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Hello kitties
In a country that favors group-feeling to individualism, two fashion-based subcultures, "egg girls" and "little gals," cause a big stir.

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By Malena Watrous

March 8, 2000 | Akari wears a pleated navy miniskirt and a white sailor middy, standard issue of junior high schools all across Japan. But the skirt is minuscule, and her middy hangs down below its hem. Akari's brown, gently bowed legs are bare on this icy January night save for the "rusu-sokusu" (loose socks) gathered in folds at her skinny ankles. She wobbles a bit on her eight-inch platform boots. Completing the look (modeled on the anime character "Sailor Moon," from the eponymous series about a clumsy, lazy and tear-prone 14-year-old who transforms herself, through magic, jewelry and makeup, into a cute, sailor-suited, love-and-justice-defending crime-fighter) is her hair, which is dyed a brassy gold to offset the burnished walnut tan of her round young face. Dolled up in her tiny uniform (purchased secondhand for about $100 from a friend who outgrew the skirt long ago), a sucker lolling from her pink mouth, Akari is one of Japan's many "kogaru," "ko" from the Chinese character for "little," and "garu" coming from the English word "gal."

Haruna, who is standing arm-in-arm with Akari on the street corner, wrinkles her nose at her friend's schoolgirl-sexy getup. She favors instead what she calls a "darker image." In her tremendous silver wig, brittle as an electrocuted bird's nest; her glittery false eyelashes that sweep down past her cheekbones when she blinks; and her mangy fleece jacket worn over Day-Glo orange hot pants and "sockboots" (tall beige socks extending down over foot-high rubber soles), Haruna looks like a pretty drag queen in the tradition of RuPaul. Her skin is a patchy ochre. To achieve this hue, she admits to paying regular and pricey visits to a Kanazawa franchise of the national tanning salon "Blacky." Some label her look the "ike ike onna," the go-go girl. Most call it "ganguro," which translates literally as blackface.

Lately, everyone in Japan seems to be talking about the growing number of kogaru and ganguro girls. In their huge shoes and tiny clothes, faces pierced, hair bleached and teased, they are as easy to spot and as easy to dismiss as those Americans who, in the '80s, forced their bangs, by spray and perm and will, into crispy arcs towering above their faces. An outsider, particularly a foreigner, might mistake a kogaru for a ganguro. But despite their shared predilection for platform soles and body piercings, the two subcultures have completely different fashion aspirations.

Kogaru want to look young, the younger the better. They wear their school uniforms out around town, on dates, probably even to bed. They wear their uniforms but they mess with them, rolling their waistbands so high that their creamy Polo sweaters hang down below their skirt hems, violating school hair and sock codes.

Ganguro want to look black and American, like their idols TLC and Lauryn Hill. In pursuit of a color that's beyond tan, they frequent tanning salons, purchase sunlamps and smother their faces in brown makeup. It's not uncommon for a girl of limited means to color her entire face with a brown magic marker. For those ganguro with the funds, however, Japan's hippest hair stylists will coerce usually rail-straight Japanese locks into bulbous "afuro" (afro) perms that take half a day to set and cost about $400. Whereas kogaru dress like sexy little girls, many Japanese believe that ganguro are prematurely aged by sunning and excessive makeup. Another name for ganguro is "yamanba," mountain grandmother, the name given to a mythical hag said to haunt the Japanese mountains.

Kanazawa is no Tokyo, no fashion hub of the world or even of Japan. Styles take a while to catch on here in the northern province, a famously subdued, bourgeois city of 400,000. Kanazawa is about as likely to set image trends as Providence, R.I. But Haruna's ganguro look is catching on fast, and not just with hostesses, either. While most Japanese employers are reluctant to hire orange-faced women with platinum dreadlocks, growing numbers of "OLs" (office ladies), shop workers, cashiers and even young, stay-at-home mothers are playing the weekend ganguro, putting on tall boots and vibrant wigs for a night on the town. Weekend ganguro can be seen pushing baby strollers down busy sidewalks every sunny Sunday.

In 1999, while the Japanese economy lagged, two new boutiques -- Glamour Jean and Key West -- opened on Kanazawa's main shopping drag, catering exclusively to ganguro. Egg magazine and other glossies aimed exclusively at ganguro are frequently sold out at convenience stores. Signs posted outside hair salons advertise the newly popular "buraku" (black) or afuro hairstyles. And in the cosmetics aisles of mainstream supermarkets, dark beige powders and tanning lotions are now sold alongside the formerly ubiquitous skin-whitening creams and industrial-strength sunscreens.

But despite their growing ranks, both kogaru and ganguro encounter hostility here. In a recent interview published in Kansai Time Out, Japan's eminent novelist Haruki Murakami called them a big problem for Japan, and said that he feels sadness and disgust when he passes these bleached and flamboyantly outfitted young ladies on the streets of his neighborhood, Shinjuku, in Tokyo.

Some of the general prejudice against ganguro style has even become legislative. In Osaka, as of February, it is officially against the law for women to drive wearing tall boots. Apparently they just can't brake fast enough with the platform soles. One woman got in an accident and blamed her platform soles, so a battery of crash tests were conducted with drivers wearing differing sole heights. A maximum allowable platform of only a few centimeters for anyone driving a vehicle was determined.

But if ever there were girls who just wanna have fun, it's these kogaru and ganguro. So why is everyone making such a big deal out of these particular fashion victims?

Here in Japan -- the child pornography export capital of the world -- childishness and sexiness are inextricably bound. So, while it may not be difficult to grasp the kind of naughty appeal that Akari has to men suffering from a "rori-kon," or "Lolita complex," it's not as easy to understand the broader, more pervasive appeal of her childish-but-sexy look.

Next page | At 25, a single woman becomes "spoiled sponge cake."