfort stations are made to appear
external to these happenings. Ōtsuka argues that it is therefore critical to teach
about comfort women in school textbooks: “Making middle school girls learn
about the existence of comfort women would be more effective than anything
else in getting them to understand that being ‘free to sell pants’ is a product of a
particular history” (Ōtsuka, 1997: 32–33). The logic of this argument may appear
somewhat convoluted, but the final point of comparison is precise: the morality of
or about schoolgirls must be connected consciously with the morality of using and
denying comfort women.
Compensation and national shame

In articles such as “Compensated Dating Is the Whole of Japan”9 (Asahi Shinbun,
20 April 1997), “In the Land of Compensated Dating” (Sh kan Kinyobi,
13 December 1996: 62), and “Japan the Embarrassing Nation” (Asahi Shinbun,
27 March 1997), compensated dating was presented as the shameful endpoint of
a national moral pragmatism. The term enjo k sai was linked, if not quite literally,
then apparently morally and etymologically, to comfort women. One commentary
on “The World in 1996” claimed that “compensated dating” was a slippery con-
cept directly reminiscent of wartime euphemisms:
The art of the naming of “compensated dating” (enjo k sai) is similar to that of
“comfort women” (ianfu), and it highlights the ingenuity of Japanese language.
It incorporates a tradition formed half a century earlier in which realities such
as “all soldiers were killed” was phrased as “all soldiers died a hero’s death,”
and “retreat” was worded as “a strategic move,” and “the occupying force”
was referred to as “the stationary force.” It is difficult for adults to argue that
compensated dating is morally wrong because the customers of the girls are
adults of their fathers’ generation.
(Asahi Shinbun, 29 December 1996)
Common and constant shifts of topic between “schoolgirls” in general and

“Japanese schoolgirls” illustrated the oscillating focus of interest—between female
shame and national shame. Artists who helped illustrate the schoolgirl as a cipher
of national sentiments include Aida Makoto, who presented a kogyaru-style uni-
formed schoolgirl committing seppuku (self-immolation) in his painting Harakiri
Joshik sei (1999; see Figure 6.4.) Acclaimed female artist Tabaimo, by contrast,
incorporated a schoolgirl defecating the national flag out of her bottom in her
work Japanese Zebra Crossing (2000).
Although “compensated dating” (enjo k sai) per se was an obscure early post-
war term with a limited circulation until its revival as a keyword in 1996, it
works as a witty variation on the widely used technical and legal term for “aid”
and “compensation” (enjo). Moreover, the pleasurable jouissance of the term
“compensated dating” is contingent on the potentially insincere undertones of
its anchor term, “compensation.” Enjo was used in the Meiji period to describe
investments of Japanese finance in raw materials extraction in colonial regions.
In 1918, for example, an entire department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
was rather euphemistically dedicated the “Department of Economic Assistance
to Siberia” (Siberia keizai enjo bu). In the postwar period and on into the 1950s,
enjo was used to refer to the various forms of “supplies aid” (busshi enjo), financial
aid, and “development assistance” (kaihatsu enjo) that Japan received from the US.
Between 1946 and 1952, Japan received two billion dollars of such compensation
from the US (Nishigaki and Shimomura, 1993: 141). In 1953, enjo was also used
to describe the Mutual Defense Assistance Program (Sōgō Boei Enjo Keikaku)
implemented in the wake of the passage of the 1951 AMPO treaty. The term enjo
k sai in its earliest traced usage, in 1953, was used to refer to the innovation of
one-off paid dates (see Chapter 2) and was almost certainly a topical play on words
reflecting the irony with which the mutual defense program and American enjo in
general may have been viewed in the 1950s. In glib jokes about the “compensated
dating of nations” the nuances of corruption embedded in the idea of “compensa-
tion” were rehearsed.10
Hints of the ongoing suspicion about the financial aspects of Japan’s relationship
with America continued to lurk within aspects of the storytelling about com-
pensated dating in the 1990s. For example, Hayami Yukiko’s 1996 breakthrough
news article “Drunk/Tiger Girls Terrible Compensated Dating”11 starts with the
story of a high-school-girl interviewee called Eriko, who had begun her career as
an amateur prostitute a year earlier, after being approached by an American man
in Shibuya who said, “I like schoolgirls. If I pay you, will you be my girlfriend?”
(Hayami, 1996a: 62). The article seems to imply that compensated dating con-
tinues the psycho-national tradition of a feminine Japan being led and sexually
consumed by a masculine America.12 In the US, Newsweek magazine unwittingly
reconfirmed its own role as the American counterpart in this international erotic
subplot on the front cover of its Christmas Day 1996 issue, which featured the
words “Japan’s Dirty Secret: Schoolgirls Selling Sex” and a photograph of Japanese
schoolgirls in kogyaru-style uniforms.
Enjo k sai also quickly became a general metaphor for describing corrupt and
impure relations in general, and for corrupt international relations in particular.
Thus an anti-colonialist article published in the left-wing magazine Impaction
insisted that “Japan should stop doing compensated dating with Asia!”13 The arti-
cle argues that the governments of Asian states such as South Korea have muffled
and repressed domestic political and feminist movements—especially those seeking
justice for comfort women, which would have disturbed their own comforta-
ble governmental relations with Japan—in exchange for receiving much-needed
financial enjo, or “compensation.” The writer argues that sums of compensation
doled out until 1993—108 million dollars to Indonesia, 78 million to China, 64
million to the Philippines, 48 million to Thailand, 21 million to Malaysia, and 14
million to South Korea—have ensured that anti-Japanese movements have been
gagged. The article lampoons the complicity of these dealings and further insists
that “Japanese economic assistance to the Asian despots with which it must keep
a relationship is no different to older men doing compensated dating with the
young girls they simply have to have dates with” (Pakuiru, 1998: 49). Stretching
the connection even further, the article goes on to compare the sudden vocality
of Asian governments about comfort women after 1993 to the hypocritical clamor
of schoolgirls criticizing older men for their indecent solicitations, yet (apparently)
only after they have had their dates with them and gotten their cash.
Debate about schoolgirls in the 1990s and early 2000s revealed that “receiving
compensation” continues to be understood as a sign of a “political sellout,” or of
a compromising “complicity with an enemy.” Kuronuma Katsushi and Murakami
Ryū, for example, compare the presumed attitude of girls at this time to the atti-
tudes of their own generation in the 1960s: “We thought of adult society and
money as approximately the same thing, and we had the notion that both money
and adult society were dirty. The precise point was a bit vague, but receiving
money from adults was unpleasant and controlling money was not cool,” opines
Kuronuma. “But now” interjects Murakami, “they never imagine it as receiving
emergency rations from their enemy” (Murakami and Kuronuma, 1997: 297).
Troubled thoughts about the cost of adequately compensating the former
comfort women (ianfu) engaged in legal battles against the Japanese government
from 1991 on—and coterminous thoughts about the cost of adequately com-
pensating less-than-eager Japanese women for their domestic labor and role as
child-bearers and care-givers to the elderly—ran in close parallel with conversa-
tions about schoolgirls and their compensation in the 1990s and 2000s. In the
context of these multiple discussions about compensating women, radical feminist
Wakao Noriko argued a case for a legal recognition of the unofficial “compen-
sation” earned by women through sexual work (Wakao, 2003: 192–193). The
notion of support or compensation (enjo) ran through these concerns about care
and reproduction. In 2009, for example, an innovative local “Welfare Bank”
(Fukushi gink ) was launched in Kobe to which younger individuals could offer
30-minute units of “life assistance” (seikatsu enjo), mainly cooking and cleaning,
to old and infirm members. The issue of legal or financial compensation for the
underpaid or unpaid labor of women past, present, and future was moot on mul-
tiple levels, and continued to be through the 2000s, as evidenced, for example, in
one the key policies of the Democratic Party (DPJ) elected to power in August
2009, which was to provide a generous child benefit (kodomoteate, joseikin) of
26,000 yen a month per child to the guardians for each child under the age of
15 years old.
Compensated dating can be understood as an extraordinarily resonant, influential,

