Japanese Girls' Fashion

I told you that I'm one of the writers for the portal web site Japan Mode. Well, recently a Dutch site had added a link to our site :-) So I jumped there and saw what this Dutch site was like... and found out that it featured "ganguro", a style of Japanese gals.

I have to say I was surprised by the fact that "ganguro" had travelled all the way to far far Netherlands. Wow, power of Internet, huh?

I hardly hear about it these days, but until some time ago it was common among Japanese people to think that "people who have never come to Japan still think that Japan is about samurai and geisha girls".

Maybe some Dutch travellers would come to Japan expecting to see a bunch of "ganguro" gals?

But I have to tell you this: there aren't that many "ganguro"s around in Japan anymore.
You can still see some if you go to Shibuya - the gals' district - but even then they've almost gone extinct.

So what's the latest trend now? It's a style called EROKAWA. It means to wear clothes which has a lot of skin exposure - so ERO for erotic - and yet to dress girly cute - so KAWA for KAWAII (=cute, pretty). It all started from the popular J-POP singer Kumi Koda, but I think she got the idea from American "sexy singers" and adapted to a Japanese style.

It's same for "ganguro" too, but I think this EROKAWA came from the conflict between ladies' hearts' desire to be pampered by guys and expression of self-identity.

OK, so much for now. Maybe I'll talk about some fashion related topics again.

*ganguro: literally means "black face" or "extremely black". if you want to see images of them, visit Japan Mode and follow the link ;-)