Masafumi Monden

Japanese contemporary culture, including fashion, has increasingly gained popularity outside Japan, making it a timely topic for both scholarly and wider publics. Most current studies of popular culture focuses on manga, anime, and other such forms of visual culture, and dress and design studies are also emerging as a rapidly growing field. Building on the works of McVeigh (2000), Miller (2006), Slade (2010) and Steele (2010), this book addresses this new interest in an innovative fashion, expanding the significance of dress and delving into a wide range of examples from films, magazines, music videos and literature. By connecting diverse topic areas including dress, gender, media and cultural studies, Japanese Fashion Cultures analyzes the relationship of fashion aesthetics and gender identity within an increasingly interconnected, transnational world.
The book pays particular attention to the relationship of past and present. It examines contemporary Japanese fashion trends that adopt and restyle European historical clothing forms: the Edwardian dandy style, Victorian little girls’ dresses, and the Rococo and Romantic dress typical of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Japanese fashion culture actively promoted European clothing styles both politically and aesthetically, particularly since the country’s re-engagement with Euro-America in 1868. Throughout this book, I refer to the theory of “format” and “product” articulated by cultural sociologist Keiko Okamura (2003) where a cultural form, in this case Euro-American clothing styles, can be seen as a “format” when accepted globally. This standardized “format” becomes a carrier of the locality of cultures, allowing its “local” characteristics to be visible, measurable, and comparable with that of other cultures. Through this theoretical idea, I explain complex cultural theory using compelling examples. For instance, differences in preferred modes of masculinity and fashionability in Japan and Euro-America will be explained via garments and advertisement campaigns of Dolce and Gabbana. This process will therefore reveal the characteristics both universal and culturally specific to the Japanese context, including the ways in which Japanese men and women engage with fashion today. This poses a challenge to a widely held, often Eurocentric notion that Japanese men and women simply desire to imitate their Euro-American counterparts.

Japanese Fashion Cultures provides comprehensive insights into representations of clothes and gender in a society still poorly understood by outsiders. I dispel the popular misconception that Japan approves of gender inequalities and that women still occupy inferior social positions to men, expressed also in clothing. I argue that using the lens of fashion reveals the complexities of gender relations in Japan. Four contemporary case studies position the argument: young men’s fashion magazines, female performers’ use of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” in music video, “Lolita” fashion and Tetsuya Nakashima’s film Shimotsuma monogatari (Kamikaze Girls, 2004), and the continuing remarking of “Ivy-League” style in Japan. These four examples are notable for their adoption of historic European and American clothing forms. Their relatively “mainstream” stature in contemporary Japanese culture comes with a “twist” or unconventional characteristics. The “mainstream” standing of these types of popular culture indicates their reach, consumed by a great number of individuals within Japan. Certain qualities they manifest, on the other hand, impose a subtle, almost “delicate” kind of revolt against a set of idées fixes surrounding the relationship between clothes and gender. Using media and cultural texts as a primary source for discussion enables consideration of these complex links between distortion and reality. As Diana Crane (1990) has argued, both are parts of the “real” world where these case studies are first produced.

The first important issue this book raises is that, through negotiating male readers’ desire to attract admirers and to dress for their own pleasure, young men’s fashion magazines endorse the idea that crafting a pleasant look is the foundation of self-assurance and a successful life. Secondly, I show that female Japanese singers allow an accentuation of femininity without necessarily sexualization through the use of Japanese cute (kawaii) aesthetics. The third possibility this book explores is that highly decorative styles of Japanese Lolita fashion should not be read as symbolic of restriction and passivity. The fourth point this book addresses is that, as illustrated by the Japanese embrace of the “Ivy style,” both men and women engage with fashion in very similar ways. This is a major point of difference with the role of fashion historically in Euro-America.

These readings offer novel ways to understand the relationship between gender and dress, which is often blamed for maintaining repressive distinctions between “man” and “woman” in contemporary culture. Ultimately, this book aims to show that the Japanese appropriation of European clothing forms shows that there might be different, and hence less rigid approaches to understanding the relationship between fashion and gender. Japanese refashioning of European clothing concepts, this book argues, offers a compelling case for the implication of the aesthetics of fashion, gender, and cross-culturalism.

“Masafumi Monden's book is a gem. By bringing together and exploring colourful examples from Japan's vibrant street culture and fashion, he artfully demonstrates just how individualistic, innovative, and original the Japanese are. He also dismantles myths and misperceptions about gender relations, sexuality, and social relations in Japan.” –  Brian J. McVeigh, University of Arizona, USA,

“Monden provides a rich and detailed examination of the subtle intricacies of gendering and sexuality in contemporary Japanese fashion. While exploring the extremes of Tokyo street fashion he is able to illuminate some of the mechanism behind the perplexingly divergent ways to be a man or a woman in today's Japan.” –  Toby Slade, University of Tokyo, Japan,

“Masafumi Monden's fascinating and important book, Japanese Fashion Cultures, will be of great interest to everyone interested in fashion, gender, globalization, and youth culture. His research on young Japanese men and their attitudes towards fashion is especially significant, as it calls into question persistent stereotypes about how men and women are assumed to engage with fashion.” –  Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator, The Museum at FIT, New York City, USA

“From the possibility of subversion in lace-trimmed Lolita outfits and petite pinafores straight out of Alice in Wonderland, to the enchantments of Milkboy dandyism, Masafumi Monden's Japanese Fashion Cultures offers up a delightful combination of case studies that reveal the very best thinking in fashion theory today.” –  Laura Miller, Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Anthropology, University of Missouri–St. Louis, USA

"Masafumi Monden’s Japanese Fashion Cultures shines a spotlight on many of the looks that brought the world’s attention to an island nation which, like Britain, has consistently punched above its weight in matters of dress and appearance...In Japanese Fashion Cultures you have some most interesting comments about gender and I for one have learned a lot about the less reported (in the West at least) looks for young Japanese males." - Ted Polheums, Author of Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk

Socio-anthropological definitions of fashion include direct modifications of the body such as hairstyles and clothing. Both clothes and hair are fundamental aspects of manga (Japanese comics), providing a way to clearly identify characters in a medium without the benefit of audio or, in many cases, color. Importantly, they also carry conceptual and symbolic meanings that are deeply intertwined with the narrative themes. This chapter examines Yuriko Hara’s manga series Cocoon Entwined (Mayu, matou/ 繭、纏う 2018 – present). Set in modern Japan, Cocoon Entwined is a tale of schoolgirls attending an exclusive and secluded girls’ academy. The school uniform of this academy is, unusually, made from the long hair of girls in their final year. I argue that Cocoon Entwined beautifully parodies and critiques the idea of shōjo, the iconic representation of ideal girlhood in Japanese culture. The manga’s homosocial environment and the concept of the school uniform, which is the ultimate regalia of adolescent femininity in Japan, raises questions about gender, sexuality, nostalgia and confinement. The medium of manga allows creative expressions of fashion that are often impossible in reality, and while it encourages readers to empathize with characters who wear such fashion, it simultaneously objectifies those characters, leading to the creation of complex relationships between fashion, feelings, and aesthetics.

Since Alice was first introduced to Japan in 1899, Lewis Carroll’s famous heroine has occupied a prominent place in the Japanese imagination. The Japanese literary world’s fascination with Alice is evident in the nearly 200 Japanese editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass published between 1908 and 2004, and “Arisu” is instantly recognisable to most people in Japan today. Visual representations of Alice, particularly Sir John Tenniel’s celebrated illustrations (1865 and 1872) and Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951), play a large part in Alice’s current popularity in Japan.

