In the streets of Tokyo’s Harajuku district, Hitomi, 15, wears lime green knock-off Converse All-Stars that she customized with a handful of safety pins. An ankle bracelet of multi-colored plastic beads is wrapped around an orange sock, which overlaps her sky-blue fishnet leggings. She’s wearing a pair of day-glow trousers under her lacey silk skirt, and she has topped it all off with a shiny red sash. Her wrists and neck are buried under plastic-beaded bracelets and vintage–looking sweat bands. She wears huge plastic rings on every finger and her hair is ornamented with shiny patterned clips, colorful bits of string and fake flowers. Her sunglasses are disco-huge, and under her hot pink polyester jacket, her shirt reads: Fuck You.
Hitomi is one of thousands of young people in Tokyo just doing their thing. For many of them, identity and reality are exercised as freedoms of choice. Like most teens and young adults, they make friends by having similar choices in dress, behavior, outward appearance and places to hang out.
Throughout Japan’s capitol, individualistic youth are creating a variety of niche culture enclaves. These trend setting subculture style enthusiasts are constantly evolving to stay ahead of their own game, and have a sharp postmodern awareness of their own self-image and its flexibility. Youth subcultures have become an indispensable commodity to Tokyo, not only as tourist attractions, marketing opportunities and photo ops, but as living, breathing landmarks for many of the city’s most frequented metropolitan hubs and train stations.
In Tokyo’s dense urban cityscapes, high land and housing costs coerce many people to socialize outside of the home. Certain public transportation lines, and their respective stations, have become breeding grounds for group interaction. Fascination with urban youth and new technologies in Japan, has kept the media spotlight focused on the teenagers that congregate in and round Harajuku, Shinjuku and Akihabara stations.
Cognitive dress, language, sexuality, gender and spatial choices amongst these young people are balanced somewhere on an increasingly blurred line between fantasy and reality. Ironically, it is their collective individualism that allows us to classify them as part of one subculture group or another, but most of these kids want to put their own spin on whatever lifestyle they are a part of. That is why dress is often so important.
There is also a very accessible opportunity for Tokyo’s young people to engage in solicited sex to support their lifestyle choices and consumerism. It’s not always about fashion. But it is about lifestyle choices.
The D.I.Y. Fashion Fanatics and Cosplayers of Harajuku
Harajuku Train Station, just north of Shibuya on the Yamanote line, has become a cultural mecca for young people from all over Japan. Predominantly under 20, and varied in outward style, Tokyo’s trendiest flock to the Shibuya ward’s most frequented hot spots in droves, namely Takeshita Dori and its surrounding side streets. Some of them are make-it-yourself dressers, with a flared-out fashion-forward sense of personal statement embedded into their extravagantly stylish attire. Others let the costume they wear bring the fantasy character within them to life.
For years, hordes of Japanese teens have gathered in the Harajuku Station area every Sunday afternoon to partake in cosplay, which is short for costume play (kind of like how pokemon is short for pocket monsters). But more recently, just about any day in the Harajuku, you are sure to find numerous gatherings of Lolita (both sweet and gothic), Victorian maids, punk rockers and countless other characters from the fantasy, science fiction and modern worlds. Cosplay is truly a hobbyist phenomenon. Many participants strive to not only look like characters, but to actually become them in thoughts, words and actions—at least on a social level.
There are specialty stores all over Tokyo that specialize in cosplay attire, but the trendsetters make their own. The process of getting together the right fabric, patterns and amount of time necessary to bring an intricate costume to life, is as much part of the culture as wearing one. Some spend months making wings, prepping sheet metal for armor, collecting complicated patterns for sewing , buying beaded jewelry, specially dyed fabrics, leather belts and gloves, pleated skirts, as well as countless props and fake weapons that compliment their outfit.
Tokyo street fashion is far more radical than its counterparts in New York and Paris, but even with its daring and transformative flavor, there are still plenty of bandwagon participants. In order to separate themselves from their peers, trendsetting youngsters are always modifying their look. And as copy-cat kids from all over Tokyo and the rest of Japan start showing up in Harajuku looking just like they do, the originators switch-up quick, and the cycle repeats itself.
The Otaku of Akihabara
The Akiba experience begins as soon as you exit the Akihabara train station. Right across the street there is an eight-story building (Radio Kaikan) showcasing action figures, comics and model kits. Up and down Chuo Dori, you’ll find countless outlets selling manga, anime, erotic computer games and other techy wares. There’s also a slew of recently established cosplay cafes, where young maids and other fantasy characters cater to a mostly otaku (basically a geek) clientele. “Electric Town,” is Neo Tokyo: a place where private fantasy and obsession take over.
