Is it possible to change to a Japanese who is not Japanese?
OE KENZABURO1
When Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs was published in 1970, and on its English translation in 1982, it was given a mixed reception. This may have been in part to do with Said’s Orientalism having appeared four years earlier than the English version, and sensitivities to cultural appropriation being intense. It is easier to dismiss Barthes’ book as another example of a white man’s Orientalizing, thereby reducing its very premise to a rebuke. For Barthes’ intention was to find in Japan an antidote to the West’s penchant for endlessly accreting sign systems. In Japan, and particularly in Zen, Barthes sees a reprieve from the noise of Western culture, calling it a place of transition, hesitation, in which material things are placed in the service of effortlessness and weightlessness. “Japan,” Barthes confesses, “has afforded him a situation of writing” which is an “emptiness” and “the exemption from all meaning.”2 In short, for Barthes, “Japan” begins as a set of signs whose very purpose is to precipitate a lapse of signification. “Japan,” then, becomes a metonym for this process. What Barthes cannily located was the trait with Japanese culture for seeking out the space between. While there are a multitude of things that are incontestably Japanese, there is also an observable trait since the modernization of the Meiji Period at the end of the nineteenth century to bring the West into juxtaposition with itself. Arguably whatever may be deemed unquestionably “Japanese” is seen as such in contrast to what is not, and for the sake of describing an in-between space. Two examples bear this out: the work of Rei Kawakubo (of Comme des Garçons) and the contemporary phenomenon of cosplay. But first a gloss on the modernization of Japan.
Japan still retains many aspects of its pre-modern history in which it maintained isolation relative to other countries. Up until today, no foreigner, regardless of contribution or affiliation, may become a citizen. Isolationism was especially in force from 1639 with the sakoku or “closed country” policy, and reigned until the fall of the Edo period in 1868 and the beginning of the Meiji Reformation. A little earlier in 1854 Japan had begun to open its doors when Commodore Matthew Perry and his “Black Ships” enforced the Convention of Kanagawa. This led to the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate and the founding of a centralized state under the Emperor Meiji. With new infrastructure and foreign policy, Japan seized the opportunity for imperial expansion. Japan took control of Taiwan, Korea, and southern Sakhalin following the victories in the First Sino–Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905). It would continue this expansion after siding with the Allies in the First World War, later losing them after the crushing defeat of the Second World War. Japan’s foreign policy ambitions since the second half of the nineteenth century were deeply ingrained with the need not only to emulate Western imperialism, but to carve out its own space as an “Oriental” nation that stood out from others, an important part of which was to make other countries submit to Japan’s own Orientalizing. As Dorinne Kondo puts it, “Western Orientalizing, counter-Orientalisms, self-Orientalizing, Orientalism directed at other Asian countries: the interweavings of such constitutive contradictions produce ‘Japan’.”3 Artificiality, stylization, fashioning, are overarching in Japanese culture, in which constructive mediation is deemed essential to one’s relationship to the world. Evidently the same process was being conferred to culture-building.
Japan’s expansion into other countries and cultures had a paradoxical effect, which was to engender an eclectic culture which, at the same time, had a stiff, almost pig-headed, sense of its own uniqueness. As Ihab Hassan writes in his ruminations on Japan, Between the Eagle and the Sun, which amounts to a reply or complement to Barthes’ book:
The myth of Japanese uniqueness, however, is far more complex than Japanese isolation, racism, xenophobia would suggest. For the myth rests on contradictory ideas of uniqueness, which often contains its own anxieties. Thus Japan’s insistence on its distinctiveness may also betray its old identity problem, reverting to massive borrowings from China in the seventh century, continuing through massive appropriations from the Meiji Restoration. The paradoxes persist.4
Japan, he goes on to add, succeeded in Westernizing to an unprecedented degree, culminating in the economic boom of the 1980s made possible of the design and manufacture of technologies that were rooted and consumed in the West. (It might also be contrasted to the less successful and troubled history of Westernization that took place in Turkey.) Hassan contends that “Japan’s vaunted doubleness, at once Asian and Western … is a different form of uniqueness … a postmodern form, double coded, uninterested in ‘purity’.”5 It is non-purity that asserts itself through continuous references to relics of a pure past, and through its constant reconstruction. Indeed it is double movement that is immanent to the Japanese aesthetic: after seeing that his son had swept the path to his tea house too clean, the tea master Rikyu returned a scattering of autumn leaves over the path to his teahouse.6
The duality within Japanese modernization is best illustrated in the attitudes to dress that persist to this day. The Meiji period made foreign goods of all kinds more accessible to everyday people, which included Western dress, which was both affordable and less restrictive than the traditional work kimono worn by rural men and women. In pre-modern Japan, the gendered differences in clothing were far less pronounced, while modern Japan encouraged women to wear kimono and men to wear suits. It also stipulated Western clothing, yofuku, and attire, wafuku, for weddings, funerals, and the like. (When the Duke of Edinburgh visited in 1869, the Imperial Court received him wearing formal Western dress. In the next year naval cadets were made to wear uniforms inspired by the British, while the army were inspired by the French. In 1971, policemen and mailmen were Westernized in their dress, and in 1872 so were rail workers.)7
This change also affected the understanding of the kimono in Japan from something of a universal garment to a decorative one reserved for ceremonial occasions. In the Meiji and Taisho eras these sartorial designations became quite intricate and stratified, especially when applied to geishas, with variations between formal party wear to more everyday wear. The ability to cope and comply with these variations was an index of one’s status in being able to afford them and also to have the discipline to comply with them, which included seasonal modifications as well.8 Complying and discerning carried its own reciprocal prestige, as Liza Dalby affirms: “A practiced eye could distinguish geisha from amateur even if each wore the same outfit. The same holds today.”9 The love of such intricate codes suggested a return to a ceremonial past, albeit that many of these codes were very much of post-Meiji making. One source of such zeal was in the prosperity leading up to the First World War, which fostered invention and revival, and the two intertwined.
Thus, in contemporary Japan, the kimono is not only ceremonial dress, but also for those who have learned its protocols. Kimono dressing is a matter of esoteric knowledge, passed down by specialists teaching in specialized kimono schools. In the words of Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni, “With modern kimono, like other inventions of tradition in modern Japan, what is Western plays a significant role. It is conceived in large collective terms that make it absolutely and systematically different from the Japanese. Both the Western and the Japanese are referred to as cultural and discursive constructs rather than as objective realities.”10 This dialectical play is crucial to the way in which Japan created its Japaneseness that appeared to leave tradition intact without forgoing the benefits of Western progress. It was during the modernization period that the difference between what was Western (yo) and what was Japanese (wa) was articulated and justified.