and profitable cultural fiction about teenage female deviancy that emerged from a
particular history of negative stereotypes and cultural narratives about unmanageable
young women. But there was also something more complicated and deceptive at
play. Compensated dating operated as a placebo news event (or pseudo-event) that
both distracted from and reversed the meaning of other less easily digestible and less
“entertaining” questions of compensation and gender. Whereas the most significant
aim of the campaign of former comfort women for apology and retribution was that
they would not die with the label “prostitutes” still attached to them, the narrative
of compensated dating insisted that schoolgirls in uniform were all too willing to
prostitute themselves. Media parades of images and statements about “compensated
dating” generated emotional and moral dispositions, in which Japanese manhood and
institutions in general took a strong moral high ground. Ironically, this news story
had the effect of reversing the damaging impact of the comfort women testimonies
on national moral status, rescuing Japan from national shame, if only domestically.
Comfort women—who remain entirely absent from television entertainment, art
and film, despite relatively consistent news reportage—may have been pushed to
the edges of public conscience and consciousness by the thrilling cacophony of news
about teenage prostitutes.
Notes
1 A version of this chapter was published in U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal, no. 41 (2011):
52–71, under the title “From Compensating Comfort Women to Compensated
Dating.”
2 There were just under 2.25 million (2,213,163) middle-school girls, and about the same
number (2,263,214) of high-school girls. Figures from Somuch , population statistics.
3 Miyadai Shinji’s comments are pertinent here. In his view, “Information about murder,
rape, and suicide are circulated in the news media quite freely. So long as it is labeled
as reportage on an aspect of a subculture (f zoku), the media has an excuse to circulate
these topics as normal news and entertainment” (Miyadai interview, 5 February 1999).
4 This article is titled “Factory-Hand Girl ‘Egi’” (Joshi Kōin “Egi”) and was one in a series
on “Asian Women in the Pacific War.”
5 Liberal Democratic Party politician Kōno Yōhei’s 1993 statements were seen as a
grave mistake by future Liberal Democratic Party leaders. Prime Minister Asō Tarō
controversially attempted to reverse this earlier acknowledgment of comfort stations in
2007.
6 Interestingly, articles on the comfort women issue peaked in 1997 in the Taiwanese
press, too. Shogo Suzuki correlates the Taiwanese coverage to debates surrounding the
launch of the Asian Women’s Fund in Japan in 1997, though in Japan the frequency of
articles on comfort women was somewhat more spread out, and a large number were
also published in 1996 (Suzuki, 2011: 228).
7 The “chickens coming home to roost” theory of schoolgirl compensated dating suggests
that the easy access to cheap and often juvenile sex that Japanese gained in Asia in
the 1980s established a contemporary precedent: “I think there has been a child-porn
problem in Japan since the late 1980s. In the 1980s Japanese men went on ‘sex-tours,’
they went on package tours to other Asian countries, where they could buy sex cheaply
from local children, from minors. Now they want to buy it at home” (Sonoda interview,
26 January 1999).
8 Thanks to my former student, James Robidoux, for drawing my attention to these

interesting pages in Kobayashi’s Sens ron in his 2008 Oxford MA thesis.
9 In his short article “Nihon Zentai ga ‘Enjo Kōsai’” (Asahi Shinbun, 20 April 1997)
the novelist and politician Tanaka Yasuo (also briefly discussed in Chapter 5) argues
that because “the commercialization of sex” (sei no sh hika) permeates Japanese culture,
from the culture of the Ginza to use of military comfort women to postwar corporate
entertainment, it is an absurdity to remove comfort women from middle-school
textbooks, since a similarly commercial style of sex is just as well presented in taught
cultural classics such as Genji Monogatari.
10 Leheny cites one instance of Buddhist writer Sawada Kantoku suggesting, rather
counterintuitively, that Japan was the compensating dating partner of the US, since
Japan financed US bases in Japan (see Leheny, 2006: 75).
11 “Toragyaru”—here tora has two meanings and can be read as “tiger” and also as
“staggering” drunk girls.
12 See Anne Allison for a clear summary of the ongoing metaphor of Japan as the femme
fatale in a risqué interracial courtship between a vulnerable Orient and an infatuated and
insistent Western man (Allison 2001).
13 “Nihon wa Asia to no enjo kōsai o yameyo,” Impaction (October 1998): 32–52.
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NEWSPAPER AND MAGAZINE
ARTICLES
AERA
“Shibuya no ‘shinsei’ Center-guy” (Shibuya’s new Centre guy), AERA, 7 June 2004:
53–54.
Asahi Shinbun
“At Fourteen My Body Was Broken” (14sai … watashi no karada wa chigirareta),
Asahi Shinbun, 7 August 1992.
“Compensated Dating Is the Whole of Japan” (Nihon zentai ga “enjo k sai”), Tanaka
Yasuo, Asahi Shinbun, 20 April 1997.
“Don’t judge people by their hair and skin color” (Kami ya hifu no iro de hito wo
minai de), Asahi Shinbun, 22 November 1999, evening edition.
“Factory Hand Girl ‘Egi” (Joshi K in ‘Egi), Asahi Shinbun, 3 September 1991.
“Financial Compensation for Former Comfort Women” (Moto ianfu ni kinsen enjo),
Asahi Shinbun, 30 March 1993.
“Individual Compensation Payments to Former Comfort Women Considered”
(Moto ianfu ni dokuji hosh wo kent ), Asahi Shinbun, 12 August 1992.
“Japan the Embarrassing Nation” (Hazukashii kuni Nihon), Asahi Shinbun, 27 March
1997.
The Proliferation of Fake School Uniforms (Nanchatte seifuku z shoku), Asahi
Shinbun, 15 April 2003.
“Travel, Cram School, Anticipating Child Benefit” (Ryok , juku … teate kitai),
Asahi Shinbun, 24 October 2009.
“The World in 1996” (Ses 1996: ano hitokotoba ni chotto hitokotoba), Asahi Shinbun,
29 December 1996.
Bungei Shunj
“Shitsugyō taikoku Nihon no tanjō” (Empire of Unemployment: anniversary of
Japan), Bungei Shunj , June 1995: 290.
Cawaii!
“All Right, Girls! Let’s Try Mode of Half!” Cawaii! September 1996: 39.
“Cheeky Pride in Foreign Brands” (Kaigai burando namaiki g man), Cawaii! May
1996: 20–21.
Ch goku Shinbun
“Bill to Provide Assistance to Former Comfort Women” (Moto ianfu ni enjo hoan),
Ch goku Shinbun, 11 April 1993.
The Daily Telegraph

“Schoolgirls the Prey in Paradise for Paedophiles,” The Daily Telegraph, Sydney,
Australia, 20 October 1996: 44.
dacapo
“Sh jotachi no shing , ang , ryûk g ” (Girls’ new words, codes and slang), 89–93,
15 October 1997.
Dime
“Gyaru + Animal = Gyanimal Breeding” (Gyaru+animaru=gyanimaru z shoku),
Dime, October 1998: 10.
“What’s All That Talk of Only a Fraction of Girls Using Telephone Clubs and
Bloomer Sailor Shops!?” (Data watching – shakai no mado: terekura, burusera wa goku
ichibu no hanshi!?), Dime, 1994: 118.
Economist
“The Underlying Sickness of Infantilized Men and the Children for Whom Calling
Prostitution ‘Compensated Dating’ is Common Sense” (‘Enjo k sai’ to iu na no
baishun ga j ishikika suru kodomotachi to y chika suru otokotachi no by kon), Economist,
7 January 1997: 90–92.
Egg
“Homeboy into the Real World: Whatsup?” Egg, September 1995: 109–111.
Focus
“Are We Going to Have Even More of These Witch and Black Face Porno
Videos!?” (Tadaima AV ni mo z shokuch ganguro, yamamba tte ii!?), Focus, 8 March
2000: 24.
220 Newspaper and magazine articles
Gekkan Gendai
“Pursuing the Trend of the Ganguro—High School Girls from Distant High
Schools,” Gekkan Gendai, March 2000: 321.
“Professor Kashima Explores the Heisei [1989~] Jungle In Search of ‘Uncharted
Regions of Everyday Life’ 3: ‘Platform Boot Witches’ No Longer in the Lead in
Shibuya,” (Professor Kashima Explores the Heisei [1989~] Jungle In Search of ‘Uncharted
Regions of Everyday Life’ 3: ‘Platform Boot Witches’ No Longer in the Lead in Shibuya),
Gekkan Gendai, February 2002: 326–328.
Gendai Shis
“Konmei suru sex work ron” (Misleading Theories about Sex Work), Gendai Shis
26: 8 July 1998.
The Guardian
“Schoolgirl to Sex Object,” The Guardian, 8 July 1999: 8.
“Schoolgirls Trade Sex for Designer Goods,” The Guardian, 9 June 1997.
“Teenage Kicks: Sex with Schoolgirls is a Booming Industry in Japan,” The
Guardian, 30 October 1996.
Harpers Bazaar
“Tokyo Glamorama,” Harpers Bazaar, October 2000: 311–315, 338.
Impaction
“Japan should stop doing compensated dating with Asia!” (Nihon wa Asia to no enjo
k sai o yameyo), Impaction, October 1998: 32–52.
K hy
“The Experiences of the Compensated Dating 4% Generation” (“Enjo k sai 4%
sedai” ga yobikakeru taiken), K hy , July 1997: 26.
Mainichi Daily News

“Elite Diplomat Arrested for Child Prostitution,” 21 February 2002: 8.
Mainichi Shinbun
“For Five Years Every Day Was Misery: At 16 Years Old I Was Molested by a
Policeman” (Kuyashii hinichi gonenkan mo, 16 sai no toki ni keikan ni ranb sareta),
Mainichi Shinbun, 5 March 1992.
Marco Polo
“Suspicious High School Girls, Tasty High School Girls” (Ayashi joshik sei, oishi
joshik sei), Marco Polo, August 1993: 62–64.
Le Monde
“Schoolgirls Pander to the Lolita Fantasy,” Le Monde, 8 December 1996.
The New York Times

