Harajuku Girls

Circumnavigating Tokyo on the Yamanote line, the fashion is an analogy of Japanese culture. The dress is uniformly conservative and homogeneous. Men wear business suits. Young women wear skirts with high socks. All very well dressed, but with little variety. A young man with wild hair or a hip-hop look adds the odd bit of flair. These stand out like pale stars against the otherwise uniformly dark sky.

By comparison, the Sunday crowd at Harajuku is a brilliant explosion of fireworks. Every weekend, girls (and a few guys) from the areas surrounding Tokyo ride into the city and converge on Harajuku station. Once there, they emerge like butterflies from the cocoon. The outfits are vast in variety, fulgent, and exquisitely intricate. “Gothic Lolitas” and visions from an anime reel walk the street. It’s an amazing spectacle. A feast for the eyes.





Drawn to this flame is a motley crowd of locals, Japanese tourists, and gaiijin. I was just one of many confused and bemused westerners circling the scene with camera drawn. But we weren’t alone. Buses full of Japanese tourists (yes, they have them too) stopped on the bridge to take it all in from behind tinted glass. Several older Japanese men prowled the scene, asking the girls to pose for their cameras. I couldn’t tell if they were serious photographers or just creepy old men.





Also attracted to this feeding frenzy were others seeking to capitalize on the confluence. A train of vans, painted with slogans and blaring propaganda, stopped to evangelize to the crowd. A man paced back and forth with a UFO adorned flag emboldening everyone to “Welcome E.T.” A peaceful young man held a large sign advertising “Free Hugs”.





Through it all, the girls showed an odd combination of exhibitionism and shyness. I sat along the bridge for a couple of hours, observing the scene and wondering. Why were these girls here? What drove them to this audacious form of expression? And what were they expressing? Doubtless, this was statement of individualism. These girls not only stood out from the crowd, but they also stood out from each other. But there was also a palpable sense of community and belonging. The girls arrived and remained in pairs. They greeted each newly arriving member with gleeful screams and hugs usually reserved for long lost friends. Maybe living in the less cosmopolitan outskirts of the city and alienated in their own communities, they found here a longed for sense of belonging. Many of the girls, underneath their elaborate plumage, didn’t meet the societal ideal of conventional beauty. So maybe this was a way of receiving attention not otherwise afforded.

I’m no anthropologist, so I don’t know. And I probably couldn’t understand anyway. But whatever the cause, the effect is a unique and curious bit of counterculture. Another beautiful idiosyncrasy of Tokyo.






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