State interventions into dress were not unusual in Japan but hitherto they had been oriented toward distinctions of class. The strategies in the Meiji period were far more sweeping, amounting to the men encouraged to wear Western clothing—which also meant cropping the hair and dispensing with the sidelicks and topknots that hailed from the samurai—and the women to wear traditional dress. There were fines for men who did not follow the new regulations, as well as commendations for those who deported themselves well.11 In the early Meiji period however, it was still a familiar sight to see men dressed in a suit but wearing a pair of traditional sandals known as geta.12 One important factor in the wholesale civilian acceptance of Western dress came when military dress became Westernized.13
Overall, the implications of this gendered partition were profound. From a symbolic perspective, the men were to be the travelers and ambassadors, bringing back the fruits of the West, while the women were the guardians of the home, safeguarding what was unique about Japan. Western utility was compared against the Japanese traits of beauty, respect, and harmony. The kimono was directly related to ideas of harmony in nature, and women were its purveyors. The coming-of-age ceremony that occurs when entering one’s twentieth year ensures that these distinctions are at the core of social fabric: for the men it is a straightforward matter of buying a suit; for the women the process is highly elaborate, involving accessories, photographs, and, of course, the kimono. As Goldstein-Gidoni adds, the ritual is steeped in significance, and rule-bound: “Japanese women regard their own ignorance in the ‘secrets’ of kimono dressing as an embarrassing flaw in proper etiquette and femininity.”14 As one would expect, the quality of the daughter’s kimono is a critical reflection of social status. The initiation ceremony has the kimono as the instrument to Japanese female rectitude, for her to become the “good wife, wise mother.” (Until relatively recently, something of a universal touchstone for the Japanese role-modeling had been the Japanese Royal Family, which was upheld as a living symbol of Japanese lineage.)15 Donning the kimono properly—with its elaborate additions of padding to create a smoothly cylindrical silhouette—was synonymous with cultivating the desirable woman—and a Japanese woman at that.16 The geisha and the kimono have a firm hold on the Japanese imagination to this day, to the extent that they amount to talismanic national symbols.17 Goldstein-Gidoni concludes that “the almost obsessive occupation of the Japanese with self-definition has reached the point of self-Orientalism and self-exoticism.”18
Figure 32 Yasaka Pagoda and Sannen Zaka Street in the Morning, Kyoto, Japan. Photo by Patrick Foto/Getty Images.
This is maintained through keeping the differences at sway within the culture itself, that is, that the “West” is enacted as well, which is the province of men. Japan can be said to exist as a byproduct of the dualities it has labored to construct for itself: man–woman and “West”–“Japan.” By way of another example, Japan is active in melding English words with their own grammatical and cognate conventions, or spelling them phonetically when sounded with a Japanese accent. This is what Hassan calls “Japlish.” The results can be amusing and bemusing to foreigners.
Japanese often use foreign words like free-floating signifiers, meaning anything, unless the letter o or u is tacked at the end of the word, as in aisu-kurrimu, happy-endo, faito (fight), tafu (tough), kissu, rabu hoteru (love hotel), tarento, feminisuto, which Japanizes the word, turning it into “real” language; then the Japanese use the word, as if it had sprung from the Yamato earth.19
It would be hard to find a better entrée and summary of the manner in which modern Japan has recreated itself. It is fluid, almost parasitic, adaptation that is then enshrined in essentialism through recursiveness and national self-entitlement.
The issue of Japanese fashion as the term is maintained and circulated in contemporary fashion in Euro-America as well as in South-East Asia, and Japan itself, continues to be a very vexed issue. This is not only because of the generalities and stereotyped expectations that it confers, nor to do with an acknowledgment of a noticeable difference. It is also to do with the way a multiplicity of qualities and approaches are lumped together, many of them inferred a posteriori, after the fact, as “Japanese.” The phenomenon of Japanese fashion, which must include the many debates that surround it in addition to the material objects themselves, is a cardinal instance of a transorientalist reciprocal movement, in which cultural origin in time and tradition run reciprocally with cultural creation and interpretation. And it brings to light, simply, what occurs after arbitrary attribution, the power of naming of something as belonging to a place and its attendant history.
The tenacity of Japanese fashion as an idea and an epithet is due largely to the fact that it originated in Paris. Because of this it is immediately classed as something different from ethnic dress, since in retrospect it can be read as an intentional formulation that posed alternatives to Western tailoring and silhouette, alternatives that were then naturally given a cultural code. The first major designer to begin his career in Paris was Kenzo Takada, followed by Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yanomoto, and Hanae Mori. The next generation of designers included Junya Watanabe, Matsaki Matsunisha, Hirochi Nakano, and Yuji Yamada. Yuniya Kawamura, in her book, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion, makes a great deal of what attracted Paris to the first wave of designers in particular, as an epicenter of taste that had been established since the reign of Louis XIV.20 France, as a purveyor of aesthetic refinement and luxury, has long been a fascination to Japan, which includes among others the prestige that the upper middle classes see in being able to speak French.
The other reason was more logistical, and again based in the highly gendered partitioning of Japanese culture. When in 1959, at the age of twenty Kenzo wished to embark on a career in fashion design, he struggled to find a school of design that would admit male students. Finally, he found the Bunka school of design in Tokyo where he became caught up in stories of his mentor and teacher, Chie Kioke, who had recently returned from studying at the L’École de la Chambre Syndicale in Paris.21 Kenzo was also aware of the influence that Paris fashions had on Japanese designers in Japan, which made the transition a sensible one. Kenzo’s flair was in combining fabrics, pattern, and color, making for highly eclectic ensembles that used Western prints (many of them that had grown out of the long history of trade with India and China), folkloric designs, and Japanese fabrics. As Kawamura observes, Kenzo, seeing the profitability of the brokering race, quickly “realized that the “exotic” elements were attractive to the French public, so he began to look elsewhere for other ethnic cultures. He also used straight lines and square shapes, which are derived from kimono that do not have any curves.”22 As modern Japan would use non-Japanese words as their own with increasing promiscuity, Kenzo did the same with fabrics and designs. He is given credit for “such recent trends as kimono sleeves, the layered look, folklore fashion, winter cotton, the explosion of bright colors, vests, baggy pants, and workers’ clothes.” The Kenzo-sown seedbed of contemporary Japanese fashion meant an approach to color that perpetuated the longstanding association with bright colors and the orient, forms that ran counter to what had been desirable, and with an unapologetic license for cultural appropriation. He was the non-European in his own Orientalizing, plundering the West and delivering it back for Western approval. All of this was executed in an eye-opening but not too challenging way, which prepared for the more radical experiments of Miyake, Kawakubo, and Yamamoto to follow.
