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What's Behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms?
Abstract
In the mid-1990s a new high school girl subculture emerged in Japan. It was characterised by an extraordinarily close interraction with the mass media and with intellectuals. High school girl subculture, popularly referred to as kogal fashion or style took a rather camp and self-conscious delight in the idea of being photographed: polaroid art, print club stickers (purikura), and other modes of self-framing in highly stylized and camp poses in photo media, became a core aspect of kogal culture. Kogal culture started with media interest in the (albeit constructed) scandal of high school girls' engaged in amateur prostitution or enjo kôsai. Images of deviant high school girls in customized school uniforms, worn with loose socks and rolled-up skirts, flooded into the news-media. This article attempts to unravel some of the meanings of the school uniform fetish and fashion in contemporary Japan by means of tracing the political memories represented by military-style school uniforms and their complicated subjectivity in street postwar fashion.
... In this respect, the bedroom is reminiscent of certain kawaii formulations, or the particular brand of commodified Japanese 'cuteness' (e.g. Kinsella 1995Kinsella , 2002Allison 2003Allison , 2006Akita 2005). Studies of kawaii in Japan and elsewhere have argued that the practice allows women to subvert traditional expectations of adulthood, particularly those involving adherence to strict gender norms. ...
... In this respect, the bedroom is reminiscent of certain kawaii formulations, or the particular brand of commodified Japanese 'cuteness' (e.g. Kinsella 1995Kinsella , 2002Allison 2003Allison , 2006Akita 2005). Studies of kawaii in Japan and elsewhere have argued that the practice allows women to subvert traditional expectations of adulthood, particularly those involving adherence to strict gender norms. ...
The dramatic reconfiguration of the social, political, and ideological order in South Africa since 1990/1994 has demanded a concomitant reconceptualization of (white) Afrikaner notions of self and belonging in the (new) nation. In this article, we draw on recent developments in the study of varidirectional voicing (polyphony), performance, and mediatization to examine how the South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord makes use of parody and metaparody in their music to critique emerging ‘new Afrikaner’ identities and the racial, class, and gender configurations on which they are based. We also discuss the structural limits of these critiques and the political potential of (meta)parodic performance more generally. ((Meta)parody, polyphony, performance, race, class, gender, South Africa)*
... What is interesting is that the children at Komatsudani preschool, like shown in the picture, wear their own clothes to school, whereas those at Madoka preschool wear their school uniforms, and change out of their uniform at the entrance of the school building into a T-shirt, shorts and a cap. Japanese uniform seems to be pervaded worldwide as a token for Japanese culture (Kinsella, 2002). Madoka preschool, as a middle-class private school located at the capital, perfectly conforms to this stereotyped Japanese culture. ...
... Mitos juga dapat disebut dengan hubungan antara penanda dan petanda yang menghasilkan tanda pada sistem semiologis tingkat kedua.Mitos sendiri terbentuk dari makna tersembunyi yang secara sadar disepakti masyarakat. Semiotika Barthes dapat digambarkan pada tabel berikut.Beberapa penelitian yang berhubungan dengan pakaian khususnya seragam sekolah Jepang pernah dikaji olehKinsella (2015) dengan judul What's Behind The Fetishism Of Japanese School Uniforms?. Dalam penelitiannya, dia mengungkapkan bahwa seragam sekolah model militer telah menjadi salah satu ikon budaya Jepang modern sebagaimana seperti blue jeans di Amerika. Selain itu merepresentasikan sebuah mediasi perbedaan yang kuat antara 'tradisional-pakaian Jepang' atau pakaian 'Barat'. ...
The symbols on junior high school uniforms in Japan have different meanings. The purpose of this study is to describe the meaning of semiotics (denotative, connotative, and myth) in junior high school uniforms in Japan using Roland Barthes' semiotic theory. This research is a qualitative descriptive study research with literature study data collection techniques. The results of the analysis show six symbols whose meanings can be known, namely the school uniform was not only clothes worn by certain groups, but there are several semiotic meanings contained in parts of the school uniform. In addition, school coats are required to be in a dark color, which is a tradition in Japan where students are prohibited from wearing brightly colored coats. They wear a suit collar with a standard collar shape which is the best collar to use in any occasion, the symbol in the middle of the coat buttons means an identifier of the origin of the uniform, the coat pocket is decorative and is used to place an item. Then the purpose of using ties is for the student to be more confident and learn to dress neatly, white school shirts like school shirts in general symbolize cleanliness and innocence which makes students look formal when attending school, and school skirts that cover part or all of their legs part to show the feminist side of female students.
... Aside from the use of national symbols like rituals, celebrations, institutions, flags and anthems (but see also Befu 2002 on the complexities in the use of such symbols), more specific examples of this kind of symbolic or actual materiality of the nation in Japanese society include the existence of the Emperor and the imperial household, prevalence of uniforms enforcing a perception of homogeneity and expectations of conformity (cf. McVeigh 2000;Kinsella 2002), practices of furusatozukuri in creating idealised shared roots (Robertson 1998;Scheiner 1998), and so on. But as Billig (1995) demonstrates, much of national identity-building is instantiated through regular patterns of practices, even through how people refer to themselves. ...