“Japanese Men’s Obsession: Sex with Schoolgirls,” New York Times, 3 April 1997.
Popteen
“Don’t Call Me a Bloomer-Sailor High School Girl!” (Mou burusera joshikosei to
yobenai de!!), Popteen, December 1993: 57.
“I Want to Change the Way Girls Think about Their Lives” (Onnanoko no ikikata
wo kangaenaoshitai), Popteen, January 1981: 52.
President
“The Real Thoughts of Modern High School Girls (“My Customer is Virtually
My Dad”)—A Survey of Fathers and Daughters: Among High School Children
65% Have Experience of Sex, 23% Have Done Compensated Dating” (Gendai
joshi k sei no honne (ot san wa okyakusan)—chichi to musumeno anketo: k k sei no bu:
SEX no keiken ari 65%, enjo k sai ari 23%), President, July 1997: 280.
“The Role and Responsibility of the Fathers of Ultra-Dangerous Daughters”
(Tokush : musume ga ‘ch ’ abunai chichioya no yakuwari to sekinin to wa), President,
July 1997: 264.
Ronza
“Special Report: To Our Daughters Who Do Compensated Dating” (Tokush :
enjo k sai suru musume e) Ronza, April 1998, 3–61.
Sapio
“Reverse Compensated Dating Has Started among OLs in Their Thirties” (30dai-
OLtachi no ‘gyaku enjo k sai’ ga hajimete iru), Sapio, 9 May 1997.
Seiron
“Who does the bloomer sailor compensated dating body belong to?” (Burusera enjo
k sai no shitai wa dare no mono ka?), Seiron, January 1997: 41–42
“Dating in Dangerous Waters” (Enjo k sai no kiken suiiki), Seiron, September 1997:
132–141.
Sekai
“(Enjo kōsai) to yu movement” (A Movement Called Compensated Dating).
Kawai Hayao, Sekai, March 1997.
Shinch
“The Diary of Idiotic Men Doing Compensated Dates” (Baka oyaji ‘enjo k sai’
taikenki), Shinch , February 1998: 212.
Sh kan Asahi
“Section Chief That Gave a High School Girl to His Supervisor on His Birthday”
(Joshi no tanj bi ni joshi k sei ageta kach ), Sh kan Asahi, 24 October 1997.
Sh kan Bunshun
“The Middle School Girls I Met at a ‘Dating Club’” (Date Club de deatta
joshich gakusei), Sh kan Bunshun, 23 May 1996: 155.
“Groping Tales” (Chikan monogatari), Sh kan Bunshun, 16 May 1996.
“The Horrifying Performance of School Girls” (Joshi ch k sei no susamajii sein ),
six-part series in Sh kan Bunshun, 2 May–13 June 1996.
“Last Year’s Four-Person Shocker” (4P de ‘Kyonen mo shock’), Sh kan Bunshun,
30 May 1996, a letter reprinted from Elleteen.
“The Lust of Girls Swilling around the Voicemail Introduction Services” (Dengon
dial ni uzumaku sh jotachi no ‘yokub ), Sh kan Bunshun, 2 May 1996: 205–209.
“Prostitution Called ‘Compensated Dating’” (Enjo k sai’ to iu na no baishun),
Sh kan Bunshun, 16 May 1996.
“The Reason Why Little Yumi Will ‘Sell’ Herself” (Yumi Chan ga uri wo yaru riy ),
Sh kan Bunshun, 30 May 1996.
“Sizzling Sex underneath the Cherry Blossoms” (Sakura no shita de moretsu H!!),
Sh kan Bunshun, 2 May 1996, letter by a “middle school student” reprinted from
Pastelteen.
“Why Did Black Face Magazine Egg Close Down When It Was Selling 450,000
Copies a Month?” (Ganguro zasshi ‘egg’ ga 45manbu de naze ky kan?), Sh kan
Bunshun, 10 February 2000: 170–171.
Sh kan H seki (Weekly Jewel)

“Asking 600 Middle School Students ‘What Do You Think of Compensated
Dating?’” (Ch gakusei 600 nin ni kiku, ‘enjo k sai d omou?), Sh kan H seki, 16 July
1998: 20–21.
“We Want to See the Real Faces of Our Black Face Daughters!” (Ganguro musume
no sugao ga mitai!), Sh kan H seki, 14 April 2000: 54.
Sh kan Kinyobi
“In the Land of Compensated Dating” (Enjo k sai’ no kuni ni), Sh kan Kinyobi,
13 December 1996: 62.
Sh kan Playboy
“Yamanba Girls Must be Classified as National Cultural Property Before it is Too
Late (Ima koso yamanba gyaru mukei bunka sai ni shite), Sh kan Playboy, 2000: 198–201.
Sh kan Post
“Beat Takeshi’s End-of-the-Century Venom: Pro-Wrestler Girls and Nude Idols
Are Just a Continuation of Compensated Dating High School Girls” (‘Hair nude
idols mo, joshi pro-wrestler mo, kekkyoku enjo k sai suru joshi k sei no ench datte no [Beat
Takeshi no ‘sekimatsu taiwa’]), Sh kan Post, 12 September 1997: 206–208.
Cabaret Clubs Have Become Lairs for Those Ugly Witches” (Kyabukura wa
yamamba mitai busu no ni natta), Sh kan Post, 8 October 1999: 63.
Suddenly a 14-Year-Old Middle School Girl Said ‘Will You Gimme Some Pocket
Money, Mister?’” (‘Joshi ch gakusei (14sai) ga ikinari ‘okozukai ch dai), Sh kan Post,
4 August 1989.
Sh kan Shinch
“Yamanba Make-up That Started in Shibuya Is Amazing the World” (Shibuyahatsu
‘yamanba’ make ga sekai de ninki no ky gaku), Sh kan Shinch , 26 October 2000:
38.
Spa!
“Big Survey of Aesthetic Taste: Teenage Witch Girls Should be Worried!” (10dai
yamanba gyaru osoru beki bi-ishiki dai ch sa!!), Spa! 1 September 1999: 136.
“The Compensated Dating Generation Arrived in Our Company! Selfish, Rich
… etc.” (Enjo k sai sedai ga bokura no kaisha ni yattekita! Wagamama, kinman … etc.)
Spa!, 21 May 1997: 36.
“Compensated Dating Running Wild” (B s suru enjo k sai), Spa! 16 December
1998: 47–51.
“Extremist Kogyaru: Is the Shocking Reality That They Are Being Radicalized as
They Dance across the Media Stage!? From Compensated Dates to Sex Services,
from Bloomer-Sailor to Adult Videos, from Street Hustlers to Gangs, etc., Girls
That Deceive about Their Age Live in a Dark World” (Kogyaru kagekiha: sono
odorokubeki jittai—media no hy butai o odorite seneika!? Enj kara f zoku e, burusera
kara AV e, chi-ma—kara gyangu e etc. nenrai no itsuwari yami no sekai o suru sh jotachi),
Spa! November 25 1998: 26–31.
“From Kogyaru to Witches, Platform Boots, Black Face, Idiot-ization: Kogyaru
on the Darker and Dirtier Program” (Kogyaru kara yamanba e: atsuzoko, ganguro,
bakaka. Kogyaru wa shidai ni kuroku, kitanaku), Spa! 1 July 2003: 26.
“The High School Girl Cultural Revolution” (Joshi k sei no “bunka daikakumei”),
Spa! 30 November 1994: 27.
“Is It the Influence of Global Warming, Evolution, or a Passing Trend? Probing

the ‘Latinization’ of Japanese Youth! Witch Girls in Monster Make-up—Lax
about Time and Appointments, Kissing and Arguing in Public, Relaxed about
Sex” (Ondanka no Eiky ka? Soshite Ichiji no Boom ka? Shinka ka? Nippon Wakamono
no Latin-ka Genz o Saguru!—Yamanba Gyaru no ‘Adamosute’—ka, Yakusaoku ya
Jikan ni Ru-zu, Hitomae de mo Kiss ya Kenka, Sex ni Ooraka), Spa!, 9 February 2000.
“The Lure of the Kogyaru” (Kogyaru no y wake), Spa!, 9 June 1993: 11.
“The Problem of Pretty Revolutionary Girls’ Experienced with Flirting, Bloomer
Sailor Shops, and Telephone Clubs, Told with Naked Confessional Genius:
Kamida Uno’s Declaration of the Conquest of Japan by Uniforms” (Mondai no
kakumei bish jo ga nanpa, burusera, terekura taiken o akahadaka kokuhaku tensai: Kamida
Uno no nippon seifuku sengen), Spa!, 19 October 1994: 124.
Sunday Mainichi
“80 Men That Had Compensated Dates with 60 Girls (Girls That Lust)” (Sh jo
60 nin to enjo k sai shita 80 otoko [yokub suru sh jo]), Sunday Mainichi, 12 October
1997: 160.
“Elite Company Employee Charged with Compensated Dating” (Enjo k sai de
kokuso sareta elite shain), Sunday Mainichi, 8 February 1998.
“Have Black Face Girls Gone Even Further Than Muta?” (Ganguro jok sei wa Muta
o koeta?) 23 April 2000: 139.
“There’s No Misrepresenting the Meaning of ‘Compensated Dating at 4 per-
cent’” (Enjo k sai 4%’ no imi wo miayamarumai), Sunday Mainichi, 3 November
1996: 138.
Views
“In Debate with High-school girls: compensated dating is heaven and the only
anxiety is being discovered by parents” (Joshik sei zadankai: enjo k sai tengoku, ky fu
wa oyabare dake), Views, 26 April 1996, pp. 26–29.
“Survey of 1000 High School Girls: The Full Data: (School Test Grades);
Graduation from Virginity; Graduation from Telephone Clubs; Graduation from
Compensated Dating; Young Ladies versus Play Girls; Tokyo Metropolitan High
School versus Osaka State High School” (Joshi k sei 1000 nin anketo: zen data
hen—(hensachibetsu) shojosotsu.terekurasotsu.enjok saisotsu (oj samako VS. asobiko)
(Tokyotoritsuk VS.Osaka k ristuk ), Views, 7 April 1997: 171.
Wall Street Journal