The innovations of these designers, which now have a strong and growing literature, only enforced the “Japanese” label. It was one with which all of the designers felt uncomfortable. For while they knew that it meant acceleration to observability, they were justifiably sensitive to the limitations that it bestowed in equal measure. Kondo remarks how Miyake, for example, complained that naming him as Japanese limited his claims to be universal, running the risk of reducing him to a fad. While relishing the success, he was also distrustful of the rise of Western interest in new Japanese design, apprehensive that such patterns are followed by a decline in interest that is just as swift.23 As Kondo reflects,
Miyake’s claim on universality reproduces the contradictions animating Japanese identity formation from the 1970s. On the one hand, his appeal for universality fuels the forces of consumer capitalism. “Universality” means clothing that will sell anywhere in the world.… On the other hand, “universality” reaches for recognition outside essentialized Japanese identity. Here the salient feature is racial marking, which preserves the unmarked category of universality for “white.” Who, after all, is allowed the designation “designer,” not “Japanese designer.” Miyake’s move toward universality on this level is a common, if problematic, move to escape ghettoization.24
Miyake’s dilemma is another version of the Michael Jackson syndrome, that creates its own kind of blackness while also ensuring an unmissable amount of whiteness as insurance against obscurity. One result is that “Japan,” in fashion and other practices as they approached the end of the millennium, has evolved to be a floating signifier that embraces precisely this contradictory position, which is recognition and evasion both at once.
“I want to be forgotten” seems a fairly disingenuous proclamation by a designer that is so ambitious and with such wide global influence, which means that her influence and example will last well beyond her lifetime. However it is a comment that is in character for Kawakubo, who is well known for her evasiveness, which spreads to many things, from her reluctance to be in the limelight, her intolerance of what is not within her ethical and aesthetic worldview—and her aversion to being called a Japanese designer. But the desire to avoid designation has the effect of the drawing attention to the same. Moreover, it is a disavowal that is based in what is perhaps an over-presumption, of over-attribution, of ascribing the creative output to a series of cultural essentialisms—when to be associated with the country of origin may only need be that.
But just in surveying her earliest collections, it is hard not to devise narratives of attribution. In Holes (autumn/winter 1982–83), Kawakubo was one of the first designers—the other salient one was Vivienne Westwood—to introduce wear, stress, and depredation into the syntax of the garment. Westwood’s early work frequently repurposed old garments, and her collaboration with Malcolm McLaren and punk gave her garments a brutal quality that ran counter to what was considered decent and acceptable. Kawakubo, for her part, brought the language of damage and destruction into garments that otherwise stood for style, as opposed to the anti-style of Westwood’s punk. Formerly the habitus and expectation of high fashion was the best tailoring and the best fabrics. A garment that showed signs of wear was properly discarded, this being the luxury and imperative of class. Kawakubo may have still been using expensive fabric, but was subjecting it to stress that suggested degradation. The garments were also baggy or wrapped, in defiance of Western tailoring. Sagging, draping wrapping, together with raggy textures were all in the next collection, Patchworks and X (spring/summer 1983). Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats (autumn/winter 1983–84) included fabrics of uneven wefts that were also torn and ragged. The wrapping and layering of the body was strongly suggestive of makeshift streetwear, down to the way that homeless people wear clothes of different sizes and torn clothes like bandages. With wear and improvisation at the heart of the garment’s meaning, Kawakubo designated the body wearing it as fundamentally traumatic, since she came after a former nameless (and absent) wearer. These collections were also exclusively black.
These references to ruins, hiatuses, and ghosts of history—which also rendered her sympathetic to interpretations aligned to the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction26—inevitably courted associations with postwar Japan. The aesthetics of destruction, allusions to the remnant and to improvisation due to deprivation, could easily be read together with the Japan in the legacy of the cataclysms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As renditions of a “post-Holocaust clothing,” Kawakubo’s collections from the early 1980s are compelling. A resounding theoretical refrain in the 1970s and 1980s—when succeeding generations of artists, thinkers, and scholars were dealing with expressions of war guilt—was Theodor Adorno’s gnomic statement toward the end of his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”27 It is a statement that summed up the ambivalence toward the purpose of art and beauty in its pursuit of truth. The unutterable atrocities after the Second World War left little space for escapist or lyric poetry, and the ruins of the landscape across Europe and in East Asia made a return to pre-war innocence impossible, if not unconscionable. It was also from the protest era of the 1960s onward that artists were rethinking traditional modes of approaching art and the art object, and therefore traditional canons of the beautiful. As a direct result of the new subcultural styles of punk and glam, in the 1980s “grunge” became a dominant aesthetic in art and design. It was an art of detritus that abjured charm. Despite all denial or attempt to sidestep these associations, they are inescapable.
In her important earlier study, Spivak in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), devotes a large portion of her chapter “Culture” on Kawakubo, as she rightly sees clothing, as with architecture, as “privileged arenas of inscription.” Spivak writes: “How very different she is, how Japanese. Yet, the authoritative cultural discourse that defines her and indeed defines Japan is placed in Euroamerican cultural history.”28 She notes that Kawakubo was born in Tokyo in 1943, so was an infant when the bombs flattened Nagasaki, yet also cites a Kawakubo comment that he “felt it important, not to be confined by tradition or custom or geography.” Yet, as Spivak asks, “How does a 1943-born Japanese buy such freedom?”29 One answer lies in the “march of capitalism” itself, which produces “plausible stories so that business can go on as usual.”30 In other words, Kawakubo’s plea not to be culturally marked is motivated by a market that expects such a plea, and that, to some extent, accommodates it for its own self-interest. Kawakubo is thus not Japanese as such, but Japanese broaching the neutral space—which is to say, very modern Japanese. Spivak, in her impassioned critique, remains skeptical of Kawakubo’s claim to being a “minimalist,” as a means of refuge from the complex culture positions that are before our eyes. “If Britain sucks Empire from Rome, Comme des Garçons sucks style from France. France is to fashion what Japan is to otherness. The subject remains Europe.”31 For Spivak, who holds to the subject being “historically and therefore geopolitically inscribed,”32 Kawakubo’s attempted elusiveness can have grave political consequences because “it often allows an other woman to disappear.”33 The smoothing out is ideologically suspect because it finds itself complicit with commodity capitalism that welcomes the variability in the name of redirecting anything in the direction of profit.34
Kawakubo’s comments about her inspiration, where her ideas come from, are similarly obscure. Her sources are somehow ex nihilo, an artistic immaculate conception. For instance, in 2012 she stated: “I have no inspiration. I never do. I am maybe triggered by something somewhere sometime, but I am not conscious of it. I start without any theme and I grope in the dark as I proceed.”35 Rather, late in her career she maintains a form of authorship that is romantic and modernist, as emanating from the wellspring of subjectivity:
External stimulus has not played a major part in recent collections. When you’ve been making clothes for over forty years, things that you happen to see and hear are not sufficient stimulus. They are no longer of use to me. Instead design is a process of finding something by starting from nothing at all. Creation is a fight with yourself.36
Genuine as they may be, it is relevant to turn to the concept of the intentional fallacy espoused by I.A. Richards and the New Criticism here, in that the artist is not necessarily the best critical witness to his or her work. The ostensible inscrutability of these remarks creates the possibility of unmooring certain strategies from their source, which of course need not all be traceable to “Japan.” But it seems that Kawakubo wants to go further than that to be thought of as a creative mind who has shorn herself clean of cultural baggage. Her alibi to this is her husband and CEO of Comme des Garçons, Adrian Joffe, who affirms that Kawakubo
never gave herself any ethnic boundaries.… From the beginning, she dispensed with any preconceived notions about western and Eastern social mores and cultures, all of these things are irrelevant to her world.… She deliberately casts away all questions of upbringing, nationality, sociology and the like. So many times it comes from just a feeling, an emotion, not a concrete reference.37
Reams could and have been written about the problematic nature of these claims: the conviction that an artist can be a cultural tabula rasa, the deletion of personal provenance from the equation, and the invocation of the modernist myth of artistic inspiration in the wellspring of the soul. It is a point of view that makes Spivak’s critique much more trenchant. It is also highly cynical, for in cleansing culture of any reference other than the act of creation itself, it also absolves the consumer of any reflective judgment.