Kokutai (national polity) was notoriously the ideological organising principle of imperial Japanese society in the early twentieth century, but the end of WWII saw it replaced by a more nation-oriented view of the relationship between the state and the people. This change led to an interpretation of the nation that prioritises ethnic nationalism, although its key text, the Postwar Constitution seems to invite a more civic interpretation. This paper argues that the change and this inconsistency should be analysed in terms of two modern myths – the myth of kokutai and the myth of homogeneous ethnos. The key to the influence of these myths lies in their symbolic representation in the 1889 Meiji and 1947 Postwar Constitutions, and how their historically contingent interpretation formalised relations between the people and the state. These interpretations produced contesting narrative articulations of the myths, among which first statist and later ethnic nationalist narratives emerged dominant, but in both cases remained in tension with other narratives.
... At the same time, has found that feelings of empathy towards cute things easily turn to violence and aggression towards the cute both of which intermix in eromanga (Cather 2017 Bardsley 2010) about cuteness and the way it mediates relations of power via a combination of symbolic meanings of weakness, submissiveness and humility that intertwine with influence, domination and control (McVeigh 2014, p. 170). Teenage girls in school uniform are a long-fetishized object in Japan (see Kinsella 2002) and present an overall picture of the sexualization of girls as natural. ...
This paper investigates how young Japanese women in contemporary Soka Gakkai (SG) navigate Japan’s continuous gender stratified society that remains culturally rooted in the ‘salaryman-housewife’ ideology. How are young SG members reproducing or contesting these hegemonic gender norms that few seek to emulate? While SG has long proclaimed that it stands for gender equality, its employment structure and organization in Japan until recently reflected the typical male breadwinner ideology that came to underpin the post-war Japanese nation-state and systemic gender division of labor. As shown here, this did not mean that SG women were without power; in fact, in many ways they drove organizational developments in the Japanese context. The recent imposition of the global framework for Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 has enabled SG to more substantially challenge its own patriarchal public front. Based on long-term fieldwork, in-depth interviews and multiple group discussions with SG members in their 20s, this article explores how SG-Japan is being challenged to follow its own discourse of ‘globalism’ and ‘Buddhist humanism’, promoted by Daisaku Ikeda since the 1990s. Using Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic power, the research shows how Japan’s powerful doxa of ‘genderism’ that held sway over earlier generations is currently being challenged by a glocalized Buddhist discourse that identifies Nichiren Buddhism as ‘humanism’ rather than Japanese ‘genderism’.
... En distintos artículos académicos, investigadores no japoneses han abordado la sexualización de la mujer y la niña representadas en los medios de este país, especialmente el manga, pero han evitado discutir las características estilísticas y semiológicas de la tradición visual nipona desde una perspectiva histórica (Allison, 1993;Kinsella, 1995;2002;Cooper-Chen, 2001;McLelland, 2006). Esto es muy importante porque, tal como Schodt (1983) y Downs (1990) han señalado, existen diversas diferencias legales y culturales entre la representación sexual que se realiza en Japón y en los demás países del mundo. ...
Resumen: Se revisan los elementos gráficos que Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989), uno de los dibujantes de historietas japonesas más famosos de todos los tiempos, utilizó para representar de manera sexual a los personajes femeninos que aparecen en sus obras, sobre todo aquellas publicadas en la década de 1960. Se retoman algunos estudios que lectores de Japón y del extranjero han hecho sobre el trabajo del artista desde la publicación de "Shin Takarajima" (La nueva isla del tesoro) en 1947. Se hace énfasis en los libros del crítico estadounidense Frederik L. Schodt, quien ha publicitado y popularizado en el mundo angloparlante la obra del llamado Dios del manga. Finalmente, se describe cómo Tezuka se convirtió en el pionero en la sexualización de niñas y adolescentes representadas en el manga japonés.
... Sexualised figures are not uncommon in videogames, and this type of schoolgirl image is very common in Japanese anime and manga. 22 But the particular focus on the female body in Kantai Collection is distinctive, with the attributes of the Japanese warships directly reflected in the physical characteristics of the women on the cards. Where smaller ships like destroyers and aircraft carriers are represented by younger, girlish figures, a large warship with high tonnage such as a battleship will be represented by a mature, full-bodied woman. ...
Kantai Collection is a media-mix phenomenon that began as an online videogame, in which Japanese Imperial warships are anthropomorphised as highly sexualised women. This chapter examines the videogame, manga and anime as part of a popular politicisation of World War Two by Japanese artists, also seen in blockbuster revisionist films. Kantai Collection depends on a masculinist construction of history employing women’s bodies for ideological ends, deeply indebted to pre-war kokutai philosophies. The hyper-sexualisation of women in Kantai Collection exoticises war as distant and unreal, in a context of controversial war memories in Japan vis-à-vis the Asian mainland.
... The 1960s counterculture movement mocked the uniform creating anti-war fashion. Finally, not limited to the United States, Kinsella (2002) argues that modernism, militarism, and the uniform are inextricably linked in Japanese cultureespecially among youth to include schoolgirls. And likewise, Playboy magazine centerfolds curiously forged toughness through wearing of masculine clothing such as combat boots (Began and Allison 2005). ...
This chapter consolidates just over 100 books and journal articles at the intersection of the military and popular culture in the social science and humanities studies literature. All studies are English language publications and focus on popular culture and the military in the United States and the United Kingdom. The studies coalesce around 18 distinctive topics known as genres in the popular culture literature. The genres include literature/books, films, television, mass media, music, video games, board games, fashion, photography, and sports. Eight emerging genres include food, technology, graffiti, scandals, social media, toys, celebrities, and comics. Most studies are published in the journal Armed Forces & Society followed by the Journal of Popular Culture; Critical Military Studies; and Media, War & Conflict, among other journals, books, and edited volumes. Qualitative methods and films dominate the popular military culture studies. Popular military culture is a burgeoning subdiscipline.
... In the porn industry, the term "uniform fetishism" is known, namely sexual pleasure that is obtained because of the stimulation of couples wearing certain uniforms, the most popular ones used are medical fetish, military costume, school uniform, and also French maid style. [14], [15] News photos and videos made by detik.com also highlighted certain body parts of store employees wearing French maid costumes. ...
... Ok In a previous quote, this same group of male ex-cadets had acknowledged the role of khaki as a technology of governance that 'increases the mastery of each individual over his own body' (Foucault [1977] 1995, 137). The 'symbolic weight' (Kinsella 2002) attached to the police uniform compelled them to avoid behaviors they exhibited as 'ordinary' students such as, for instance, loitering by the roadside during lunch break or after school, to transform themselves into disciplined police cadets. It was, however, the practice of standing on traffic duty alongside police officers and being engaged in real-life policing that made them feel that they are learning 'what SPC actually is.' ...
Drawing on data from an ethnography of the school-based Student Police Cadet (SPC) program in Kerala, India, this paper examines the ways in which female high school student-cadets mobilized SPC's uniform in their performance of citizenship education. Unlike their gendered school uniforms, SPC's gender-neutral ‘khaki’ uniform signified a program that treats girls and boys ‘equally.’ Further, SPC uniform's resemblance to the Kerala police uniform enabled female cadets to momentarily disrupt gender regimes and lay claim to specific forms of aspirational, spatial, and sartorial freedoms. These freedoms, however, are premised on the masculine authority of the police uniform and its associated protections. Thus, while the promise of female empowerment is pivotal to SPC curriculum, the conditional nature of freedom in khaki underscores the ambivalent nature of those curricular promises. The paper concludes by examining the implications of freedom bequeathed through masculine forms of protection for girls’ participation in society.
... Their military-inspired school uniforms reflect the interrelationships between citizen-making, education and military training in the Meiji era. 74 Originally designed as a junior version of the late nineteenth-century Japanese army uniform -itself influenced by French and Prussian army uniforms-these school uniforms were adopted in many schools from 1879. 75 The overexposure at the top right of Foy's photograph creates the impression that these schoolboys are moving en masse towards the camera from outside its frame. ...
This article focuses on the important symbolic role of photographs of children in the context of developing diplomatic and trade relationships between Australia and Japan between the 1880s and 1920s. A fascinating series of studio, commercial and tourist photographs are examined, including commemorative postcards marking the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and hand-coloured lantern slides produced commercially in Japan. Building on political and military studies of Australian–Japanese relations, it explores the ways that Australian–Japanese relationships were mediated and reproduced through photography practices operating across private and public domains. In these photographs, children feature simultaneously as the face of Japan and an interface for political and cultural interpretation. As photographs of children helped to reinforce conflicting conceptions of Japan as a children’s paradise, a budding military power and an industrial threat, they offer insight into Australian anxieties about what modernity meant for the two Asia-Pacific nations.
... Sharon Kinsella points out how female high school uniforms in particular gained fashion status in the mid-1990s and became central in the so-called kogyaru (high school girl) 'boom'. Media interest in kogyaru, high school girls, included attention to the alleged involvement in new forms of amateur prostitution by high school girls, referred to as enjo kôsai (compensated dating), in which the school uniform came to play a significant visual role in discourses of female sexuality (Kinsella 2002). While the identical faces in Sawada's photos appear as a consequence of the repetition of the model (the artist herself), the use of a generic high school uniform points to the use of uniforms in society in general as a way of homogenizing particular social groups and making visible their social function in the public sphere. ...
Under the headline of 'Japan Cool', popular culture from Japan has gained a significant role in the global market within the last decade. One of the concepts related to 'Japan Cool' is kawaii, meaning cute and sweet, both as a style and a lifestyle. Kawaii can be seen as visual trademarks in fashion, manga, animé, and many other parts of popular culture, as well as in visual arts by neo-pop artists such as Murakami Takashi and his associates. However, kawaii as a critical concept, has been flourishing in Japan since the 1980s, and has been the topic of sociological research that stresses the subversive and critical dimensions of the word. This article investigates how artworks can offer an ethnographic account of kawaii as a sign of ambiguity and thus signify important social currents in Japanese youth culture in the decade before 'soft power' became the agenda for official Japan.
... Nevertheless, as scholars have argued, shojo are often considered as asexually 'pure', comparatively autonomous beings though this does not necessarily mean shojo are immune from either eroticization or the objectifying (male) gaze. But often it is the contrary that is suggested (see, for example, Kinsella 2002). Alice is indeed sometimes associated with a 'Lolita complex' (rorikon) and pornographic products in Japanese culture. ...
There is a certain curiosity inscribed to the character Alice of Lewis Carroll's famous children's books. Perhaps reflecting the ‘enigmatic’ sexuality of the author, Alice herself has been perceived and interpreted in a dualistic way, namely as an innocent child and as a self-assertively sexualized ‘Lolita’. However, Alice can also be perceived as an emotionally flat yet autonomous character. My article explores this reading of the heroine, which is notable in the context of Japanese culture. In aspects of contemporary Japanese popular culture, for instance, the idea of ‘Alice’ embodies the idealised image of the ‘shojo’ (girl), who is situated between child and adult and is largely detached from the heterosexual economy. Paying particular attention to a group of music videos in which female Japanese pop singers offer their own versions of Carroll's heroine, I examine significant meanings that lie in Japanese appropriations of the imagery of Alice. The importance of their performances as Alice is highlighted by the tendency in which the aesthetic concept of kawaii (cuteness), particularly when it is mingled with sweet, girlish, and ‘infantile’ qualities, is deemed as unfavourable and demeaning in Euro-American cultures. Do their performances of Alice demonstrate a compatibility between girlish aesthetics and senses of agency and autonomy? Can their emphasis on sweetness, demureness, and femininity without hinting at sexual allure or seeking the male gaze serve to repudiate the stereotyped representation of femininity as passive, compliant, and powerless and prevent the sexual objectification of women?
Based on ethnographic work performed in Chengdu, China, this article presents a decolonial analysis of Chinese Lolita dressing, criticising the unjustified accusations of catering to paedophilia and escapism. Lolita dressing is a clothing style originating from the Gothic clothing style of rebellious rock music singers in 1990s Japan. Some fashion studies and the mass media tend to place Lolita dressing in the context of a counter-public subculture narrative. However, such a framework is biased due to its Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism appears as origin-centrism in forming two unjustified accusations. The accusation of catering to paedophilia is formed based on its Euro-American etymological origin. The word ‘Lolita’ is inextricably associated with paedophilia in Western culture, which leads the general public, and mass media in particular, immediately to the discussion of Lolita dressing as being an abnormality. The accusation of escapism is based on its Japanese subcultural origin. Japanese Lolita dressing is an intentional refusal of the mainstream expectation of being an adult woman. This directs the discussion of Lolita dressing to youthful escapism from a disappointing reality. These two presumptions are problematic in Chinese Lolita dressing practices. Chinese Lolita dressing practitioners tend to integrate Lolita dresses into their ordinary life instead of using Lolita dresses as a medium to build an imagined identity. For Chinese Lolita dressing practitioners, Lolita dresses are neither abnormal nor counter-public. In short, Chinese Lolita dressing should be positioned as a fashionable clothing category among diverse clothing practices instead of as a subculture or an example of a counter-public rebellion.
Despite recent noticeable changes in women’s educational opportunities in developing countries such as Iran, there is still much controversy surrounding the common assumption that a direct relationship exists between women’s empowerment and formal literacy. According to the social semiotic method, the present research explores the hidden side of the female educational experience and its relationship with empowerment. In the current study, we conducted 39 interviews and analyzed the collected data using Van Leeuwen’s semiotic approach. The results are based on the analysis of three semiotic sources, all of which are ubiquitous in the daily life of Iranian students: uniforms, queues, and homework. The findings indicate that the emphasis on the ideological aspects of educational experiences, in the form of a ritualistic approach by the educational system’s agents, causes a gradual semantic break between students and educational goals. Such an emphasis also instills an ambiguous and contradictory understanding in the student’s mind, of which the final result is the alienation and internalization of passive patterns of social action.
This article presents a close reading of two costume designs from Takahashi Rumiko’s Inuyasha series (manga 1996–2008), and details the methods used to create a pair of cosplay costumes. It will explore how character designs are imbued with identity and narrative foreshadowing. Throughout this article, reference will be made to fan scholarship in addition to more academic sources. As Matt Hills points out with his model of the ‘scholar-fan’, fans are often conducting research and work that academics have yet to address, and this is often the case with anime fandom. Further, my work on cosplay treats fan-constructed costumes as an act of fan translation akin to other activities such as ‘scanlations’, that is scanned translations of manga, comics or graphic novels.
As a significant part of childhood material culture, children's clothes contribute to shaping their social identity and gender, as well as to developing and supporting their interactions with their environment related to their age. The focus on children's education and well-being is essential. Their voices should be emphasised in the interest of promoting an inclusive future in both research on children's material culture and in practice. However, despite the daily nature of children's interaction with clothing, their relationship with clothes is ignored and methods to support an analysis of it are lacking. An investigation of children's clothing behaviour is needed to better understand children's agency, to influence industry experts and to encourage policymakers to engage more sustainably with children's fashion. IN2FROCC (Interdisciplinary and International Network for Research on Children and Clothing) is comprised of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, ethnologists, museum curators, childhood practitioners, designers, industry representatives and children united in an investigation into children's clothes around the globe, historically and in social ecosystems. This network seeks to engage in an innovative, inclusive and organic manner with current research on children's dress codes, fashion and clothes to establish a deeper understanding of children's clothing interactions. This chapter will present the initial reflections and actions of this network, creating impactful methods for participative children's clothing culture and design.
Manga is the backbone of Japanese popular culture, influencing everything from television, movies, and video games to novels, art, and theater. Shōjo manga (girls' comics) has been seminal to the genre as a whole and especially formative for Japanese girls' culture throughout the postwar era. This book examines the shōjo manga industry as a site of cultural storytelling, illuminating the ways that issues of mass media, gender, production, and consumption are involved in the process of creating shōjo manga. With their glittery pastel covers and focus on human relationships and romance, shōjo manga are thoroughly marked by gender—as indeed are almost all manga titles, magazines, and publishing divisions. The book analyzesshōjo manga texts and their magazine contexts to explain their distinctive appeal, probe the gendered dynamics inherent in their creation, and demonstrate the feedback system that links producers and consumers in a continuous cycle of “affective labor.” Each chapter focuses on one facet of shōjo manga production, providing engaging insights into this popular medium. Tacking between story development, interactive magazine features, and relationships between male editors and female artists, the book examines the concrete ways in which shōjo manga reflect, refract, and fabricate constructions of gender, consumption, and intimacy. The book thus weaves together issues of production and consumption, human relations, and gender to explain the unique world of shōjo manga and to interpret its dramatic cultural and economic success on a national—and increasingly global—scale.
The aim of this article is to examine shifts of meaning of the visual material in a piece of art called Pippi Examples (2001). The Swedish artist Palle Torsson uses parts of the Pippi Långstrump motion picture for this video work, which has been accused of "making porn of Pippi". It is when the visual material is moved from its original context of children'scultureand placed in a context ofart, that the perception of the viewers' position changes. Four pictures from Pippi Examples are examined through a semiotic method. These pictures are related in different ways to signs of sexualisation used in visual pornographic material. The girls in the material are exposed in a sexualised way, related to two frames of interpretation. The first one is the references in the pictures to a pornographic visual tradition. The second important frame of interpretation is the concept of the male gaze, in the article also referred to as the male viewer's position. This position is structured through the historical meaning of children's sexuality, cultural boundaries for girls' physical use of their body and the sexualised gaze of male adults. The theoretical ground for the article is Laura Mulvey^ essay on the male gaze and Michel Foucaulfs work on the history of sexuality. In the final part of the article the gender of the artist is discussed as a vital part of Pippi Examples. The artisfs male gender both confirms the sexual content of the visual material and tums the interest to his person rather than to the art. This can be seen as a new situation for the male artist that historically has had a position related neither to sexuality nor gender.
In this undergraduate dissertation, I explored the trend of 'vtubers' or 'virtual YouTubers' in Japan, analysing the factors leading to the trend's success within the context of past attempts to popularise 'virtual idols' in Japan.
Japan has recently seen an upsurge in idol ikusei (nurturing) games: networked mobile games where one nurtures and produces an idol pop group. These games are a significant part of Japan’s contemporary ‘media mix’, influenced both by virtual pet games and by discourses of nurturing surrounding the production of ‘real’ girl idol groups by male producer-auteur figures. Previous analyses have considered affection for simulated or virtual girl idol figures as a detached longing for stylised characteristics ( moe). This article uses a case study of a mobile game at the centre of the Love Live! girl idol-nurturing simulation franchise to suggest that we cannot only speak of players’ affection for nurturing games’ characters in terms of postmodern disembodiment; we must also consider how in playing idol-nurturing games, players take the place of real male producer-auteur figures in Japanese popular music production, where discourses of gendered nurturing abound.
In the last decade, discourses of non-conforming masculinities have become increasingly prominent in Japanese mass media. In particular, the so-called “herbivore men” have been made infamous by Japanese newspapers and were accused of being responsible for sinking birth rates and economic stagnation in Japan (Schad-Seifert 2016). In this article, I explore the discourse on the “herbivore men” in Japanese love advice books which are meant to guide and inform the (female) reader’s assessment of potential romantic partners. Utilising Siegfried Jäger’s methodological approach (2015), this discursive analysis focuses on the line of discourse that implicitly criticises the “herbivore men” and rejects their turn away from hegemonic images of masculinity. The analysis yields that the “herbivore man” is constructed as an ‘unnatural’ form of masculinity in these publications, which allegedly causes women to become sexually active and career-driven “carnivores.” Japanese women’s empowerment from hegemonic gender ideals is thereby misrepresented as a symptom of psychological distress due to changing masculinities. By perpetuating ideas of biological determinism linked to the backlash against the “gender-free” movement in the early 2000s, this line of discourse propagates problematic relations of gender and power in Japanese society.
The image of shōjo is largely conveyed through visual cues of dress, gesture, and appearance. With the exception of the now well-documented Japanese Lolita fashion, however, theoretical analysis of the association between shōjo and dress is still a rarity. Paying particular attention to fashion brand Milk, and romantic ballerinas and Victorian girls as underlying inspirations, this chapter aims to uncover significant meanings behind shōjo fashion. It contends that fashion aesthetic is crucially intertwined with the process of crafting and sustaining the image of shōjo, and further that this aesthetic subverts the stereotypical equation of girlish (shōjo) femininity with derogatory sexualization, values denounced as passive and unfavorable in many Euro-American societies. The shōjo fashion aesthetic, this chapter argues, inverts these negative associations into positive and empowering ones.