“The Japanese Paradox,” Wall Street Journal, 23 September 2003.
The Weekend Australian

“Japanese Crack down on Schoolgirl Sex Rings,” The Weekend Australian, 22 June
1996.
Yomiuri Shinbun
“Financial Support for Former Comfort Women of Korea” (Kankoku, moto ianfu
ni shienkin), Yomiuri Shinbun, 7 February 1993.
FILMOGRAPHY
A Clockwork Orange, 1971, directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Adolescent (Sh jo), 2001, directed by Eiji Okuda.
All About Lily Chou Chou (Lily Ch Ch no subete), 2002, directed by Iwai Shunji.
An Yong Yumika (Good bye Yumika), 2009, directed by Tetsuaki Matsue.
The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without
Images, 2011, directed by Eric Baudelaire.
Audition, 1999, directed by Miike Takashi; based on a novel by Murakami Ryū.
Bum! (Bomu!), 2002, directed by Kashima Tsutomu.
Battle Royale (Survival Program), 2000, directed by Fukasaku Kinji.
Bounce Kogals!, 1997, directed by Harada Masato.
Enjo K sai Bokumetsu Und (Compensated Dating Extermination Movement), 2001,
directed by Yamamoto Eiji; based on 1998 comic for men by Koshiba Tetsuya.
Female Convict Scorpion (J sh Sasori) series, 1972 to 1977, directed by Fujita
Toshiya; second film Jailhouse 41, 1972.
The History of Japan according to Madam Onboro (Nippon sengo shi Madam Onboro no
seikatsu), 1970, directed by Imamura Shōhei.
Innocent World, 2000, directed by Ten Shimoyama; based on the 1997 novel
Innocent World by Sakurai Ami.
Insect Woman (Nippon konch ki), 1963, directed by Imamura Shōhei.
Japan: The Strange Country, 2010, directed by Tanaka Kenichi; animation.
Kamikaze Girls, 2004, directed by Nakashima Tetsuya; based on a novel by
Takemoto Novala.
Filmography 227
Kill Bill: Volume 1, 2003, directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Lady Snowblood (Shurayuki-hime), 1973, 1974, directed by Fujita Toshiya.
Limousine Drive, 2001, directed by Masashi Yamamoto.
Love & Pop, 1998, directed by Anno Hideaki, scriptwriter Murakami Ryū.
Love Exposure (Ai no mukidashi), 2008, directed by Sono Sion.
Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995~, animation created by Anno Hideaki.
Princess Mononoke (Mononoke no hime), 1997, animation created by Miyazaki Hayao.
Prostitute at Fifteen, A (J godai baishunfu), 1970, directed by Adachi Masao.
Saint Michael’s Campus Adrift Sei Mikaera gakuen gory ki), 2000, adult animated film;
originally a 1986 play written by Takatori Ei.
The Schoolgirl’s Friend (Jogakusei no tomo), 2001, directed by Tetsuo Shinohara.
Schoolgirl Guerillas (Jogakusei guerilla), 1969, directed by Adachi Masao.
Seagull Diner (Kamome shokud ), 2006, directed by Ogigami Naoko.
Secret Garden (Lolita Vibe-Zeme), 1987, directed by Satō Hisayasu.
Shaman Girls’ Prayer (Miko no inori), 1996, Mariko Mori; animation.
Spirited Away (Sen to chihiru no kamikakushi), 2001, Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki Hayao.
Suicide Circle (Jisatsu circle), 2001~, produced by Sono Sion; trilogy.
Third (S do), 1970, scripted by Terayama Shūji.
Throw out Your Books, Let’s Get into the Streets (Sho o suteyo machi e dey ), 1971,
directed by Terayama Shūji.
Tokyo Decadence, 1992, scriptwriter Murakami Ryū, based on his novel Topazu.
Utsushimi, 2000, directed by Sono Sion.
Vermin! (Gaich ), 2001, directed by Shiota Akihiko.
What’s Wrong with That? (Ee ja nai ka?), 1981, directed by Imamura Shōhei.
INTERVIEWS
Aida Makoto, artist, Mizuma Gallery, Iidabashi, Tokyo, 30 June 2010.

Arai Hiroshi, chief editor of Cutie magazine between 1995 and 1998, Tokyo,
29 October 1997 and 5 November 1998.
Brown, Iona, female American artist in her thirties in the Yale Art School Masters
in Fine Arts program, New Haven, 5 March 2002.
Four anonymous high-school girls paid to meet with senior editors of a major
publishing company on Christmas eve, Shōgakukan Head Office, Hitotsubashi,
Tokyo, 25 December 1997.
Fujita Munekazu, lecturer specializing in juvenile delinquency, Ochanomizu
Women’s University, Tokyo, 6 December 2002.
Funahashi Eiji, Osaka Prefectural Government, Culture and Lifestyles Department,
Osaka, 27 January 1999.
Fuse Hiromi, chief editor of Pee Wee girls’ fashion magazine, Tokyo, 6 October
1997.
Harada Masato, film director, Shibuya, Tokyo, October 1997.
Hashimoto Hijiri, editor of the kogyaru magazine Street Jam, Kagurazaka, Tokyo,
30 November 1997.
Hayami Yukiko, Shibuya, Tokyo, January 1999, 5 February 1999, 29 January
2003, 15 March 2003, 16 April 2003.
Honda Masuko, Ochanomizu Women’s University, Tokyo, November 2002.
Ichimura Seiji, Seinendan (Youth League), Tokyo, November 1997.
Iwama Natsuki, director of Rise, lead researcher of the 1996 Youth Survey, inter-
views in Tokyo, November 1997 and April 2003 and written correspondence
dated 20 January 2003.
Interviews 229
Koshiba Tetsuya, manga artist specializing in kogyaru stories, Tokyo, March 1999.
Koyama Hideyuki, Sega Ltd, telephone interview, 10 December 1997.
Koyama Kiyoko, Vice Section Head of the Women’s Affairs Section, Tokyo
Metropolitan Government, Tokyo, 7 October 1997.
Maeda Toshio, Sagamihara, 18 October 2012.
Matsuba Ichirō and Funebashi Eiji, Youth and Sports Section, Osaka Prefectural
Government, Osaka, 27 January 1999.
Matsuoka Kenji, journalist specializing in high school girl culture, Shinjuku,
Tokyo, 23 December 1997.
Miyadai Shinji, 109, Shibuya, Tokyo, 5 February 1999 and 26 April 2003.
Mori Nobuyuki, Ryōgoku, Tokyo, 20 March 2003.
Nakamura Yasuko, founder and manager of boomplanning marketing company,
22 April 2003.
Nara Takumi, editor of Dime magazine, Tokyo, 3 October 1997.
Nara Yoshitomo, artist, in Moph cafe, Parco 1, Tokyo, 24 April 2003.
Nukatani Hiroko, chief editor of Cutie magazine, Tokyo, 23 October 2002.
Obi and Kakino, 6 January 1998.
Ogino Yoshiyuki, chief editor of Cawaii! magazine, Tokyo, 12 November 1997.
Ōtani Yoshiko, chief editor of Heart Candy magazine, Nakano and Shibuya,
Tokyo, 2 October 1997.
Ōtsuka Eiji, Kichijoji, Tokyo, 30 January 2003.
Sakoda Shinji, Pony Canyon film distribution, Tokyo, 5 January 1999.

