As a train cut through the cool air of a smoggy textbook morning, I sat in its third carriage, silently twirling the beer can that was my camera. It might not have been the most appropriate choice to take to Asakusa as the English tutor to a group of Japanese schoolgirls, but when I’d agreed to take the job last week, through the same talent agency that had got me the SMAPxSMAP job, they hadn’t given any specific rules about camera choices.
It was another day without sleep. Another Tokyo extravaganza.
The all-girls Shinagawa Jusho Gakuin looked like anything but a junior high school; it was more of a Stalinist monolith that issued students with swipe cards to enter the security door. The vaulted cafeteria perpetuated the communist-era feeling, which was only exacerbated when a talent-agency member assembled our group of thirty-five foreigners inside, made a brief speech and left us in the capable hands of identically uniformed thirteen-year-olds who subdivided everyone into alphabetical and then numerical groups.
‘May I please have your name?’ they read from a piece of paper in perfect unison.
Chelsea Haywood.
‘Chelsea Haaay-wood-o,’ they said. ‘You will be in Group F, number five-o.’ Once everyone had been classified, we were led down stark corridors to a staircase. ‘Our classroom is on the third floor,’ they read. At the third floor the girls stopped again. ‘Please follow us.’ And soon we arrived outside our classroom five minutes ahead of schedule. Looking dumbfounded at this unexpected obstacle, their quick solution was to ban us from entering until the scheduled time of nine o’clock, when we were filed to the front of a blackboard to introduce ourselves ‘with your biography’ to a wide-eyed class.
I stood at the end of the line and waited my turn. First, Natasha was from Moldova — a Soviet state I didn’t even know existed. Connie from the Philippines was next. She’d been in Tokyo twenty-five years on account of being married to a Japanese man. The Polish girl, Alina, also had a Japanese husband, and the last foreigner, Bill, was just a regular dude from the States.
Bill was seated first at a table of six girls who went ape-shit when he pulled out his chair, shrieking in a fit of screams and giggles and causing him to turn several shades of red. He was a foreign man, after all, and that was pretty extreme for teenage schoolgirls in Japan.
To a less dramatic effect I was greeted by gasps, giggles and a heavily whispered sugoi (cool/great/fantastic), but the noise at my table was still disproportionate given that it came from only three girls. I had to ask Saeko and Reiko to repeat their names, but the third girl’s name was Yoko.
‘Sumimasen, Chelsea-san, etto ... how old are you?’ Yoko asked as all three girls hovered over exercise books. They held their breath with pencils poised.
‘I am twenty-one years old,’ I enunciated slowly, and they shrieked with delight.
‘Do you have a boyfuhrend-o?’ giggled Reiko.
‘No, I do not have a boyfriend. I am married.’ This elicited even more shrieks.
‘Where are you fuhrom?’ asked Yoko, and Canada was scratched into a blank space in wobbly letters. After much discussion in Japanese, the girls asked what I’d like to eat for lunch and then studied potential spots on a map of Asakusa. When enough questions had been answered to satisfy their curiosity and the expectations of their teacher (who they very, very much didn’t like because she was very bad and old, with a two-year-old baby), they smiled on cue, announcing, ‘O-kay! Let’s go to Asakusa.’ We left before anyone else.
The girls were dead silent as we walked to Kitashinagawa station; the only one to answer any of my questions was Yoko. The others simply giggled. Aboard the train, Saeko and Reiko stayed where they could see me, stuffing their school bags between pigeon-toed feet. Yoko kept her bag on her lap beside me, overflowing with Hello Kitties and Minnie Mice. Inside every compartment there were more containers and various cartoon things, the only useful one among them a mobile phone dangling with more than its weight in gizmos. I asked where she lived in an attempt to start conversation, and she answered Saitama. Saitama was over an hour away, which meant that Yoko travelled a long way just to get to school. So did Saeko and Reiko, but from different outlying areas of Tokyo. Already they were genuine Japanese commuters in training.
‘What time do you have to get up?’ I asked.
‘I get up-puh at six o’clock-o.’
And what time do you go to bed?’
It took some debate between the girls before Yoko finally answered. ‘Everybody go to bed-do attuh one a-m.’ Oh my God. Only five hours’ sleep! These girls were only thirteen.
‘Why so late? What do you do?’