Among many, here are two collections in which historical and cultural references are plain to see, notwithstanding rhetorical efforts to downplay them. One is what remains the most controversial of Kawakubo’s collections, Body Meets Dress—Dress Meets Body (spring/summer 1997), colloquially known as the “Lumps and Bumps” collection for the way the body’s natural line is interrupted by bumps in unconventional places. As Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Kawakubo retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017, relates, the protuberances from goose down feathers “completely disfigured the body: so it was a celebration of deformity, which was challenging with these normative conventions of beauty … they still stand out as one of the most provocative collections, more so because it was often done in very child-like and sweet bubble-gum pink gingham.”38 Commenting on the same collection, the painter David Salle mentions latent expressions of “cruelty” in such designs,39 and “[n]ever has pink-checked gingham, gathered and pulled tight over a nonanatomical protrusion, looked so uncompromising.”40 He also observes a connection between the Japanese obsession with packaging, and the “not-so-minor art form called tsutsumi, of which there are different schools and myriad forms.”41
Figure 33 Fashion designer Rei Kawakubo’s dresses present during The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institutes’ 2017 exhibition as an honored guest in New York, United States on May 2, 2017. Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.
Yet another genealogical point in the now notorious “Lumps and Bumps” collection is again kimono, in which the body is often radically reshaped through padding the body front and back. For essential to the kimono dressing ceremony is the process of “correction” (hosei) in which the young woman’s body was affixed with towels, gauze, and other materials to devise an ideal female form. Thin women were enlarged with extra towels, the breasts of other women were flattened, and if women had a noticeable irregularity elsewhere then it was suitably “corrected.” The body was then closely wrapped and tied, followed by the kimono with the sash (obi) providing the final security, which was secured with all the strength of the women assisting.42 Dispensing with the elaborate binding and the rest of the encoded ritual, Kawakubo was simply turning the smooth surface of the kimono on its head, “deconstructing” the convention by redeploying padding for making an irregularly bumpy and irreverently striated form.
If all of Kawakubo’s work is eclectic to some degree, gathering from a range of sources and ideas so diverse they are hard to trace, there are certain collections that show this inclination in an especially “Japanese” light. In her Cubisme collection (spring/summer 2007) the angular, geometric fragmentation germane to synthetic cubism was unmistakably inflected with a Lolita kind of kawaii (“cute”) that, at the time of the collection’s conception, had become an unmissable presence of Japanese street style, and beyond. The ensemble was a paragon of post-millennial East-meets-West, and a reminder of how modernist fashions, including those by avant-garde artists, continue to be a source of inspiration for everyday wear, in dress-ups, through to film costume. At the launch of the collection, the models were in generic whiteface, which rendered them part clown, part cyborg, like characters from anime or from illustrated science fiction. The garments were limited to red, black, and white, with some of the layered white tulle dresses stamped with large, opaque red dots, in this context hard not to be construed as references to the Japanese flag. Other skirts, also of flared tulle, like a vernacular reference to Dior’s “new look,” were all blood red. Large belts slung on the torso over the breasts created a language of bracing and enclosure, but also connoted the flattening of the breasts in kimono. The tops were a mish-mash of the prim (one had a rounded school-girl collar, red on white) and the pulverized, shards of clothes like clippings from the fitting floor, reaffixed in random asymmetry. When sleeved, the arms were still visible under the translucent gauze or tulle, in one the coyness of this effect undermined by a second sleeve that resembled the outer armor of a robot. All the models were similarly shod in closed flat shoes with socks, all of which drew from the classic brogue. The sartorial semantics of safety and decorum are a typical ploy of the Lolita look of false modesty, the ironic mask for coquetry.
Figure 34 A hall exhibiting the work of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo is shown to the media on May 1, 2017, prior to the public opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute exhibition “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the In-Between” in New York. The exhibition ran through September 4. Photo by Kyodo News via Getty Images.
Lolitas and cosplayers are names for the various approaches to identity recreation that developed out of the fandom cultures of the 1990s largely between Japan and the United States. They both entail dressing up: cosplayers for particular events, while Lolitas assume a more lasting persona, imbuing a distinctively girlish aesthetic into their daily appearance and into aspects of their life and their immediate surrounding. Although invoking the eponymous novel by Vladimir Nabokov, Lolitas maintain that their identity play is not strictly defined by it. The ways in which it has been interpreted owe a great deal to the adaptive principles of contemporary Japan. What the Lolita and cosplay have in common—despite the many testimonials amongst them to maintain a clear qualitative distinction—is that they are highly encoded forms of costuming that have become an established practice of identity creation and communication. Cosplay in particular is a living example of the powers of reciprocal exchange between American comic culture as it grew out of the mid-twentieth century, and Japanese popular culture such as manga and anime.