Sakurai, Ami. Tokyo, 15 March 2003.
Sasaki Toshiharu, long-time supervisor of women’s magazine research, Publishing
Research Center (Shuppan Kagaku Kenkyūjo), Tokyo, December 2002 and
January 2003.
Sasaski Mitsuaki, interview at his home, Tokyo, 21 April 2003.
Satō Hisayasu (film director) interview in Shinjuku, 16 June 2010.
Sekizawa Hidehiko, director of the Hakuhōdō Institute of Life and Living research
center, Tokyo, 24 October 2002.
Shibata Hidenori, active member of Cafe Gentleman, at the center of internet
introductions and compensated dating debate between 1995 and 1997 before
230 Interviews
being closed down by the police. Interviews in Ginza, Tokyo, 4 October 1997
and November 1997.
Sonoda Hisashi, local government activist and lecturer in Law at Kansai University,
Osaka, 26 January 1999.
Sonozaki Toshiko, volunteer and activist in Kansai ECPAT (End Child Prostitution,
Child Pornography, and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes), the Osaka
branch of the international NGO, Osaka, 26 January 1999.
Tamaoki Hiroshi, Youth Section, Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Shinjuku,
Tokyo, 28 November 1997.
Uchida Kaoru, freelance writer and journalist specializing in girls’ culture,
Hitotsubashi, Tokyo, 8 November 1997 and 23 December 1998.
Water, Mark (pseudonym), leader of the Revolutionary Himote League
(Kakumeiteki himote dōmei), Nakano, Luna Base, 3 August 2013.
Yamakawa Takeshi and Dai Hiroshi, Mainichi Shinbun newspaper online reporters,
Tokyo, January 1999.
INDEX
109 (department store) 10, 18, 20, 53, 66, Anno Hideaki 15, 85n, 92, 227
81, 87n, 135, 229 Araki Nobuyoshi 165n, 199
1960s 12, 32, 59n, 114, 134, 139, 141, Asano, C. 59n, 184, 213
172–3, 179, 182, 183, 186n, 191, 196 Audition 167, 170, 226
Adachi Masao 179, 226–7 avant-garde 17, 125, 137, 156, 179–81,
183
adult video (AV) 29, 37, 38n, 42, 48, 54, Ayanami Rei 19
169, 171, 214, 223 Ayumi Hamasaki 45–6, 143
adult video actresses 29, 38n, 54, 214 Azuma, H. 8, 10, 12, 18, 32, 119, 128,
Ahmed, S. 131, 147n, 199 153, 155, 165n, 186n, 199, 213
Aida Makoto xi, 16, 101, 119–21, 123,
125–6, 128, 156, 158, 162, 165, 189, Bahktin 137
194, 213; DOG 102, 126, 162, 165; Banana Yoshimoto 149, 167, 211
Harakiri schoolgirls xi, 16, 119, 121, 189, Battle Royale 170, 174, 226
194 Benjamin, W. 99
AKB48 160 Bergson, H. 186n
Allison, A. 3, 42, 153, 161–2, 198, 199 Best, J. 27, 210
All About Lily Chou Chou 15, 174, 226 b-kei 21, 134–9; black models and singers
Ambaras, D. 8, 58n, 59n, 85n, 199 49, 134–6, 139; Jamaica 135, 140, 210;
Amuro Namie 49, 62, 135, 143 R&B 131, 135–7, 139, 140
Angst, L. 22, 199 black (American) culture; ghettofabulist
animalistic 31, 45, 109, 123, 139, see also 45, 135, 142; Lil’ Kim 65, 136, 142,
Azuma, H. 143, 211; female Japanese interest in
Aoshima Chiho xi, 101–2, 167 Afro-Americans 138–40; passing 131,
animation; deforume (deformed style) 140, 144, 199; Uncle Tom’s Cabin 139,
8, 101, 152; Ghost in the Shell 180; 148n, 155
La Blue Girl 162, 181; Legend of the black diasporic culture; Enter the Dragon 140;
Overfiend 162, 181; Miyazaki Hayao Ghost Dog 140; Iona Brown 140; martial
102, 119, 128, 180–1, 186, 212, 227; arts 140, 168, 170; rap/hip hop 21,
Neon Genesis Evangelion 15, 19, 155, 65, 127, 131, 134–7, 139, 140, 141–2,
227; pornographic 162, 181; Princess 144–5, 148n, 149n, 151, 200, 201, 205
Mononoke 119, 165n, 181, 207, 227; black face minstrelsy (North American
pseudo-Japan 119; Revolutionary Girl blackface) 22, 64, 142, 149n, 151–5,
Utena 180, 186n, 187; Sailor Moon 180, 165, 205; infantilizing effect 152; Jim
186n; Saint Michael’s Campus Adrift 180, Crow 152, 156, 205; Lott, E. 64, 128n,
227; Spirited Away 180, 181, 212, 227; 151–3, 155–6, 161–3, 205; Lhamon, Jr.
“transforming” (henshin) 153–5, 186n; W. 141, 151, 160, 165, 205; Zip Coon
Twin Angels 162, 180–1 xi, 163–4
232 Index
birth rates 3, 111 hidden politics of 15, 17, 21, 39, 168–9;
bishōjo (beautiful girls) 7, 16, 162, 186n, increasing 28–9; legislation against 20,
216, 224 33–7; punishment of juveniles 33–5,
bishōjo senshi (beautiful girl fighters) 7, 186 37; as a story/narrative 13, 14, 17, 18,
body conscious (bodikon) 60–1, 94, 115, 21–2, 26, 36, 42–9, 64, 88, 125, 169,
134, 164, see also gyaru 174, 184, 191, 193, 195–7; specialists of
bohemian 156, 185 13–15, 18, 55, 58, 78, 122, 183, 188; as
bondage, torture, rape xi, 41–2, 44, 59n, a style 28, 32–3, 42, 61–5, 84–5
98, 100–2, 152, 161–2, 165n, 168–9, Condry, I. 8, 21, 136, 148, 200
171–2, 174, 176, 181–2, 197n, 199, Cornyetz, N. 21, 126, 127n, 139, 140,
215, see also eroguro and Aida Makoto: 148–9n, 201
DOG cosplay 61, 156, 158
Boorstein, D. 13 cultural production content cycle 20, 37,
Bounce Kogals! x, 13–14, 16, 125, 155, 44, 61, 84
170–1, 193, 226 cultural populism 183
bubble economy 4, 92, 95, 156; narikin culture producer cliques 14–18
(nouveau riche) 65 culture studies 14, 59n, 66, 84, 147, 183
bloomer sailor shop 25, 26, 44–5, 59, 62, cute 2, 8, 33, 63, 69, 75, 94, 115–16, 118,
149, 172, 219, 224 131, 134, 141, 144, 148n, 156, 160,
brand names 61, 65–6, 88, 90, 92–3, 95, 163, 165n, 172, 174, 177, 180, 206, 209
98, 136, 182, 199, 219 Cutie 63, 74, 136, 141, 148n, 162–3
burusera (“bloomer sailor”) 23, 59, 62, 171,
189, 215, 219, 221, 223, 224 Dale, P. 113, 114, 201
date-clubs 28
café waitresses 61, 94, 102, 175, 177 daughters 21, 30, 42–3, 94–6, 99–101, 105,
Cawaii! xi, 48–9, 59, 63–6, 75–8, 86n, 87n, 106n, 108, 114, 132–3, 177, 180–1,
92, 135–6, 170, 183, 219, 229 221, 222; sale of daughters 21, 96, 100,
censorship 16, 19, 34, 35, 47, 74, 199; 101, 106n, 132, 137, 177, 180–1
anti-censorship 34, 35; black list 48; Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) 35, 190,
culture “morality committees” (rinri 196, 197n
iinkai) 60, 85n Doi, T. 114
Center Gai (Shibuya) 10, 20, 31, 77, 85n, Dyer, R. 114, 127n, 186n, 201
107, 148n; chiima (hustler) 140, 149n
Cohen, S. 12, 13, 32, 49, 84, 147, 183, ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and
200, 212 Tourism) 25, 34–5, 50, 192, 230
colonial (style, history) 22, 109, 111, 114, editoral work xi, 20, 21, 34, 39, 44–51,
124, 125, 175, 191, 193, 195, 199, 200, 52–3, 59, 61, 75–7, 81–4, 86, 87n, 88,
see also historical revisionism 108, 111
colonization 101, 113, 125, 185, 187n, 189 Egg 20, 47–8, 74–5, 77, 80–3, 87n, 108,
comfort women xi, 3, 22, 37n, 101, 125, 135–6, 139, 148n, 183, 219, 222
188–94, 196–8, 204, 209–10, 212, 216, England 12, 24n, 32, 183
218–19, 225; Korean government 190– eroguro (erotic grotesque) genre 153, 162,
1; Asian Women’s Foundation (AWF) 165n
28, 37–8, 190, 191; compensation 3, ethnography 20, 30, 55–8, 59n, 95, 128n,
22–3, 188–91, 194–7, 218 181, 209, 216; pseudo-ethnography 20,
compensated dating (enjo kōsai) 9–14, 19, 30–2, 55–8, 181–4
26, 29, 38n, 53–4, 59, 64, 125, 172,
177, 191–2, 194–5, 198; advertising factory hands 21, 61, 83, 91, 94, 100, 103,
against 34; ambiguous meaning 27–8, 132, 175–7, 197, 197
37–8n; construction of in the media Faison, E. 100, 106n, 132, 200, 201
30–2, 83–4, 85n, 88–92, 96, 169–73; Fanon, F. 142, 201
etymology 27–8, 190–1, 195–6; female fashion magazines: 23, 74–8, 86n, 87n,
writers 15, 17, 43, 55–6, 85; as girls 130, 132, 134, 151; “street” magazines
getting money 88, 98–7, 103, 105; 1, 13, 20, 63–6, 73–7, 83, 136, 147,
Index 233
148; “lifestyle information magazines” Genda, Y. 5–6, 86, 104, 202

