TUGUMI
Banana Yoshimoto
Tokyo: Chuokoronsha, 1990
The tourist who visits Tokyo - whether Japanese or foreign - is nowadays apt to forsake the older sights of Ginza or Asakusa for a newer neighborhood of the city, one less known for its shrines and temples than it is for its ready-to-wear sales and sidewalk cafes with such improvable Japanese names as "Vienna 'B' Haus." The neighborhood is called Harajuku, a name which once referred to a rural (hara) road stop (juku) for Edo Period officials headed for Nihombashi, the former center of the capital.
Today it is itself the final destination of distant travelers, reached by taking the city's Yamanote circle line to a deceptively modest, Tudor-style train station which, when exited, deposits the visitor at the head of a broad, magnificently tree-lined boulevard. To stroll the quarter-mile or so of this boulevard is to view an eclectic jumble of prewar, postwar, and now postmodern buildings housing high-end fashion emporiums as conservative as Paul Stuart and Hanae Mori, and as cutting-edge as Comme des Garcons and Obscure Desire of Bourgeoisie. At the same time, one finds informal tent cities squeezed between the sleek minimalist boutiques, Japanese versions of the? Turkish bazaar, where long-haired hippies hoarsely hawk such low-end accessories as "Dartmouth University" T-shirts and Sister Boy make-up kits. Rio has its Carnival, and New York has its Fifth Avenue - what Tokyo has is something akin to both but, typically, all its own.
One of the first impressions an American tourist might have of Harajuku is that, unlike Rio or New York, which are very much playgrounds for adults, here are well-heeled and tony surroundings given over entirely to children. Imagine, if you will, a "Disneyland Meets Bloomies." Stop and stand anywhere in Harajuku, look around - as far as the eye can see, a sea of hundreds, even thousands of teenagers. The effect on an American can be unsetting, not only on account of such youth but their gender (one guesses that three-quarters are female) and the endless, undifferentiated navy blue of the school uniforms that junior and senior high school girls are required to wear. The architecture in Harajuku is amazing for its diversity of color and form, but its daytime population is equally surprising for its sheer homogeneity of every thing from the regulation grade-school haircut down to the white bobby socks and sensible black shoes.
All of Tokyo, save perhaps the business district of Marunouchi (which has its own, albeit male, homogeneity of the navy blue business suit), can seem like a city inhabited by a race of shojo, or "schoolgirls." I doubt that Tokyo produces any greater percentage of teenage girls than any other city, but it has certainly made them more visible than others. They are conspicuous not only in the sense that large crowds of them roam Tokyo's shopping districts in their ample leisure time; they are conspicuous in that the shojo has become a commercial icon, a symbol of the average consumer represented and reproduced in advertisements everywhere. Magazines, billboards, above all television: In whatever direction one turns, the barely pubescent, uniform-clad teenage girl is there to promote products and to purchase them, to charm the erotically titillated adult male and herself be charmed as a flurry of goods and sevices circulate like toys around her. The word most often associated with the teenage girl is kawaii, or
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