Why has Alice, a symbol of Victorian girlhood, become so popular in Japanese culture? This chapter proposes that Alice’s image in Japan is strongly intertwined with the concept of shōjo, a representation of liminal femininity and girlhood in Japanese culture. Although she is a child of seven in Carroll’s books, Alice tends to be depicted in illustrations and visual adaptations as a girl in early adolescence. Carroll’s Alice is curious, delightful, and has a sense of autonomy; she is neither assertive nor passive, but rather positioned comfortably in between.

Alice has influenced the visual culture of Japanese girls and women, including manga (comics), music videos and fashion. A recent addition to the long history of Alice adaptations in Japan is the music video for Japanese pop artist Aimer’s chart-topping song “I Beg You” (2019). Featuring popular teen actress Minami Hamabe traverses a world reminiscent of Wonderland. The girlish Hamabe wears a late-Victorian style white lace dress, a symbol of the liminal time of shōjo - between childhood and maturity. The use of a montage of symbols associated with Alice such as clocks, white rabbits and chessboards along with a Victorian carousel create an atmosphere which is both kawaii (cute) and gothic, conveying shōjo as a state which is childlike yet erotic, merry yet dark, and innocent yet decadent.

The transcultural theory of “format” and “product” argues that a cultural form can be seen as a “format” when becoming accepted across cultures. This standardized “format” then becomes a carrier of a local culture, making its qualities visible and hence comparable with those of other cultures. Is Alice, then, a format that reveals different perceptions of girlish identity across cultures? This chapter examines how the image and idea of Alice is used in mainstream Japanese culture, particularly by women and girls, to construct a performance of a specific kind of shōjo identity – emancipated and independent without compromising girlish femininity and innocence.

Alice’s popularity in Japan reveals some key concepts of transcultural theory. It has been suggested that the initial enthusiasm for the books may have been due to similarities between some of the characters and traditional Japanese yokai spirits. Also, the difficulties in translating Carroll’s wordplay into Japanese means that the Japanese version of Alice is linguistically simpler, with a greater focus on the visual.

服飾史家アン・ホランダーは、衣服は着ることによってはじめて、その存在や美的な重要性を理解することができると述べている。それは、衣服は人の身体で動かされることによってはじめて、その役割を完全に遂行するということ、すなわちファッションを論ずるうえで、それを身に着ける人間に注目するのは大切なことである。ファッション・ショーやファッション雑誌などをとおして私たちが目にするファッション・衣服は主にファッション・モデルによって着て見せられている。本章では、男性ファッション・モデルについて論じてみたい。ファッション・モデルはファッション学研究の中でも、驚くほど研究がなされていない。近年では英語による研究が現れはじめているが、とくに日本の男性モデルについては今だ皆無に等しい。本章では、筆者の近年出版予定の男性モデルの研究をベースに、その溝を埋める手助けをしたいと思う。

男性モデルが研究対象のみならず、社会的に軽んじられる背景には、ファッションや美しさなど、身体を資本とした仕事は、女性のものとする偏見によるところが大きい。男性モデルは、自分の身体・外見を使った、「男らしくない」職業に就いているという先入観と、（本来的には女性がなるはずの）ジェンダー論的「眼差し」の対象になる、という二つの偏見にさらされていることがあげられる。有名なフェミニスト作家ジャーメイン・グリアは現在の英語では、「美しい（beautiful）」という名詞自体が男性に使われることは稀だと述べており、それは男性の魅力は身体以外の、仕事や経済力に趣をおく社会的傾向と関係している。日本では、男性にも美しいという言葉が使われることが多く、はたして、男性の美的身体に対する考え方にも違いがあるのだろうか。男性ファッション・モデルはファッションを着てその美的な重要性を機能させるだけではなく、人種の観念やジェンダー・アイデンティの越境性について、私たちに考えさせてくれるのではないかということを、問うてみたい。

Fairy tales and romantic ballet have a prominent relationship with the material culture concerning girls’ lives. Because of their association with “princess culture,” often accused of imposing the ideology of heteroromantic love and asymmetrical gender roles onto their main, female consumers, both ballet and fairy-tale-inspired fictions have been subjected to criticism. Many such texts and their cultural significances are therefore yet to receive adequate scholarly attention.

By focusing on Japanese anime series Princess Tutu (2002-3), which employs aspects of fairy-tale texts, this chapter proposes another reading. Particular attention is paid to the simple inversion of gendered agency between the cursed princesses and the knight/hero in the anime series, and its introduction to complexity and moral nuance in the relationship between the two main female characters. Utilizing the conventions of shōjo manga, magical girl anime and ballet, Princess Tutu avoids some of the clichés and reimagines fairy tales as modern stories of girls confronting and challenging their own fates. Does it exemplify the idea that depictions of female characters are much more diverse in Japanese popular culture than in its Euro-American counterparts? I argue that the narrative of Princess Tutu offers one way to re-evaluate and assign new meanings to modern interpretations of fairy tales.

This chapter examines male beauty in contemporary Japan, specifically related to the fully clothed body. It argues that male beauty is often understood, especially outside Japan, in a binary of muscular maturity and slender youthfulness. However, in reality, male beauty is a continuum, as recent TV commercials created for the Shiseido men’s grooming product line Uno (2016–2017) indicate. These advertisements offer a male image that is situated somewhere in the middle of the continuum between a rugged, mature, and brawny image thought to be preferred by men, to the slender, delicate, and youthful images designed to appeal to women. While such appreciation may depend on the sexual orientation and class of those evaluating beauty, the different modes of male beauty in Japanese popular culture, this chapter proposes, also signal a degree of flexibility in appreciating male beauty in Japan.

Asada Mao's life recounts a dramatic narrative of suffering and triumph. It follows a girl considered beautiful and her meteoric rise to skating stardom; a period of hardships she confronts tacitly; and the performance of her life at the 2014 Olympics that touches many around the world. This chapter reconsiders Asada's public persona of a diligent athlete, the good girl-next-door who speaks with a smile. Asada seems to embody an ideal Japanese young womanhood. Behind this innocent persona, however, is a strong woman, with a fierce commitment to her professional performance and audiences, and a skilful way of concealing her personal life from the public eye. This chapter argues that Asada is a diva who captures the heart of people with her extraordinary looks, artistry, and athletic talents, a diva whose spectacular performances and risk-taking behaviours always excite audiences, and whose good-girl persona may be her greatest performance of all.

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.

Before the well-documented ‘Japanese Fashion Revolution’ in Paris that started in 1981, Rei Kawakubo’s designs were frequently associated with such terms as cute, girlish and romantic. In this chapter I examine Kawakubo’s use of ballet-inspired designs and her earlier, ‘pre-revolution era’ designs. I argue that, rather than dismissing these romantic, apparently ‘conventional’ designs of Kawakubo as trivial or unimportant early-career experiments, the girlish, cute and romantic sartorial aesthetics in Comme des Garçons reinforce the subversive aspects of her design, particularly in relation to fashion and gender. These aesthetics, and their references, whether explicit or implicit, conscious or otherwise, to such icons as ballerinas, novice nuns of the Roman Catholic Church and old-world schoolgirls effectively represent Kawakubo’s unique approach to fashion and femininity. By examining the cultural symbolism of classical ballet as well as the Japanese aesthetic concepts of shōjo (girls) and kawaii (cute), this chapter raises the possibility that an apparently passive femininity can indeed be highly powerful. Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons have, I would argue, persuasively shown this through their designs, creating dresses for strong, independent women who can retain qualities of romantic, girlish femininity and who do not need to expose their bodies in order to be beautiful.