21, 44–7, 53, 74, 81, see also kogyaru gender equality 1, 4, 23, 103, 115, 128n,
magazines 192, 200, 213
female ambition 7–8, 65, 80, 95, 132, 156, gender inequality 103–6
164, 183, 185 gender order 22, 133, 162–4
female classes 176–8, 183 gender transgression 153–5
Female Convict Scorpion 168, 176, 186, 226 girls: as animals 109–10, 111, 123–4, 126n,
female: disenchantment 167; emancipation as characters (kyara) 8, 22, 96, 118,
1, 3–4, 93, 132, 155; independence 21, 130, 151–2, 155, 162, 184, 186, cult
96, 132, 177 of 1, 6–7, 17, 22, 130, 151–2, 162–3,
female labor force: 3, 5, 8, 83, 99–100, delinquent (fūryo shōjo) ix, xii, 8, 16–20,
103–5, 132, 175, 189; Asian women 35–7, 51, 60–87, 96–8; as ethnic group
29, 61, 101–2, 171–2, 175, 177, 188–9, 22, 100, 110–11, 116; energy 4, 7, 22,
191–7; full-time employment 4–6, 105; 69, 83–4, 103, 109, 153–5, 160, 174,
cheap 5, 21, 100; emotional labor 103, 185–6; intelligent 7, 177, 180; left wing
106n; indentured 21, 61, 96, 98–102, sympathy for 17, 22, 93–4, 155–6,
152, 106n, 168–9, 175, 180–1, 190; 161–2, 168, 172, 177, 183–5, 192; as
part-time x, 1, 5–6, 27, 32, 59, 76, 96, the native folk xi, 57–8, 100, 112–21,
103–5, 128n, 163, 213; slavish/slave 155–7; nostalgia for 1, 2, 8, 18, 21,
99–103, 180–1, 190–1, 212; wages x, 137, 155; girls, “ordinary” (futsū) 9,
4–6, 104–5 94, 96–7, 108, 155, 170–1, 174, 178;
female revenge 20, 35, 167–9, 172–3, prostitution (shōjo baishun) 26, 37, 39,
176, 183, 186n, see also Female Convict 153, 178–9; as symbols of exchange
Scorpion and Lady Snowblood 88–91, 95, 99, 101, 103, 106n; robotic/
feminist 15, 17, 23, 35, 38, 91, 101, 108, cloned 19, 21, 33, 119, 133, 148;
139, 156, 158, 169, 171, 181, 184, 187, servile/obedient 7, 85n, 126, 130; as
191–2, 195–6, 202, 205, 209 transcendent beings 118, 132
fieldwork for this book 17–18, 20–1, 59n, Girls Studies 112, 115–18, 122, 128n
63 Gogo Yubari 167–8
Fine 60, 135 Gonda Yasunosuke 175, 186n
folk 58, 59n, 65, 112–18, 122–4, 126–7, Guardian, The. English newspaper 19, 31,
128n, 155, 175–6, 183, 186n, 200–1 38n, 56, 149, 203, 220
folklore 15, 18, 57, 60, 107, 113–15, gyaru (girl) xi, 7, 21–4, 60–3, 82, 85–6n,
119, 122, 127, 156; maiden (otome) 94–6, 107–12, 115–16, 123, 126, 131,
archetype 19, 113–16, 119, 137 134–46, 148n, 153, 163–4, 168, 173,
Früstück, S. 101, 125, 189, 201–2 183, 184, 206, 219, 223–4; female
Fujii, Y. 15, 30, 44, 70, 127n, 213, 215 university students (joshi daisei) 3–4,
Fujimoto Yukari 34 60, 94, 153, 104, 153, 177, 184; gyaruo
137; accusations of materialism 20, 60,
Galbraith, P. 8, 18, 95, 153, 202 65, 83, 92–9, 103, 105, 164, 191; oyaji
Gakko e ikō 12, 70 gyaru (bloke girls) 94, 116, 164 platform
gakureki shakai (education-ranking society) dancers 61, 94
72, 87n, 137
ganguro (black face) ix–x, xiii, 11, 21–2, Hall, S. 40, 59n, 88, 206, 208
42, 61–2, 78, 82–3, 107–11, 123, 126, Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living 7,
127n, 130–7, 139–50, 206, 219, 220, 229
222, 223, 224; as animals 109–11, handbags (designer) 19, 65, 88, 92
123, 126, 165, 199; linked to “Africa” Harada Masato 14, 16, 125, 170–2, 182,
22, 110–12, 124, 140, 142, 144; 226, 228
skin tanning 49, 107, 109–11, 136; Harootunian, H. 59, 66, 122, 148n, 175,
theatricality 1, 8, 32, 130, 136, 142, 186n, 199, 203, 207, 208
144–5, 149, 151, 163; cross-dressed Hebdige, D. 21, 39–40, 84, 127n, 142, 203
mimicry of 145, 156–60 Hein, L. 22, 203
Hertog, E. 3, 203
234 Index
high-school girl (joshi kōsei) 2, 9–10, Iwama Natsuki 13, 27, 228
39, 92, 106n, 177, 215, 217, 221–4;
(global); archetypes 18–19, 83, 137, Japan Echo 31, 108, 148n
167, 181; fixed image of xiii, 2, 7, Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno 19
9, 22, 32, 184, 189, 194; as gifts 42; Japan: The Strange Country 19
independence from market for female Japan’s Underground Economy 26–7, 214
labor 21, 96, 132, 176–7, 180, 186–7n; Jogakusei guerilla 179, 227
ignorance/ idiocy 16, 31, 45, 72, 109,
144, 223; mothers of 8, 12, 174, 193; Kamikaze Girls 167, 226
mute/voiceless 21, 32, 50–1, 57, 147, kanri shakai (managed society) 137
171, 174, 189; part-time employment Kawai Hayao 15, 31, 114–16, 128n, 182–3,
(‘baito) 1, 27, 32, 59, 78, 103–5; 187n, 204, 213–14, 221
professional high-school girls 20, 32, Kawamura, K. 116, 133, 176, 214
52–3, 59n, 76–7, 82; self-destructive 16, Kill Bill I 19, 167–8, 186n, 227
123, 174; revenge against elders/parents kogyaru xiii, 7, 10–11, 13, 18, 20–5, 30–2,
35, 168–9, 172–3, 183; resistance 19, 38n, 45, 48–50, 60–87, 105–11, 142,
55, 94, 132, 137, 168, 169, 171–5, 171–3, 177, 182–3; as editors 18, 48,
181–5; voices 7, 9, 12–13, 55–9n, 59n, 75–7; invention of 60–1; kogals
69–70, 113, 155; with weapons 19, x, 10, 12, 32; and compensated dating
167, 170–4 49, 63–5
Hijikata Tatsumi 156 kogyaru magazines 20, 21, 45–8, 50, 59n,
Hiratsuka Raichō 187n 66, 73–84, 86–7n, 108–9, 135–7, 183;
historical revisionism 22, 188–9, 193; amateur models 50, 76–7, 81–2
Kobayashi Yoshinori 193, 198, 214; kogyaru subculture 20, 21, 24n, 39, 60–87,
memories of wartime 175, 189, 193–6 145, 144; “adult” (otonappoi) 20, 21,
Hoggart, R. 66, 203 32, 61, 63, 72, 87n, 90, 136; atsuzoku
Honda, M. 116, 118, 128n, 132, 147n, (platform shoes) x, 2, 49, 63, 109, 136,
186n, 213 140, 142, 170, 220, 237; Burberry 56,
Honda, T. 8, 95–6, 115, 214, 228 61, 62, 75; dirty/scruffy 67, 70, 71;
housewife 1, 4, 80, 86 exotic/tropical theme x, 63, 65, 67, 99,
hostessing (mizu shōbai) 12, 23n, 29, 42, 131, 135, 149n; frank and coarse 10,
38n, 61, 75, 185–6, 193, 199 57–8, 63–4, 67, 68–9, 71–2, 75, 81,
Humphreys, L. 32, 203 83, 93, 131, 133, 176–7; garish/gaudy
42, 65, 71, 82, 98; glamour/“charisma”
“image professionals” 16 63, 81, 94, 109, 139, 163, 177; live
Imamura, S. 106n, 137, 175–6, 186n, 214, in present 81–4; masculine language/
226–7 postures x, 57, 67–70, 83, 177; be
Inoue, Miyako. 8, 23n, 58n, 59n, 70, 203 rich/luxury theme 20, 42, 65–6, 92–3,
Inoue, Mariko. 147, 187n, 203 95, 106; photo-subculture 53, 45,
Insect Woman 106n, 227 58, 59n, 78–82; runpenppoi (trampish)
intellectuals 14, 16, 35, 37n, 70, 116, 124, 44, 66–70, 85n; in weekly magazines
128n, 133, 173, 175, 182–4 49–50, 84, 181 (see also compensated
intellectual and cultural professionals 20–1, dating: narratives); “real,” earthy 56,
39, 64, 116, 144, 185 57, 73–4, 79, 80–2, 148–9; play with
internet introduction sites (deaikei saito) 9, media attention 10, 64, 72–3, 76, 83;
36, 213 ugly/gross theme 67, 79; views of other
Internet Introduction Site Act (Deaikei teenagers 70–3
Saito Kisei Hō) 36 kogyaru-go (kogyaru language) 69–70, 111,
Irigaray, L. 91, 203 170
irony 13, 27, 73, 78, 119, 125, 171, 174, komori (child infant carers) 61, 83
195 Komura Tetsuya 135, 143
Ishida, H. 1, 6, 23n, 203 Kon Wajirō 66, 122, 128n
Itō Seiu 165n Koshiba Tetsuya 111, 165n, 172–3, 214,
Ivy, M. 57, 113–5, 203 229
Iwai Shunji 15, 226
Index 235
Kotani, M. 158, 204 61, 64, 78, 145, 152, 181, 192, 203;
Barthes, R. 57, 199; collective content
ladette 73, 86n 14; framing 14, 20, 57–8, 77–82;
Lady Snowblood 168, 176 feedback loop 13, 36–7, 44, 49, 51,
Lafcadio Hearn 113, 129n 145; impact on social behavior 32–3,
Lamarre, T. 168, 186n, 227 49, 51, 72–3; professionals 12–13,
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 36, 190, 17, 21, 39, 44, 52, 82, 144, 185;
197n professional cliques 14–18; unequal
Lolita’s (gothic) 61 access to 39–40, 56–8, 58n, 147
Lolita-complex (rorikon) 8, 15, 44, 64, 87n, Marxist 175, 187n
116, 122, 128n, 137, 152–5, 160–4, Masubuchi, S. 116, 149n, 162, 215
165n, 168, 180, 181, 186 Matsuda Seiko 94, 141, 165n
Lolita Vibe Torture x, 17, 161 McGuigan, J. 183, 205
loose socks 1, 55, 60–4, 73, 77, 93, 136 McLuhan, M. 9, 205
love capitalism (renai shihonshūgi) 95–6 McVeigh, B. 3, 62, 106n, 206
Love Exposure 16, 160 Meiji schoolgirls 8, 58n, 59n, 70, 176–7
Love & Pop 15, 42, 44, 54, 85n, 92, 172, men: deluded x, 13, 14; as “enemy” 170,
182, 187n, 193, 215, 227 171, 196; oyaji (“old man”) 19, 43,
lynching and dismembering 161–2, see also 58n, 94, 116, 130, 167–71; oyajigari
Aida Makoto: DOG (mugging men) 19, 170, 172; oyajigirai
(man hatred) 167
Madam Butterfly 19, 205 miko (girl shamans) 114, 116, 118, 119,
maids 21, 94, 101, 153, 175, 180 216, 227
male: elites 14, 43, 105, 106n, 220, 224; Miller, L. 7, 23n, 24, 69, 78, 127n, 170,
fathers 30, 43, 96, 100, 106, 167, 206
169, 170, 174, 176, 194, 221; in minstrelized girls xi, 22, 151–66; cross-
feminine national identity 113, 115; dressing as a girl 145, 153, 156–60, 172;
grandfather 53; guilt 36, 174, 191, 194, energetic and powerful bodies 152–5,
197; imagination 8, 21, 24n, 94, 99, 160; josoko 153; josō ota 156–8; josō
106n, 113, 126, 128n, 130, 161–87; shōnen manga 158; mimicry of girls
impotency 129n, 184–5; intellectuals street fashions 144–6, 156–9
and artists 8, 16, 23n, 31, 38n, 70, Miwa Akihiko 156
119–21, 128n, 147, 151, 156, 158, 162, Miyadai Shinji xi, 14, 15, 18, 25–8, 30–1,
165n, 179, 182–5, 186, 189; irregular 39, 44, 54–6, 59n, 82, 93, 127–8n, 145,
employment 1, 4–6, 95–6, 104, 162–3; 156–8, 165n, 169–71, 182, 188, 197n,
IT and computer company employees 215, 217, 229
41; male gaze 1, 63; press 10–11, 39, mobile phones 9, 12, 31, 40, 53–4, 63, 88,