This essay explores the violence and viability of kawaii, a Japanese “cute” aesthetic, for theorizing Asian American feminism. Critics point out kawaii’s embeddedness in visual commodity culture and global racial capitalism, denouncing the multivalent forms of objectification that Asian cutification entails and invites. Through an analysis of the anime Madoka Magica and Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being, this essay demonstrates how the invocation of kawaii need not be read as a simple resignation to structural inequities. Both works harness this feminized cute aesthetic to speak to the social and economic precarity of the contemporary neoliberal moment and to imagine alternative models of ethicopolitical collectivity that can better accommodate those forms and feelings of precarity.
This paper examines Australia's history of uniformed schooling as mediated by its leading mass-market magazine, the Australian Women's Weekly . This magazine was a significant cultural agent that served as an authority on everything from fashion to schooling, capitalizing on the matter of school dress by running advertisements for school uniforms, printing articles and letters on school wear, and featuring attractive images of uniformed schoolchildren. This paper argues that the Weekly used this content to provide textual and visual reinforcement for a powerful cultural trope of the proper, desirable, happy, and modern Australian schoolchild as uniformed. In doing so, it represented the normative school mother as working behind the scenes to produce or procure the school uniform as well as to arrange and manage the uniformed child. We contend that the magazine portrayed this work as part of a project to draw the mother into a respectable and ostensibly “Australian” community.
This paper analyzes how war memories are often romanticized and/or popularized through representations of shōjo (girls) in anime. In Arpeggio of Blue Steel: Ars Nova and Kantai Collection, submarines and battleships are personified as girls in World War II scenarios. These contents have been disseminated across multiple media platforms, and fans of the contents visit war-related sites, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) bases, museums, and events produced in cooperation with MSDF. War-related tourism and popular culture are often associated with death and tragedy, but such war-related contents tourism becomes light entertainment, while darker values and meanings are displaced and/or invalidated.
This paper examines how war-related contents tourism serves to rewrite war memories, to popularize Japanese militarization and hence displace its meanings and values. Fans treat war-related contents as fashionable by commodifying the Self-Defense Force (SDF) through the images of shōjo, and they relate the SDF to themselves through the popularization and familiarization achieved through anime.
Enjo-kōsai, the term attributed to the practice of teenage girls selling dates and sex to older men, became a major controversial issue in Japan in the nineties, followed by political debates and public concerns regarding the nature of the habit and its social and ethical consequences. The article investigates the origin of enjo-kōsai and its development from a trivial subculture game to an actual practice defining sexual conduct and creating rising moral panic all over the country. Drawing on a long ethnographic research including 96 individual interviews and thousands of online surveys, the research explores the ambiguous forms of manipulation and control exercised by the hegemony of the media and fashion magazines in order to promote enjo-kōsai and rebalance the power relations between the teenager girls and their buyers. Based on participants’ testimonies, the study tracks the historical events while following the rise of Girl Power ideologies of empowerment and liberation versus the opposing political pressure that attempted to restore and reinforce traditional images of submissive femininity. It also attempts to contextualize the enjo-kōsai boom within the social changes and economic turbulences that Japan had gone through during the post-bubble decade.
This is the most complete and compelling account of idols and celebrity in Japanese media culture to date. Engaging with the study of media, gender and celebrity, and sensitive to history and the contemporary scene, these interdisciplinary essays cover male and female idols, production and consumption, industrial structures and fan movements. © Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin 2012, Aoyagi Hiroshi 2012 and Contributors 2012. All rights reserved.
Following the success of Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii took a break from directing to focus his energies on other film projects. During this time, he became involved in two films in which he did not serve as director, but was nonetheless a major creative force. The two films, Jin-Roh and Blood the Last Vampire, are fascinating companion pieces because they are nearly polar opposites in terms of approach and style.
Following the success of Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii took a break from directing to focus his energies on other film projects. During this time, he became involved in two films in which he did not serve as director, but was nonetheless a major creative force. The two films, Jin-Roh and Blood the Last Vampire, are fascinating companion pieces because they are nearly polar opposites in terms of approach and style.
Modern humans have become cyborgs. Our transformation into a technologically oriented species is readily apparent; as we have shaped our world with our tools, the tools in turn have shaped our perceptions of the world. In her groundbreaking “Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway states that “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”1 Philosopher Chris J. Cuomo concludes from Haraway’s ideas that “our dependence on and identification with machines is hardly less significant than the fact that we are flesh.”2 We do not need to be physically fused to machinery in order to be cyborgs. Our ways of organizing and thinking about the world are already wedded to technological practice; a physical combination of man and machine would only be a phenotypic expression of our mental state. As we steer our identities through a mediated environment (keeping in mind Timothy Leary’s reminder that the term cybernetics derives from the Greek word for “pilot”3), we must come to terms with the fact that even in our daily interactions with the world of technology and machines, we are cyborgs.
This article analyses the structures and implications of Japan’s contemporary street fashion cultures, primarily those of Harajuku. Using Roland Barthes’ analogy of dress and dressing it situates the radical subcultural styles within traditional Japanese aesthetics and in a wider history of fashion. Examining various motifs from kawaisa to uniforms, cross-dressing, masks and the politics of second-hand fashion, it deals with theories of authenticity, appearance and agency.
