In the years that I have been coming to Japan the fascination of street fashions has remained compelling. Often I have thought about writing on this subject but where do you actually begin? The other night I went out to Shinjuku with Purple High Mountain and the specific ambition to capture images of the fabled Tokyo Trotter (more on that taxonomy later) but, very strangely, this normally abundant and highly visible trend set was hard to spot that night. However, in about three hours we managed to capture over 300 images without really trying, you just stand there and fire away, the herds of shoppers are packed with observable enigmas.
If you are in any way serious but understanding Japan then you have to come to some understanding of this role of fashion in Japanese society. Failing to consider what it is you are actually seeing leaves you hopelessly exposed as a voyeur. No doubt some who come to these pages will do so only for their own gratification and, in the grand scheme of things, I suppose this has a certain validity (after all the ladies here all dress to look good and be seen) but such intellectual shallows lack the oxygen required to provide real insight and understanding. Whether you are wading or swimming, I am sure that the images here will provoke a response. Please feel free to comment in the space below.
Starting at the beginning, we left from Mushashi Koyama and stopped briefly for some chicken at the Yakitori stand. This is fast food Japanese style, mountains of chicken pieces skewered on sticks and piled on trays containing a trough of sauce. The charcoal ovens and grills mass produce this treat from all the bits of the chicken, liver, skin, flesh, and everyone gets stuck in. 200 yen a stick, about £1.50, and before you know it you have eaten six of them. Once fed we left for the tube.
As you can see the ladies like to dress, perhaps this is the same everywhere but in Tokyo, as we progress on our journey we will begin to see a variety of styles and dress sense simply not found "anywhere".
Obesity is not something generally associated with the Japanese. The diet and the lifestyle do not lend themselves to pigging out on junk fast food in front of the TV. As we have associated slenderness with beauty in the west, through the corruptive influence of the catwalk industry, it is natural to see all around you women who fit into that false, plastic mould of beauty we have forged in our own culture.
Japan though is a world away from what we think and believe. Far too often I have heard and read "opinion" on the Japanese which is simply a complete pile of horse shit. One commentator recently said, "Well of course the Japanese have become American consumers in reality.". Now there was a man who was straining his brain cell to the limit. Being Japanese is non-negotiable and in the world of Tokyo fashion, whilst at first glance it may seem to be filled with compromise and contradiction, all you see is actually truly Japanese.
Thankfully Japanese people love the camera and they generally love being photographed. Indeed, on this particular safari we found that a couple of the ladies we snapped appeared to keep returning within our range. Now this may have been due to particular shopping requirements or maybe the person concerned had got lost but almost certainly in a few cases they were coming back for the camera.
The ladies above point out one of the fundamentals of understanding Japan; shopping is one of the two major sports (the other is eating). Shopping is not an occupation or a hobby but a devotion, a very serious part of the day/week/month and no matter your age, shopping is a pre-requisite of being defined as a Japanese woman. The preferred territory of the compulsive Japanese shopper is the department store and all around you are examples of what I call department store chic.
All of this is fairly obvious stuff and one could easily argue that none of what has been said is really culturally exceptional. Well we are going to have to scratch the surface a bit more if we are going to get beyond the lipstick and into the underwear of the issue. The two key points which could be addressed to open up the discussion would immediately start to cause unease in the western mind; schoolgirls and breasts. We should perhaps start with the least contentious of these two and that would be the subject of breasts.
As much as you wander around Tokyo you will find it hard to see European levels of cleavage displayed on the streets. This is not to say that are no sexual displays of breasts, for that is exactly what low cleavage dresses represent, because of course there are some Tokyo girls who go in for this type of fashion. However they are in the absolute and almost invisible minority.
We could listen to those who would argue that Japanese women are not generally physically possessed of breasts substantial enough to mount a decent display and that accounts for this fashion phenomenon. We could but let's not bother taking on board such a poor racist, sexist argument. This absence of something we see daily in the west is a cultural difference and relates to a conservative idea of female modesty.
The human female is the only member of the primate family which possesses constantly enlarged breasts in the adult form. Gorillas, Orang-utans, Chimpanzees etc., only have enlarged breasts when feeding young. The key difference between us and the other primates is that we are upright walking, we are the upright walking chimpanzee [Diamond 1992], and this physical position removes the buttocks from the line of sight of the eyes. In other primates the main sexual sign/stimulus/response mechanism relies on the buttocks which, when walking on all fours, are in the line of sight. Thus the view of female breasts acts directly on the sexual consciousness of the male keying into the formation of a "false buttocks" shape and reaching right down into the evolved cortex to activate ancient behavioural responses. Any woman with a healthy cleavage and a low cut dress will confirm this in ways an academic could only dream about!
So if the presence of cleavage is actually part of the sexual heritage of the human animal then the absence of its general display in Japanese society would appear to be a cultural issue. This is the issue of female modesty but also one of taste; open displays of breasts are basically perceived to be a vulgarity in the Japanese consciousness. In our western societies we may perhaps infer that this is an example of sexual prudishness but, I would contend, there is little that is prudish about the Japanese approach to sexuality. Indeed, any such attempt to label them as such would really be an example of cross cultural misunderstanding. Only in the west do we possess the ability to be a prude, it is after all a quality expressing the eternal compromise between the reality of life and the ridiculous moral incarceration of monotheistic mythologies (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).
