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Ganguro
Japan is a country that will fascinate everyone forever. The high technology, combined with an old tradition, is a bizarre combination that still produces a shock among tourists coming from the Western world. In the middle of the XX century, this country that had been isolated for a hundred years finally discovered the Western world. It was the real turning point in the history of Japan. Japanese society realized that some Western standards were interesting and attractive, and slowly but constantly they adopted some of them. So that is the reason why Japanese like soccer and baseball; the walls of Japanese teenagers are decorated with Madonna, Jessica Alba and Brat Pitt posters; the most popular movies are French pictures like "Taxi"; and the most-loved beer is German "Beck."
The most peculiar and shocking experience for Western tourists is the conclusion that Japanese teenage girls don't look like slant-eyed , black-hair beautiful geishas and Japanese boys don't resemble a typical samurai known from plenty of movies. Such a stereotyped persons have been changed into Western-oriented girls and boys look like Paris Hilton and David Beckham.
If you walk in the streets of Japanese towns, you will notice that local teenagers want to look more American than American teenagers really are. The former beauty ideals are gone forever. The place of the geishas’ beauty is seized by blond- or red-haired, suntanned girls with a special heavy makeup that has one aim—to mask slant-eyed faces. The natural brown eyes are hidden by intense blue or green contact lenses. The beauty of "Caucasian" eyes is picked out by long, curly artificial eyelashes, the face is covered by concealer that hides the yellowish skin shade, and the lips are strongly outlined with a white lipstick.
The traditional, typical pupil school uniform is not longer in use, and modern girls wear laced, intense-coloured thigh boots, mini skirts that show more than hide, and close-fitting sweaters or T-shirts with popular English slogans like: "I am sexy at all!" or "Catch me if you can!" The odd design is completed by a number of pink strings of beads, rings and hairclips in a flowered shape. Such clothing style is called "ganguro" and the Japanese capitals of this are two of Tokyo's districts: Ikebukuro and Shibuya. Thinking that being ganguro is only wearing a different clothing style is a mistake. Ganguro style also contains specific behaviour, music and slang that is a mix of English and Japanese language, and a typical Japanese person can not understand what a member of the ganguro subculture speaks.
Ganguro are a good target for market managers, so they produce ganguro-oriented TV programmes, make Internet portals and publish special fashion magazines. The subjects of them encompass the view of modern fashions, make-up advice, and presentation of new electronic gadgets like cellular phones or MP3 players. Just the ganguro style essentials according to the rule "Get wild & Be sexy". The members of ganguro like to party, so they meet each other in teenager night clubs and dance rhythmical Para-Para. After parties, they like to visit special restaurants that offer only low-calorie meals. Here is the one difference between a typical American-oriented member of ganguro and a real American teenager: every ganguro girl is slim. And this is the most important thing, because if a ganguro member is a little bit too fat, she will have to lose some kilos as soon as possible…because if she did not, she would have to return to the standard Japanese society. For ganguro, it would be a real disaster!
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Frank W. Abagnale
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Nan Madol
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