58, 108–9, 130, 153, 160; projection 88, 90
on to women 2, 22, 38n, 83, 169, “modern girls” 8, 23n, 61, 83, 177, 181,
181–5; resentment of women 2, 8, 163; 183, 187n
responsibility 34–6, 43, 114, 160, 174, Mods 12, 83, 183
194, 216, 235; self-awareness 54, 116, moe 8, 96, 115, 152–5, 180, 202
156; subculture 1, 7, 39–59; subjectivity modernization 8, 124, 148, 205
22, 169, 184–5 Monbukagakushō 15
manga 7, 9, 34–5, 96, 128n, 153, 162, moral panic 12–13, 20, 24n, 84
165n, 180, 185, 193, 204, 209, 212; Mori Nobuyuki. 17, 37, 111, 122, 128n,
Ranma ½ 153, 165n; Yubisaku Milk Tea 215, 229
153 Morimura Yasumasa 156
Mariko Mori 118, 227 Murakami Ryū 15, 30–1, 42–4, 53–4, 59n,
marriage 3, 8, 95, 104–5, 128n, 132, 135, 93, 106n, 167, 182, 187n, 193, 196,
147n, 211, 217; nonmarriage (mikon) 3, 215, 226, 227
5, 215
Maruta, K. 13, 27, 70, 127, 215 Nakamori Akio 44, 122, 128n
mass media 6–13, 22, 32, 33, 39, 59n, Nagashima Yuichirō 158
236 Index
Nara Yoshitomo 156, 165n, 167, 174, 229 70, 82, 90, 160, 184, 192
National Diet 15, 86n proletarian literature 175, 186, 200
news media x, 8, 10–14, 17–18, 21, prostitute: the archetype 33, 38n, 65, 83–4,
24n, 48, 59n, 64, 90, 136, 197n; 95, 109, 141, 145–6, 176, 195; Parent
“catching” (tsukamaru) subjects 12, Duchalet 33, 83–4; and race 126–7,
51–3; exploitation by 13, 58n; headlines 127n, 146–7
10–12, 18–19, 26, 30, 48, 84, 86n, 108– prostitution: amateur 20, 29, 33–4, 60,
9, 129, 169–70, 189–92; temporary 96–7, 125–6, 189, 195; campaign
subprofessions of 12–13, 51–2; to legalize it 35; indentured 21, 96,
narratives 2, 13, 14, 18, 21, 22, 36, 125, 98–101, 175–7; karayuki 98–102, 106n,
152, 155, 169, 180, 197; overseas news 175, 206; Prostitution Prevention Act
media 2, 18–19, 62, 90, 195; evidence 15, 35; Sandakan Brothel No. 8, 106n,
through citation 30–2, 55–7 212; Victorian dress-lodgers 99
Nikki Lee 143, 150 pseudo-event 13, 23n, 197; placebo-event
197
Ōba Minako 108, 127n, 211 PTA (Parent Teacher Association) 25, 34
office ladies 7, 43, 60–1, 95, 106n, 116,
207, 221 race 8, 22, 64, 100, 108–50; anti-slavery
Oriental maidens 18, 19, 113–15, 127n, 155, 162; Darwinist 22, 122; Japanese
144, 149–50n, 195, 198n race (yamato minzoku) 22, 124–7, 129n;
otaku 7, 8, 18, 22, 23n, 32, 34, 44, 85n, systems of racial thought 1, 109, 123–5,
87n, 95, 115, 116, 122, 123, 128n, 155, 145–7; racism 124, 127, 149–50n;
158, 160, 165n, 168, 170, 173, 181, shinjinrui (new breed) 94, 95, 126;
185; intellectuals 116, 128n, 173; milieu romantic racialism 132, 155–6; slavery
17; subculture 7, 8, 22, 128n, 116, 181 101, 128, 139, 148n, 155, 162, 181,
Ōtsuka E. xi, 15, 51, 95, 106, 116–17, 191, 212; Southern races 123
128n, 156, 168, 193–4, 215, 216, 229 Rave 84
Out (novel) 167 recession 1, 4–5, 7, 26, 92
revolt into style 21, see also Hebdige, D.
pan pan 61, 94, 122, 126 revolution 26, 82, 96, 172, 177, 180,
parasite singles 5, 215 183–5, 186n
patriarchy 19, 115, 168 Ring 167
pixilation x, 9, 12 Robertson, J. 110, 125, 127n, 129n, 153,
police (NPA) 12, 19–20, 21, 24n, 25, 29, 177, 208
36–7, 38n, 43, 94, 96–8, 102, 106n, Russell, J. 21, 124, 127n, 139, 208
125, 149n, 171, 174, 176, 179, 190,
212, 214, 220, 230 Sādo (Third) 178, 227
Popteen x, 20, 44–8, 66, 73–5, 80, 84, 86n, Saitō, T. 7–8, 149n, 168, 184–5, 186–7n,
136, 144, 145, 158, 183, 221 208, 216
pornographic 1, 34–5, 44, 81, 87n, 142, Satō Hisayasu 17, 161, 227, 229
162, 165n, 168, 181 Sato, I. 64, 67–8, 84, 87n, 209, 230
pornography: Child Solicitation and Child Sega 78, 87n, 229
Pornography Prevention Act 15, 35, 43, seinendan (Youth League) 25, 228
192; hitotsuma 42, 80; opposition to the Seldon, M. 22, 203
focus of the Child Solicitation Act 35 sex work 29, 35, 97, 101, 204, 213, 220,
porn publishing 1, 37, 47, 50, 44, 74–6, 81, 176–7
87n; FBI 48, 87n; lifestyle information sex services industry (fūzoku) 7, 20, 29, 34,
(seikatsu jōhō) magazines 44–50, 53, 38n, 45, 48, 54, 56, 61, 74, 90, 96, 103,
74–7, 81–2 197n, 223
porn novels 41–2 sex tourism 34, 38, 191–2, 197–8n
pragmatism 15, 61, 70, 82, 194 sexual self-determination 35, 169
print club (purikura) 20, 50, 69, 75–82, 87n, sexualization 22, 129n, 134, 152–3, 165n
183 Shamoon, D. 23n, 85n, 128n, 177, 180,
producers (of visual culture) 13, 17, 32, 58, 187n, 209
Index 237
Shibuya x, xi, 2, 10, 19, 20, 30–2, 34, subcultures 2, 62, 87n, 167–8, 181 (see
52–3, 59n, 61, 66, 69, 70, 77, 80–1, also Kill Bill); animation; overseas news
85n, 107, 109–12, 135, 137, 138, 148n, media; Victorian lower-class subcultures
171, 178, 193, 195, 218, 220, 223, 228, 65, 205, 211
229 Sugiura Taiyō 158
Shigematsu, S. 152–3, 160–1, 209 Suicide Circle 16, 123, 167, 174, 189, 227
shōjo (girl) 2, 12, 22, 26, 63, 85n, 95, 101, sukeban 161, 165n
103, 106n, 115–19, 126, 128n, 131–4, surveillance 12, 21, 24n, 37, 88–106, 125,
139, 152, 153, 158, 163, 168, 172, 180, 130,
186–7n, 208, 211–17, 219 Suzuki, Y. 101, 216
shōjo culture 132–4, 168, 180, 187n; bihaku
and “white skin” 78, 131–7, 147n, Tabaimo 119, 194–5
148n, 201, 209; Caucasian 74, 132–4, Takeshi Kitano (Beat Takeshi) 10, 55, 90,
147n, 148n; Eurasian looks 132, 134; 223
Nakahara Junichi 132, 147n; o’josama Tamanoi, P. 83, 106n, 108, 113–4, 210
133, 177; privileged 168, 176–7; upper Tanaka Yasuo 94, 95, 198n, 218
class 132–4, 147n, 177, 206; Yoshiya Tanizaki Junichiro 23n, 132–4, 177, 210
Nobuko 132, 139, 147n taxi-dance halls 41–2, 103, 139
Silverberg, M. 23n, 67, 70, 83, 128n, 133, talent (tarento) 12, 81, 82, 85n, 90, 144, 158
147n, 149n, 177, 187n, 209 telephone club (terekura) 9–10, 25, 26, 28,
Slater, D. 1, 6, 203 30, 34–5, 40–7, 53–4, 57, 59n, 128n,
SMAP 78 174, 206, 219, 224; telephone club hold
snack bar (sunakku) 12, 23n, 29n, 30n up 170–1
soliciting (kaishun) 20, 33–6, 36n, 53, 64, television x, xi, 7–15, 25, 28, 31, 33–4,
172, 193, 216; Kaishun Jōrei 34 39, 44, 47, 50–1, 53, 55–61, 70–3, 78,
sociological surveys 13, 20, 24n, 25–9, 81–2, 88–91, 94, 98, 109, 130, 156,
30, 55; methodological weakness 26, 158, 164, 173, 181, 183, 189, 197, 217;
37–8n; 1994 PTA Survey 25; 1996 audience 12–13, 44, 55–6, 78, 90, 130,
TMG Youth Survey 13, 26–8, 37n, 188; 158; camera crews x, 10–12, 53, 84,
1997 AWF Survey 28, 37–8n, 64, 192–3 88; invasive 12, 70; telop x, 10, 23n, 57,
Sono Sion xi, 15, 16, 123, 158, 160, 90; yarase (staged/ set-up scenes) 46–7,
167–8, 170, 174–6, 227 70, 181
Spivak, G. 58, 184–5, 210 Terayama Shūji 137, 178, 186n, 227
statistics 20, 26, 25–31, 37n, 38, 58, 101, Tezuka Osamu 180
104, 188, 197, 200; magical numbers Tiqqun 2, 187n, 210
27, 90–1; as entertainment 30–2, 89 Thornton, S. 24n, 84, 210
Sterling, M. 21, 210 Tokyo (as capital region) 9, 12, 23, 31–2,
subculture 1, 7, 8, 14–15, 20–2, 67, 87n, 35, 52, 62, 33, 65, 78, 8–7n, 95, 103–5,
115–16, 122, 127n, 133, 134, 145, 111, 122–3, 131, 139, 176, 178, 184,
147, 153, 158, 165n, 180, 184, 197n, 188, 189, 192, 199
202, 203, 204, 206, 208, 215, 230 Tosaka Jun 137, 148n, 175
(see also otaku subculture); bōsōzoku trains 21, 48, 85n, 115, 144, 193, 202, 217;
64–7, 67–8, 84, 87n, 216; kasutori 61, commuting 9, 20, 115, 202; and girls
82; koha (hard school) x, 67–9; kigaeri 85n (see also Love & Pop); Trainology
(alternating outfits) 61–3, 144; yankii (torenorojii) 85n; train-carriage
67, 74, 80, 87n, 165; lower-class female molestation (chikan) 85n, 173, 222; train
subcultures 20–1, 32, 61, 65–6, 70–3, station (as a site) 9, 20, 63, 137, 141,
82–3, 94, 98, 131, 177; mimicry 20, 171
51, 64, 65, 66, 87n, 110, 131, 142–3, transracial styles 21, 112, 130–50
158; posing and performing 18, 21, Tsukuru Kai 115, 128n
32, 37, 81, 85n, 87n, 136, 142, 144–5,
163; salaryman subculture 39–59, 84; Ueno, C. 3, 15, 22, 30–1, 35, 95, 114,
slumming 21, 45; symbiosis with mass 118, 127n, 148n, 169, 190, 211, 217
media 21, 61, 64, 80–1, 83–4, 87n, uniform xi, 7, 9, 13, 16, 17, 23n, 25, 41,
147; US /European interest in Japanese
238 Index
44–5, 54–5, 60–4, 77, 85–6n, 89–92, weekly magazines (shūkanshi) 9, 21, 31, 34,
111, 116, 119, 122, 123, 126, 158–9, 39–56, 58, 108–13, 130, 156, 170, 181,
161, 167–8, 171, 174–5, 178, 195, 192; profits 12, 50–1; role in inflating
197, 204; kogyaru style 60–4; mixing compensated dating 30–1, 43
components 62; nanchatte (fake) 62, Wired 19
75–6, 85n; regulations (fukusō shidō) 62, Wood, J. 21, 139, 212
77, 86n; Tokyo High School Girl Uniform
Fieldbook 111, 122 Yamada Eimi 139, 201
university (female attendance) x, 3–4, yamanba 18, 19, 21, 70, 107–13, 126,
66–7, 94–5, 164, 184; junior colleges 127n, 130–50, 158, 168, 207, 223, 224;
(female attendance) 3–4, 66–7, 164, 206 “Dirty Girl Busters” 70; self-parody/
unemployment 4–6, 219 camp 144–6, 206
uri (sell) 27, 69, 222 Yamane, K. 7, 29, 95, 104, 106n, 116, 123,
US–Japan Peace Treaty 179, 193 212
Yanagita Kunio 59n, 113, 116, 127–8n,
Vermin (Gaichū) 155, 174, 227 175, 217
vicarious(ness) 8, 39–44, 51, 183, 203 Yoshimi Yoshiaki 189–90, 212
virginity, virginal 30, 45, 91, 119, 125, Young, J. 29, 212
131–2, 137, 176, 180–1, 187n Youth Law 33, 36, 96
Youth Ordinance 34–7, 38n; hijitsuzai
Walt Whitman 156 shōnen (virtual youth) 34
Walkowitz, J. 127n, 211 Yumeji Takehisa 147n
zengakuren 18, 172, 179, 182, 210