We should be looking at this whole issue from a very different perspective than western thinking, we should be looking at this issue from the position of Japanese thinking. To do this we also then need to consider the schoolgirl look. Before I left for Tokyo on this trip I was talking to one of the guys who was doing our building work back in the UK. His name was Paul, a nice, decent guy, the sort you wouldn't mind your daughter marrying (if you had a daughter that is). I made mention of the schoolgirls in Tokyo and as I did so I realised that Paul could easily interpret this as me being some sort of pervert with a schoolgirl fetish. That is the western moral position in a nutshell with regard to the word schoolgirl and all that surrounds it.
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Anyone who has spent any time in Tokyo cannot have missed the influence of the schoolgirl fashion model on society. My own niece here is about to go up into her secondary school and her main pre-occupation with the choice before her is the uniform on offer at the various schools. This primary concern with fashion is connected to ideas of being smart and presentable at all times. In Japan cleanliness and hygiene are pre-eminent virtues and the extension in terms of fashion is to be cleanly and smartly dressed.
Even if you are a social rebel your uniform of dissent is never grubby or worn, even in the department stores you will find the designer clothes for those who want to be different! One key incident that formed my opinions on this subject was an encounter with the East Tokyo Motorcycle Club. This happened at a service station on a motorway heading out towards Nagano a few years back. For over an hour on the road out of Tokyo a constant stream of chopped motor bikes passed us with riders sporting the cut down denim jacket and the MC style logo on the back for East Tokyo. There were hundreds of them on the road that day (when the Japanese join a club they always do so in numbers!).
Later at the service station I had the chance to look at them close up. What struck me was how clean and tidy they all were, the concept of a motorcycle "greaser" was a million miles away from where these guys were coming from. As one of their number gilded slowly into the parking area on a mightily chopped and mean machine, what glinted more than the sparkling chrome of the engine housing was lightning flashes of reflected sunlight coming off of his Gucci sunglasses. I just knew in that moment that there was a department store section entitled "Motorcycle Club Fashion: You Being Two Wheels.". Even when the Japanese rebel they do it fashionably, after all, no-one wants to be anti-social!
But when individuality is something you buy off the peg in the department store then being able to create your own look takes a certain creative skill. In many ways this is what I see in Tokyo street fashion. Many times I look at the girls and think, "What the hell was she thinking when she put that lot together?" but then when you consider that this fashion conscious society provides few outlets for individual expression, suddenly the world of the Tokyo streets opens up in another interpretation for you. These girls are very much saying "This is me!". But even when they do there still remains that primal template of the schoolgirl (as seen above).
Large breasts on display is not the dominant sexuality motif of Japanese society, the schoolgirl takes that place. At every convenience store you will see men standing at the comic magazine stand reading the animi soft porn. They read it in the shops before purchase, they read it on the subway trains and they keep it in their briefcases. At each stand there are covers displaying drawings of schoolgirls in various states of disarray. This is normal behaviour in Japan, try sitting on a tube train in London with such material and you stand a good chance of being lynched. That is a cultural difference. That is what happens when a dominant metaphor in one cultural mythology has a different meaning in another cultural mythology.
In our culture, with all of its current politically correct health and safety madness, the mention of the word schoolgirl is enough to cast grave doubts about your character if not actually be a criminal offence. In Japanese culture the schoolgirl look is a symbol of youth, purity and emerging sexuality and recognised as such without having to then suffer with some sort of socially collective chest beating anguish or guilt. Fundamentally the reason for this difference is our shackles to that old moral dungeon master, monotheistic mythology. We were thrown out of Eden by our vengeful God, cast into a separation from the divine, set apart from nature and all because of women and sex (remember ladies that the monotheistic myth is a male myth with a male god and therefore definitely sexist). In that myth structure we are at odds with the world and nature and our role is to pacify the natural world and deny our natural instincts. We are all to become men of god, even the women too.
You may say that you are not a Jew, a Christian or Islamic (all of which worship exactly the same God but kill each other for not worshipping that God in exactly the same way: insanity) but within that western psyche the worm has buried itself deep within the apple. Even the avid atheist in the western world is riddled with malicious monotheistic viral code effecting their behaviour.
In oriental mythology there never was a separation of the human from creation. In this mythology we are all part of everything and everything is part of us. Sexual guilt is not on the moral agenda, in fact guilt itself is something that is a very confusing emotional phenomena for those who have no sin on their souls and do not have to make account of that sin before the vengeful god on the day of reckoning. Relieved of this heavy baggage, but still with some culturally specific bags of their own, the Japanese do not see a problem in the "Alice in Wonderland" fashion statement. Yes, women in their twenties actually wear this style and a lot more we would find odd in the west. But we are not in the west are we.
Looking at anything from a cross cultural position should teach you two main lessons. The first is always about who you are and what you think. Until you can work out why it is you see the world in the way you do you have absolutely no chance of really understanding another culture. Until you have a depth perspective on how it is you construct your own opinions all you will ever do is project those opinions on other people in other places and other times. The second lesson is obvious once you have learnt the first.
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