Yuniya Kawamura: Understanding Japanese Youth Subcultures through Fashion: 1995-2006
Fashion Institute of Technology/State University of New York
A visual investigation of Japanese youth subcultures focusing on their outward appearances is the best way to understand their worldview, values and norms that have changed drastically over the past decade. The way they dress serves as a marker of social background and subcultural allegiance. Fashion always reflects the prevailing ideology of a society, and today’s Japanese youth are the case in point.
By borrowing and applying the classic and contemporary subculture theories, I trace the recent history of Japanese subcultures which are geographically defined. When the Japanese media started to pay attention to youth subcultures in the mid-1990s, there were only two or three groups and were easily recognizable because of their distinct styles. These subcultures have branched out intricately in many smaller sub-subcultures since then, and their social networks are becoming very complex.
The most appropriate way to study subcultures is by an ethnographical method since a researcher can get close to the empirical social world and dig deeply into it through face-to-face communication and interaction with research subjects. I combine direct observation, both participant and non-participant, with the structured and semi-structured in-depth interviews to attain a close and full familiarity with the world I examine. My research data comes primarily from a fieldwork study in Shibuya and Harajuku, two of the most fashionable districts in Tokyo, where youth subcultures are found and the latest street fashion originates from.