Japanese society in the 1990s and 2000s produced a range of complicated material about sexualized schoolgirls, and few topics have caught the imagination of western observers so powerfully. While young Japanese girls had previously been portrayed as demure and obedient, in training to become the obedient wife and prudent mother, in recent years less than demure young women have become central to urban mythology and the content of culture. The cultic fascination with the figure of a deviant school girl, which has some of its earliest roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, likewise re-emerged and proliferated in fascinating and timely ways in the 1990s and 2000s.
As an embodiment of the shoujo, a specific Japanese representation of 'girl', the schoolgirl often appears as a central character in Japanese popular culture. With the import, and widespread availability, of Japanese cultural products in the West (such as comics called manga, animated movies called anime, toys and games), the Japanese schoolgirl has gained a visibility in Western popular culture, and perceived as cute and shy. In this paper, the way the Japanese schoolgirl is represented in British popular culture is examined, and contrasted with the representation in Japan. It is concluded that cultural context influences the representation and, in agreement with the work of Saito (1996), the British representation is simplistic and distorted in comparison to that in Japan.
This paper highlights the efforts of cultural intermediaries operating social networks for pets, known as petworking. Petworking aligns with the ever-increasing use of social media platforms where “one in ten pet owners have a social media account especially for their pet” (Schroeder). Petworking represents the increased affect of connectivity between pets and their owners within the broader pet community. Although it is true that “no one knows you are a dog on the Internet” (Steiner), it is fair to say that petworking is not the work of the animals directly, but the cultural intermediaries who construct the environment for pets to interact with others.
Boo the Pomeranian is one example of a highly networked, cute and celebrity pet, whose antics are broadcast across a plethora of online networks including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, to contradict the rhetoric that cats rule the Internet, it is instead the strategic efforts of cultural intermediaries that take the banal activities of Boo and his “petworked individualism” to his global fan base. The research within this paper, through the lens of animal celebrity, extends recent work undertaken in the celebrity studies field that seeks to understand the connection between celebrities and ‘ordinary folk’, or rather ordinary folk as celebrities. In that regard, the connection between ordinary and celebrity animals is explored through the work of the cultural intermediary who capitalises on the authenticity and cute characteristics of animals. This paper also seeks to understand the role of the petworking cultural intermediary by exploring the cyclic process of disintermediation/remediation/intermediation of Internet communication.
Analyses of fads and fashions often note the importance of trendsetters whose early adoption of novelties provides an example for others to follow. However, trendsetting is usually taken for granted; there is no effort to explain why some groups assume fashion leadership. This article seeks to account for the rise of kogaru (stylish high-school girls) as trendsetters in 1990s Japan. We argue that trendsetting requires resources - particularly leisure time to devote to fashion, disposable income, and communication networks. Kogaru became trendsetters because they gained these resources at a time when the female college students who preceded them had less time for trendsetting, and when economic recession made inexpensive items of the sort kogaru could afford more desirable fashion objects. At the same time, new electronic technologies sped the flow of information among kogaru, while media coverage of this new social type gave kogaru visibility in the larger society.
A major change overtook Japanese girls' fashion in the early 1990s. Influenced by the fashion magazine Cutie, a version of the young girl-oriented subculture publication Takarajima, girls began to aggressively express themselves with individualistic clothing that did not go out of its way to pander to the opposite sex. Girls' fashions up until then tended to be imbued with a very Japanese childlike girlishness, but the ‘new’ cute look added boyish elements. This early 1990s trend in Japanese fashion was related to the popularity among Japanese youth at that time of the ‘Seditionaries’ clothing line created by British designer Vivienne Westwood in the late 1970s.
Advances in telecommunication technologies have massively altered the landscapes within which human relationships and self perspectives are enacted. Electronically transmitted, inter-linked spaces (e.g., via Internet, mobile phones and DVDs) are now part of our daily lives, fusing the virtual and the real, and revealing our fragile identity and stability as individuals. Manga (Japanese cartoons) and anime (animated manga) represent some of the most popular media circulating through global communities today, offering vast, imaginary sites for shielding people's injured, suppressed and shaken individuality which has intensified from the pressures of continuous social competitions and conformity. This paper discusses how the study of manga/anime as visually crafted experiences can reflect the fluid and hybrid complexity of contemporary society through rich narratives as well as kaleidoscopic representations. Treating these representations as scholarly "objects" therefore involves linking diverse disciplinary fields such as literature, education, psychology, cultural studies, religious studies, history, anthropology, politics and consumerism. Most manga/anime are story-driven and are able to deal with "nearly every imaginable subject" (Schodt, 1996). Their readerships range from infants to mature men/women while their contents and styles differ widely. They have also evolved with and are linked to other communication media, such as electronic games, the Internet, and mobile phones. Manga/anime are therefore situated as pivotal points for inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural research into not only contemporary Japan but also post-modern society in general.