Historically a place to buy junk electronics, surveillance equipment and hacker software, Akihabara is now a bustling center of commerce, and home to another one of Tokyo’s most publicized commodities: Akiba-kei, otherwise known as the otaku. There is much debate about the actual origins and functionality of the word “otaku,” as its literal Japanese definition doesn’t put it into current context. It is said to mean “your house/family/side” and is quite formal, like something housewives might say when addressing one other. Whatever—an otaku in Tokyo today is basically a nerd, and the nerds are becoming more and more popular in the digital age. They are way more than into anime, manga, figurines, role play and video games—they completely obsess over that shit. And, and they’re often introverts.
Right when Japan’s bubble economy burst in the late ‘80s, anime and other otaku interests became one of the most popular Japanese exports. Inevitably, the commercial mentality of otaku culture became heavily researched and marketed. Today, otaku is considered to be one of the most important faces of Japanese postmodern society, and an indispensable force behind an estimated 19 billion dollar per year industry. Otaku have even been celebrated in Japanese TV series’, movies and music videos. However, they haven’t always been so well-liked.
In 1989, Tsutomu Miyazaki was arrested for kidnapping, raping and murdering three young girls. In his room, police found an abundance of pornographic anime videos and Lolicon manga. The nature of this crime, and the criminal’s interests, sparked national curiosity about what kind of lifestyle had created such a terrible human being, and as a result otaku were given a very very very bad rap. It wasn’t until otaku culture became indispensable as a marketing commodity, that the stigma began to unravel. There are still negative connotations in calling someone otaku (ota, for short), but it’s usually seen as sort of a term of endearment.
Otaku are predominantly young men, but they come in all ages and genders. Ladies tend to shop for their anime and manga outside of Akihabara, as otaku men and women prefer not to shop at the same stores. This way, gender reality does not interfere with the romantic fantasy world that a lot of anime and manga specialize in. Kei Books, only minutes away from JR Ikebukuro train station, is one hotspot for female otaku. There you’ll find plenty of comics about hunky men in odd uniforms, as well as “The Prince of Tennis—and other quintessentially ‘eastern’ studs.
Kabuki-cho and Easy Money for Tokyo’s Youth
Kabuki-cho is Tokyo’s biggest red light district. It is located southeast of Shinjuku Station in west-central Tokyo. There are an estimated 5,700 sex-related businesses in the 40,000 square meter area, and it’s work for more than 10,000 young women. In Kabuki-cho there are “clubs” and “cabaclas” where patrons can enjoy conversation (sometimes more) with a hostess or host, and there are the many massage parlors which distinguish themselves by the image of the girls that work there (school girl, college student, housewife, etc.), and usually all sorts of “massage” services are offered. But then there are “soap lands” and “image clubs” that offer full-service sex, often in erotically staged fetish-friendly environments.
Prostitution is illegal in Japan, but is only defined as coitus, leaving oral, anal and other sexual acts unaccounted for within the law. Furthermore, the legal age of consent for sex in Tokyo is only 13 years old, not 16 or 17, as is the law as in most other Japanese prefectures.
Mariko, 21, is a full time college student who was featured in an article published on SeekJapan.com. "I've been working part-time at an image club for about four months," she was reported as saying. "It's good money. For only one night a week I can earn more money than if I was working forty hours at Mister Donut, or some stupid job like that. At first I was nervous. I had to dress up in a school uniform, and men would come in and pretend like they were my teacher. It was kind of scary, but I got used to it after the first few times. The job's not so bad, plus it gives me a lot of time to meet my boyfriend. Please understand, I'm not a sukebe onna (a kinky girl). I'm futsu (an average girl).”
Thor Williamson, 26, who was born and raised in Hiroshima, but has lived in Tokyo since 1999, was featured in an article published on hirangatimes.com. His father is a former protestant missionary from Canada. Williamson wears Versace suits to work as a top-ranking host at Club Ai in Kabuki-cho, one of the best known host clubs in all of Japan. He says that the performance-based pay is great, and he’s averaging between 4 and 8 million yen a month. "Everything in this business is liquid," Williamson says. "You can be 20 years old and have 10 people working under you. You can't do that in regular Japanese business. This job takes everything out of perspective, so I try to keep perspective on life. A lot of what happens here is just fantasy.”
Thousands of young people in Tokyo have dabbled in Enjo kosai, which is what authorities describe as compensated dating—marketing themselves to adults through internet sites and phone clubs, mostly to earn money for hobby expenses, as well as designer handbags and brand-name clothing. It usually doesn’t start as a chosen way of life, it’s just a quick way to make a lot of cash.
Kogal girls, often characterized by promiscuity and their distinctive tastes in fashion, music and language, have been frequently associated with enjo kosai as a means to pay for their exuberant lifestyle and attire. The look these girls go for is sort of like a twisted, sun-tanned valley girl— usually wearing platform boots, extremely short skirts and copious amounts of makeup, hair coloring, artificial suntan oil and designer accessories. Many kogals congregate in Ikebukuro because of its cheap karaoke, fast food, department stores, and proximity to Waseda University.
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