What makes Japanese men’s fashion magazines striking is their almost full focus on men’s bodies and appearance. Such magazines are largely absent in Euro-American heterosexual men’s culture. With the exception of certain European titles, Anglophone men’s magazines such as GQ and Esquire, even with their inclusion of fashion contents, could not really be considered “fashion” magazines. Anglophone men’s magazines are indeed rarely referred to as fashion magazines due to the importance of appearance and dress in definitions of femininity and the feminine gendering of fashion. Therefore, magazines with fashion contents that are primarily targeted at men (and/or at unisex readership) are instead called “lifestyle magazines.”

What significance can we then derive from looking at these Japanese men’s fashion magazines? In this chapter, I argue that the significance of analyzing magazines primarily targeting male readership lies in the possibility that representations of “masculinity” found in magazines might both reflect and shape certain ideals and ideas of gender, which are consumed by their readers. Fashion discourse, as produced through media texts like fashion magazines are themselves shaped by, and dependent on, wider social forces and their relations with other fields. We can then deduce that a collection of Japanese men’s fashion magazines at least allow calibration of the ways in which Japanese conceptions of masculinity are manifested.

This chapter begins with a brief history of men’s fashion magazines in contemporary Japan and explain how magazines correspond with various, subtly nuanced styles. Then it examines how magazines deploy male models to help create a social affinity between readers, magazines, and models. These models can represent a slender, boyish, and kawaii (cute that implies vulnerability) male aesthetic, which, along with more muscular male ideals found in other sectors of Japanese culture, may be indicative of Japanese popular culture’s elastic approach to the representations of masculinity. The chapter then explores an amalgam of three desires these men’s fashion magazines evoke in readers in relation to men’s fashionability: 1) to attract women’s admiration, 2) to compete and emulate other men, and 3) to simply indulge in their own pleasures. Since fashion media are constantly evolving, it is important to observe how these magazines, which aim to create and maintain a close social affinity with their readers, are respond to changing notions of masculinity and publishing.

Classical ballet, which was first introduced to Japan in the early 1900s and popularized by Russian émigre ballerinas, has been an icon of romantic imagination in Japanese culture especially since the end of Second World War. This is particularly owing to the popularity of shōjo manga (girls’ comics). Its unofficial (sub)genre “ballet manga,” both shaped and reflected social and historical reality – from sparkling as a symbol of glamour and romantic dream in the precarious times of the after-war period to mediating the challenges of addressing feminine independence and psychological complexity in the 1970s onwards. This notably “feminine” emphasis of the art form, which corresponds with the female dominance in ballet learning in the country, poses a number of questions relating to ballet, fashion, and gender. What aspects of ballet have made it so admired in Japanese girls’ and women’s cultures? Does the art form infiltrate Japanese men’s and boys’ culture, too? If so, how? This chapter will attempt to answer these questions. I argue that not only fairy tale-like romantic narratives of ballet, but also conventional ballet costumes for females, which can be described as “the long white, bell-shaped dress made of layers of muslin, or a variety of muslin called tarlatan,” appeal to girls and women in contemporary Japan. The increasing attention paid to male learning of ballet, which coincides with emerging young ballet boys who achieve international fame, both corresponds with and problematizes a recent tendency in Anglophone culture to “masculinize” ballet in order to lure boys into learning the art form. Japanese stars of competitive figure skating, a close and sporty cousin of ballet with its combination of decorative outfits, artistry, and high level of athleticism, in turn, challenges the accusation that elegance “feminizes” and by implication devalues the seriousness and athleticism of the sport.

Derived from Vladimir Nabokov’s eponymous 1955 novel and its pre-adolescent heroine, seen by the older male narrator as a ‘nymphet’, the ‘Lolita’ look typical in the United States, for example—generally characterized by highly eroticized adolescent or preadolescent girls—has stirred controversy in many Western societies. Japanese Lolita fashion, on the other hand, is characterized by images of women adorned in elaborate dresses with delicate fabrics inspired by stylistic interpretations of early-modern European clothing such as Rococo and Victorian dresses. The style thus exudes the look of European bisque dolls, yet one senses there is something odd about these Japanese ‘European’ dresses.

Lolita style also references various forms of contemporary popular culture, including Western Goth subculture, manga, anime and Visual-kei (Visual-Rock) music—a Japanese music genre popular in the 1990s, typified by musicians wearing elaborate make-up and hairstyles, with flamboyant, rather androgynous costumes. Although it is practised by a small group of people, Lolita fashion has received substantial media and academic attention, perhaps due to its visually spectacular and eye-catching nature. Moreover, the presence of Lolita fashion has increasingly been noted in locations worldwide. But why do people wish to dress in Lolita fashion?

When discussing cultural flows within a transnational context, often the focus of debate is the issue of whether cultures tend towards unification or. In this chapter however, I am interested in whether flows of culture override or dissolve cultural differences in the places they reach, via an examination of Lolita fashion. The first section focuses on Lolita fashion in the Japanese context. Paying particular attention to its stylistic aspects, I examine one of the ways in which historical European clothing has been appropriated in Japan. The second section looks at the Lolita trend outside Japan by way of a textual analysis of an Anglophone on-line community for Lolita fashion lovers, ‘EGL (Elegant Gothic Lolita) The Gothic & Lolita Fashion Community’. In so doing, I will explore how concepts such as ‘local’ and ‘global’ have been relativized or renegotiated in Lolita fashion.

The history of Japanese 'Ivy style' is said to have begun with Kensuke Ishizu who was the 'architect' of Take Ivy, and a kind of Japanese version of Ralph Lauren. He founded the Ivy League-inspired clothing brand company VAN JACKET in 1951. Until the 1990s, the styles that resemble the 'Ivy-league style' made an almost continual appearance in Japan. The 'Ivy style', and similar styles with names such as 'school', 'preppy' and 'trad', are popular today, particularly for those who appreciate the neat and conservative styles (kireime) and high-casual styles. This modern day revival of the 'Ivy style' was particularly marked since 2007 where the aesthetics of the 'Ivy style' were blended with other styles and engendered a number of similar styles with a subtle nuance. The Japanese version of the 'Ivy-league' style is a good example of a global crossing. A cultural form is accepted in a different cultural context, blended with 'local' characteristics, and then flows out again in multiple directions. Indeed, what is striking about the Japanese embracing of the 'Ivy style' is not only its 'preservation' of the style when such styles were perceived as démodé in the United States, but also its demonstration of subtly nuanced changes and transformations. Japanese adaption and appropriation of the 'Ivy-league' style, I argue, tells a cultural process where an 'American' clothing styles are blended with 'Japanese' aesthetic ideals and preferences. This cultural mélange has in turn been re-imported to the United States, making new meanings and new markets for this now perennial style.

Japanese girls’ comics have become prominent as a subject of study in popular culture in English and Japanese. This article focuses on a new horror-thriller subgenre, with Koiwa Mihoko’s Midnight Cinderella (1982) as an example; it enacts a nuanced portrayal of heroines – which this article terms “the amoral shōjo”– who practice violence, extortion, and murder.