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SCHOOLGIRLS, MONEY AND

Sharon Kinsella is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.

Other titles in the series:

The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness Japan and Protection

Educational Reform in Japan Japanese Science Fiction

Japan’s Early Parliaments, 1890–1905 Japanese-German Business Relations

Japan’s Foreign Aid Challenge Japan, Race and Equality

Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan Japan, Internationalism and the UN

Ceremony and Ritual in Japan On The Margins of Japanese Society

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese The Dynamics of Japan’s Relations

Militarization and Demilitarization in The Right to Life in Japan

Women’s Giday and the Japanese Japanese-Soviet/Russian Relations

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Japan’s Agricultural Policy Regime Japan’s Postwar

ISBN: 978-0-415-70410-6 (hbk)

1 Introduction: the age of the girl 1

2 Gathering and interpreting the statistical evidence 25

3 Compensated dating as a salaryman subculture 39

4 Kogyaru chic: dressing up as a delinquent girl 60

5 The surveillance of financial deviancy 88

6 Girls as a race 107

7 Ganguro, yamanba, and transracial style 130

8 Minstrelized girls 151

9 Schoolgirl revolt in male cultural imagination 167

10 Problems compensating women 188

European language bibliography 199

1.1 Girls with up-to-the-minute caramel-colored hair and platform

4.3 Picking noses and unladylike squatting by kogyaru girls on the

Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan

intricate code of meanings underlying the news-reportage on sexually and finan-

Percentage entering higher education 50

Lack of male advancement and economic recession

employed cohorts of male high-school and college graduates into a permanent

Men and women

Girl cult in the media

Hourly wages of female employees as a percentage of male

Resistance to female ambition

“Japanese schoolgirl inferno”—an introduction to

FIGURE 1.5 Screen pixilation in news coverage (1997)

FIGURE 1.6 “I hope to do compensated dating …” declares a voicemail message

testifies to the indelicate mode of this engagement in comments on how “1990s

Seaside resorts were invariably full of journalists and photographers, wait-

Cliques creating the story

of interviewing and some participant observations of magazine production and

Japanese schoolgirls as a global archetype

domestic entertainment and journalism to frame schoolgirls as ethnic nationals and

schoolgirl prostitutes, the problem of women under Japanese governance re-eval-

The power of weekly magazines, newspapers, and television shows to define

means of an undisclosed calculation, that compensated dating was at its peak in

Voyeurism and statistics

Columnist Nakano Midori cites another journalist’s descriptions as source material

As I don’t know much about this tendency, my consideration will have to

The popularity of deviant schoolgirls as the mute motif of intellectual discussion,

Schoolgirls encountered by editors in city centers, and those receiving social

Legal controls on soliciting sex (kaishun)

The right to sexual self-determination

Laws for the National Police Association

street-fashion performances by girls, which were then taken as visual evidence of

Though compensated dating was hastily interpreted as a form of schoolgirl effron-

The text continues with our odd couple’s dialogue: