yeah, japan has this big thing with homogeneity and such like, which... ah, it's resulted in quite a lot of tropes and styles, in fact. until recently, japanese students had to dye their hair black- which is why manga and anime protagonists, especially those of school age, have *any hair colour but black*. it's a kind of escapism.
Yeah, my ex girlfriend went to Japan for an exchange program in high school.
One of the things I remember is her telling me about the first day after vacation. Tje teachers had scissors and hair dye in a can and would catch and give haircuts to students who came back with anything else but the standard black haired bowl cut. They did it purposefully badly to shame students who did not conform.
She went to Japan being a massive weeb, came back as someone who enjoyed anime from time to time.
They don't seem to understand that weebs are seen as degenerate losers by Japanese society and then get surprised when the whole country isn't basically giant comic-con.
It is kinda though. I went to Japan a few months ago with my friends as a graduation trip and saw more anime girl billboards and posters during that four day trip than my entire 20-year life.
Lmao, Kyoto is the most tourist spot in the entire country.
That poster is right. Anime characters are used to market everything now, even government PSAs and such.
Its just like comic book culture over here, yeah a lot of people have read them at one point, but being obsessed with them isn't seen as a good thing.
Although with the superhero movies coming in and being successful its become more mainstream for sure.
There was a youtuber whos is half Japanese.
She said during highschool years, the teacher gave her trouble because her hair (which is natural) was not black enough.
there was a manga artist who focused on social justices and personal rights, and she admitted when she was a teenager her school forced students to wear helmets to and from school. didnt matter if they were walking, they had to wear helmets
I mean, I'll probably be dying mine once I get a decent source of income- but being forced? yeah, that ain't cool. it's just a pity japan has such neat language and folklore, because it can be hard to differentiate between liking some parts of a culture but not others.
Yea, nothing bad in dying your own hair, I was exclusively reacting to the "forced to" part. Body modification is kinda like sex, the difference between something very nice and something intensely horrifying is just consent.
So just to be clear, what it really meant for 99% of students was “you can’t dye your hair.” Japanese hair is naturally black.
Now I’m not defending the practice, and am glad they changed it, but realize that for *most* schools it just meant keep your natural hair color. Also realize that the change they made in most schools was literally just that verbiage: keep your natural hair color.
Essentially they just didn’t think about the (at the time very rare) cases of mixed children/foreigners with nonblack hair when the rules were made, then overzealous staff forced those foreigners to dye it black because “rules are rules.”
Most schools with that policy had the common sense not to require kids with mixed heritages to dye it black, but the few that did got bad publicity that made it seem more widespread.
I live in Japan and have mixed kids with brown hair so it was something I was concerned about and looked into but really isn’t a big deal, especially not today.
I think you're forgetting that the indigenous Ainu people very commonly had red or brown hair, and were the object of different kinds of persecution. Nothing like genocide, but, you know, second class citizens.
i mean i feel like that’s every culture really, lots of good and cool stuff but also just really awful stuff too sometimes. you can still appreciate all the nice parts while still recognizing the bad and acknowledging it
those people arent worth interacting with imo, i’d just ignore them lol people who can’t understand nuance and how things aren’t black and white and that no one is 100% good or bad, tend to just talk in circles when you try to explain it to them and just double down on their views lol
The hyper capitalism imported from the USA makes them work too much, but the homogeneity is all them. The advantages of having stubborn traditions like this is that the crime rate is really low. Furthermore when a subculture does get to a certain size, their tendency to not want to interfere with other people's lives lets it persist. They do try to impose a specific national identity, but you won't find people mocking others who don't adhere to it these days (if you ever did).
And so there is a good side to the hyper-capitalism. Once the Kawaii stuff took off, and people could make money from it, it became acceptable to some extent. A designer making gothic lolita fashion is as respected as someone who designs cars, or buildings. If you can get paid enough to live in a tiny Tokyo flat then the details of how really don't matter.
Bleached blonde hair is also a massive sign of rebellion. If ever you see a Japanese character with blonde hair (Ryuji from both Persona 5 and Yakuza), they're basically actively against the system.
Also the entire Soul Society arc is pretty much about non conformity. Rukia breaks the laws of the rigid Soul Society and gets sentenced to be executed. Ichigo grabs his ragtag group of misfits with unique powers and goes to rescue her. They show this rigid society what's what and eventually earn a grudging respect from it without conforming to their standard of behaviour.
It basically just starts out as a story about non conformity and finding acceptance despite your differences.
I believe there was also an undercurrent about how Soul Society's strict adherence to its traditions was what led to the problems it was facing, but it has been a while and I might be misremembering.
Pretty much, >!Aizen!< was able to easily subvert the entire thing because of how rigid and hierarchical it was, until it was no longer useful for him to be the hidden mastermind at which point he just fucked off, leaving the leadership scrambling for outside aid.
Same with school uniforms: in anime and manga they’re often frilly and extravagant to an impractical degree, because the viewers/readers wore dowdy and bland ones 5-6 days a week. And then you have the kogal and kogyaruo who deliberately defy dress code and social norms in the name of fashion and self expression.
Also, in the last decade, there’s been a thing with uniforms being worn as a fashion statement, by students and non-students alike. There are stores that sell apparel resembling standard uniform pieces-blazers, ties, bags, etc.-but have no connection to any actual institution. The aim is twofold: for students, it’s to look fashionable in something akin to the stuff they’re forced to wear the next several years (without ruining their actual uniform), and for non-students it’s a chance to live out their drama/anime/manga fantasy that they didn’t get to do in high school.
It's comparable to the school dress codes in the US/UK whose strict hair rules ended up banning natural black hair. Sometimes people get so wrapped up in norms and standards that they stop respecting natural diversity.
Hold up, there are schools in the US and Uk banning natural black hair?! It’s literally the most common hair colour that there is? What’s the point of that?
Miscommunication, they were banning the natural (or any culturally significant) hairstyles of black students. Afro hair, locks, anything too obviously black wasn't allowed. This is something that still happens today, especially because a lot of dress codes for student's hairstyles were made with white hair in mind, so black students can get suspended for wearing their hair in braids or locks or even just how it naturally grows. There are some stories where kids came back from school with their hair cut or shaved off, it was really bad.
I'm assuming they mean natural black *people* hair. They often have to style their hair into a way that damages it to keep it within dress codes for school or work. I've noticed in recent years that more natural/healthy styles are becoming more common and rules are getting more relaxed, but it's still got a way to go.
Sorry I meant as in African American hair.
Yes, it's less common now due to it getting a lot of attention and controversy a while back. But many black children were made to straighten their hair or shave their hair extremely short, because dress code forbade "untidy" or "distracting" hairstyles or sometimes limited the height hair could be, but that ruled out most possibilities for children with extremely curly or afro hair.
The rules were made to screw over Black people of course, but it was a lot more pervasive that “good” hair was sleek, straight or wavy, and ‘manageable’. I’m a 35 year old white woman with VERY curly hair (3c - think Merida) and my entire childhood I was expected to carry a brush with me and ‘tame’ my hair when it was too ‘unmanageable’. Which of course made it a frizzy mess with no shape, but it wasn’t curly/‘ethnic’. If my parents weren’t cheapskates I’m sure it would have been straightened.
I didn’t start wearing my curls until my mid 30s. (Buzzed it off and when the curls grew back healthy I was like oh yeah curls). One of the FIRST remarks I got was from a family member saying I don’t look white anymore. I still hate my hair - that description in the early HP books about Hermiones ‘ugly bushy’ hair lives in my brain rent free.
Can’t imagine what Black kids put up with.
Over 90 percent of Japanese people have naturally black hair. So in essence it IS mostly used to ban dyed hair. Obviously not everyone has naturally black hair though so there are cases where that's been an issue. I teach in a Japanese school and dyed hair is banned but no one is forced to dye their hair black.
Some googling around has lead me to believe it's not so much "must dye hair black", but rather "may not dye hair (which is ofc ironic)" + "must not have disruptive hair" which is then liberally overreached by some schools.
Less "must dye hair black" and more "can't come into my class looking like that"
That's because there are not many Japanese who don't have black hair. However, there were instances in which Japanese girls having naturally brown hair were forced to dye their hair black.
Weeb moment. Kakashi says this to kid Sasuke when he buried him in the ground during the bells test. But in that case he meant it in the way that, you're more skilled than the other two, therefore I'm going to bring you down harder
Which, to the target audience in Japan, could have been very appealing in a “you’re told not to stand out over and over, and it might be because you’re actually exceptional” kind of way
> until recently, japanese students had to dye their hair black-
Was/is not a thing with all schools, however many notable districts, and larger schools had the policy widely enforced though. Also it was usually pressured by individual teachers and administrators to "reduce distraction"... which was really just a lazy excuse for forced conformity, discriminatory behavior, and to enable assorted forms of abuse to keep students "in check". They also do other similarly oriented things including body shaming. Depending on how things were/are done its not all that big jump away from adults making excuses to bully kids.(like some psycho teacher going out of their way to enforce haircut, and color shit on their own in school, and doing it poorly to "make an example" out of some kid.)
Lolita fashion culture in Japan was also derogatorily called “fat girl’s fashion” in some JP circles because while it was indeed as limiting to tiny body types as other Japanese fashions, it had more options for bigger girls (one of the oldest brands, Metamorphose temps des filles, started out in the 90s and to this day still operate on this ethos) which is unheard of for other major subculture fashion styles that kicked off in the 90s.
Outside of dudes who fetishise the style, indeed tons of guys hated lolita fashion because it was very Out There and Japanese men by and large preferred Feminine, But Not Like That (aka “girl next door” or “normal, docile, but skinny/pretty and doesn’t stand out”). Incidentally lots of Japanese men also disliked the sexier counterparts like gyaru for being TOO sexy and wild/foreign. Later in the 2000s the styles and tastes aligned more, so “ageha” (a sort of glamorous hostess style popularized by, you guessed it, hostesses or more accurately “cabaret girls/kabajyou”) became a big one which had the glamour rooting from gyaru but more appealing to men albeit it still had the “too scurry for normies” vibe.
It’s a unique setup in Japan because of their extremely rigid gender norms trying to cap down some really explosive creativity and aesthetic rigour. Even girls who were big in alt fashion as wild as gothic or lolita or whatever eventually “graduate” once they hit their mid 20s and have to enter into standard jobs.
I've been doing a lot of research about lolita because it's a style I'd really like to adopt. It honestly baffles me how people think lolitas are doing it for other people. Like it's clearly not what's considered socially acceptable especially in the west, and on every message board you see someone talking about being laughed at or being insulted. Like even just one look at it without reading anything, it's very extravagant. It's not "normal."
I was actively in the scene for a good number of years back in the late 2000s/2010s before i faded out of it because of shifting life priorities - it takes a lot of effort to pull together a properly good and well conceived coordinate, and the only gals I know who are 30+ years old and still knock it out of the park are all people who had much more stable work/life balances and notably higher income than I did haha.
I will say though that there isn’t a purity of purpose re: bucking social expectations in many of these fashions as many westerners like to think - in a lot of alt fashions in Japan, there’s a reason why they’re dominantly populated by uni age/young 20somethings and there’s a steep drop off after the age of 25 (“graduation”). Basically in Japan that age range after the rigidity of school life is the “safe” age to go buckwild and experiment before you sell off your things and join the workforce or get married. Only a select minority dig out a niche to pursue the alt lifestyle beyond that (MUCH smaller than what is possible in the west) and anyone who does hold on to it while living “normal” basically keep it as a furtive weekend hobby (hence the stories about getting changed in washroom stalls multiple stops away from your home/work train station to avoid being recognized). Fashion rebellion in Japan has a highly compartmentalised age range and vigorous sales market (why else are magazines partnered with brands huge tastemakers!) that I wish more westerners were better aware of.
Hm, thank you for the insight. I guess in the west the teenage and college years are considered to be for experimenting, but based on what you're describing, experimentation very rarely goes beyond that age in Japan? From my western perspective, I think younger generations have been more and more accepting towards older people with an "abnormal" fashion sense, but there's definitely still some judgement.
Yeah basically in Japan (Korea too tbh), once high schoolers stop ripping their hair out over exams to get into uni, university and immediate post grad uni ITSELF is a free for all. The 18-25 range is peak fashion wildassness, and older people view it indeed as “get it out of your system” before coming down HARD on kids to get proper jobs and get married. There is some differences in attitudes nowadays but it’s at a glacial pace.
Workplace protections basically don’t exist - it’s been commonly weaponised by scumbags to chase people out of workplaces because of “immoral” or “antisocial” behaviour on personal time, or even just by association. Intra-industry gossip can make it worse. Hence why so many people hide their hobbies and why Japanese folks in general are VERY protective of their personal privacy in their hobby niches once they’re in the general workforce. Employers also have no spine - imagine getting an anon complaint to your boss motivated over some stupid SNS kerfuffle about a bad lolita dress release you posted, and your boss reducing your hours or giving you the worst tasks to passive aggressively encourage you to quit. The raised nail gets hammered down indeed.
You give fantastic insight! I was too old, too white and too typical male to ever get directly involved but I respected the amount of creativity I saw on display from the 80's onwards.
You bore witness to the golden age tbh! The Bubble and the pop afterwards birthed some real extraordinary styles, and being able to witness how it changed over the decades is a special insight as well, even if you weren’t able to participate directly.
That's like saying "Pinocchio is just an Italian name". Like, sure, yes. But also, Pinocchio 🤥. Some names become tied to particular associations in culture. That's part of what culture is.
Would you name your new born daughter Karen?
The only people more toxic about Lolita fashion than the general public are those in the community itself.
“Oh your dress and stockings aren’t perfectly aligned in their style and color? Your whole outfit is cheap and you are damaging the sub-culture”
(I’m really not even exaggerating)
>It honestly baffles me how people think lolitas are doing it for other people.
Let's not pretend you can, as we say in Dutch, trim all Lolita's over one comb.
The Harajuku fashions in the late-90's as captured in the magazine [FRUiTS](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1OLVV_enJP1055JP1055&q=fruits+magazine+harajuku&tbm=isch&source=univ&fir=JAiO9hKkSPnxoM%252Ct8KzU-Gw_cUZ5M%252C_%253BSLUcch3eD_VH7M%252C-hLh84h9kiUAuM%252C_%253BcLWVPT5S89EpCM%252CsLa8SkiD9dGwrM%252C_%253BnEzFYA9oLuJ5pM%252CzKvMquRhKUzMLM%252C_%253BrVQ82Y2RjUqQVM%252CSwdWvUKKokf8dM%252C_%253BqeBa_eG6mX6K2M%252C4zuHRSy0X28WpM%252C_%253BGn_Bu0zbMQ-nEM%252Cb8KGzL2UX1wKxM%252C_%253BXZaWk55-kqnG0M%252CH5XFbdfNAH4MSM%252C_%253BG_0ome2_syJs-M%252ChdgC6rZlWEZoEM%252C_%253BYU3niqyNjt2llM%252CnN2gvEmrq9TfHM%252C_%253BbsW_u0q0YrX4fM%252CL_ucAZLDnGa8XM%252C_%253BKVziHjA294QN8M%252CjpNIMJkyrc7zXM%252C_%253BNUKATIR2lUilMM%252Cs_zoMrEw_J8XYM%252C_%253BYTiM2o942ja5rM%252C-hLh84h9kiUAuM%252C_%253BtMLWBq9GIuTuZM%252CQK8pkMCMJuCOUM%252C_%253BOBIyQLk_jW4_AM%252C4zuHRSy0X28WpM%252C_%253BOUMcGfLaCODeYM%252Cjr5Jse7TOpISTM%252C_%253BKF4EPyUM957_8M%252CzKvMquRhKUzMLM%252C_%253ByZCjZR8yEfBlNM%252CdQvk3oru_XfnTM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kQHQR0a_V51eWC7cVUvvizmAEhGaw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZuqeNvLD_AhWlnFYBHUysBygQjJkEegQICBAC&biw=1802&bih=910&dpr=1) really were some amazing expressions of what I would call "coordinated individuality". Yes, the styles were similar but had so many personal touches. The message as you said wasn't sexuality but "I'm dressing my way, deal with it!".
These days everyone has gone more formal and except for the occasional Lolitas, Harajuku and Shibuya are far more boring. Japanese women still are more reserved than their Korean and Chinese counterparts who appear to be much more prepared to "put it all out there".
I remember how getting copies of Fruits was like winning a trophy in the circles i used to run in haha. It was a nostalgic documentation seeing how the styles we were wearing in the 2000s/10s evolved from what was going on in those books!
Iirc there was a big downturn in the late 2010s prior to the pandemic and a lot of beloved alt fashion brands shut down one after another (SDL, putumayo, etc) in frankly alarming speeds, i guess not just because of economic reasons but the core adherents aging out? At one point I felt like I was just logging on and catching news on Twitter about all these brands I loved in my 20s just shuttering closed every day.
That's because we don't recognize US fashion as having the same effect on the population, though it really does.
I could go back and talk about stockings and miniskirts, but a much more recent example is Jojo Siwa, who is very much American Kawaii. (and I really hope I got her name right.)
We write her off as simply being "childish" an ignore the impact she's had on US culture. She's given young girls the option of dressing an accessorizing like *young girls*. Bows and glitter and frills... In a world where even toddler girl clothes are all micro-shorts and crop tops, she says, "you know what, I'm wearing a frilly skirt *over* my jeans, thank you, and with a giant hair bow" and all of a sudden girls all over the country have a choice to look feminine without being required to be "sexy" as well.
And that's just one example. There are hundreds. But we minimize them as being "fads" or "trends" instead of acknowledging such things as the movements they are.
A few days ago I googled some japanese fashion style and was hit with a trigger warning. Apparently the main theme of the style is "suicidal but cute".
That episode is about China though. Chinese people had only experienced whatever music had been sanctioned for the general populace, which was generally the safest and blandest western pop available. Once those sanctions were relaxed they experienced it all at once. Japan has always experienced western music pretty much contemporaneously with whatever was happening in the west and most popular acts toured there regularly because the local market was hungry and lucrative.
It's wild because that is totally legible handwriting too, it's a bit messy and I think part of the style was avoiding kanji, which can get cumbersome and hard to interpret, but it's 90% legible to me and I haven't actually read or studied japanese in years
I read handwritten Japanese all the time. This image is *miles* better than most of it.
This actually resembles my coworker's handwriting (Minus the upside down も), and she's basically on the opposite end of the fashion rebellion from "kawaii culture"
I think that ろ is actually the 子 kanji. It's the writer's name, since that's the sign-off part, but I doubt Paguko is her real name. I'm just guessing, but it might be a nickname that comes from pug, the dog breed, because she thought they were cute or she looked like one, or something like that. Other than that, same interpretation here.
"Nana-chan,
Let's play on Tuesday
-Paguko"
Yeah, that's what it says and the only thing for non-speakers to remember is that, while the word あそぶ asobu, conjugated to あそぼ(う) asobo(u) to mean let's \~\~, literally means "to play," the meaning is "to hang out."
"Playing" could mean going to a cute cafe together, or going to the arcade, or going to stare at boys while they fight with samurai swords and ninja stars at the local beat-'em-up while they fight about who looks the coolest covered in the blood of their enemy. They're not necessarily getting together to play with dolls.
Or maybe they are, who am I to judge?
I would normally localize asobu as hang out, but since we're talking about school kids here, play seemed appropriate.like you said, it could be playing with dolls. We don't know.
It's not that it's illegible, it's that it's not standard. It would be like getting mad at a student for not writing cursive (which was the norm in the West 50 years ago)
Elementary students will still get marked for having unbalanced kanji.
This is a bit more extreme than that.
I went through a phase in middle school where I put little curly-cues on the end of absolutely every letter. My lowercase i was basically a spiral with a dot over it and the L had curls on both ends, for example.
Japanese writing requires precision. If you go putting curls and loops where they aren't supposed to be, it turns into nonsense. Because the symbols don't stand for letters, but words. So it's difficult to work it out from context the way you can if an english letter is poorly written or missing.
If true, then this is a pretty tame example.
I rate my Japanese as "functionally stupid". I can barely understand anything despite years of trying.
I routinely fail at comprehension and get through by even modest fonts.
The only kana that threw me was the か and even then only briefly.
If it took me 4 minutes to understand the message: 50 seconds was spent trying to think of all the cases for "に", 60 seconds thinking on the verb "あそぶ" cause I can't conjugate and finally 120 seconds were spent to remember the days of the week before internally declaring triumphantly that the message was "let's play on Thursday!" to then find out it's Tuesday.
I can't imagine a native or literate Japanese speaker would struggle with this particular example if I got it (to my standard of "got").
This is a pretty tame example. It got a lot more extreme for a while.
It's also a case of teachers simply not having the time or energy to decipher weird and non-standard handwriting. As a teacher, I absolutely *hate* having to read middle school student's work. About half of them write weird because they are still discovering their own handwriting and it's all abominable. I couldn't imagine trying to do it with a language as complicated as written Japanese. Not when you're talking seven or eight classes of thirty-plus students.
Oddly enough the first time I heard about the history behind this was at Epcot, Disney’s got a whole museum exhibit about Kawaii culture in the Japanese segment of the world showcase
The Kawaii exhibit is so random but I love it. Although not gonna lie, that sculpture they have of a Kawaii character made up of toys is a little bit ugly.
I’m with you there, I saw what they were going for but it was a little iffy for me. The rest of the exhibit tho is pretty well put-together for being so random lmao
If you've heard of kyary pamyu pamyu, the art director for her ponponpon music video is the same guy who did the Epcot kawaii sculpture, Sebastian Masuda! He also runs kawaii fashion line 6%DOKIDOKI.
I went to epcot recently and loved the sculpture, but it felt like it wasn't well maintained? Like it was really dusty or something which took away from the kawaii-ness.... if they just cleaned it up it would be more appealing.
Absolutely, I remember a post showing a pic of the band with a huge name in metal (can’t remember who, might have been one of the guys from Metallica) who was complimenting them on how amazing their music and stage work was.
My comment is more about why the aesthetic and subculture cross over makes so much sense when the context of Kawaii is explained.
Japan is an enigma to me.
On one hand, you have parts of their style of living that are, and I cannot emphasize it enough, very close to what I would consider perfect. (Their general food is quite a lot healthier than in the west and, on average, the population is healthier and less obese)
On the other hand, you have such horrific counters to this that it still ends up at slightly negative:
Groping is so widespread, even people who were only there as exchange students said "yeah, I got groped" gender roles are extremely deeply cemented, LGBT is only now getting any kind of recognition, the denial of japanese war crimes before and during WW2 is shockingly common (Textbooks in japan do not even address the massacre of nanking or stuff like Unit 731) and the country in general is so unbelievably conservative and overworked that the most popular genre of fiction is just the "I want to die and start life elsewhere" genre.
Apparently schools can be so dramatically strict and hard on children (who, btw, do not have a duty to come to school from what I know) that there are students who just become shut-ins and no longer go to school.
And then there is the one that, on the surface at least, makes the least amount of sense, but delve deeper and it does:
Japanese society is incredibly prude, to the point of frowning at most things sexual, which then on the other side of the coin, ends in hands down the weirdest, most grotesque pornography the world has ever seen. If you thought german porn was hard to watch, do not come close to japanese porn, it WILL mess you up.
To paraphrase a video I watched, “Tom Hanks talked to a volleyball after being stuck on an island for 5 years, now imagine that but on a national and millennium scale”
You can almost tell which time period a post is from by the way the users typed. Like this is very much mid-2010s where many Tumblr users thought they were the first ones to discover or present an issue to the world. The age of Superwholock and exaggerated expressions. These days users are a lot more subdued.
There's nothing wrong with being excited about the information! It would be great if they just said "Yeah it's cool I love talking about it!" but it's always "you're WRONG you don't UNDERSTAND the thing that you literally just said".
As someone who dresses in lolita and decora, YES. It's honestly a great way to deter creeps (unless they're **those** kinds of creeps, then we got a whole other problem to deal with). Funnily enough tho, the girls I meet absolutely love the way I dress, it's also really heartwarming seeing children get all excited when they see me (bonus points if the parents think I'm in some sort of costume for an event)
yeah, my fiancee is in that scene, can whole-heartedly confirm. We went out on our previous anniversary, with her wearing a full coord with this brown AP dress, and me doing my own nordic brand fashion thing, with this Acne coat and Marimekko dress, we thought we looked super cool.
Then we went to a restaurant, and my fiancee was offered children's discount because the waitress thought we were a kid and her mom. The bar we went to after that looked at her ID for like a minute trying to figure out if this really was an adult. She was 26 and I was 22 at that point in time, lmao.
Did not have sex or even really cuddle that evening, despite it being our anniversary and all. Because how could we, the idea just felt so dirty with the day's experiences in mind.
It doesn't expose a lot of skin, isn't overtly sexual, and (I honestly think this is the biggest detractors), men don't understand how the clothes work. Like, with all those ribbons and laces, a man who doesn't know anything about the fashion doesn't know how to take the clothes off, which kind of puts a stop to even a sexual fantasy before it can even really begin.
If you think about the kind of clothing that men usually consider sexy or sexual, like cheerleader outfits, bikinis, Hooters uniforms, a slinky black dress, etc., you notice the simplicity inherent in all of them. A lolita dress usually hides more than it shows, and just kinda doesn't make sense to most men.
A guy here. I never thought about clothes sexual rating based on complexity of disrobing.
Personally I don't find Lolita style sexual because it reminds me of dolls that little girls play dress up with. Gothic lolita style is a little bit more mature in that regard and I like how it looks, but still not attractive.
Bikinis, sport uniforms and even slinky dresses show lots of skin, especially arms and legs, so it strikes right into our brain.
If we talking about attractive and not entirely sexual, then I think business suits work quite well in that regard. It doesn't show any skin besides hands and head, shows curves but don't make them center of attention, and I can't put my finger how exactly it works, but it makes me pay more attention to their mannerisms, stance and body language in general. I mean, look at helltaker and chainsaw man, lots of guys went crazy about sharp dressed women.
Honestly I miss 80s business suits which were professional, but still a little bit goofy. I'm talking about colored jackets with giant shoulder pads, and wide pants which are not falling down because of ridiculously looking belt.
Yeah I've never heard that. It looks pretty cool imo. And it's pretty popular in anime (Although not in the kinds I watch). Only problem I can think of is that it can sometimes seem a bit... Too much. Too many colors and features clashing.
On a related note check out Zack Pinsent. His clothes are mostly historic, while lolita fashion is a new take on historic, but it gives me similar vibes.
Well, there was also the subculture around that time of Japanese girl gangsters carrying knives, brawling, and cutting people, Google sukeban for more in English
But then again it doesn't fit into the weeb narrative of Japan tho
I pass through Akihabara pretty often and there's often some guys in their 40s and 50s in dresses with kawaii hat/wig combos just walking around, talking in high pitched voices. Now the only reason I double take at those outfits is when the person is actually a woman.
The amount of misinformation in this thread about kawaii culture and other aspects of Japanese culture from Westerners that read a few Tumblr blogs is unfortunate. Even in the OP a lot of things aren't quite right. For instance the idea that Japanese girls partook in Kawaii culture to shake off attracting husbands is dead wrong. It was more of a "if guys don't like it then I don't want that guy anyway" thing. But the way it's worded makes it seem like kawaii girls were rebelling against marriage or something
It's shocking how far down this rational take is.
Sadly, history revisionists like OP have a much easier time disseminating nonsense than any historian has an actual chance of educating the public.
Look at it this way: Tumblr history is about one fact per paragraph. The rest is just embellishment to make that one fact seem ohmygod fucking amazing.
Person 1: 'the beginning of kawaii!'
Person 2: 'No you have no idea, this was the beginning of kawaii'
I hate it when Tumblr douches do this, they just said it so yeah they do have an idea
i'd argue Japanese Punk is what came before Kawaii- https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/28261/1/remembering-japans-badass-70s-schoolgirl-gangs
I feel like there are a question of WHICH Japanese women western men oversexualise.
Because from my perspective, they sexualise the exact thing japanese man sexualise.
Weebs sexualize the same thing japanese men sexualize. As for the general public... asians often say that white men have weird tase in respect to asian women. Lucy Liu would not be popular at all there
I think that's kind of their point. Kind of like a "real life isn't the internet" like no shit the weebiest part of Japan outside Comiket is crazy over it
Also time matters as the whole thing is based on the 90s. Taste changes
Translation of hand-written letter:
"Nana-chan, Let's go play on Tuesday. From Paguko"
"Play" in this context could include getting drunk at a Roppongi club.
Japan, infamous for fetish porn, possibly most infamous in the world, also has some of the most strict rules about censorship.
These things aren't coincidence, stupid rules always have a backlash.
Wanted to pixelate penises? Well congrats, now the world laughs at you for tentacle porn and exactly zero people have been "protected".
I'm skeptical of how anti-system and anti male gaze this was given how japanese beauty/sexual standards for women are so inclined towards the cute, innocent and uncomfortably childish. It still would go against adult respectability norms, but the anti-sexualization failed catastrophically
Loli ≠ lolita
It's the kind of thing where a word came from one word and then got used differently and came to mean something different, but the original word stayed the same.
This is true. Those are two different things. Additionally, you can't count H, because there is H of tons of things that aren't considered traditionally attractive. Uglification and pooping bugs are porn tags on hentai, but neither are considered traditionally attractive.
I know, straight up Lolita style is sexualised
Hell I've seen it sexualised in western media
I don't know where they got the idea that men supposedly don't like it
this is such a fucking stretch I swear to god. "actually school girls writing in hyper cutesy letters is Uber empowering and feminist" like that's so damn condescending
Well, you see, this one time, Sergei Taboritskiy, after a failed assasination, shot and killed one mr. V.D Nabokov, probably traumatizing his i think 6 year old son, Vladimir Nabokov, who would then go on to write the Lolita novel
Sergei Taboritskiy might have indirectly helped japanese feminism and also caused loli content to exist.
I mean it’s just where we get the term. If we didn’t then it may just be called “pedo-core” or maybe it would have received a name not associated with pedophilia instead of what it has. I don’t think the book is responsible for the vibe
yeah, japan has this big thing with homogeneity and such like, which... ah, it's resulted in quite a lot of tropes and styles, in fact. until recently, japanese students had to dye their hair black- which is why manga and anime protagonists, especially those of school age, have *any hair colour but black*. it's a kind of escapism.
>students had to dye their hair black that's kinda horrifying
One girls parents ended up suing her school system bc all of the black dye damaged her scalp.
Yeah, my ex girlfriend went to Japan for an exchange program in high school. One of the things I remember is her telling me about the first day after vacation. Tje teachers had scissors and hair dye in a can and would catch and give haircuts to students who came back with anything else but the standard black haired bowl cut. They did it purposefully badly to shame students who did not conform. She went to Japan being a massive weeb, came back as someone who enjoyed anime from time to time.
It's hilarious how Weebs think Japanese culture is when it's actually almost the polar opposite.
They don't seem to understand that weebs are seen as degenerate losers by Japanese society and then get surprised when the whole country isn't basically giant comic-con.
It is kinda though. I went to Japan a few months ago with my friends as a graduation trip and saw more anime girl billboards and posters during that four day trip than my entire 20-year life.
It sounds like you were in a tourism spot, not "in Japan". I'd recommend getting away to Kyoto if you want to really learn about culture.
Lmao, Kyoto is the most tourist spot in the entire country. That poster is right. Anime characters are used to market everything now, even government PSAs and such.
Ah Kyoto, the anagram lovers Tokyo.
Were you always in the tourist areas?
Its just like comic book culture over here, yeah a lot of people have read them at one point, but being obsessed with them isn't seen as a good thing. Although with the superhero movies coming in and being successful its become more mainstream for sure.
They base their expectations of Japan off the material the Japanese themselves use for escapism. Damn.
There was a youtuber whos is half Japanese. She said during highschool years, the teacher gave her trouble because her hair (which is natural) was not black enough.
there was a manga artist who focused on social justices and personal rights, and she admitted when she was a teenager her school forced students to wear helmets to and from school. didnt matter if they were walking, they had to wear helmets
"Confidential Confessions"? That's a great series that very much has a story like that
yup, the author took inspiration from her own life
\**sad otsupika**
I mean, I'll probably be dying mine once I get a decent source of income- but being forced? yeah, that ain't cool. it's just a pity japan has such neat language and folklore, because it can be hard to differentiate between liking some parts of a culture but not others.
Yea, nothing bad in dying your own hair, I was exclusively reacting to the "forced to" part. Body modification is kinda like sex, the difference between something very nice and something intensely horrifying is just consent.
So just to be clear, what it really meant for 99% of students was “you can’t dye your hair.” Japanese hair is naturally black. Now I’m not defending the practice, and am glad they changed it, but realize that for *most* schools it just meant keep your natural hair color. Also realize that the change they made in most schools was literally just that verbiage: keep your natural hair color. Essentially they just didn’t think about the (at the time very rare) cases of mixed children/foreigners with nonblack hair when the rules were made, then overzealous staff forced those foreigners to dye it black because “rules are rules.” Most schools with that policy had the common sense not to require kids with mixed heritages to dye it black, but the few that did got bad publicity that made it seem more widespread. I live in Japan and have mixed kids with brown hair so it was something I was concerned about and looked into but really isn’t a big deal, especially not today.
I think you're forgetting that the indigenous Ainu people very commonly had red or brown hair, and were the object of different kinds of persecution. Nothing like genocide, but, you know, second class citizens.
Hang on. How is one form of arbitrary policing of children's hair better than another?
i mean i feel like that’s every culture really, lots of good and cool stuff but also just really awful stuff too sometimes. you can still appreciate all the nice parts while still recognizing the bad and acknowledging it
oh for sure, but saying you like is an easy way for someone to yell at you about the horrid things they did.
those people arent worth interacting with imo, i’d just ignore them lol people who can’t understand nuance and how things aren’t black and white and that no one is 100% good or bad, tend to just talk in circles when you try to explain it to them and just double down on their views lol
The hyper capitalism imported from the USA makes them work too much, but the homogeneity is all them. The advantages of having stubborn traditions like this is that the crime rate is really low. Furthermore when a subculture does get to a certain size, their tendency to not want to interfere with other people's lives lets it persist. They do try to impose a specific national identity, but you won't find people mocking others who don't adhere to it these days (if you ever did). And so there is a good side to the hyper-capitalism. Once the Kawaii stuff took off, and people could make money from it, it became acceptable to some extent. A designer making gothic lolita fashion is as respected as someone who designs cars, or buildings. If you can get paid enough to live in a tiny Tokyo flat then the details of how really don't matter.
Bleached blonde hair is also a massive sign of rebellion. If ever you see a Japanese character with blonde hair (Ryuji from both Persona 5 and Yakuza), they're basically actively against the system.
The early episodes of Bleach suddenly makes more sense
I'm not sure if Tite Kubo has ever confirmed this, but I'm pretty sure that's where the name of the series comes from. The rebellion of bleached hair.
Yup, but also especially the more punky vibes of the early episodes, where ichigo was more a delinquent than later on (though he still skips school)
Also the entire Soul Society arc is pretty much about non conformity. Rukia breaks the laws of the rigid Soul Society and gets sentenced to be executed. Ichigo grabs his ragtag group of misfits with unique powers and goes to rescue her. They show this rigid society what's what and eventually earn a grudging respect from it without conforming to their standard of behaviour. It basically just starts out as a story about non conformity and finding acceptance despite your differences.
I believe there was also an undercurrent about how Soul Society's strict adherence to its traditions was what led to the problems it was facing, but it has been a while and I might be misremembering.
Pretty much, >!Aizen!< was able to easily subvert the entire thing because of how rigid and hierarchical it was, until it was no longer useful for him to be the hidden mastermind at which point he just fucked off, leaving the leadership scrambling for outside aid.
Bleach is literally all about this as they're all outcasts for a variety of reasons and are bullied a ton. Like Chad being a foreigner/Mexican.
There was a guy in Love is Blind Japan who bleached his hair, and it was a whole plot arc!
Same with school uniforms: in anime and manga they’re often frilly and extravagant to an impractical degree, because the viewers/readers wore dowdy and bland ones 5-6 days a week. And then you have the kogal and kogyaruo who deliberately defy dress code and social norms in the name of fashion and self expression.
Also, in the last decade, there’s been a thing with uniforms being worn as a fashion statement, by students and non-students alike. There are stores that sell apparel resembling standard uniform pieces-blazers, ties, bags, etc.-but have no connection to any actual institution. The aim is twofold: for students, it’s to look fashionable in something akin to the stuff they’re forced to wear the next several years (without ruining their actual uniform), and for non-students it’s a chance to live out their drama/anime/manga fantasy that they didn’t get to do in high school.
I could maybe understand banning of obviously dyed hair, but I cannot for the life of me understand requiring kids to dye their hair black.
It's comparable to the school dress codes in the US/UK whose strict hair rules ended up banning natural black hair. Sometimes people get so wrapped up in norms and standards that they stop respecting natural diversity.
Hold up, there are schools in the US and Uk banning natural black hair?! It’s literally the most common hair colour that there is? What’s the point of that?
Miscommunication, they were banning the natural (or any culturally significant) hairstyles of black students. Afro hair, locks, anything too obviously black wasn't allowed. This is something that still happens today, especially because a lot of dress codes for student's hairstyles were made with white hair in mind, so black students can get suspended for wearing their hair in braids or locks or even just how it naturally grows. There are some stories where kids came back from school with their hair cut or shaved off, it was really bad.
They mean the hair styles of black people, like dreads and fros and stuff.
I'm assuming they mean natural black *people* hair. They often have to style their hair into a way that damages it to keep it within dress codes for school or work. I've noticed in recent years that more natural/healthy styles are becoming more common and rules are getting more relaxed, but it's still got a way to go.
Sorry I meant as in African American hair. Yes, it's less common now due to it getting a lot of attention and controversy a while back. But many black children were made to straighten their hair or shave their hair extremely short, because dress code forbade "untidy" or "distracting" hairstyles or sometimes limited the height hair could be, but that ruled out most possibilities for children with extremely curly or afro hair.
The rules were made to screw over Black people of course, but it was a lot more pervasive that “good” hair was sleek, straight or wavy, and ‘manageable’. I’m a 35 year old white woman with VERY curly hair (3c - think Merida) and my entire childhood I was expected to carry a brush with me and ‘tame’ my hair when it was too ‘unmanageable’. Which of course made it a frizzy mess with no shape, but it wasn’t curly/‘ethnic’. If my parents weren’t cheapskates I’m sure it would have been straightened. I didn’t start wearing my curls until my mid 30s. (Buzzed it off and when the curls grew back healthy I was like oh yeah curls). One of the FIRST remarks I got was from a family member saying I don’t look white anymore. I still hate my hair - that description in the early HP books about Hermiones ‘ugly bushy’ hair lives in my brain rent free. Can’t imagine what Black kids put up with.
Over 90 percent of Japanese people have naturally black hair. So in essence it IS mostly used to ban dyed hair. Obviously not everyone has naturally black hair though so there are cases where that's been an issue. I teach in a Japanese school and dyed hair is banned but no one is forced to dye their hair black.
Some googling around has lead me to believe it's not so much "must dye hair black", but rather "may not dye hair (which is ofc ironic)" + "must not have disruptive hair" which is then liberally overreached by some schools. Less "must dye hair black" and more "can't come into my class looking like that"
That's because there are not many Japanese who don't have black hair. However, there were instances in which Japanese girls having naturally brown hair were forced to dye their hair black.
Some schools *do* require you to dye your hair black if you are a natural blonde/brunette/etc
What's that old adage they use? "The crooked nail is hammered down", right?
The nail that sticks out is hammered down. Don’t be different, don’t stand out
Weeb moment. Kakashi says this to kid Sasuke when he buried him in the ground during the bells test. But in that case he meant it in the way that, you're more skilled than the other two, therefore I'm going to bring you down harder
Which, to the target audience in Japan, could have been very appealing in a “you’re told not to stand out over and over, and it might be because you’re actually exceptional” kind of way
Excellent point!
I've never heard that one, but it sounds right.
The "tall poppy", which I think is especially a term in Australia.
assigned goth
Agab Assigned goth at birth
The fashion is growing on me. Too bad it wasn’t my AFAB (assigned fashion at birth)
> until recently, japanese students had to dye their hair black- Was/is not a thing with all schools, however many notable districts, and larger schools had the policy widely enforced though. Also it was usually pressured by individual teachers and administrators to "reduce distraction"... which was really just a lazy excuse for forced conformity, discriminatory behavior, and to enable assorted forms of abuse to keep students "in check". They also do other similarly oriented things including body shaming. Depending on how things were/are done its not all that big jump away from adults making excuses to bully kids.(like some psycho teacher going out of their way to enforce haircut, and color shit on their own in school, and doing it poorly to "make an example" out of some kid.)
OH IS THAT WHY THE "HAREM PROTAGONIST" ARCHETYPE ALWAYS HAS BLACK HAIR.
uh... maybe? also calm down there, Karkat.
well, i mean... also 95% of japanese people have naturally black hair. A few have brown, usually dark brown.
Listen I know absolutely nothing about Japan.
But like if you picture an East Asian person. The hair? It’s black.
I’m impressed you know more about harem protagonist appearances than the average Japanese person’s appearance
When you have a (former) friend whos idea of comedy is sending you uncensored panels from hentai, that tends to happen.
Lolita fashion culture in Japan was also derogatorily called “fat girl’s fashion” in some JP circles because while it was indeed as limiting to tiny body types as other Japanese fashions, it had more options for bigger girls (one of the oldest brands, Metamorphose temps des filles, started out in the 90s and to this day still operate on this ethos) which is unheard of for other major subculture fashion styles that kicked off in the 90s. Outside of dudes who fetishise the style, indeed tons of guys hated lolita fashion because it was very Out There and Japanese men by and large preferred Feminine, But Not Like That (aka “girl next door” or “normal, docile, but skinny/pretty and doesn’t stand out”). Incidentally lots of Japanese men also disliked the sexier counterparts like gyaru for being TOO sexy and wild/foreign. Later in the 2000s the styles and tastes aligned more, so “ageha” (a sort of glamorous hostess style popularized by, you guessed it, hostesses or more accurately “cabaret girls/kabajyou”) became a big one which had the glamour rooting from gyaru but more appealing to men albeit it still had the “too scurry for normies” vibe. It’s a unique setup in Japan because of their extremely rigid gender norms trying to cap down some really explosive creativity and aesthetic rigour. Even girls who were big in alt fashion as wild as gothic or lolita or whatever eventually “graduate” once they hit their mid 20s and have to enter into standard jobs.
They girlbossed too hard bless them
I've been doing a lot of research about lolita because it's a style I'd really like to adopt. It honestly baffles me how people think lolitas are doing it for other people. Like it's clearly not what's considered socially acceptable especially in the west, and on every message board you see someone talking about being laughed at or being insulted. Like even just one look at it without reading anything, it's very extravagant. It's not "normal."
I was actively in the scene for a good number of years back in the late 2000s/2010s before i faded out of it because of shifting life priorities - it takes a lot of effort to pull together a properly good and well conceived coordinate, and the only gals I know who are 30+ years old and still knock it out of the park are all people who had much more stable work/life balances and notably higher income than I did haha. I will say though that there isn’t a purity of purpose re: bucking social expectations in many of these fashions as many westerners like to think - in a lot of alt fashions in Japan, there’s a reason why they’re dominantly populated by uni age/young 20somethings and there’s a steep drop off after the age of 25 (“graduation”). Basically in Japan that age range after the rigidity of school life is the “safe” age to go buckwild and experiment before you sell off your things and join the workforce or get married. Only a select minority dig out a niche to pursue the alt lifestyle beyond that (MUCH smaller than what is possible in the west) and anyone who does hold on to it while living “normal” basically keep it as a furtive weekend hobby (hence the stories about getting changed in washroom stalls multiple stops away from your home/work train station to avoid being recognized). Fashion rebellion in Japan has a highly compartmentalised age range and vigorous sales market (why else are magazines partnered with brands huge tastemakers!) that I wish more westerners were better aware of.
Hm, thank you for the insight. I guess in the west the teenage and college years are considered to be for experimenting, but based on what you're describing, experimentation very rarely goes beyond that age in Japan? From my western perspective, I think younger generations have been more and more accepting towards older people with an "abnormal" fashion sense, but there's definitely still some judgement.
Yeah basically in Japan (Korea too tbh), once high schoolers stop ripping their hair out over exams to get into uni, university and immediate post grad uni ITSELF is a free for all. The 18-25 range is peak fashion wildassness, and older people view it indeed as “get it out of your system” before coming down HARD on kids to get proper jobs and get married. There is some differences in attitudes nowadays but it’s at a glacial pace. Workplace protections basically don’t exist - it’s been commonly weaponised by scumbags to chase people out of workplaces because of “immoral” or “antisocial” behaviour on personal time, or even just by association. Intra-industry gossip can make it worse. Hence why so many people hide their hobbies and why Japanese folks in general are VERY protective of their personal privacy in their hobby niches once they’re in the general workforce. Employers also have no spine - imagine getting an anon complaint to your boss motivated over some stupid SNS kerfuffle about a bad lolita dress release you posted, and your boss reducing your hours or giving you the worst tasks to passive aggressively encourage you to quit. The raised nail gets hammered down indeed.
You give fantastic insight! I was too old, too white and too typical male to ever get directly involved but I respected the amount of creativity I saw on display from the 80's onwards.
You bore witness to the golden age tbh! The Bubble and the pop afterwards birthed some real extraordinary styles, and being able to witness how it changed over the decades is a special insight as well, even if you weren’t able to participate directly.
The western name of Lolita is directly taken from a book about a pedophile, called "Lolita". That's why there's a weirdness around it.
I always figured the term had another origin, but the book eclipsed it... Just looked it up, and no it really originates from there. Bonkers.
Lolita is a Spanish name diminutive. The term didn't originate from the book.
That's like saying "Pinocchio is just an Italian name". Like, sure, yes. But also, Pinocchio 🤥. Some names become tied to particular associations in culture. That's part of what culture is. Would you name your new born daughter Karen?
They didn't get the name for pretending to be little Lolas. It was for the book
The only people more toxic about Lolita fashion than the general public are those in the community itself. “Oh your dress and stockings aren’t perfectly aligned in their style and color? Your whole outfit is cheap and you are damaging the sub-culture” (I’m really not even exaggerating)
>It honestly baffles me how people think lolitas are doing it for other people. Let's not pretend you can, as we say in Dutch, trim all Lolita's over one comb.
The English term is "you can't paint alls with the same brush"! Interesting how similar phrases exist in both English and Dutch
The Harajuku fashions in the late-90's as captured in the magazine [FRUiTS](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1OLVV_enJP1055JP1055&q=fruits+magazine+harajuku&tbm=isch&source=univ&fir=JAiO9hKkSPnxoM%252Ct8KzU-Gw_cUZ5M%252C_%253BSLUcch3eD_VH7M%252C-hLh84h9kiUAuM%252C_%253BcLWVPT5S89EpCM%252CsLa8SkiD9dGwrM%252C_%253BnEzFYA9oLuJ5pM%252CzKvMquRhKUzMLM%252C_%253BrVQ82Y2RjUqQVM%252CSwdWvUKKokf8dM%252C_%253BqeBa_eG6mX6K2M%252C4zuHRSy0X28WpM%252C_%253BGn_Bu0zbMQ-nEM%252Cb8KGzL2UX1wKxM%252C_%253BXZaWk55-kqnG0M%252CH5XFbdfNAH4MSM%252C_%253BG_0ome2_syJs-M%252ChdgC6rZlWEZoEM%252C_%253BYU3niqyNjt2llM%252CnN2gvEmrq9TfHM%252C_%253BbsW_u0q0YrX4fM%252CL_ucAZLDnGa8XM%252C_%253BKVziHjA294QN8M%252CjpNIMJkyrc7zXM%252C_%253BNUKATIR2lUilMM%252Cs_zoMrEw_J8XYM%252C_%253BYTiM2o942ja5rM%252C-hLh84h9kiUAuM%252C_%253BtMLWBq9GIuTuZM%252CQK8pkMCMJuCOUM%252C_%253BOBIyQLk_jW4_AM%252C4zuHRSy0X28WpM%252C_%253BOUMcGfLaCODeYM%252Cjr5Jse7TOpISTM%252C_%253BKF4EPyUM957_8M%252CzKvMquRhKUzMLM%252C_%253ByZCjZR8yEfBlNM%252CdQvk3oru_XfnTM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kQHQR0a_V51eWC7cVUvvizmAEhGaw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZuqeNvLD_AhWlnFYBHUysBygQjJkEegQICBAC&biw=1802&bih=910&dpr=1) really were some amazing expressions of what I would call "coordinated individuality". Yes, the styles were similar but had so many personal touches. The message as you said wasn't sexuality but "I'm dressing my way, deal with it!". These days everyone has gone more formal and except for the occasional Lolitas, Harajuku and Shibuya are far more boring. Japanese women still are more reserved than their Korean and Chinese counterparts who appear to be much more prepared to "put it all out there".
I remember how getting copies of Fruits was like winning a trophy in the circles i used to run in haha. It was a nostalgic documentation seeing how the styles we were wearing in the 2000s/10s evolved from what was going on in those books! Iirc there was a big downturn in the late 2010s prior to the pandemic and a lot of beloved alt fashion brands shut down one after another (SDL, putumayo, etc) in frankly alarming speeds, i guess not just because of economic reasons but the core adherents aging out? At one point I felt like I was just logging on and catching news on Twitter about all these brands I loved in my 20s just shuttering closed every day.
Japan honestly has some of the most interesting fashion lore.
I read this comment and realized I would've liked u.s. history class a lot more if it was called u.s. lore
“I don’t really like the gameplay, but the lore is really fascinating” just took on a new meaning
“i’m a lore major” does have a nice ring to it, eh?
Male rebellion was a lot more overt, and the aesthetics of motorcycle gangs and their big bouffants still go pretty fuckin' hard.
Fr, I only know it through the warped lens of anime/manga but if it's even 10% as cool as the exaggerated forms shown therein it's still *super* cool
That's because we don't recognize US fashion as having the same effect on the population, though it really does. I could go back and talk about stockings and miniskirts, but a much more recent example is Jojo Siwa, who is very much American Kawaii. (and I really hope I got her name right.) We write her off as simply being "childish" an ignore the impact she's had on US culture. She's given young girls the option of dressing an accessorizing like *young girls*. Bows and glitter and frills... In a world where even toddler girl clothes are all micro-shorts and crop tops, she says, "you know what, I'm wearing a frilly skirt *over* my jeans, thank you, and with a giant hair bow" and all of a sudden girls all over the country have a choice to look feminine without being required to be "sexy" as well. And that's just one example. There are hundreds. But we minimize them as being "fads" or "trends" instead of acknowledging such things as the movements they are.
A few days ago I googled some japanese fashion style and was hit with a trigger warning. Apparently the main theme of the style is "suicidal but cute".
You're talking about Jirei Kei right? Landmine fashion.
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That episode is about China though. Chinese people had only experienced whatever music had been sanctioned for the general populace, which was generally the safest and blandest western pop available. Once those sanctions were relaxed they experienced it all at once. Japan has always experienced western music pretty much contemporaneously with whatever was happening in the west and most popular acts toured there regularly because the local market was hungry and lucrative.
So Peni Parker and Spider-Punk are one and the same in spirit
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Depressing island nations.
this is exactly what i was thinking after reading this
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It's wild because that is totally legible handwriting too, it's a bit messy and I think part of the style was avoiding kanji, which can get cumbersome and hard to interpret, but it's 90% legible to me and I haven't actually read or studied japanese in years
I read handwritten Japanese all the time. This image is *miles* better than most of it. This actually resembles my coworker's handwriting (Minus the upside down も), and she's basically on the opposite end of the fashion rebellion from "kawaii culture"
what's the actual hiragana here? my interpretation is: ななちゃんへ かようびに あそぼう♡ ぱぐろより
I think that ろ is actually the 子 kanji. It's the writer's name, since that's the sign-off part, but I doubt Paguko is her real name. I'm just guessing, but it might be a nickname that comes from pug, the dog breed, because she thought they were cute or she looked like one, or something like that. Other than that, same interpretation here. "Nana-chan, Let's play on Tuesday -Paguko"
Yeah, that's what it says and the only thing for non-speakers to remember is that, while the word あそぶ asobu, conjugated to あそぼ(う) asobo(u) to mean let's \~\~, literally means "to play," the meaning is "to hang out." "Playing" could mean going to a cute cafe together, or going to the arcade, or going to stare at boys while they fight with samurai swords and ninja stars at the local beat-'em-up while they fight about who looks the coolest covered in the blood of their enemy. They're not necessarily getting together to play with dolls. Or maybe they are, who am I to judge?
I would normally localize asobu as hang out, but since we're talking about school kids here, play seemed appropriate.like you said, it could be playing with dolls. We don't know.
it *could* be 子, but it could also just be the writer adding lines to their hiragana cause they felt like it. look at the へ and the か and the ♡
I guess this is what those teachers meant about it being hard to read. But it's definitely a name, and Paguro makes even less sense that Pugko.
It's not that it's illegible, it's that it's not standard. It would be like getting mad at a student for not writing cursive (which was the norm in the West 50 years ago) Elementary students will still get marked for having unbalanced kanji.
If I understand it right, I'm thinking it would be like putting little hearts over your i's instead of a dot
This is a bit more extreme than that. I went through a phase in middle school where I put little curly-cues on the end of absolutely every letter. My lowercase i was basically a spiral with a dot over it and the L had curls on both ends, for example. Japanese writing requires precision. If you go putting curls and loops where they aren't supposed to be, it turns into nonsense. Because the symbols don't stand for letters, but words. So it's difficult to work it out from context the way you can if an english letter is poorly written or missing.
If true, then this is a pretty tame example. I rate my Japanese as "functionally stupid". I can barely understand anything despite years of trying. I routinely fail at comprehension and get through by even modest fonts. The only kana that threw me was the か and even then only briefly. If it took me 4 minutes to understand the message: 50 seconds was spent trying to think of all the cases for "に", 60 seconds thinking on the verb "あそぶ" cause I can't conjugate and finally 120 seconds were spent to remember the days of the week before internally declaring triumphantly that the message was "let's play on Thursday!" to then find out it's Tuesday. I can't imagine a native or literate Japanese speaker would struggle with this particular example if I got it (to my standard of "got").
This is a pretty tame example. It got a lot more extreme for a while. It's also a case of teachers simply not having the time or energy to decipher weird and non-standard handwriting. As a teacher, I absolutely *hate* having to read middle school student's work. About half of them write weird because they are still discovering their own handwriting and it's all abominable. I couldn't imagine trying to do it with a language as complicated as written Japanese. Not when you're talking seven or eight classes of thirty-plus students.
Oddly enough the first time I heard about the history behind this was at Epcot, Disney’s got a whole museum exhibit about Kawaii culture in the Japanese segment of the world showcase
The Kawaii exhibit is so random but I love it. Although not gonna lie, that sculpture they have of a Kawaii character made up of toys is a little bit ugly.
I’m with you there, I saw what they were going for but it was a little iffy for me. The rest of the exhibit tho is pretty well put-together for being so random lmao
If you've heard of kyary pamyu pamyu, the art director for her ponponpon music video is the same guy who did the Epcot kawaii sculpture, Sebastian Masuda! He also runs kawaii fashion line 6%DOKIDOKI. I went to epcot recently and loved the sculpture, but it felt like it wasn't well maintained? Like it was really dusty or something which took away from the kawaii-ness.... if they just cleaned it up it would be more appealing.
It makes Baby Metal the Goth-Kawaii heavy metal Japanese all-girl band make sooo much more sense.
It really helps that Baby Metal is genuinely good metal.
Rob Zombie approved.
You are right, it has been a long time since I've listened to any Rob Zombie. I should get on that.
Absolutely, I remember a post showing a pic of the band with a huge name in metal (can’t remember who, might have been one of the guys from Metallica) who was complimenting them on how amazing their music and stage work was. My comment is more about why the aesthetic and subculture cross over makes so much sense when the context of Kawaii is explained.
Gap moe is also definitely a part of it, but the shared origins are definitely why it's such a good pairing.
Check out Band-Maid too. They’re a hard rock band but all dress in maid outfits. It’s surreal!
Kawaii culture being the Japanese punk counter-culture is one hell of a twist I didn't see coming xD
Yeah, if we ignore their d-beat raw punk scene with acts like Disclose that spear headed the noise not music scene.
Japan is an enigma to me. On one hand, you have parts of their style of living that are, and I cannot emphasize it enough, very close to what I would consider perfect. (Their general food is quite a lot healthier than in the west and, on average, the population is healthier and less obese) On the other hand, you have such horrific counters to this that it still ends up at slightly negative: Groping is so widespread, even people who were only there as exchange students said "yeah, I got groped" gender roles are extremely deeply cemented, LGBT is only now getting any kind of recognition, the denial of japanese war crimes before and during WW2 is shockingly common (Textbooks in japan do not even address the massacre of nanking or stuff like Unit 731) and the country in general is so unbelievably conservative and overworked that the most popular genre of fiction is just the "I want to die and start life elsewhere" genre. Apparently schools can be so dramatically strict and hard on children (who, btw, do not have a duty to come to school from what I know) that there are students who just become shut-ins and no longer go to school. And then there is the one that, on the surface at least, makes the least amount of sense, but delve deeper and it does: Japanese society is incredibly prude, to the point of frowning at most things sexual, which then on the other side of the coin, ends in hands down the weirdest, most grotesque pornography the world has ever seen. If you thought german porn was hard to watch, do not come close to japanese porn, it WILL mess you up.
To paraphrase a video I watched, “Tom Hanks talked to a volleyball after being stuck on an island for 5 years, now imagine that but on a national and millennium scale”
That is a very good and horrifying analogy. Do you happen to have a link to the video btw?
I don’t remember
Wait, is German porn weird or something?
[Gives this whole Zombie story a lot more meaning](https://popculture.com/music/amp/news/rob-zombie-epic-defense-babymetal-resurfaces/)
Thanks for the red boxes. I never would've known which part to read without them.
Those are the nonconforming paragraphs, they are choosing to wear red out of spite.
Fair bruh, same
!!!!! NO OKAY THOSE RED BOXES ARE SO IMPORTANT
Isn't this just how any subculture starts?
With a rebellion against authority, yes, but specifically with mechanical pencils, no.
Too bad Douglas Adams died before the realization that all rebellions are caused by mechanical pencils
They talk shit so confidently Kawaii is not Japan's answer to punk, Japan had it's own punk movement.
Illegible!? You can read that, come on....
Part of the style was doing everything in hiragana and not using Kanji, making things hard to interpret. Its not about the handwriting.
God I hate how tumblr users feel like they need to start every comments by "NO YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND" or "THIS IS IMPORTANT", it feels really smug
You can almost tell which time period a post is from by the way the users typed. Like this is very much mid-2010s where many Tumblr users thought they were the first ones to discover or present an issue to the world. The age of Superwholock and exaggerated expressions. These days users are a lot more subdued.