It argues that the largely underexplored “amoral shōjo” genre provides an example of female agency which challenges a hegemonic definition of shōjo in the cultural imagination, revealing instead a complex, powerful ideal of girlish identity in Japanese culture, forging a new modern female identity.

Fashion has been a feature of shōjo manga (girls' comics) since the beginning of the genre in the 1950s. However, the topic has received scant scholarly attention. This is possibly due both to fashion's ubiquity and to the bias that things like dresses are merely "feminine vanity." Yet exploring the varied uses of clothing in shōjo manga has become even more important with the rise in popularity of female manga artists.

This article focuses on a popular work from the 1990s, A White Satin Ribbon (Shiroi saten no ribon, 1994). Created by Iwadate Mariko, the manga tells the story of a girl's infatuation with her grandmother's lace feminine dress, which she sees as an embodiment of "shōjo (girlish) identity." I argue that, by combining tropes from romantic fairy tales, notions about aging, and discourses about shōjo, Iwadate's manga enacts a complex and more nuanced version of girlhood that is constructed and embodied through a dress. While many female artists have aesthetically objectified shōjo manga, Iwadate subtly subverts the fulfilment of the desires of both the protagonist and, by extension, the readers. I propose that Iwadate's manga offers a platform to critique the role of fashion in evoking emotions of desire, affection, and jealousy.

Since the introduction of ballet to Japan in the early 1900s, male dancers have figured prominently, with a profile equal to that of female dancers. Despite this, the association between ballet and girls’ cultures has been dominant in Japan, as in other cultures. As a consequence, ballet is often considered to be a highly ‘feminine’ activity, with associations as a ‘queer’ activity for males in contem- porary culture. What does the increase in visibility of ballet in Japanese boys’ culture tell us? This paper examines Japanese popular media that target boys and men as its core audience, especially the magazine Dancin’, possibly the first ballet magazine in the world exclusively for boys and young men. I examine how the magazine operates in contrast to the female version to attempt to create a virtual, imagined community that might offer a sense of belonging and encouragement to otherwise isolated ballet boys.

Men increasingly define themselves through the management of their bodies in today’s media-driven society, and bodily ideals operate as a major point of cultural reference —influencing men’s perceptions of their own bodies, and indeed their self-identities. One of the dominant modes of ideal male beauty in contemporary Japan, as embodied by many of the country’s male actors, models, and celebrities, differs from the generalized Western ideal of muscularity; being slender, shōnen-like (boyish), and predominantly kawaii (cute) are in vogue. These clean-cut, boyish demeanors, I argue, visually allude to a type of male identity that is situated in a liminal realm between boyhood and manhood, embodied not only by adolescent boys but also by young men in that timescape between “adolescence” and what some societies see as manhood. The primary aim of this article is to examine a particular sector of the significance of this male beauty in contemporary Japanese popular culture —namely the bishōnen, the beautiful boy positioned between child and adult. While the term bishōnen has been used extensively in its literal sense —any beautiful young man, in studies of the aesthetic imagination of Japanese boyhood —it is much more than just a genre label; it denotes a critical concept and an imagined figure of the boy. This article examines bishōnen as a cultural imagination, a complex ideal of boyish identity in Japanese popular culture, and argues that the way bishōnen is perceived and conceptualized calls into question the widely assumed equation of human beauty with sexual desire — pointing to the potential of bishōnen beauty to be appreciated purely on an aesthetic level.

"The popularity of classical ballet as a cultural form grows apace in a global context. Even in a country like Japan, which has not been previously identified as a “ballet capital,” it is receiving wide public attention. As a conventionally female-dominated arena, ballet and the ideas that circulate around it reveal the complex interrelationship between femininity, beauty, and selfhood. A prime example is the understudied genre of “ballet manga” in Japanese Shōjo Manga culture.

With the first examples published in the mid-1950s, the history of ballet-themed manga reveals that, particularly in the years following the Second World War, ballet was the epitome of a dream world, connoting luxury, beauty, and glamour. “Ballet manga” used this particular art form, its costumes, and romanticized, almost fairy tale-like settings of Old World Europe as a mix of femininity, rigor, and elegance remade for Japanese audiences. Since the 1970s, some authors have attempted to combine this imagery of ballet with the idea of feminine independence and agency, thus negotiating the paradox of reality and fantasy in lived experience. Ballet, therefore, is not presented simply on the stage but in Japan is frequently interpreted/experienced through Shōjo Manga. This distinctive situation deserves closer scholarly investigation. "

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, such as Alisa Mizuki, Tomoko Kawase (AKA Tommy February) and Kaela Kimura, 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?

Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides (1999) can be viewed as visualizing the (re)negotiation process of the twinned aspects of girlish ‘autonomy’ and ‘restriction’. Although the film’s references to more established images of girlhood are observable, its vague, narrative neutrality, supported by cinematic aesthetics with a dreamy and melancholic effect, leaves their meanings largely unexplained. Connected to our contemporary ideas about adolescence, femininity is generally linked to either pathological fragility or emphasized sexual assertiveness. I question the legitimacy of these binaries and instead read The Virgin Suicides as a depiction of female complexity where the subtle complexity of the heroines contradicts these stereotypes. Instead of situating on either polar of extreme assertiveness and fragility, Coppola presents her conception of adolescent girls as floating between these two. The film’s ethereal and maidenly aesthetics conveyed through the visual qualities of the Lisbon Sisters, including the dresses they wear, effectively layer the girls’ sense of autonomy and sexual maturity, signifying the negotiation of idealizing, suppressing, and empowering adolescent girls. The tragic fate of the girls, on the other hand, limits the film’s capacity to offer an alternative to the monolithic idea of adolescent ‘girlhood’ and how it is visualized in our contemporary culture.

"Readers unfamiliar with contemporary Japanese media might be puzzled by the appearance of men in fashion magazines. This is particularly the case for images of Japanese young men whose strong concerns over their appearance and slender physicality seem to enhance their (hetero)sexual desirability. These publications suggest to their male readers that crafting fashionable looks through selection of the right clothes, cosmetics, fragrances, and maintaining a balanced diet is necessary to self-assurance and a successful life. Do Japanese men engage with fashion differently from men in Europe, Australia, and North America?

The co-presence of Asian and non-Asian models can make these publications seem even more confusing. Readers might wonder if these models are another reification of the ‘Westernised’ nature of Japanese youth. This article shows that a rich study of subjectivity and aesthetics might be found in these Japanese men’s publications. Male aesthetic sensitivities at a cultural level and notions of “the self” might be understood in different terms than they are in many Euro-American cultures. Likewise, the male aesthetics favored by some contemporary Japanese youth might imply an attempt to reject the more established, dowdy mode of ‘salaryman’ masculinity. In short, I argue that Japanese young men’s almost narcissistic concerns about appearance and fashion might offer a different, more ‘relaxed,’ approach to understanding men’s relationship with fashion."

"The process of cultural globalisation does not always imply cultural homogenisation.
Rather, it can be seen as a process of cultural ‘glocalisation’ and hybridisation where
cultures continuously interact with and interpret each other to engender a hybrid
cultural form. As Arjun Appadurai (1993) contends, neither centrality nor peripherality
of culture exists in the context of cultural globalisation. Rather, transnational cultural
forms are likely to circulate in multiple directions.

