Introduction
She is the queen of cool. She’s a cold-hearted killer. She’s a popstar, an angel, a saviour. She makes men weak at the knees, and makes women nostalgic. She gives children hope. She’s a heroine for gamers, a muse for artists, and an inspiration to her peers. The power of her purse makes businesses drool, while marketers scramble for her opinion. She’s a trendsetting trail-blazer, and a glimpse of her country’s future. She’s a symbol of feminine mystique. She is the Japanese schoolgirl.
Schoolgirls, of course, are hardly unique to Japan. But I would be hard pressed to find someone here who disagrees with the manga editor who told me that Japanese schoolgirls make “an impact” on society—an impact that, I believe, is more profound and influential than that of school kids anywhere else on the globe. The question is why.
It’s something I’ve been asking myself since I first started covering Japanese schoolgirls for Wired magazine back in 2003. It was my first paid writing gig, and because of it I had to read their glossy magazines, consume their culture, and pick their brains in the hope of tracking the latest craze. Schoolgirls got my foot in the door of a writing career, and for that I will forever be in their debt.
Yet whenever I revealed that I was doing a book about them, people reacted with raised eyebrows and coy assumptions that were clearly a carryover of stereotype and fantasy. I wasn’t completely surprised. Japanese schoolgirls aren’t only cool, they’re objects of fetish. The Japanese Google site pulls up over 20 million results for joshi kosei (high school girl), and the English version is not far behind. Of course, this being the internet, a large chunk of those results are for pornography—which is an extreme manifestation of the power she wields over people. But getting mired in the fetish quagmire is to miss the bigger picture: the appeal of the Japanese schoolgirl is rooted in various emotional and sentimental elements of the nation’s psyche.
For Japanese women, the appeal of schoolgirls is that they are in the prime of their lives, unfettered by work, marriage, and children. They are young and relatively free. For men, the appeal is the memory of a first crush, of sitting in a classroom surrounded by girls in skirts and sailor outfits. But the attraction isn’t drawn across gender lines. Japanese schoolgirls, clearly recognizable in their uniforms, exist in an adolescent netherworld. They are not adults, and they are not children. Kids can look up to them, and grownups can look back at them as the last hurrah before entering adulthood.
The reach of the Japanese schoolgirl’s power now stretches far beyond the domestic border. It’s not enough that they are used today to advertise everything in Japan from bicycles and yogurt to (of course) mobile phones. The diffusion of Japanese pop culture across the globe—the notion of soft power epitomized in the brand of “Cool Japan”—found its most powerful icon in the images of uniformed schoolgirls in such fare as Sailor Moon, Blood: The Last Vampire, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Western arbiters of cool have caught on too, as Japanese schoolgirls have been prominently featured in such high-profile films as Kill Bill and Babel. In fact, in a bid to ride the wave of her popularity, the Japanese government named a schoolgirl as a cultural ambassador to the world in 2008.
As I watched her power expand overseas, the question of why continued to nag me. The bid to answer it led me from the city streets of Tokyo’s Shibuya shopping district to the rural countryside of Okayama prefecture. I interviewed some of Japan’s biggest celebrities, most knowledgeable experts, and famous creators. I also talked to countless schoolgirls, on their way home, out shopping with friends, having fun. My collaborator and wife—herself, of course, once a schoolgirl—proved an invaluable source of insight into her own experience and the minutia of being a young woman in Japan.
And in the process of making this book, the obvious struck me. In asking about the impact of Japanese schoolgirls, I was actually asking about the power of all Japanese women—who either are, will be, or have been schoolgirls. And in thinking about modern Japan, it is only natural to think about this majority of the population and its makeup. The Japanese schoolgirl is both gruff samurai, strong and powerful, and demure geisha, beautiful and coquettish. Decked out in her Western-influenced uniform, she brings these elements together into a state of great flexibility—the ability to be strong or passive, Japanese or Western, adult or child, masculine or feminine. At home and abroad, she is a metaphor for Japan itself.
This is not fiction. The schoolgirl of the popular imagination and the cultural zeitgeist are informed and influenced by the real. Within real Japanese schoolgirls is a curiosity that drives their search for new stuff, the clear conundrum of yearning for both independence and acceptance, and always, of course, the subconscious awareness of just how ephemeral their time in uniform is.
Even with all the uncertainty of what will become of current school-girls after high school and what future fads and trends ensuing epochs will bring, one thing is dead certain.
They wield a mean bunch of cool.
Brian Ashcraft
Osaka, Japan
Note: The Japanese names in this book appear in the Western order, given name followed by surname. Japanese words have been written in the manner they most often appear in romanized text.
If clothes make the man, uniforms make the schoolgirl. Whether it’s those sailor suits with big red ribbons, blue blazers with striped neckties, or short plaid skirts and loose socks, the Japanese schoolgirl uniform is more than a wearable ID. It’s a statement. With roughly 95 percent of high schools in Japan requiring them, wearing uniforms (seifuku) is not simply the norm, but a rite of passage, representing that carefree period in a woman’s life when she makes the transition from child to adult.
It wasn’t always this way. At the Tombow Uniform Museum in Okayama, costumed mannequins are displayed in a timeline revealing the evolution of uniforms. The museum is Japan’s only academic garb repository and sits catty-corner to Tombow’s school uniform factory, where threads are fabricated for students across the country. Okayama is the uniform capital of Japan, and if you’re wearing a Japanese school uniform right now, there’s a seven out of ten chance it’s from there.
The groundwork for mandated clothing in Japan was laid in the seventh and eighth centuries, when Korean- and Chinese-influenced imperial decrees compelled the classes to wear certain types of clothes. During the Heian Period (794–1185 ad), idle aristocrats were obsessed with seemingly trivial wardrobe matters like wearing the correct colored sleeves. When your days aren’t spent toiling in a rice paddy, even the most minor fashion detail is important!
By the Edo Period (1600–1868), regular kids could study calligraphy, poetry, and Buddhism at their local temples. In a glass case at the Tombow museum, two smiling life-sized dolls are dressed in their regal study kimonos: one sits on the floor, and the other stands, grinning ear-to-ear. These “study clothes” were threads donned for learning, but not strictly enforced or even uniform per se. For something to truly be a “uniform” it needs to be exactly the same, and that wouldn’t happen to Japanese school clothes until the late nineteenth century.
Hello sailor!
FOLLOWING THE OPENING OF JAPAN in 1853
