Noon, and my alarm goes off. I look around my apartment. It has a bedroom a kitchen and a unit bathroom — all a student needs for the summer. The only thing missing is a good air conditioner, and with the intense heat and humidity that is typical of summer in Tokyo, I have a thin layer of sweat covering my body. I lie in my bed for a while thinking about the best way to get out of bed. After five minutes my torso is off the futon; another two and I successfully stand up. I fold up my sheets and futon, place them in my closet and get ready for a day of shopping.
           I only have three blocks to walk to Aoyama-Itchome station, but by the time I get there I am ready for a cool shower. Everywhere I look in Tokyo, someone is wiping themselves with a handkerchief. My towel today is blue with a pink elephant; it is kawaii (cute). I know it is kawaii because I bought it at Kiddy Land in Harajuku last weekend.
           I take the Hanzomon line two stops to Shibuya station and switch to the Odakyu line and get off at Shimo-Kitazawa, my favorite place in the world. Shimo-Kitazawa is funky. It is a small neighborhood close to Shinjuku (a large sub-city of Tokyo), but a fairly small, unknown community and difficult to reach. Shimo-Kitazawa is made up of small alleys that twist and turn into each other — a maze of graffitied walls and bike racks. It’s full of thrift stores, tiny boutiques that can fit a few people in at a time, coffee shops, head shops, hookah bars, beer gardens, and laid-back, trendy people.
           There’s a wine bar that I like to visit every time I stop by Shimo-Kitazawa. It’s run by a late twenty-something-year-old, Shunji; he prefers that I call him Eric.

Art and bikes line the alleys and bring character to Shimo-Kitazawa. Photo By Amanda Moritz, July 2006

           Eric is fluent in English and French, well traveled, and a wine connoisseur. I stop by during the day before he opens for the evening every time I’m in the area. I like to talk to him about Paris and New York and I tell him about Boston. Sometimes he gives me ‘zines (self-published magazines) that his friends make. He wears simple, casual, well-made clothing, a mix of designer and vintage, with his long hair pulled back in a bun. He is Shimo-Kitazawa cool.
            Today I stop by Eric’s place as usual, but he isn’t in, so I make my way over to my favorite thrift store: Recycled. I have to squirm through a crowd of cigarette-smoking, faded t-shirt, too-big-for-their-feet-Birkenstock-wearing reggae listeners before I can get into the store. It’s busier than usual because Recycled is having an end of the season “off”, or sale. Even with everything marked down 20 to 30 percent I still find t-shirts that are selling for a couple hundred dollars. After an hour I emerge with a scarf and two shirts that I probably spent too much money on, but at least I know they’re cool. I head back over to visit Eric, where he lets me take a few pictures of him while he’s getting his place ready for the evening.
           
One time he took me shopping. We spent hours looking through the racks of used clothing. He didn’t buy anything. He said he was looking at what was being sold this week and for how much. Just a couple decades ago and there would not have been any used clothing stores lining the alleys of Shimo-Kitazawa. Second-hand clothes

Eric works on the menu in his wine bar. Today he is wearing a leather rope as a necklace. Photo By Amanda Moritz, July 2006

were for those who could not afford new clothing. Now thrift stores help moderate and dictate trends.
            Street fashion in Shimo-Kitazawa is laid-back chic. But being laid-back takes intense attention to detail in a completely un-laid-back manner. From the shoes and hats you wear, to the music you listen to, to the way you speak, to your manner of smoking a cigarette — all of it has to be carried out in style. But the style is always changing.
            Style changes because teenagers dictate current fashion. That’s why people like Eric go to thrift stores: to create the next trend. They are willing to spend up to $1000 for a used Mickey Mouse sweatshirt because the particular brand is desirable at the time as Rebecca Mead comments on in “Shopping Rebellion”. Eric once told me that an article of clothing by an exclusive label such as Comme des Garçons may be worth much less than its original price in a thrift store if it is not cool at the time. Gregory Beals points out in his article “The Trendsetter: How do Tokyo’s Teens Stay Ahead of the Fashion Curve? They look to Hiroshi Fujiwara, a So-Hip Guru of Style” that teenagers revere ex-DJs like Hiroshi Fujiwara because they help start and spread cool trends from Tokyo to the rest of the country.
            Unlike in the US, where “cool hunters” (as Malcolm Gladwell calls them in “The Coolhunt”), like DeeDee Gordon, who works for Reebok, go around the US looking for the next cool thing for large corporations to market, being “cool” is more underground in Japan. Fujiwara knows what is cool because he starts, finds, and spreads the trends. His store in Harajuku, an area in Tokyo famous for fashion-obsessed schoolgirls and exclusive boutiques, sells limited release clothing. Various other boutiques in Harajuku do the same. A small designer will make one hundred t-shirts and stores will market these t-shirts by advertising their scarcity. These designers are not necessarily designers in the traditional sense, like Junya Watanabe; they are musicians, DJs, artists, and students who started off making their own clothing and branched off to making their own brand.            
           After a few hours in Shimo-Kitazawa, I take the train back to Shibuya to do some more shopping and finish up the evening. I exit the station at the Hachiko exit, which puts me right across the street from Shibuya 109, the teen-girl Mecca of Japanese fashion. Shibuya is different from Shimo-Kitazawa. Girls on the street do not strive for the comfortably cool look. Instead, most of them are deeply tanned, with bleached blonde hair and 4+ inch platform sandals. Their style is called Kogal. Although I do not completely understand the style that is Shibuya and would never adopt it, I love to watch it.