This is particularly evident when examining Gothic & Lolita – a Japanese fashion trend
which has emerged since the late 1990s. Applying Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s theory of
‘globalisation as hybridisation’ (2004), and Roland Robertson’s concept of ‘glocalisation’
(1995), this article attempts to explore how this fashion trend manifests the process of
cultural ‘glocalisation’, hybridisation, and interaction through the localisation of Western
Goth subculture and especially, historical European dress styles in Japan. In addition,
it explores how the fashion signifies the idea of ‘reverse’ flow of culture through an
ethnographic observation of an English-speaking online community devoted to the
trend. The analysis of the online community also seeks to establish the idea that this
transnational cultural flow serves as an alternative to the local culture."

Shōjo manga varies in style and genre. Despite this diversity, however, there is a certain conception of shōjo manga aesthetics, dominated by images of flowers, ribbons, fluttering hem skirts, and innocent-looking girls with large, starring eyes. While it has been a tradition to equate the beginning of shōjo manga with Tezuka Osamu’s Princess Knight (Ribon no kishi), more recent studies have instead focused on shōjo manga prior to Tezuka’s, namely the creations of Takahashi Macoto, who was influenced by the so-called lyrical illustrations (jojōga) of artists such as Nakahara Jun’ichi, Takabatake Kashō and Takehisa Yumeji. And manga influenced by jojōga arguably prioritized visual qualities.

The importance of visual qualities has increasingly been recognized in shōjo manga studies. However, most critical examinations of shōjo manga place emphasis on the role of narrative structure and representation of gender. This applies particularly to those who read shōjo manga as a medium to challenge conventional gender roles. As Iwashita Hōsei points out, especially female manga researchers have tended to focus on biological and socially constructed gender. This column discusses two such works, Fujimoto Yukari’s Where is my place in the world? (1998, revised edition 2008) and Oshiyama Michiko’s Discussion of Gender Representation in Shōjo Manga: Forms of “Cross-dressed Girls” and Identity (2007, revised edition 2013). This paper aims to show that an attention to qualities other than explicitly gender-subversive narratives can equally be important for advancing the genre as a scholarly topic. Paying more attention to visual and fashion aspects as well as less known works and thematic sub-genres will further illuminate the cultural uniqueness of shōjo manga.

Мать участницы балетного конкурса считает, что свадебный танец Авроры из «Спящей красавицы» (1890) Чайковского — это очаровательная, но «несложная» вещь в сравнении с партией Медоры из балета «Корсар» (второй половины XIX века), требующей поистине виртуозного мастерства. Эпиграфом к этой статье взяты слова ее дочери, 17-летней балерины Мидори, которая доказывает сама себе, что должна исполнять именно эту партию. Мы видим внутренний диалог девушки на фоне иллюстраций к сюжету балета: с распростертыми руками под дождем из розовых лепестков, скромно улыбаясь, стоит Принцесса Аврора в изысканной, украшенной вышивкой классической пачке, похожей на венчик цветка. Это фрагмент комикса Мото Хагио «Цветочный фестиваль» — по всей видимости, предназначенного для молодых женщин. По крайней мере с середины XIX века связь между классическим балетом и материальным миром, окружавшим юных девушек, стала очевидной. По словам Джульетты Пирс, балет представлял собой не просто популярную форму девичьего досуга: начиная уже с 1830-х годов, когда девицей была сама королева Виктория, «на товарах, предназначенных для девочек, можно было часто встретить плоские или объемные изображения балерин» (Peers 2008: 73). Почему же девочки и женщины так увлечены балетом? На этот вопрос можно отвечать долго и многословно, но одной из очевидных причин этого интереса являются общепринятые представления о красоте. Как справедливо пишет Айвен Алдерсон, «одним из секретов очарования балета является та откровенность, с которой социально сконструированные образы выдаются в нем за эталон прекрасного» (Alderson 1986: 291). Помимо музыки, хореографии и сценографии, той красотой, которой балет буквально лучится, он обязан костюму балерины. Это особый род красоты: гибкое тело, призрачный свет, колыхание многослойной пачки, изысканные украшения (блестки, шитье, камни и искусственные цветы) — красота, которая считается утонченной и элегантной. В этой статье мы рассмотрим утверждение, что балет — это сфера женского доминирования, и потому различного рода феномены, имеющие отношение к этому виду искусства, помогают проследить неявные взаимосвязи между женственностью, утонченной красотой и индивидуальным самосознанием. Объектом нашего исследования служит специфическая форма художественного нарратива — японский комикс манга, в частности сёдзёманга, предназначенная для девочек и молодых женщин.

Тема девичества, зачастую тесно соотносимая с концептами красоты и неуловимости, наделенная поэтической аурой, издавна привлекает внимание людей искусства. В современных голливудских фильмах, од­нако, она, напротив, ассоциируется с деградацией. За редким исклю­чением героини голливудских фильмов, ориентированных на девушек и молодых женщин (например, «Жижи» (Minnelli 1958), «Маленькая колдунья» (Walker 1989), «Бестолковые» (Heckerling 1995), «Дневники принцессы», известный также под названием «Как стать принцессой» (Marshall 2001), «Блондинка в законе» (Luketic 2001) и «Дьявол носит Prada» (Frankel 2006)), «взрослеют» по ходу сюжета, превращаясь из не­вежественных, наивных и безрассудных созданий в зрелых женщин, образ которых больше соответствует традиционному. Обычно этой трансформации способствует участие старших персонажей и следова­ние ролевым моделям. В последнее время в голливудских сюжетах все чаще встречаются молодые героини, тяготеющие к активным действи­ям. Как правило, это девушка-сорванец с мальчишескими ухватками (Джуно в одноименном фильме (Reitman 2007)), маргинализованный персонаж (Энид в «Призрачном мире» (Zwigoff 2001)) или женщина в «мужском» наряде, подчеркивающем ее физическую и психологиче­скую состоятельность (таковы, например, Элизабет из «Пиратов Кариб­ского моря» (Pirates of the Caribbean; Verbinski 2003–2007), Алиса из «Алисы в стране чудес» (Burton 2010) или Белоснежка из фильма «Бело­снежка и охотник» (Sanders 2012). Эти фильмы органично вписываются в устоявшуюся картину мира популярной культуры, в рамках которой девичество наделяется негативными коннотациями и трактуется как состояние пассивное. Считается, таким образом, что юная женщина должна как можно скорее продемонстрировать свое соответствие тра­диционным моделям поведения и занять предназначенное ей место в социуме — преимущественно благодаря физической трансформа­ции (Driscoll 2002: 221).

