“The basic look consists of bleached hair, a deep tan, both black and white eyeliners, false eyelashes, platform shoes (usually sandals or boots), and brightly colored outfits. Also typical of the “Ganguro Gal” look are cell phones covered with purikura stickers, tie-dyed sarongs, mini-skirts, hibiscus flower hairpins, and lots of bracelets, rings and necklaces.

Extreme trend followers further bleach their hair up to a platinum blond shade, get even deeper tans, wear white lipstick, multicolored pastel eyeshadows and tiny metallic or glittery adhesives around the bottom rim of the eye sockets (See Yamanba). Popular Ganguro magazines include Egg, Popteen, and Ego System.”

The wikipedia article goes on to mention how outsiders to this subculture often puzzle over what these girls are trying to emulate or represent. There are several theories:

“Some foreign observers speculate as to ‘who’ these ganguro are “meant” to look like. Some say that because of the blonde hair, hibiscus flowers, and extremely tan skin, they want to look like America’s west coast girls. A handful of others believe it is an obsession with being black. A more nuanced explanation is that the Ganguro girl is a unique style evolved from Japan’s own original culture in response to the media/entertainment pop culture of the West. It is worth noting that these girls generally do not study hard in school or pursue athletics or traditional artistic goals. Like certain subcultures in the West, the style may be a form of self-expression in opposition to conservative mores. The heavy tans do cause lifelong skin damage, thereby conspicuously showing a disregard for the future.

There is some dispute surrounding the etymology of the word “ganguro”. Some academics claim that the name derives from “顔黒” (black face), but (past) ganguro practitioners themselves invariably say it derives from “ガンガン黒” (exceptionally black). Some people see it as racist and compare it to the blackface of early 1900s culture in America.”

Given the west-coast clothes, blonde hair, tans, and hibiscus flowers in the hair (as worn by hawaiian girls), as well as the lacadasical attitude toward life, it’s my guess that the west-coast American girl stereotype look is factored in there as well. To me it seems like an imitation of a skewed version of a misconstrued representaion of…something. I can really only guess at the rationale for leaving the house looking like that.

That fool Bob Sapp doesn’t help either. I spent a few weeks out there and saw ignorance all the time. If you listen to the Japanese, crime is ONLY committed by Chinese and Arabs. Any bad behavior is because “they’re foreign!”

My is lives out there…I’ll try to get her to weigh in.

I took Japanese as my language at Tufts, and because of that, interacted with a large number of Japanese from Japan during my years @ Tufts. My own personal experience is that the blackface is 80% ignorance / 20% racism.

Just me being in the program illicted a weird reaction from most of the sensei’s. They thought it was so “cool” I was learning Japanese, moreso then the other 100% causcasians in the class. At first I thought it was racist, but over the 2-3 years I realized it was more of a curiousness.

Even today, if you look at certain styles of J-Pop, or Japanese re-creations of “black” music, often times the music slides in and out of genres in bizarre ways. Gospel piano, paired with bebop horns, over r&b chords, with the vocalist singing in a bossa nova style, backed by a group of rappers. Its stuff that would get clowned here in America, but I think the Japanese expose to blacks is so limited, so “media only” they don’t have enough experience to filter out the finer details of the culture.

One interesting thign about Regge’s documentary is that he shows images of what the American media chooses to send over to Japan. They were these incredible images of the classic “mammy yokum / aunt jemima” archetypes. I actually have no idea how deep into the south the media had to travel to find those images, but they did a great job, we were misrepresented in a fantastic way.

So I think that does play a huge role in it as well.

Cool article / topic and excuse any grammar / spelling mistakes, I had a bit of insomnia last night.