The very origins of the word “cosplay” bear out the intricacy of its dual origin. For it can be taken to be the truncated form of “costume play,” but it also originates in the Japanese, kosupure, used by Takahashi Nobuyuki after attending World-Con, a sci-fi convention in Los Angeles in 1984. Founder of the anime publishing company, Studio Hard, Takahashi was impressed by the number of the people dressed up and the quality of their costumes, which indicated that they were clearly in competition with one another. He took this experience back to Japan and encouraged his readers to realize the characters that they identified in print by dressing up as them. Alternative histories state that science fiction events began to appear in Japan in the 1970s, and were given subsequent momentum by the science fiction counterparts in the United States. Other decisive markers were the series Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) and Ursei Yatsura (1980), many of whose characters were scantily and suggestively clad. Fans imitating them in these early years incited complaints of indecency, with the result that in the Comic Market of 1983 they were confined to the edge of the convention hall, a measure that lent to the perception of cosplay as a socially marginal practice.43 A further impetus to the cosplay movement was the show Captain Tsubasa (1984), which featured a soccer team in exotic sci-fi cosplay-style uniforms.
Costuming was very much a post-Second World War release by the generation that had not witnessed the war. Public parades of costuming had already begun in the United States in the 1960s. It was one of many indications of the great economic surge that the United States enjoyed at the time. Not yet called cosplay, the influence of comic cultures (such as independent comic stands that would become independent stores), and the introduction of color television would see a widening fan base that would dress up as Batman in the 1960s, and, in the 1970s, their favorite characters from Star Trek (Dr Spock was a favorite, to William Shatner’s chagrin). It is argued that this popularity and visibility of dressing up in North America gave Japanese fans the impetus in the 1980s to dress as their preferred manga heroes, while others attribute the origins of cosplay to Japan.44
The use of the original word kosupre was to distinguish it from the loaded meanings of others, such as subtle meanings pregnant in the Japanese equivalent of the word “masquerade,” which means “aristocratic costume party.” To surmount this problem Takahashi coined his own phrase, “costume play,” which was later truncated to “cosplay.” Participants were by extension “cosplayers.”45 By this time manga had already begun to have a considerable effect on North American markets. Japanese fans also referred to themselves as otaku, a special devotee of a fictional line and aesthetic. They and their North American counterparts began to intermingle with growing frequency, such that the styles and characters they were devoted to, the comics and animation themselves, also reflected such cross-pollination.
Since the 1980s, the conventions have been organized like any other major conference that has existed in academe, except they were oriented toward popular culture. They had focus activities, panels, special “delegates,” which were usually the celebrities that played a character or did the voice-over, video rooms, and organized performances. Prizes were offered for costumes, and there were numerous stands selling related merchandise. It was also an appropriate market for launching up-coming films, television series, computer games, and, later, websites and other related Internet platforms. These now highly structured gatherings have become a significant means by which cosplayers communicate with one another. They are literally sites for action and exchange in which the participants share a common language and common goals. With Internet culture, they are a way of giving material focus to what exists simultaneously on a virtual scale.
But while almost, if not all, aspects of culture have some dimension owing to the Internet, the other reason for the extraordinary popularity of cosplay is the immeasurable success of Japanese popular culture. Its rise since the 1990s runs together, as if in concert, with that of cosplay. Manga, anime, and video games now comprise a sizeable part of the Japanese export economy. This includes all possible forms of merchandizing, including books and magazines, figurines, clothing, and accessories (bags, shoes, watches, and so on). One of the reasons for the appeal of manga cartoons, what Susan Napier calls the “only major non-Western form of global popular culture,” is that it presented credible, rounded characters as opposed to the compared vapidity of Western characters that were “too stereotypically good or bad, strong or weak.”46 The ability for youth to empathize with manga and anime characters made the transition to becoming the characters easy and somewhat natural.
But the popularity is not confined to the capacity for readers and users to emote to characters, it is also due to Japan’s success in creating seductive hybrids with a wide range of appeal, usually occupying the gradient of “cute” (kawaii). In 2002 a survey found that more American children preferred and recognized Nintendo’s cuddly Italian plumber, Mario, than the once universal Mickey Mouse.47 This is not to forget Hello Kitty the character and the brand, which began as a vinyl coin purse in 1975. Since then it has become the quintessence of kawaii, and generates around seven billion dollars a year. Hello Kitty embodies a particularly Japanese aesthetic and economic condition that leads Douglas McGray to assert that: “Hello Kitty is Western so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West.”48 Another massive franchise is Pokémon, with its recognizably cute creatures, villainous or benign. They occupy a place of Western folklore tinged with sci-fi chinoiserie. The same may extend to the appearance of manga characters, who share many Western-Aryan traits but in an unmistakably non-Western, sci-fi oriental way. It is yet another very material case of what Spivak writes of Kawakubo that she is “the same-yet-not-the-same, different-but-not-different.”49 In a similar vein, and counter to the earlier argument as to the appeal of manga over American comics, Koichi Iwabuchi has referred to Japan’s penchant for having it both ways as effecting mukokuseki, or “statelessness.” Iwabuchi believes that Japan makes “culturally odorless products.” They occupy an odd place, for while we recognize them as Japanese, that is where it stops, for they are conveniently unmoored from a precise point of cultural reference.50 They provoke a soft sense of yearning that is not the real Japan, it is “an animated, virtual Japan.”51 On the other hand, Jacqueline Berndt defends the ambiguity of “mangaesque faces [as they] appear to be transcultural platforms rather than the manifestations of Japanese Occidentalism or representations of Japan’s obliviousness to its past as an invader and colonizer in Asia.”52
The racializing of manga and anime characters continues to be a source of much debate, especially given that they are strikingly ambiguous from the very start, and the looks also tend to vary. If a conclusion can be reached, it is that Japanese manga and anime attempt to universalize their heroes, assimilate them into the Western codex, while also leaving a foot in their culture of origin. “This points to the Japanese context” as Berndt concludes, “in a two-fold way: first, with respect to representational conventions which undermine straight content-oriented readings and second, with respect to the more general significance of race and racialization.”53 After all, manga discourse as such is not preoccupied with race or ethnicity, which are more concerns of scholars and other commentators in America. Indeed, as Berndt argues, some critiques from these sources may be prey to an Occidentalist error of reading manga’s perceived “statelessness” as white.54 While some err to the view that modern Japan embraced certain Western notions of race and racism, “others highlight that in modern Japan, caste-based discrimination outweighed race-based discrimination.” In an eminently posthuman twist, the discrimination that occurs in manga and anime is less based on race and is directed more as species.55 “Speciesism” as an avatar of caste sees different creatures vie for supremacy. It is a convenient displacement into the unverifiable making any discussion of racial dynamics collapse under the weight of a whole lot of imaginary animals. In so doing, Japan’s national image as a culture of the future is continuously and subliminally asserted.56
For all of this, economically the strategy of making exoticism familiar—a neutered Orientalism—has had immeasurable success. Some early statistics give a sense of manga’s popularity and reach. In 2003 the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry reported that an estimated 65 percent of the production of animated cartoons was in Japan, with sales in the realm of USD 17 billion.57 Japan also leads the world in the sales of comics, which are not only avidly consumed in the United States but throughout Southeast Asia, and beyond.58 Manga and anime, which now form a sizeable proportion of the Japanese economy, are critical instances of Japan’s soft power. And as the West continues to consume it, they of course affirm, both materially and symbolically, the significance of Japanese culture. By being fabrications in more than one sense, through manga and anime, Japan can, in turn, carefully regulate and curate its identity. This means how it can influence domestic consumers, and how it can continue to affect the way Japaneseness is perceived outside of its borders, however fluid such borders continue to be.