Альтернативой этому пути служит откровенно «мужская/мальчишеская» манера поведения как необходимое условие независимости и осуществления функций субъекта (Allison 2000: 275). Отмечалось также, что героини кинофильмов, как правило, изобра­жаются с точки зрения их (гетеросексуальных) отношений с персо­нажами-мужчинами (O’Shaughnessy 1999: 98; Fournier 2007: 375–376). Отрицательный образ девичества в фильмах отражает социальную тенденцию, согласно которой юная женщина находится в кризисном состоянии и нуждается в помощи взрослого. Отмечалось, что новост­ные программы на американских телеканалах конструируют нега­тивный образ девичества, ассоциирующийся с низкой самооценкой, искаженным телесным образом и расстройством пищевого поведения (Mazzarella & Pecora 2007: 19). Соответственно, создается впечатление, что юные женщины и в особенности девочки-подростки виктимны по определению. При этом голоса самостоятельных, уверенных в себе и деятельных девушек остаются не услышанными. Стереотипные пред­ставления о «мужественности» в равной степени оказывают негатив­ное воздействие на мальчиков и мужчин (Bem 1993; Beynon 2001: 11; Pease 2002: 27), и юноши в Северной Америке и Австралии значитель­но чаще, чем их сверстницы, предпринимают попытки самоубийства, заканчивающиеся смертельным исходом (Canetto & Sakinofsky 1998; Möller-Leimkühler 2003). Несмотря на это, однако, некоторые авторы рассматривают маскулинные стереотипы как более позитивные и даже желательные по сравнению с представлениями о девичестве (Lees 1993; Thompson 1995). Это соответствует общей социальной тенденции, про­являющей себя даже в детском поведении: отказ от «женственности» воспринимается как претензия на власть (Paechter 2006: 257). Та же тен­денция находит отражение и в американских кинофильмах, где «деви­ческая» женственность ассоциируется с простодушием, беспечностью и невежественной невинностью.

Candy Candy, the 1970s Japanese girls’ comics and animated series, achieved massive popularity in many countries throughout Asia, South America and Europe. But perhaps because of its highly girlish themes and notorious copyright lawsuits, it has never attracted the amount of scholarly attention that its popular success would indicate. Candy Candy was especially popular in South Korea, where this classic tale of rags-to-riches seems to have influenced subsequent TV dramas. The male protagonist in Candy Candy, Terrence Graham Grandchester, was known as Terry in Japan and Terius in South Korea. Terrius was so popular that the name has become a generic descriptor in South Korea for a beautiful young man with long hair and a melancholic demeanour. The primary aim of this paper is to examine a transcultural appreciation of this specific mode of male beauty in South Korea and Japan. The significance of such a male beauty ideal lies in the potential that these representations of “masculinity” might both reflect and shape ideals and ideas of gender, which are transmitted across cultures via stereotypically ‘female’ cultures but are ultimately consumed by men. I hope to shed light on the previously under-explored role that popular girls’ comics have played in shaping and reflecting ideal male beauty in Japan, which can also be understood in this cross-cultural context. The popularity of these modes of Asian male beauty which have been adopted by South Korean and Japanese celebrities and performers internationally affords us the opportunity to examine how these ideals evolve and propagate across cultures by examining a well defined historical and cultural context.

One of the dominant modes of ideal male beauty in contemporary Japan differs from the generalized Western ideal of muscularity in being slender, shōnen-like (boyish), and predominantly kawaii (cute). This kawaii masculinity is omnipresent in contemporary Japanese culture, from advertising to TV programs, from magazines to fashion media, articulating its potential influence upon contemporary Japanese men.

In this talk, Masafumi Monden examines a particular sector of the significance of this boyish male beauty in contemporary Japanese culture – namely the intersections between masculinity, body, fashion and self-hood. It argues that the significance of such a male beauty lies in the possibility that representations of “masculinity” embodied by these men might both reflect and shape certain ideals and ideas of gender, which are consumed by men in Japan.

Shōjo, the girl positioned between child and adult, is an iconic representation of femininity and girlhood in Japanese culture. A pretty and stereotypically feminine aesthetic that sometimes disguises dark and disturbing themes, shōjo has fascinated artists working in many fields from literature to manga, film to fashion, and not just in Japan. Researching the National Library’s significant contemporary shōjo collection, Masafumi Monden explores the multifaceted importance of shōjo as a cultural imagination, a complex and sometimes shocking ideal of girlish identity in Japanese popular culture that encompasses both objectification and agency, desire and identification.

Dolls play a significant role within the material culture of Japanese girls. While a doll is a physical simulacrum of a human body, it lacks consciousness and thereby agency. When the doll has a female figure, the physical passivity of the doll and its position of being owned, objectified and controlled becomes an analogy of the asymmetrical gender relations in society. But dolls feature as protagonists in some shōjo manga. These stories often exude an air of fantasy and mukokuseki-ness through an amalgam of the doll’s beautiful dresses that allude to the old-world charm; sensitive boys who become the “carer” of the doll; and the (pre-)adolescent shōjo doll itself, which instead of being depicted as a passive, motionless object, acts with a degree of agency. Fantasy settings and allusions to the romantic past in shōjo manga have often been interpreted as offering alternative pathways for female readers to examine heterosexual relationships. How do we then make sense of shōjo manga where the physical identity of the doll is assembled and crafted through the gaze of her ‘carer’ and the reader alike? Are they straightforwardly symbolic of feminine oppression? Or might these manga exemplify an attempt to re-evaluate and assign novel meanings to notions of ‘passivity’ and ‘femininity’?

Fairy-tales and romantic ballet have a prominent relationship with the material culture concerning girls’ lives. Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake (1877), with its alleged influences by fairy-tales and folklores such as Russian The White Duck, is an epitome of such association. With the cascades of white gauzy ballet dresses and lithe movements symbolizing the binary of swan/maidens, the fairy-tale-inspired ballet embodies an ideal mode of feminine beauty that still holds a currency today. Because of their association with the ‘princess culture’, often been accused of imposing the ideology of heteroromantic love, an unhealthy body image, and asymmetrical gender roles onto their main, female consumers, both ballet and fairy-tale-inspired fictions have been subjected to criticism. As a consequence, many such texts and their cultural significances in our contemporary culture are yet to receive adequate scholarly attention.

By focusing on the nexus of fairy-tales and ballet in Japanese culture, this paper proposes another reading. Princess Tutu (2002-3) is an anime series that employs aspects of fairy-tales, including Ugly Duckling, The Nutcracker, and Swan Lake. Particular attention is paid to two parallel narratives of transformation upon which the anime draws; from an animal to a human -its heroine as a duck transformed into a girl, and her beautiful friend/ enemy as a ‘daughter of crows’ rather than victimized maidens cursed into being beautiful birds as in conventional fairy-tales; and from a human to a magical ballerina heroine. Rather than simply thrusting on the (hetero)romantic ideology and capitalizing on audiences’ desire for makeover, Princess Tutu, I argue, attempts to draw a serious analysis of romantic fairy-tale genre. Does it exemplify the idea that depictions of female characters are much more diverse in Japanese popular culture than they do in its Euro-American counterparts? Will it gainsay the common criticism of fairy-tales as primarily endorsing (hetero)romantic ideologies?