They all knew the answer to that one. ‘We watchu tee-vee,’ said Saeko in a cloud of giggles. Of course, homework would be finished to perfection beforehand. You could count on that. An elementary obsession with cartoons does not necessarily replace a sharp academic intellect. Not in Japan. It just created severe sleep deficit. These junior high-school girls could probably still spout all the laws of Physics 101 at the drop of a Hello Kitty. But why did they go to a school that was so far away from home? I half-expected an answer regurgitated from the parents who paid their tens of thousands of dollars in yearly tuition. An answer like: ‘This school provides good prospects for our future,’ or even, ‘The teachers are very nice,’ but the girls surprised me.
‘Because we rike zis school uniform. It is very kawaii, so cute-o!’ Yoko giggled, and the others agreed. The sad thing was the girls weren’t alone in their thinking. As one of Saeko’s dark-brown knee socks slipped down her shin, she quickly bent forward to pull it back into order. Even with no teacher around to enforce the school’s strict grooming policy, it was far too incriminating to be caught with rusu-sokusu (loose socks).
The girls’ uniform, worn to establish that famously Japanese ‘group feeling’ from a young age, was innocent enough in construction: a floppy necktie and white-collared shirt, yellow cardigan, beige school blazer and shiny, flat-soled shoes. Apart from the deviant sock, Saeko’s only misdemeanour was the length of her red pleated skirt. It was supposed to come down to the knee, but she wore it mid-thigh, probably in more of a fashion statement than anything else. It wasn’t her fault the required dress code was anything but a symbol of innocence. She looked as proper as she should. As proper as one could in duds interwoven with the stigma of a nation that tolerated buru-sera — an erotic fascination with schoolgirls and their uniforms — as an acceptable part of the male sexual psyche.
Named after the crisp white bloomers (buru) worn under the sailor-(sera) inspired middy outfits of schoolgirls everywhere, buru-sera is only one aspect of a much larger picture: adolescence, and all its characteristics, as a commercially marketable sexual ideal. In Japan, it is completely acceptable — mainstream, at least — to promote the sexual fetish of schoolgirls with advertisements on trains and street corners, in magazines and newspapers.
It is not unusual for an adult male to pore over a pornographic manga comic, or just the regular old kind of porn, with no shame on a crowded train, or standing in line at the magazine rack in a convenience store. It is 100 per cent legal for pornography to be sold in street vending machines, as long as no pubic hair is visible. It can be watched in violent anime films that commonly depict the rape of minors and, more specifically, schoolgirls. In these films, and even on television cartoons, male characters suffer instant nosebleeds at the sight (or thought) of a cute schoolgirl. The stimulation apparently causes blood to rush to his head and come gushing out his nose. Weird? I think so. Just illustrations? I think not.
So why, then, do these things permeate Japanese culture so widely? Maybe because youth in a sexual partner is not just desirable but also deeply revered.
This idealised form of premature beauty is inherent in Japanese law. According to Interpol, Article 177 of the Penal Code puts the age of consent for sexual activity at thirteen years in Japan. While most urban municipalities and jurisdictions have now imposed laws to bump the age of consent up closer to seventeen, it was only in 1999 that specific legislation was passed to forbid any Japanese citizen from paying for sex with someone under the age of eighteen. It’s no wonder that Japan is the world’s leader in child pornography. With such a unique set of legal circumstances, you have the opportunity for some very strange things to occur.
But still, why the off-the-wall obsession? Why are schoolgirls idealised to such an extent in this particular nation? Is it because the schoolgirl is weak? Submissive? Naive? Childish? The least threatening figure in a society where power is all about adult masculinity and conformity among the masses is a must? Whatever the reasons, there is no single explanation for buru-sera, but its influence is everywhere.
It is why twenty-something women, commonly known as kogal girls, hang out in nightlife districts dressed as heavily modified schoolgirls, desperately trying to exploit the uniform’s allure to attract the attentions of men. Skirts are raised to skim just below the bum so that little white panties peep out with the slightest movement. Flat-soled loafers are replaced with twenty-centimetre platforms and are worn with mandatory rusu-sokusu bunched at the ankle. Hair is dyed in crazy cuts and faces plastered in heavy make-up, garnished with hot pink super lashes. These young women have created their own hyper-stylised caricature of the adolescent. They believe they are too old to be sexually enticing at twenty or twenty-one, so they try to hold on to the last flickers of their one perceived power before they become ‘spoilt sponge cake’ on their twenty-fifth birthday. An endearing term reserved strictly for women, it is inspired by nothing less than the heavily discounted Christmas cake that goes on sale (and is rarely bought) after 25 December. That alone is a sad, sad illustration of something gone terribly wrong, but the obsession goes much further than just fashion.