The culture includes every possible objective forms created by humans and their shared aspects of ideas, feelings, and behaviors, beliefs and etc. The dress and its ornaments are part of the culture that expresses the relationships in objective ways and in formless immaterial ways. The school uniform represents significant meanings to the students in their school years, and it is the way of expressing their individuality and full filling their needs for self-presentation. Therefore, understanding and analyzing youth culture means understanding students' school uniform along with fast changing twenty first century civilization. Korea and Japan are very close nations to each other. Both Korean and Japanese girls' school uniform style were adopted western clothing style and went through many changes based on cultural differences between two countries. They are affected by different peculiarities between two nations and youth cultures from different cities. Therefore, this research is on analyzing how different visual values of girl's high school uniforms in Seoul and Tokyo and understanding youth cultures through macro-analysis. The youth cultures in Korea and Japan are mostly similar but there is special development on animation in Japan and possibly can find many styles of girl's high school uniform. Both nations are varying to be opened to sexual culture of adolescents but Japan is more uninhibited than Korea. In Japan, sailor-uniform can be found in fetish way in public culture. On one hand, because of most private girl's high schools in Tokyo takes an entrance examination, top-ranking students are very proud of their school uniforms and even students from other public high schools get private high school uniforms to attend school festival. This analysis showed that private girl's high school uniform in Seoul appealed as slim fitted silhouette which is close to modem woman's suit style while in Tokyo appealed as boxy style matched with short pleated skirt or sailor-uniform style. Comparing that to school uniform photos taken on the street, we can find that alikeness or more extreme styles as examples. These are influenced by different youth cultures in Seoul and Tokyo and cultural differences stands for different aesthetic norm being accepted or rejected.
The Mexican telenovela's romantic love story has been a staple of the nation's TV landscape for over 50 years. In the 1980s and 1990s, these love stories boomed as an export commodity, with viewers across the world finding resonances in universal themes, melodramatic emotion and endings of happily ever after, despite the localized cultural references and nationalism at their heart. Now, just as local audiences are waning, international audiences searching for cultural proximity are also decreasing, as foreign markets produce their own versions of serial melodrama, with their own cultural references. Within this climate, Mexican TV executives must search for new telenovela models to capture a decreasing local and international market share. The popularity of Rebelde (‘Rebel', Televisa, Mexico, 2004–2006), within the teen telenovela subgenre, indicates one telenovela that has successfully maintained the reach of the Mexican telenovela industry, within this new market context. It is argued that Rebelde's investment in developing a form of [sub]cultural proximity for the transnational youth market breathes new life into the classic Mexican telenovela by challenging its traditional and exclusionary narrative in unprecedented ways.
Histories of modern art in Korea frequently begin with the self-portraits of Ko Hui-dong (1886-1965), widely recognized as the fi rst examples of Westernstyle oil painting by a Korean artist. His three existing self-portraits were painted right before, or just shortly after Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910, when the shift to colonial rule dramatically raised the stakes of representation. This essay argues that in addressing this shift and its implications, Ko's self-portraits thus anticipate the emergence, and more importantly, the ambiguity of hyo?ndae misul, a phrase doubly invoked to refer to both modern and contemporary art. They embodied what might be described as the predicament of understanding the potential of contemporaneity in a time that seemed overly determined by the imperatives of a certain model of modernity predicated on teleology and the attendant destabilisation of longstanding forms of social order.
This article documents the role of uniforms in Japan’s project of modernity and beyond, building on research that has identified
prescribed modes of dress as fundamental to the politics and poetics of a highly regulated society. A thematically organized
account begins with a brief introduction to the indigenous apparel system prior to adoption of European versions of formal
and military dress as the ‘uniform of civilization and enlightenment’. The discussion next considers the use of liveries as
the private sector spearheaded a burgeoning commercialization of metropolitan life in the early twentieth century. A flexible
interpretation of the term ‘uniform’ is taken in order to examine the referencing of traditional dress forms by Japanese designers
through object analysis of the creative outputs of the fashion industry and visual analyses of imagery culled from the canon
of fashion representation. The youthful self-fashionings of identity currently occurring in Japan are addressed for their
contributions to current popular culture and the conclusion suggests that debates concerning the embodying of power relationships
in dress might benefit from critical refraction through a prism able to accommodate the ubiquity of uniforms in Japan.
This article speculates on the pervasive motif of uniforms in clothing and fashion. Why do uniforms hold such a fascination in modern and post-modern cultures? What is the relationship between the aesthetics of uniforms and clothing styles? The answers to these questions, I argue, can be found in the ambivalent connotations associated with uniforms in Western European culture. While ostensibly uniforms signify order, conformity and discipline, uniforms also are a fetishised cultural artefact embodying ambiguous erotic impulses and moral rectitude. This double-faced character of uniforms is related to their codification in military dress. This precursor shaped the diversity of uniforms in civil society - school uniforms, professional uniforms (e.g. in the medical profession, police, academic) and quasi-uniforms (men's “white collar” suits; sub-societal codes - e.g. Sloane rangers, ladies who lunch, Amish; and sub-cultural codes - e.g. goths, surfers, rappers). The influence of the uniform extends to everyday clothing and culture. This article explores the cultural politics of the uniform as a persistent feature in contemporary culture.
Clothing serves as a system of signs that helps to order social interaction by identifying and locating individuals and groups within society. In the first in-depth study to analyze the communicative character of uniforms and other types of clothing, Nathan Joseph examines how clothing functions in a variety of social contexts to enforce norms, maintain institutional power, identify group membership, and express or suppress individuality.
Encyclopaedia of Clothing)
- Fukusô
Etiquette for the End of the Century: How to Live Never-ending Everyday Life)
- Shinji Miyadai