Ideal representations of the male body within culture, time and place are central when understanding the inter-relationship of gender and self-identity. It is hardly surprising that men frequently make sense of their bodies and dressed selves in comparison with some culturally defined ideal. They increasingly define themselves through the management of their bodies in today’s media-driven society, and their bodily ideals operate as a major point of cultural reference, influencing men’s perceptions of their own bodies, and hence their self-identities, too. One of the dominant modes of ideal male beauty in contemporary Japan, embodied by many male actors,models and celebrities, differs from the generalized Western ideal of muscularity in being slender, shōnen-like (boyish), and predominantly kawaii (cute). Their clean-cut, boyish demeanors, I argue, allude to a type of masculinity that is situated in a liminal space between boyhood and manhood, embodied not only by adolescent boys but also by young men in the space between ‘adolescence’ and what some societies see as manhood. This kawaii masculinity is omnipresent in contemporary Japanese culture, from advertising to TV programs, from magazines to fashion media, articulating its potential influence upon contemporary Japanese men. In considering the particulars of Japanese male idealized beauty, much can be learned to dissect the generalisations about childhood, teenagers and adults that dominate western thinking about youth since the 1950s

The primary aim of this paper is to examine a particular sector of the significance of this liminality of male beauty in contemporary Japanese popular culture – namely the intersections between masculinity, body, and self-hood. This paper argues that the significance of such a male beauty lies in the possibility that representations of “masculinity” embodied by these men might both reflect and shape certain ideals and ideas of gender, which are consumed by men in Japan. Beauty and fashion discourse, as produced through media texts like fashion magazines and advertisements are themselves shaped by, and dependent on, wider social forces and their relations with other fields. Do examples of this kawaii, boyish male beauty, then, allow calibration of the ways in which Japanese conceptions of masculinity are manifested in an ever changing society? What is the relationship between subjectivity and projections of ideal beauty? What comes first – the desire to adhere to the boyish state, or the products, services and industries that enable such projection to operate in the first place?

V. C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic (1979) has been capturing the hearts of adolescent girls for nearly 40 years. The enduring popularity of the novel is reinforced by the success of its recent adaptation on the small screen (2014). Despite its popularity, the work has received little, if any, scholarly scrutiny. While this may be due to its controversial storyline, which includes incest, murder and the confinement of children by their own mother, another reason may be the highly ‘girlish’ ambience of the story, which is often treated in a derogatory and unfavourable manner in Anglophone culture. In such a culture, the period of ‘adolescent girlhood’, which the story’s heroine Cathy embodies both somatically and metaphorically, tends to be perceived as merely an unstable and perilous stage that women pass through as they mature.

By focusing on its recent TV film adaptation, this paper proposes another reading. The perspectives developed within Japanese shōjo studies assign a degree of independence to such a state of ‘girlhood’, which they term as a ‘shōjo-scape’. Flowers in the Attic might be representative of a ‘shōjo-scape’, where the concept of adolescent girlhood and aesthetic qualities associated with it are ascribed greater significance and focus, and by implication a considerable degree of principality. By re-evaluating the potential of cross-cultural applicability of Japanese shōjo criticism, this analysis of Flowers in the Attic might serve to provide an alternative to the monolithic, often Eurocentric idea of intellectual ‘exchange’ that flows only in one direction.

Shōjo manga is one of the hot topics in the study of manga. Despite this visibility, scholarly scrutiny in the English-speaking world tends to have focused on limited aspects of the category –e.g. famous works from the 1970s, and/or the “queer” genres of “boys love” or fighting girls. As a result, the more “typical” aspirations of shōjo manga have yet to receive adequate attention. This paper focuses on Miyawaki Akiko’s Kin to gin no kanon (abbreviated as K&G, 1984) in which one of the heroines – Masumi – attempts to escape from her wretched life and determines to succeed with her musical talent at any cost, leading to betrayal, deception and even murder. Through K&G, this paper argues that one of the problems attached to shōjo manga studies is an unconscious avoidance of what appear to be “typical” shōjo manga, perhaps due to their “girlish” aesthetics and “ultra-feminine” protagonists. For some, these might appear too supportive of normative gender roles. If shōjo manga are, as often argued, reflections of patriarchal oppression endured by Japanese women, what sense can we then make of manga like Miyawaki’s, with its significantly ambitious heroine? This manga, moreover, reflects a tradition of shōjo culture where the relationship between girls is a recurrent theme. This might spare the female characters from being portrayed mainly via their relationship to male characters. Does K&G then point to the necessity in re-evaluating shōjo manga from new, more interdisciplinary perspectives? What does this tell us about contemporary Japanese culture and society? Might shōjo manga be re-evaluated by pursuing more “mundane” or less “exceptional” examples?

The history of Japanese “Ivy style” is said to have begun with Kensuke Ishizu who was the “architect” of Take Ivy, and a kind of Japanese version of Ralph Lauren. He founded the Ivy League-inspired clothing brand company VAN JACKET in 1951. Until the 1990s, the styles that resemble the “Ivy-league style” made an almost continual appearance in Japan. The “Ivy style”, and similar styles with names such as “school”, “preppy” and “trad”, are popular today, particularly for those who appreciate the neat and conservative styles (kireime) and high-casual styles. This modern day revival of the “Ivy style” was particularly marked since 2007 where the aesthetics of the “Ivy style” were blended with other styles and engendered
a number of similar styles with a subtle nuance.

The Japanese version of the “Ivy-league” style is a good example of a global crossing. A cultural form is accepted in a different cultural context, blended with “local” characteristics, and then flows out again in multiple directions. Indeed, what is striking about the Japanese embracing of the “Ivy style” is not only its “preservation” of the style when such styles were perceived as démodé in the United States, but also its demonstration of subtly nuanced changes and transformations. Japanese adaption and appropriation of the “Ivy-league” style, I argue, tells a cultural process where an “American” clothing styles are blended with “Japanese” aesthetic ideals and preferences. This cultural mélange has in turn been reimported to the United States, making new meanings and new markets for this now perennial style.

In one of the memorable sequences of Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, the Lisbon girls are portrayed as contemplating together in a girlishly decorated bedroom, after being confined to their home. In a sense, these girls seem to recreate the clichéd image of imprisoned fairy-tale maidens, be it ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Florine’ in The Bluebird or ‘Rapunzel;’, destined to dream, sing or contemplate in a confined space until their rescue, generally by a man. Particular attention is paid to the aesthetic of ‘sweetly girlish’ bedroom spaces such as this, the visuality of Coppola’s narrative, and the concept of the girls ‘ imprisoned’ in both a space and a filmix aesthetic. But is this film merely a metaphoric narrative of an idealized vision of ‘girlhood’ which is both aesthetically enchanting and restricting? Rather than reading it in this derogatory manner as straightforwardly symbolic of feminine oppression, this paper proposes another reading. Coppola’s film might exemplify the attempt to reevaluate and possibly assign novel meanings to the notion of ‘passivity’; that being in a submissive position could draw central attention to subjectivity, and hence assigning a degree of ‘power’ to the character.

This paper looks at romantic ballet and its influences on Japanese girls’ culture. Particularly with the creation of a filmy gauze tutu and satin chaussons de pointe in the early to mid-nineteenth century, the ballerina symbolises for young girls an extraordinarily beautiful and ethereal being, living in a gloriously romantic world. It is argued, however, that the popularity of ballet has slipped behind opera as an art form and behind gymnastic as a sport in Europe and Australia in the early twenty-first century. In contrast, it has retained its popularity in Asian cultures, particularly in Japanese girl culture. The two possible reasons for the prolonged popularity of ballet in Japan are identified: firstly, the aesthetics of ballet costumes correspond with the Japanese shōjo (girl) sensitivity. Secondly, particularly in fictional narratives, ballet can allow young heroines to exercise their senses of agency and independence without jeopardising their romantic, girlish femininity. Paying particular attention to Japanese Gothic & Lolita fashion and girls’ comic books, I will argue that such conceptions of ballet can offer an intricate negotiation of lady-like, elegant mode of femininity and senses of independence and agency.

