ABSTRACT
Male imagination and writing about young Japanese women as amorphous racial and ethnic agents is the context in which the weight and wit of kogyaru, ganguro, and yamanba style revealed itself. Weekly news magazine (shūkanshi) headlines and television anchormen’s reports reacted in tones of exaggerated horror, but even a cursory backward glance through the decades of girls’ comics, literature, theater, and fashion magazines demonstrates that girls’ culture and fashion in Japan has been riddled with wayward racial affiliations and pseudo-ethnic expressions since its advent in the early twentieth century. What is more, a look through both near-contemporary and historical writings and social policy on young women shows that maintaining a stock of sexually chaste and pure-blooded ethnic Japanese girls—and insulating them from the temptations of foreign travel, foreign female behavior and fashion, and racial miscegenation—has been a longstanding concern. This is so much the case that a complex antiphony has evolved between ideological, literary, and aesthetic proscriptions of virginal, obedient, gentle, and maternal ideal girls, chartered predominantly from within the educated male camp, and what might be called the “anti-Japanese” tendency of girls’ culture. Across the span of girl genres, dynamic girl characters with invented and hybrid ethnicities have emerged. Young women displaying commitment to either the closeted and fan-ish sphere of girls’ communications and comics, or to extrovert and cosmopolitan modes of female performance, have in turn been singled out and stigmatized as racial and cultural traitors to Japan. The continual surveillance of girls’ mores and fashion by an eagle-eyed “male press” (oyaji zasshi), which has taken upon itself the task of charting and disciplining the signs of feminine bonding, evolution, and contrariness, has simultaneously provided a rapt national audience and receptive stage for entertaining cultural digressions undertaken by the more brave-hearted of young women.