How about used schoolgirls’ panties for sale in vending machines? You betcha. These made their first appearance in Chiba Prefecture some time in 1993, at around $50 a pop. Previously available only by walking into speciality buru-sera shops, you could now spare yourself the embarrassment and just duck down to the local used-undies-of-a-thirteen-year-old-girl vending machine. But then, if you wanted a pair with a photo or bio, or even a vial of urine, you had to go to the shops anyway. The girls stopped in on their way to school for a new pair that could be delivered soiled on the way home.
What I wanted to know is: who ran these shops? Who determined the value of each pair? What took precedence? Let’s see. That one has traces of menstrual blood, but hooray, this one has several particles of excrement. Bump up the price! Disgusting. At least the public were outraged about the vending machines, but with no direct statute existing to ban the sale of used panties, there was nothing the police could do to remove them, until one day they became berry, berry crever-o, and three traders were slammed with charges under the Antique Dealers Law, a law that requires all dealers in second-hand goods to obtain permission from the local authorities. Miraculously the panties disappeared overnight, but it was a small triumph.
In a society where female adolescence is revered, young girls are tragically aware of their sexuality and how to gain from it, financially. In a land of consumer paradise, materialistic worship is on the rise. With absent, overworked parents, the values of impressionable young girls can become easily skewed. The god of Dior takes over. The god of Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Chanel. These deities require their followers to undertake ostentatious shopping sprees as the mark of their beast, and that mark requires finance. Enter enjo-kõdsai. But before anything is said, let’s make one thing clear: enjo-kõdsai is voluntary prostitution by school-age girls to raise lunch money in amounts great enough to purchase Burberry wallets and Gucci boots. (No teenager I ever went to school with was sneaking in a little jiggy on the side to raise thousands in cash while she continued to lead an otherwise normal, sometimes outstanding life. But then, no man I ever knew would have dared indulge her.)
With a literal translation of’ compensated dating’, enjo-kõsai is one of the worst drawbacks of the mobile phone besides brain tumours. Through special telephone clubs and increasingly popular internet sites that openly facilitate contact between these individuals, schoolgirls can arrange meetings with older, usually middle-aged, men and date them in exchange for designer gifts or enough money to purchase them. A date can mean anything from coffee and a stroll in Yoyogi Park to dinner or sex in a love hotel. Schoolgirls can mean junior or senior high-school students, although some are as young as twelve. Payment is anywhere from ¥30,000 to ¥60,000, or the equivalent in goods, for a single tryst.
Men who actively partake in this fantasy are hard to define. They are often married, with children in the same age bracket as the girls they seek to exploit. They are salarymen, public servants, policemen, teachers, judges. Just as there is no typical profile of the girl who takes part in enjo-kõsai, neither is there a typical man.
The men who indulge in this fetish blame it on tamaranai — an uncontrollable action. Luckily the majority of Japanese people find such an explanation hard to fathom and even more outraging than the sale of schoolgirls’ panties.
No matter where you turn, there is another shocking example of a warped sense of sexuality. In 1997 the New York Times printed an article stating that in Japan there were two legally published magazines called Anatomical Illustrations of Junior High School Girls and V-Club, which featured naked schoolgirls of junior-high age and younger. I didn’t go looking to see if they still existed.
Then there are image clubs, which provide an environment for gross public misconduct in a private setting. These entail imitation school classrooms, gym change rooms and commuter-train carriages staffed with costumed prostitutes, allowing customers to live out fantasies that should be bottled and sent off for incineration.
And just while we’re on the subject of wildly unbelievable stories of Japanese craziness, let’s not forget The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. Perhaps the first documented instance of tentacle rape in Japan, this erotic woodblock print surfaced in the early nineteenth century during the Edo period. It depicts a naked woman French-kissing a baby octopus while entwined in the tentacles of a second, giant octopus performing cunnilingus on her. The print, and its theme, had a resurgence in the 1980s when for some strange reason the male penis was not allowed to be graphically depicted. Thus, tentacle rape emerged as the logical alternative and spawned the development of another unique niche in the wonderful world of Japanese pornography.
So, with such a heavily sexualised identity, it is hard to view Japan’s schoolgirl fetish lightly. It would be nice if Japanese men’s desire could focus on women of a more appropriate age, but let’s not kid ourselves. Japan is, and always has been, a patriarchal society. Women are not equal. Men dominate. The fact that women are submissive both generally and sexually is woven into the social fabric.
In a detached culture of little intimacy, sex is a commodity. Case in point? Geisha. Hostess clubs. Dating Japanese schoolgirls. Statistics suggest that 5–13 per cent of Japanese schoolgirls have tried enjo-kõsai, but, like anything in Japan, who really knows the truth? It is all truly, truly baffling.