Unsurprisingly, the extraordinary reach and success of manga has spawned numerous non-Japanese imitations, which are called Original English Language (OEL) manga, Euromanga, or Amerimanga. These are commonly viewed as poor copies of the original, however Anthony Pym has argued that they are evidence of “interculture,” the overlapping of cultures to create a discrete new entity—much in the manner of what has been called symbolic convergence.59 Essentially the Euroamerican reinterpretations of manga are examples of transoriental multiple movement, beginning somewhere with modern Japan’s interpretation and appropriation of American popular culture icons and cartoons, that is then consumed and reinterpreted by the West. Through imitation, which is a form of homage, the instatement of a third space also solidifies the Japanese manga (in this instance) as the definite point of origin. Nor is Japan immune from the same tendency, with more cultural overlaps in the manga-ization of Star Trek and X-Men. Cathy Sell elaborates on the notion of interculture with another term, “polysystem,” to define a configuration with multiple points of origin, and one that is continually mutating. She remarks that “as the established space begins to form an identity of its own, these additional elements also begin to evolve within the interculture. Cosplay is an illustrative example of this.”60 She continues:
Through the activities of translation groups, cosplayers and anime clubs and the like, we can see that social interaction is intrinsic to manga and anime subculture. It helps to establish the intercultural space and fosters further cultural developments. This “between” space within which they interact provides not only the venue for a readership to develop and encourages greater interest in the source material, facilitating the translation of more texts, but also allows the creation of new material inspired by the translated corpus and the surrounding interculture that has arisen.61
One could also add that manga, anime, and cosplay have been the biggest drivers in reviving the international reintegration of Japan after its dishonorable record in the Second World War. The past has become obscured by a thick screen of adolescent fantasy. Or, to put it another way, the popular culture industry in Japan has been the single biggest factor in keeping Japan popular.62
The financially prosperous 1980s in Japan brought into force new forms of labor power and new sensibilities, including freeters and otaku. Freeter is another example of Japanese portmanteau neologism, being a cognate of “free” and the German word for worker, Arbeiter, in this instance to denote the rising sector of freelance workers. Even if the professional areas of graphic arts and digital design, which fed off contract labor, were not their careers of choice, the decision to opt out of being a “salary man” for more flexibility gave freelance workers more leisure time, which included their own creative pursuits.63 Another slang term from the 1980s, otaku, referred to “nerds” who devoted as many of their waking hours as they could to video games, manga, and anime. The negativity of the word otaku as misfit, nerd, or outsider would soon dissipate with the recognition that he was an active participant in popular culture. Otaku was also initially stigmatized with connotations of withdrawal from the responsibilities of family and work for the sake of escapism and pleasure. “Today,” as Nissim Kadosh Otmazgin affirms, “this term is generally applied to youngsters driven by a strong interest in contemporary culture and lifestyles, or to those who choose to facilitate social connections through specific, nonmainstream cultural practices such as cosplay.”64 However, cosplay is becoming more and more mainstream, not only with the growing number of players, but also those who may not play but know about it as a practice and as a contemporary form of expression and social engagement. In Japan, commentators continue to be divided in their views of the Japaneseness of otaku culture: detractors consider it a diluted and mutated Americanization, and a symptom of a need to ingratiate itself with the American.65 It is curious that something deemed so Japanese from outside Japan itself can be viewed as a tool of deception.
Seen in retrospect, the dual birth of cosplay in the United States and Japan seems like a foregone conclusion, given that both societies are highly technologized, an effect of which is an entertainment industry that is entrenched in daily life. The “fandom” of cosplay is not to be seen solely as a cultish response by consumers, but is far more physical and psychological. It suggests that everyday people can participate in the fantasy universe, commensurate with some superhero origin stories that tell of ordinary outsiders who become transformed. And this notion of transformation implies that cosplay is not conventional masquerade, where an individual remains that individual but who is just playing a role. Cosplay is far more serious, and aligned with the otaku sensibility as the operation of someone other. The psychic transference germane to cosplay is fueled by a will that has become used to vicarious play through video games and other virtual realities. Hundreds if not thousands of hours are lavished on this imaginary embodiment, which includes conceiving costumes (as variants and not always copies of the heroes people may mimic), and devoting attention to the way these costumes are designed and crafted. While costumes of varying levels of quality can be bought in shops or online, dedicated cosplayers tend to lavish enormous amounts of attention on making their own costumes, or of overseeing their making. As Therèsa Winge explains,
Cosplayers exist at various places along a cosplay continuum, which is based on their level of commitment. At one end are cosplayers content with dressing (e.g., wig, makeup, and costume) as their chosen character and attending conventions and events for socializing and having fun. At the other end are those cosplayers obsessed with a given character, re-creating that character with meticulous attention to detail and performing as that character as often as time and money will allow. Between these two extremes there are cosplayers who research, study, and practice their characters and participate in cosplay events, such as masquerade and karaoke. Regardless of his or her place on the cosplay continuum, each cosplayer has an extraordinary level of dedication and commitment to the depiction of the chosen character, based on individual objectives that may include, but are not limited to, the following criteria: humor, accurate depiction, and casual participation.66
From this we can conclude that cosplay is not your typical play, but rather a subcultural context of a very unusual and distinctive bent, which for some people is a way of life.
In this regard, cosplay is very much a symptom, or better, a component, to the virtual identities that exist across the Internet. Selfie cultures also suggest that costumes and make-up will always place the photographic representation at a higher premium than the lived image, since it is the electronic image that can be more lastingly transacted.67 At this juncture it may be useful to dispense with the presumption that there is a real identity behind the constructed one, as if there was some vestigial human truth behind the mask. Rather, it is a transformation in which the self becomes the self. While this had been the case before, virtual identities have made this a normal form of social and psychological conditioning. As is so often commented, the selves that exist on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, let alone the myriad dating sites, are particular projections of a self that the individual deems desirable and reflects the kinds of personalities and types they wish to attract. These worlds present wish-worlds that have escaped from workaday reality.