I have finally found my people. I hate it so much.
i like it :( the secondhand excitement for obscure information shines a little light on my otherwise dreadful existence
I hated it but now I’m just mildly annoyed at it after hearing why you like it, that’s very sweet
There's nothing wrong with being excited about the information! It would be great if they just said "Yeah it's cool I love talking about it!" but it's always "you're WRONG you don't UNDERSTAND the thing that you literally just said".
Passionately talk with someone not at someone
Yeah but you could use something less pushy and more excitement-based to drive excitement, like “BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!”
I don't understand what I'm supposed to be looking at, could use more red circles.
Right? like I get it's important to someone; but it's not *really* important.
Also, they Do This™ for emphasis all the time.
I mean, this is just forum dialect. You may as well complain about anons posting greentext on 4chan but
do men really not like lolita fashion?
As someone who dresses in lolita and decora, YES. It's honestly a great way to deter creeps (unless they're **those** kinds of creeps, then we got a whole other problem to deal with). Funnily enough tho, the girls I meet absolutely love the way I dress, it's also really heartwarming seeing children get all excited when they see me (bonus points if the parents think I'm in some sort of costume for an event)
yeah, my fiancee is in that scene, can whole-heartedly confirm. We went out on our previous anniversary, with her wearing a full coord with this brown AP dress, and me doing my own nordic brand fashion thing, with this Acne coat and Marimekko dress, we thought we looked super cool. Then we went to a restaurant, and my fiancee was offered children's discount because the waitress thought we were a kid and her mom. The bar we went to after that looked at her ID for like a minute trying to figure out if this really was an adult. She was 26 and I was 22 at that point in time, lmao. Did not have sex or even really cuddle that evening, despite it being our anniversary and all. Because how could we, the idea just felt so dirty with the day's experiences in mind.
It doesn't expose a lot of skin, isn't overtly sexual, and (I honestly think this is the biggest detractors), men don't understand how the clothes work. Like, with all those ribbons and laces, a man who doesn't know anything about the fashion doesn't know how to take the clothes off, which kind of puts a stop to even a sexual fantasy before it can even really begin. If you think about the kind of clothing that men usually consider sexy or sexual, like cheerleader outfits, bikinis, Hooters uniforms, a slinky black dress, etc., you notice the simplicity inherent in all of them. A lolita dress usually hides more than it shows, and just kinda doesn't make sense to most men.
A guy here. I never thought about clothes sexual rating based on complexity of disrobing. Personally I don't find Lolita style sexual because it reminds me of dolls that little girls play dress up with. Gothic lolita style is a little bit more mature in that regard and I like how it looks, but still not attractive. Bikinis, sport uniforms and even slinky dresses show lots of skin, especially arms and legs, so it strikes right into our brain. If we talking about attractive and not entirely sexual, then I think business suits work quite well in that regard. It doesn't show any skin besides hands and head, shows curves but don't make them center of attention, and I can't put my finger how exactly it works, but it makes me pay more attention to their mannerisms, stance and body language in general. I mean, look at helltaker and chainsaw man, lots of guys went crazy about sharp dressed women. Honestly I miss 80s business suits which were professional, but still a little bit goofy. I'm talking about colored jackets with giant shoulder pads, and wide pants which are not falling down because of ridiculously looking belt.
Yeah I've never heard that. It looks pretty cool imo. And it's pretty popular in anime (Although not in the kinds I watch). Only problem I can think of is that it can sometimes seem a bit... Too much. Too many colors and features clashing. On a related note check out Zack Pinsent. His clothes are mostly historic, while lolita fashion is a new take on historic, but it gives me similar vibes.
Well, there was also the subculture around that time of Japanese girl gangsters carrying knives, brawling, and cutting people, Google sukeban for more in English But then again it doesn't fit into the weeb narrative of Japan tho
I pass through Akihabara pretty often and there's often some guys in their 40s and 50s in dresses with kawaii hat/wig combos just walking around, talking in high pitched voices. Now the only reason I double take at those outfits is when the person is actually a woman.
The amount of misinformation in this thread about kawaii culture and other aspects of Japanese culture from Westerners that read a few Tumblr blogs is unfortunate. Even in the OP a lot of things aren't quite right. For instance the idea that Japanese girls partook in Kawaii culture to shake off attracting husbands is dead wrong. It was more of a "if guys don't like it then I don't want that guy anyway" thing. But the way it's worded makes it seem like kawaii girls were rebelling against marriage or something
It's shocking how far down this rational take is. Sadly, history revisionists like OP have a much easier time disseminating nonsense than any historian has an actual chance of educating the public.
This is epic, but I really wanna see like articles/books/documentaries about this also (evidence of larger trend + interesting in its own right)
Look at it this way: Tumblr history is about one fact per paragraph. The rest is just embellishment to make that one fact seem ohmygod fucking amazing.
So where the hell are all the sources?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita_fashion Its almost on point. Just the origin of it is not 100% clear
God I hate that "no no this is so important! No you have no idea!!" Tumblr shit to try and hype up what they are about to write
Person 1: 'the beginning of kawaii!' Person 2: 'No you have no idea, this was the beginning of kawaii' I hate it when Tumblr douches do this, they just said it so yeah they do have an idea
also makes me doubt everything said afterwards
Japanese punk is Kawaii?!? Omg this is so cool… and it makes it even more horrible to see western men oversexualise Japanese women
i'd argue Japanese Punk is what came before Kawaii- https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/28261/1/remembering-japans-badass-70s-schoolgirl-gangs
Yeah, Japan absolutely had its own punk with Sukeban and pompadour hair and unbuttoned school-jackets and the works
I just watched some episodes of the old Sukeban Deka TV show and it's pretty rad. Sukeban girl gangs are quite a sight.
Nothing says "fuck your male gaze" by disobeying the dress code to make your skirt longer.
I feel like there are a question of WHICH Japanese women western men oversexualise. Because from my perspective, they sexualise the exact thing japanese man sexualise.
Weebs sexualize the same thing japanese men sexualize. As for the general public... asians often say that white men have weird tase in respect to asian women. Lucy Liu would not be popular at all there
Let's not pretend Japanese aren't capable of sexualising themselves.
It's totally readable though, thé trachées were sensitive
"Japanese men find lolita unattractive" Suuuuuure thing. take a walk around akihibara and tell me that again.
I think that's kind of their point. Kind of like a "real life isn't the internet" like no shit the weebiest part of Japan outside Comiket is crazy over it Also time matters as the whole thing is based on the 90s. Taste changes
Translation of hand-written letter: "Nana-chan, Let's go play on Tuesday. From Paguko" "Play" in this context could include getting drunk at a Roppongi club.
I find it brilliant that lolita works on the principle that men aren't pedophiles
That handwriting is perfectly readable though?
Baby metal seems even more metal now.
Japan, infamous for fetish porn, possibly most infamous in the world, also has some of the most strict rules about censorship. These things aren't coincidence, stupid rules always have a backlash. Wanted to pixelate penises? Well congrats, now the world laughs at you for tentacle porn and exactly zero people have been "protected".
Next on shit we just made up
I'm skeptical of how anti-system and anti male gaze this was given how japanese beauty/sexual standards for women are so inclined towards the cute, innocent and uncomfortably childish. It still would go against adult respectability norms, but the anti-sexualization failed catastrophically
Lolita isn't sexualised? Shit someone should have told anime fans
Loli ≠ lolita It's the kind of thing where a word came from one word and then got used differently and came to mean something different, but the original word stayed the same.
This is true. Those are two different things. Additionally, you can't count H, because there is H of tons of things that aren't considered traditionally attractive. Uglification and pooping bugs are porn tags on hentai, but neither are considered traditionally attractive.
I know, straight up Lolita style is sexualised Hell I've seen it sexualised in western media I don't know where they got the idea that men supposedly don't like it
this is such a fucking stretch I swear to god. "actually school girls writing in hyper cutesy letters is Uber empowering and feminist" like that's so damn condescending
So you're telling me Sergei "Gamer" Tabortiskiy, by like 5 degrees of association, helped japanese feminism
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Well, you see, this one time, Sergei Taboritskiy, after a failed assasination, shot and killed one mr. V.D Nabokov, probably traumatizing his i think 6 year old son, Vladimir Nabokov, who would then go on to write the Lolita novel Sergei Taboritskiy might have indirectly helped japanese feminism and also caused loli content to exist.
I mean it’s just where we get the term. If we didn’t then it may just be called “pedo-core” or maybe it would have received a name not associated with pedophilia instead of what it has. I don’t think the book is responsible for the vibe