"rori-con" & Fashion Madness

Hello Kitties
By Malena Watrous
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Akari wears a pleated navy miniskirt and a white sailor middy, standard issue of junior high schools all across Japan. But the skirt is minuscule, and her middy hangs down below its hem. Akari's brown, gently bowed legs are bare on this icy January night save for the "rusu-sokusu" (loose socks) gathered in folds at her skinny ankles. She wobbles a bit on her eight-inch platform boots. Completing the look (modeled on the anime character "Sailor Moon," from the eponymous series about a clumsy, lazy and tear-prone 14-year-old who transforms herself, through magic, jewelry and makeup, into a cute, sailor-suited, love-and-justice-defending crime-fighter) is her hair, which is dyed a brassy gold to offset the burnished walnut tan of her round young face. Dolled up in her tiny uniform (purchased secondhand for about $100 from a friend who outgrew the skirt long ago), a sucker lolling from her pink mouth, Akari is one of Japan's many "kogaru," "ko" from the Chinese character for "little," and "garu" coming from the English word "gal."

Kogaru want to look young, the younger the better. They wear their school uniforms out around town, on dates, probably even to bed. They wear their uniforms but they mess with them, rolling their waistbands so high that their creamy Polo sweaters hang down below their skirt hems, violating school hair and sock codes.

Ganguro want to look black and American, like their idols TLC and Lauryn Hill. In pursuit of a color that's beyond tan, they frequent tanning salons, purchase sunlamps and smother their faces in brown makeup. It's not uncommon for a girl of limited means to color her entire face with a brown magic marker. For those ganguro with the funds, however, Japan's hippest hair stylists will coerce usually rail-straight Japanese locks into bulbous "afuro" (afro) perms that take half a day to set and cost about $400. Whereas kogaru dress like sexy little girls, many Japanese believe that ganguro are prematurely aged by sunning and excessive makeup. Another name for ganguro is "yamanba," mountain grandmother, the name given to a mythical hag said to haunt the Japanese mountains.

In 1999, while the Japanese economy lagged, two new boutiques -- Glamour Jean and Key West -- opened on Kanazawa's main shopping drag, catering exclusively to ganguro. Egg magazine and other glossies aimed exclusively at ganguro are frequently sold out at convenience stores. Signs posted outside hair salons advertise the newly popular "buraku" (black) or afuro hairstyles. And in the cosmetics aisles of mainstream supermarkets, dark beige powders and tanning lotions are now sold alongside the formerly ubiquitous skin-whitening creams and industrial-strength sunscreens.

Here in Japan -- the child pornography export capital of the world -- childishness and sexiness are inextricably bound. So, while it may not be difficult to grasp the kind of naughty appeal that Akari has to men suffering from a "rori-kon," or "Lolita complex," it's not as easy to understand the broader, more pervasive appeal of her childish-but-sexy look.

Edited for size.
Truth is Stranger Than Fiction:
http://www.livemusicstudio.com/mac/pages/ganguro.html
www3.tky.3web.ne.jp/ ~edjacob/fringe.html