The seriousness of the cosplaying multiverse is reflected in numerous conventions around the world. In Japan the Ministry of Foreign Affairs plays an active part in partnering with other organizations to host initiatives that support Japanese popular culture. For example, in 2003 it teamed with tourism-related organizations in Nagoya for the “World Cosplay Championships” to judge the best cosplay outfits. The same convention in 2009 was attended by fifteen countries, from Italy to Singapore, Spain to Thailand. Other countries where fan culture is especially dominant include tech-based economies like Korea and Taiwan.68 In 2006 the ministry initiated the International Manga Prize, which it intended to be deemed the manga equivalent of the Nobel Prize.69 Fan-created manga, or doujin events, take place all over Japan; the largest is Comic Market, which, in 2006 had visitor numbers of some 430,000 over the three days it was held. Of these there were 10,280 female and 2,170 male cosplayers (these numbers were tabulated only according to those who used the official changing rooms).70 Also in 2003, the same year as the World Cosplay Championships, Anime Boston was founded, the largest Japanese anime convention in the northeast United States. That a three-day festival in the United States is given to a cultural product not their own is no less than remarkable. It also points not only to the exertion and success of Japan’s marketing of itself abroad, but also to the way such conventions reflect, as Susan Napier contends, how “performance remained an important key to how [Japan] was perceived.”71 As we saw earlier, this has a long history that dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century. The thirst for Japanese popular culture in American markets can be perceived as a mutated form of new millennial Orientalism, which is nourished by Japan being complicit in its own Orientalizing, a reciprocal relationship that is, hence, transoriental.
To argue that anime characters are more “real” than those from Western comics is a moot and emotional point for some such as the Batman die-hards. Yet what remains incontestable is the dominance of Japanese characters in the relevant conventions, irrespective of where they occur, Japan or the United States, Singapore or New Zealand. True enough, Batman retains his certain ubiquity, and there will be characters from colossally successful franchises such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Game of Thrones, but more plentiful are motley ninjas from Naruto and the mechanics and pilots from Neon Genesis Evangelion. The manga look has been adopted by numerous young women, and the instances of plastic surgery for larger eyes and bulbous breasts is on the rise. One of the celebrated “human Barbies,” or living dolls,72 is the Ukranian Valeria Lukyanova who looks so much like a manga character that she was cast as a doll in a horror film in 2016.73 The sci-fi look is also conducive to improvisation from face painting to outlandishly colored hair, all favorites of their female-dominated delegates.
Figure 35 Forty cosplayers from twenty nations pose in a photo session during the 2013 World Cosplay Summit in Nagoya on August 3, 2013. The forty cosplayers will compete in the World Cosplay Championships. Photo JIJI PRESS/AFP/Getty Images.
One of the many results of the populous female cosplay communities has been the confidence to experiment, one striking tendency being to dress as male characters. And cross-dressing is not the exception, it is indeed more like the rule. As Daisuke Okabe relates, in cosplay, those “who look good as men are highly rated by the community.”74 Yet practices such as these are not aimed at replicating masculinity or as expressions of dissatisfaction with their own gender. Rather, “cross-dressing requires the cosplayer to be beautiful while also portraying the male character in question.”75 The kind of masculinity they explore is more parodic, and exaggerated as found in dragging, thus the “men mimicked by cross-dressing cosplayers is a copy without an original.”76 It may also be instructive to recall that the first geishas, as they appeared in the eighteenth century, were men, who entertained the other men waiting to see a courtesan (oiran).
To return briefly to Kawakubo’s Cubisme collection, the garments bring into collision jagged, jarring, and asymmetrical surfaces with an uncanny “girly” look that in Japan, and by fans who follow such a look, is known as shojo. Kawakubo’s love of aesthetically irreverent juxtapositions is typically put at the service of realigning the meaning and the contours of female dress, in this case “girliness” (shojo-sei) is played down by the harsh lines and the use of over-large accessories like belts. But the closed and flat-bottomed shoes ensure that the references in the collection are firmly anchored in shojo, which is more universally known as Lolita. Like their cosplay counterpart—from which they also aggressively distance themselves as something qualitatively and philosophically different—Lolitas are conceived in an intercultural space.
As will be recalled, Lolita is an under-aged coquette who is the sexual muse to the hapless Humbert Humbert, who in many ways is Nabokov’s symbolic cipher for inappropriate desire. The “Lolita” type that arises from this story is conceivably a figure that exudes youthfulness, that incites desire, and who also enshrines perversity. Although Lolitas and their commentators have been quick to refute the connection with the “Lolita evidence,” there is nevertheless enough aesthetic evidenced to make it, albeit in the broadest sense.77 Another aesthetic touchstone is the dress of Victorian upper-middle class girls. Blurring documentary fact and period illustration, this is the girl as found in the representation of Alice by John Tenniel in his original illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This reference does nothing to dull the covert sexuality implicit in the adoption of the term “Lolita.”78 History has, apocryphally or not, ascribed to Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) some tarnished and unwholesome motives in his attitude to children (he was inclined to draw and photograph children in the nude).79 Yet another source of Lolita styling is in Rococo-inspired fashions. However if Rococo enters into a dialogue with femininity and fashion, it cannot escape one of sexuality, given the endless seductions of the paintings of the period.
