Six Unbelievable Japanese Subcultures
Japan is so different to other cultures, we even think some customs are really crazy. Of course, we say that with nothing but admiration. Their mind-blowing and often unsettling subcultures have faced the pressure of high expectations and stifling social codes, and responded by taking rebellion to new, terrifying places.
#6.Dekotora
When lots of Americans picture Japan, they're picturing Tokyo--one big Blade Runner-esque city. But take the subway out of the city, past the endless suburbs and there's a Japanese heartland just as rough and tumble as the deepest parts of the South. There are even Japanese truckers.
Known as dekotora (a combination of the English words "decoration" and "truck") these guys add amazingly elaborate spoilers, lights, boxes and elaborate murals to their rides.
A dekotora truck can have a Cadillac bumper, illuminated chrome side-running boards, paper lanterns, luggage racks that light up like Christmas trees, detailed murals featuring dragons, samurai and cartoon characters, and even metal tubes shooting off the front that serve no purpose at all.
Amazingly, most of these trucks are actually used to transport goods.
#5.Gyaru
Named for the English word "gal", gyaru are young girls who dye their hair sickly shades of silver and blonde, get fakey tans and slather the makeup on thicker than Bugs Bunny in drag. They can be found hanging out on street corners in almost every major city, but the movement was born (like almost every freaky Japanese style) in the ultra-hip Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo.
There are all sorts of subgroups of gyaru, and each successive generation gets weirder than the last.
First came the kogyaru, high school girls who wore sexualized versions of their school uniforms (supershort skirts and incredibly saggy socks) and dyed their hair blond. Once that style peaked, some girls started to go off the rails. Known as ganguro, they slathered dark makeup on their faces, painted their lips white and attached shiny stickers to their faces.
#4.Lolita
In Japan, lolita refers to another subculture. Unlike their gyaru contemporaries, who cake on the makeup and bare as much skin as legally possible, lolita's dress up in clothes so modest, Queen Victoria would tell them to loosen up a little.
Clad in petticoats, high-collared dresses, bonnets and wielding fluffy parasols, they walk the Bladerunner streets of Tokyo looking like graduates of The Tim Burton School for Girls. There are all kinds of lolita's, each with their own variation on the theme, but they all share a love of women's fashions that died out before their grandmothers were born.
And these aren't just outfits they wear to special clubs or garden parties. You can see grown women in these full Victorian doll costumes on trains, in book stores and wolfing down cheeseburgers at McDonald's.
#3.Male Hosts
Gyaruo style, which started out as male versions of gyaru, is the weapon of choice for the young dudes who want to look cool. They wear expensive clothes, gallons of cologne and sport Rod Stewart haircuts. Male Hosts--men who make their livings drinking with older women--are at the pinnacle of this trend.
Like the gyaru, they keep their skin tanned and their hair an unnatural shade of dirty blond. By dirty, we mean it looks like they haven't washed their hair for a very, very long time. But unlike the gyaru, the gyaruo took it up market and some of them have been raking it in ever since.
Not all men who dress like this are actual hosts, but the ones who are make large sums of money in specialized clubs all over the country. And what do they do for these women? Nothing; except sit with them, drink with them and slip them a romantic line every once and a while.
#2.Yankii
The closest thing Japan has to white trash, yankii, (a corruption of Yankee) are young men and women who dye their hair blond or orange, wear trashy clothes and smoke, drink and have children before they're out of high school. They are famous for being loud, rude and refusing to take part in the strict manners of Japanese culture.
There is some overlap of the subcultures here, as the yankii borrow some of their style from gyaru and gyaruo, but their clothes and hair aren't what set them apart. When the yankii started to appear in the late 80s and early 90s, Japanese media quickly whipped up a frenzy, predicting an Akira-like lawless Tokyo full of bad mannered punks with bad haircuts terrorizing little old ladies and not doing their homework.
#1.Visual Kei
Visual Kei is a term that represents both a style of music and a particular style of dress that both the bands and fans embrace with frightening joy. The music itself is largely forgotten 80s hair metal. But the costumes look like the aftermath of an orgy between lolitas, goths, vampires and anime characters where everybody had to hurriedly get dressed in the dark.
Aspects of visual kei style have even infiltrated regular fashion, as regular young Japanese women wear flouncy scarves in their hair and young men wear ass-hugging jeans. Yes, in about five years, real-life Japan will look exactly like a Final Fantasy cutscene. Source: Geoff Shakespeare
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Originally Posted by ware4me
). The Yankii is kind of offensive, giving a bad name to Westerners and probably giving "normal" Japanese people a bad impression of what "Yankees" are really like.
