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I always had an inkling that Japanese youth dressed
to a different drum machine. Before the Internet and mass explosion of
global culture, the rare soy-stained copies of fashion magazines like
Cutie and J&J’s circulating in local Japanese
restaurants provided a shop window to the wacky and wonderful world of
Japanese teen fashion. Here were highly organized manuals on how to
properly layer oneself, from skin-whitening make-up to fringy hair and
stripy toe-socks, an all-encompassing guide to looking absolutely
adorable. I sighed green-eyed and resigned myself to what was it,
Giordano? These Jap girls were funky, cute, and looked so exotically
fashionable.
Those were just the normal girls, though.
Numerous viewings later of Takeshi’s Castle, Akira,
and Oh! My Goddess, after a course on Japanese cinema and a
hubris-doomed stint at learning the language, I grasped something of the
tensions straining behind their alternately bizarre and conservative
culture, scars of the sudden rift from ancient isolation to high-speed
industrialization which have painted the nation’s face a neonmagnetic hue.
Tokyo is often presented in literature and cinema as the city of the
future, a city of dreams both utopic and dystopic in its ultra-modernity,
where humanity hangs like a misplaced question mark. Something was bound
to erupt, as it did in Ghost in the Shell, where all viral hell
broke loose in self-serving consciousness.
Of course, literature
and cinema are not quite reality, but life has been known to imitate art.
Luck landed me in Tokyo last week, where I got to see all my personal
infestations up close to see if they compared. The place was William
Gibson overdrive, and I appropriately Cased the joint. Destination:
Harajuku. Mecca for fashion-obsessed youth, rebellious in appearance only.
Emerging from a node in the circuits of subway to the circus of
subcultures, I stood for a moment as a fixed point while everybody
converged and fluxed around me, intersecting, sluicing the air with their
razor-blunt style and bleached orange hair. Except for the hair, I stood
out like a sore nail waiting to be hammered down. Amidst sailor-mooning
schoolgirls in their super short skirts, logogrammed J-phone wielding
neophiliacs, and goulish geishas tottering on getas, my white tank top and
khakis simply will not get me on the pages of the latest Street Fashion
magazine.
The predominant fashion trend was this kind of
layered uptown bag-lady look. A loose, thin tunic thrown over a few tanks
and a skirt and/or slim pants were typically worn by the average young
Tokyoite. Accessorize hazardously. And of course, pay close attention to
your hair and make-up. Japanese women are the most cosmetics-crazy in the
world, probably followed close by Japanese men, and this before
metrosexuality became a Details media fad. These kids, if
decontextualized and placed on the Manila streets, would raise a few
eyebrows but probably be at home with the Mich Dulce school of dressing.
On the streets of Shibuya, they were the uniform norm.
A few other
genre-bending mish-mashes abounded. The tanned, blond surfy James Deaners,
the hiphop cheerleaders, the Madonna punkettes. There were still a few
ganguros, chicks who bed-tanned themselves silly, circle their eyes
and lips with white liner, wear loud colors and towering platforms, a
skewed reference to black American culture peppered with rave aesthetics.
The more recent phenomenon is the elegant Gothic Lolitas with their
intricate, elaborate get-ups (who, if in Manila, would be ardent fans of
the Tessa Prieto-Valdes school of dressing).
It was a Saturday,
and they all came out to play. The kids dolled up in their weekend finery
for a stroll around the park, perhaps with the ultimate purpose of being
photographed by the many trend documenters, an affirmation in their own
manuals of style, cult-followed magazines like Fruits and Gothic
+ Lolita Bible. The Gothic Lolitas, girlishly dressed in short frilly
Victorian black, rivers of white eyelet, twirling a bloody parasol if the
sun was out, were not exactly baby vampires out to spook the common folk.
They have little to do with the mopey Robert Smith goths who define
themselves through the oft-morbid music they listen to. Nor would they say
they’re overtly playing on the sexualized innocence of Nabokov’s Lolita
character, either (though I’m sure lecherous old men would disagree).
Gothic Lolita, for them, is merely the name of a style of a rather darkly
sweet and fanciful dress they adhere to, and not a defining statement on
identity.
It’s just cosplay, after all. Cosplay is short for
costume play (the Japanese love doing that shortening thing–Brad Pitt gets
hacked down to an icky "Burapi") which may have its roots in the Kabuki
theatrical tradition, but has currently evolved as a trend among Japanese
teens who like to dress up like their favorite visual rock bands, or just
plain dress up. Well, at least they’re spending money on clothes and not
shooting up and dying in dank alleyways. Among the otaku in other
countries of which the Philippines has a significant number, cosplay is
usually relegated to those funny anime conventions where hardened fans
make their own robo-suits or come as a J-pop or J-rock star. Now wouldn’t
you rather look Voltes 5 than F4?