A Kogal with purple hair and matching shorts examines her make up in a mirror while crouching on a sidewalk outside of the Shibuya train station.	A Japanese schoolgirl and fellow Kogal stand in a shopping street in Shibuya, cigarettes in hand.
Photos By Amanda Moritz, July 2006

           As I make my way through Shibuya crossing (the busiest crossing in the world) I see groups of girls and boys huddled together on the sidewalk and in front of stores. Some of the girls are so dark and orange that it is hard to see their features, so they highlight their noses and cheekbones with silver or white make up. Their hair is bleached and teased up. It seems that the girls with the biggest hair have the shortest skirts. Even though these girls are little, I know they’re tough. My friend Kaz used to tile roofs during the summer. Groups of these girls would sneak into the construction sites where they would “battle” other groups. Mostly they would dance and “trash talk” each other, but Kaz said that sometimes they could get violent, and there would be fistfights.
           I always make my way over to Shibuya 109 (spoken as Shibuya Ichi Maru Kyuu, or just Maru Kyuu). 109 is a ten-story shopping mall that caters to fad-hungry teenage girls. Schoolgirls make weekly pilgrimages to 109 to check out the latest merchandise and to imitate the idolized salesgirls’ style. According to Yuniya Kawamura’s paper “Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion”, girls will go to 109 nearly every day to become friends with the salesgirls. When a position opens at 109, the salesgirls will promote their friends for the job. If you are a salesgirl at 109, you are a trendsetter. Street fashion magazines will ask you to model for them and you will be idolized by the next wave of girls to enter 109.
           Two summers ago I was an exchange student at a public high school for three weeks. A few of the girls in my class were kogal. They didn’t speak much English, but the first thing they said to me was, “I like to tan,” whereupon they pointed to their orange faces and smiled. They took me out to Shibuya a couple times to show me what it was like to shop with them. We headed straight to Shibuya 109, where we spent four hours shopping. They knew a few of the salesgirls, and the salesgirls showed them the newest arrivals. Upon seeing the skirts, little tank tops, and big earrings, the girls would giggle and scream “Kawaii!” They would repeatedly point to clothes and ask me if I liked them. I never knew what to say. The clothes would never fit me, and even if they did, I would never wear them. They carried around fashion magazines and tried to replicate the same outfits that their favorite models wore. I wondered if these girls knew how ridiculous they looked. And then I realized, of course they do because they pose in pictures for tourists all the time. Unlike Shimo-Kitazawa, where fashion is about individuals discovering their own fashions, the girls who shop in Shibuya closely imitate the latest trends put out in certain stores, magazines, and salesgirls/models. This is how these trends spread from Shibuya to the rest of Japan.
           I used to wonder where these girls on the street get their money since they don’t appear to do much other than shop, sit on the street, and go clubbing. Kawamura notes at the end of her paper “kogal is often associated with…teen girls meet[ing] with older men for sex in exchange for expensive designer label gifts or money to finance their shopping spree.” Some of these girls are runaways and turn to prostitution to support themselves. They are a community of girls who escaped to the streets of Shibuya to rid themselves of their parents and the expectations that come with them.
            On Sundays, I head over to Harajuku to look at the girls who dress up in Cosplay, or “costume play”. Some imitate their favorite animé characters, but most are some variation of the typical “Gothic Lolita” look. These girls wear short, gothic style dresses with caps and socks and matching bags. Every Sunday, these girls, and some boys, congregate on the bridge between Yoyogi Park and Harajuku. They pose in tourists’ pictures and sit, waiting to be looked at. Girls who dress in Gothic Lolita strive to be as kawaii as possible; they appear young and innocent. In some cases these girls dress up as a reaction to the extremely tough and provocative Kogal style, in others, the girls are escaping to a fantasy through Cosplay. After taking a few pictures with them, I head back to my apartment and collapse.

Two girls stand on the bridge between Yoyogi Park and Harajuku this Sunday to display their outfits to tourists and Japanese onlookers. Photo By Amanda Moritz, July 2006

           After a weekend of shopping in Tokyo heat, I don’t want to do anything but lie on my futon, close my eyes, and feel the fan, because shopping in Tokyo is more than merely shopping. I can’t help but think about all the people I saw on the street. The different ways young people in Tokyo create their outfits. The ways they wear their hair, carry their bags, and hold their cigarettes are statements.
            All of these styles are a reaction to a demanding Japanese society. Japan is known to many as a “conformist nation”. Fashion in Japan, since its Westernization, has been about high-end brands and fashion trends. Fads would sweep the country and the result was a homogenous nation of people — they all looked the same. Today’s street fashion, as I have noticed in Tokyo’s Harajuku, Shibuya, and Shimo-Kitazawa neighborhoods, is about personality, individuality, and self-expression. These young people are saying that they’re sick of living in a world of labels, brands, and sameness, and instead want to break away from what their parents and grandparents are, by means of fashion.

NOTE:

The texts cited in this essay are: Beals, Gregory. “The Trendsetter: How do Tokyo’s Teens Stay Ahead of the Fashion Curve? They Look to Hiroshi Fujiwara, a So-Hip Guru of Style.” Newsweek. 11 Dec. 2000: 37; Gladwell, Malcolm. “The Coolhunt.” The New Yorker. 17 Mar. 1997: 78-89; Kawamura, Yuniya. “Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion.” Current Sociology. Sep 2006: 784; Mead, Rebecca. “Shopping Rebellion.” The New Yorker. 18 Mar. 2002: 104.