The more lascivious connotations have been mitigated by tempering the inflections of Hello Kitty and manga. A Lolita has a mincing, contrived grace that places “girliness” (shojo-sei) on a fetishized pedestal, making parallels to dolls unavoidable. Just as Lolitas are often inclined to make reference to emulating porcelain dolls, the Lolita appearance is one extracted from the past while simultaneously projected into an animated comic-con future of visual excess and high-key color (when the Lolita is not Goth black). Winge identifies the Lolita as a “transnational object.” As with any subculture it borrows, it consumes a cross-section of elements in a way that is in constant renewal. It is an aesthetic that began with borrowing and selecting from Western culture, in this case redefining Victorian-style dress such that it became repossessed as Japanese. “The Victorian-era dolls and dress were removed from their original Western context, which allowed their assimilation and incorporation into Japanese culture as the Lolita aesthetic.”80
The notion of becoming-doll is key to understanding the Lolita identity. For what cannot be overstated is that to dress as a Lolita is not the same as dressing up. The process of becoming Lolita transmutes traditional notions of self and fashion, for one does not dress up as Lolita, one becomes her.81 As an identificatory process of diversion and empowerment, the character type is not so much a shell but rather the participant enacts the equivalent of a transubstantiation so as to be able to give life to parts of her that have been dormant or disallowed. The way Lolita—to use the word metonymically like kimono or hijab—toys with sexual content is highly conducive to the encoded and covert ways of sexual expression in Japanese society. Even when Lolitas protest that they are not eliciting sexual attention, they continue to be observed closely by Japanese men.82 To this extent, Lolita, despite now being a worldwide practice, must also be understood as a very particular Japanese approach to dragging.83 This self-recreation through an ambiguous stylistic subterfuge that combined Western nostalgia with Japanese futuristic fantasy is an enactment on the self of Japan’s many cultural reformulations since the nineteenth century. As Winge observes,
Within Japanese culture, Lolitas occupy a subcultural space where young women and men are empowered by the Lolita aesthetic to present themselves anachronistically in order to escape the trappings of adult life and with it the culture’s dominant ideologies. But while they exist on the margins of Japanese culture, Lolitas also have had an impact on global popular culture: their traces are surfacing at global cosplay events, in American music videos, and even in the streets of New York City. This exposure has led to much scrutiny of the name and the style, as well as some unintended associations and appropriations, such as Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku girls.84
But the ethos of escapism, metaphor, and fancy is now so firmly ingrained into Japanese culture that it has become a viable, if not necessary, means of communication.
Lolitas originated in the kawaii culture in Japan from the 1970s and by the following decade had begun to occupy aspects of children’s imagination, not confined to what they consumed or observed but to choices of dress and behavior. The 1980s also marked the appearance of visual style or vijuaru kei or visual-kei rock bands that explored their own interpretations of British glam rock and “New Romanticism,” using experimental make-up and dolling up in costumes in which the presence of Lolita was never too remote. Drawing from the increasingly voguish dress-up culture at home, in the 1990s the band Malice Mizer combined looks from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Adam Ant, and Kiss, presenting themselves as a form of Goth masquerade. One member (Közi) was a Venetian harlequin jester, another a Louis XIV clone, while the female member, Mana, dressed as Lolita, with bonnet and frills. Mana would not only present herself as such on stage but would also pose for magazine photographs. Bands such as Malice Mizer and X Japan fed the appetite for Lolita and Goth that would coalesce in the periodical Gothic and Lolita Bible. From thereon, Lolitas—classic, sweet, and cute, or more on the Gothic spectrum—would continue to permeate all imaginable forms of Japanese popular culture, including numerous manga and anime series. Just how deeply Lolitas had seeped into so many parts of Japanese life and imagination is testified to by the fact that the craze also has its masculinized incarnations. These came in roughly two forms. One was an oji, which followed a Victorian boy’s dress with britches and long socks, a cap, and vest or jacket in luxury fabrics such as satin or velvet. The other was a female as an oji, effectively a tomboy Lolita hybrid, a girl dressing as a girl who wants to be or to look like a boy, but a boy who is in thrall to a girl type.
In many ways the Lolita is the natural development of the otaku mentality and culture. It is a persona that is an overt and socially ritualized escapism that, while once considered peculiar and eccentric, is at turns valued, desired, or accepted by most Japanese. Moreover, Lolitas now have become their own communities, physical and online. While Lolita is frequently referred to as “Loli cosplay,” many Lolitas are adamant about differentiating themselves from cosplay cultures, not only in their philosophies and self-presentation, but also insofar as the Lolita is a more or less permanent identification as opposed to a character that is periodically adopted as a lubricant to social interaction at designated events. And while always varied and varying, the Lolita presents as a far more homogenous and therefore graspable and commodifiable entity, which has caused its subcultural status to be diluted by its entry into the mainstream, as seen in the mass marketing of Lolita styling with is related kawaii counterparts in America and Britain.85
Seen from another angle, the commodification of Lolita has also helped her seepage into more segments of culture. The sanitized appeal of shojo, as Frenchy Lunning argues, has an airily vacuous quality that “at the same time allows her [Lolita] to monopolize commercial constructions and advertising.”86 It is Lolita’s ostensible powerlessness that makes her a “Trojan horse.” For it is this very lack of a threat that has gained her admission to patriarchy, Lunning avers, which is unaware that a gamut of other queer identities follow in her path: “Having gained admittance, she has stealthily brought her siblings—the adult female heroines of gaming, the gay guys of yaoi, and the transgendered hero/heroines of manga—all as subjects in her family of forms.” It is Lolita’s particular constructedness that roots her in postmodern Japan. It is a Japan in which male roles and privilege still hold sway. Yet it is her ability to meld transnationally, into Euroamerica that is a decoy to her ability to infiltrate high guarded zones of gender and conduct, causing them to be destabilized by her own artificiality and the queerness of her entourage. This is a position also interrogated by Isaac Gagné who looks at Lolita’s presence in mass media such as television. Here Lolitas introduce a series of idiosyncrasies of speech and action that are presented as normal and as always having been around. It is a form of play in which young Japanese women can explore feminized and hyperfeminized forms of expression, as well as reshaping these expressions, that may have elicited reprisal had they not been under the aegis of role-play.87
Like no other culture, Japan maintains a contradictory position to its identity that appears at first glance to be poised in harmonious balance. On one hand, Japan is the most racially pure country on the planet, admitting no foreign citizenship. On the other, Japan has co-opted Western traits and mores with multifaceted subtlety, even such that they have quietly mutated to become “unmistakably” Japanese—manga for example. Japan is also a culture of agonistic identification, as Kawakubo demonstrates in her attempted slipperiness to her inspiration and aesthetic allegiances. Writing about Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, Pico Iyer reflects that:
The very notion of foreignness has changed, you could say, in the global age (this is one if Ishiguro’s implicit themes, and one that would no doubt impress itself on a Japanese writer that can’t write Japanese). The person who looks and sounds like us may (as in Banks’s [a character in the novel] case) be a complete alien; the one who looks quite different from us, and has a funny name to boot, may (as in Ishiguro’s case) be so close to us that he sees through all our games. Foreignness has gone underground in our times—become invisible, in a sense—and yet it has never lost its age-old terrors, of being left out or behind.88
Or it could be that at the core of Japan is this displacement that it has fought since the second half of the twentieth century so hard to win. It is a displacement that harbors against its failures and which seeks to exist outside of any shadow that history might cast. Hence contemporary Japan is less a series of attributes and qualities, but more the capacity to integrate these qualities into other cultures and back into itself. Japaneseness is not a thing, but a process.