Modern Japan is so steeped in
style that it’s hard to tell where substance begins. People used to look
"gothic" or "punk" because that was their lifestyle and music choice.
Japanese kids do nod fervently to the west for trends, but they
reappropriate them, smush ‘em through a blender, splice and remix them
until mutated to a bastard pop fusion of styles that may not signify one
thing in particular but nothing and everything. And hey, they look darned
interesting, if not at least provocative in questioning notions of beauty.
They are fashion-obsessed, self-expressed and dress with manic,
extreme-sport enthusiasm, because they know it will be all over in a few
years when they enter university or the gray world of salary suitdom. The
irony is, these kids take so much pains in looking different that they end
up looking different in exactly the same way. Birds of the same feather
frock together. The world has gone Pop! and eaten itself.
Nevertheless, these mimetic, hyperkinetic kids are sine qua non in
a Tokyo that would otherwise be a less colorful place. There would be less
reaction from the fetishizing outside world, because Japan, it its own way
is still the curious bubble it used to be during its isolation years.
There would be no crazy cons and upsurgences of gothlolis and other
original aberrations in London, the US, and Manila. Then there would only
be the sararimen and faded flower ladies sleeping on subway cabins as they
are carried along, heads bobbing unknowingly in unison as the subway
curves and bends, speeding only toward a predetermined end. The kids do
know how to draw attention, and surely that’s what being stylish is about.
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Blue And Yellow Roppongi
Hills |
Although I skipped
out on the delicious underbelly that was this big fish’s nightlife, I did
a couple other things in my speed tour of Tokyo besides gawp over
unaffordable clothes like the undercover tourist that I was. The
antithesis of Shibuya street fashion, where the kids undoubtedly
hand-sewed some of their outfits, was the phantasmagoric behemoth of a
super-complex called Roppongi Hills. Carved into an urban renewal area of
the comparatively shabby surrounding Roppongi area, the Hills have been
designed to be an environment in its own right, a "unique, dynamic
lifestyle destination and true cultural hub." A giant spider sculpture
welcomes you to its parlor, which is flanked by an oriental garden and the
steel grids of the Asahi TV station, and presided over by a huge video
screen endlessly flashing the iridescently cute Roppongi-branded
animations created by the Louis Vuitton man of the moment himself, Takashi
Murakami.
Only the highest-end shops dared show its fancy-ass
facade in this winding arcade. It was a tourist trap, and many Japanese
came here not to shop but to breathtake in the massivity of its insisting
existence. This was futurama in its most real, sprawling form, an
overpowering entity among the overcrowded, overstretched rest of Tokyo.
The 40th floor of the Mori Tower housed a 360 degree observation deck
where one could peer like God down onto the megalopolis as it cornered the
cloudy blue horizon, the color of television tuned to a dead channel.
Roppongi Hills was well dazzling, but lest one be blinded by this pantheon
of commerce, there lurked an unnamable sinister quality that seeped from
beneath its stony yellow veneer, something quite out of a Haruki Murakami
novel.
I, and so do you,
spend a considerable amount of time in what might be called non-places.
Travelling stuck in highway traffic, with only billboard amusements to
distract and blot out the murky sun; mall life, centered on banal
activities that try half-heartedly to pass for culture; implanted to the
cellular phone, which draws us tightly together in a communicative void;
night surfing for net catch for I don’t know what. We long to escape, but
only find ourselves caught up in more non-places of no "real" distinction,
hubs like airports which are becoming more like mini-cities, autonomous,
duty-free, transient and transitional. We are just passing through.
Shuffling off.
Tokyo, and all other cities, are each a city of
dreams both utopic and dystopic, and places where the non-place is
breaking through, spreading virally, consciously. And though the big
global cities are all starting to look the same, sound the same and feel
like any 24 hour 7/11, the place still has its place. I found place in the
small things, not the big.
I found place in my first bite of Kobe
beef, which tasted indeed like what a fat lazy cow who drinks beer all day
and gets massages should.
I found place in the toilet cubicles of
Roppongi Hills, where each bowl had an electronic appendage and a
mysterious "flushing sound" button. Ahem, no more fake coughing to muffle
your pooping noises or whatever else you might be doing in there.
I found place in the relative tourist-unfriendliness of Tokyo,
which made me feel less of a tourist than a decipherer of hieroglyphics.
I found place in the organized chaos of the intersections where
people criss-crossed en masse like a hive mind, in the layered subway
depths that never stop shifting, in the balance Zen rock gardens strike in
the shadows of concrete madness.
I found place, rather
extravagantly, in the P90/minute phone call I made to my favorite traveler
who was roaming an unmined, off-beaten Laos, reminding me of other places
that still are and those that will always be.
And I found place in
the vintage samurai pants I bought at the Oriental Bazaar, heavy and stiff
and dusty, worn by a lone swordsman but to be turned into a dress by me!
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