The application of the Japanese word kawaii (cute) is contested, contentious and culturally contingent. In simple definitional terms, kawaii refers to an aesthetic that connotes something childish, girlish or sweet; it is neither restricted to children nor women in Japan. The concept of a ‘cute’ aesthetic, particularly when associated with feminine appearances, is most often viewed in the generally unfavourable terms of infantilisation, objectification and passivity in many Western cultures. Yet the Japanese concept of kawaii can also be interpreted as a “delicate revolt” that softly and implicitly subverts established stereotypes and cultural preconceptions.

My paper explores this issue by focussing on a group of music-video clips in which female Japanese pop-singers adapt and appropriate the imagery of Lewis Carroll’s famous heroine ‘Alice’. The emphasis in these videos is on the singers’ girlish and cute, almost “infantile” appearance, mostly constructed through the repertoire of clothing that they wear. I argue that these performers offer an innovative representation of youthful femininity in terms of a negotiation between “infantile” cuteness and forceful independence. Furthermore, I explore how the ‘cute’ fashion displayed in these music videos possibly serves as an alternative to the established binaries of sexualisation and subservience in which young women tend to be represented, particularly in but not exclusive to the West. This Japanese aesthetic concept of kawaii, I argue, might illuminate the possibility of detachment of eroticism from the representation of femininity, as well as from ‘sweet’ and ‘girlish’ sartorial style.

Banana Yoshimoto’s novel Tsugumi (Goodbye Tsugumi) was first published in 1989, becoming a best seller in Japan. It was then translated into Italian in 1994 and into English in 2002 by Michael Emmerich. Of great significance within this novel is the representation of girlhood. Narrated from the perspective of the nineteen-year old Maria, the novel centres upon another youth, the eighteen-year old Tsugumi. The eponymous character is delineated through a cascade of dualities; ethereally beautiful yet maliciously selfish, physically delicate yet emotionally robust, and so forth.

My paper explores how the novel’s representations of youthful femininity bring together two often-contradictory attributes of “femininity” and “masculinity”, such as ‘girlishness’ and strong senses of agency and autonomy. This kind of representation is shared not only by Yoshimoto’s other novels, but also by other arenas of mainstream Japanese popular culture. Furthermore, I explore how this novel reflects a tradition of Japanese fictional narrative in which the friendship between young women is a recurrent and central theme. Arguably, this might spare the female characters from being portrayed mainly in terms of their relationship to male characters. Japanese representations of girlhood, as manifested in Goodbye Tsugumi, might offer an alternative to our understanding of representations of young women, which tend to function within the somewhat monolithic binaries of futile assertiveness and pathological fragility.

Cultural globalization is not just a political process. It is also a creative process in which cultures continuously interact and re-interpret the other in order to engender a novel cultural form. In the famous contention of Appadurai (1993), neither centrality nor peripherality of culture exists in our transnational era. Instead, disjuncture and fluidity within this very flow suggests the circulation of cultural forms in multiple directions, denying the artificially separated dichotomies of “local” and “global”, and perhaps even more radically for our world of binaries, of the West and non-West.

These vectors of cultural flow can be read through my examination of Lolita style – a Japanese fashion trend, which has emerged since the late 1990s. The fashion has subsequently circulated outside Japan, even with certain limitations, indicated by the presence of an English-speaking online community devoted to the trend amongst other manifestations. In this paper, I pay particular attention to Nederveen Pieterse’s theory of “globalisation as hybridisation” (2004), the theory of “format” and “product” articulated by Okamura (2003), and Robertson’s concept of “glocalisation” (1995). Applying these theories, I illustrate how this fashion manifests the process of cultural “glocalisation”, hybridisation and interaction through the appropriation of Western ‘Goth’ subculture and the deployment of historicising European dress-styles in contemporary Japan. Furthermore, I explore how these fashions also signify the idea of the “reverse” flow of culture, and how this is interpreted differently in the West, a different cultural context. This grounded example of transnational cultural flow, I argue, might serve as an alternative to the monolith idea of ‘local’ cultural values, norms and aesthetics.

Derived from Nabokov’s controversial novel (1955), the name Lolita connotes infamy, particularly when applied to the way in which young women are represented in Western culture. Evidently, the Lolita look, where young women are portrayed girlishly and “innocently” in Western media, is accused by some as endorsing female infantilisation and objectification (Merskin, 2004). This sentiment reflects the famous contention made by sociologist Thorstein Veblen at the turn of last century, in which female sartorial ornamentation was a stable signifier of dependency and subservience. To what extent a “girlish” and emphatically “ornamental” fashion-look inevitably signifies such negative connotations is the question posed in this paper. Looking for a new possibility, I turn to Japanese culture where different modes of representation of femininity are flourishing than in the West (Napier, 1998).

My paper focuses on Tetsuya Nakashima’s film adaptation of Kamikaze Girls (2004). The emphasis of this film is particularly highlighted by Momoko, one of the film’s two adolescent, “fashionista” heroines. She is dressed in the Japanese Lolita fashion, a lavishly lacy and self-consciously girlish style with references to the European Rococo tradition, and quite freely engages in established “masculine” activities without undergoing any sartorial metamorphosis. In this paper, I will argue that Kamikaze Girls offers an innovative representation of young women with a high degree of autonomy and agency. Furthermore, I explore how the film possibly gainsays the established notion that assumes the correlation between girlish femininity and negative connotations of passivity and subservience. Kamikaze Girls, I argue, might shed positive light upon our understanding of the disparaged ornamental and “girlish” sartorial style.

Clothing is often perceived as a device to create, define and demarcate the gender binary. Accordingly, there are sets of preconceptions regarding ways in which men and women are assumed to engage with fashion. The research presented here reviews three of these ideas, some of which have been challenged by scholars but which are, still persistently, present in popular culture. Such preconceptions assume that men prioritize functionality over aesthetics and are the bearers, not the objects of the gaze, while women’s fashion is represented through multiple binaries of sexualisation and restriction, and female sartorial ornamentation is seen as symbolic of subservience. I investigate these presumptions via three contemporary Japanese cultural texts –(a) Japanese young men’s fashion magazines, (b) Japanese female performers’ appropriations of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” in their music videos, and (c) Lolita fashion and Tetsuya Nakashima’s film Kamikaze Girls (2004), respectively.
My study of these three selected texts explores the following possibilities that: (a) through negotiating the male reader’s desire to attract admirers and narcissistic impulse, young men’s fashion magazines endorse an idea that “crafting” the pleasant “look” is a part of quintessence of self-assurance and the idea of a good, successful life; that (b) kinds of Japanese cute (kawaii) and girlish aesthetics demonstrated by the Japanese singers allow them to accentuate their “cute” femininity without a hint of sexualisation, and; that (c) one of the heroines in Kamikaze Girls engages in both conventionally “masculine” and “feminine” activities while almost always dressed in the highly elaborate, girlish Lolita fashion. My examinations of these texts arguably renders the cultural and social-psychological conceptions of “gender performativity” and “androgyny” effective and credible.
The Japanese context is appropriate for this aim because this is where, particularly since 1868, European sartorial styles have been actively promoted, both politically and aesthetically. Consequently, Japan has become an ethnographically unique space where the subtle marriage of European dress style and Japanese aesthetics has taken place. Along with the theme of fashion and gender, this research attempts to unearth the meanings behind processes of Japanese adaptation, appropriation and restylisation of European sartorial and aesthetic concepts. Japanese appropriation and refashioning of European sartorial concepts, this research argues, offers a unique interpretive illustration of the aesthetics of fashion and transnationality.