Subcultures in Japan

Modern Japan is a fast-moving, highly volatile environment, with a strong sense of neophilia amongst the Japanese people. Combine that with the easy adaptability of the youth, and you get a veritable breeding ground for new and altered subcultures based on behaviours, clothes, music, whatever.

A short list of subcultures include:

• Gyaru - "Gal" culture, very consumer and fashion oriented. This includes kogal, ganguro, and yamanba groups. A male version is gyaru-oh.
• Bosozoku / Hashiriya - car and motorcycle enthusiasts, particularly in regards to street racing and illegal modifications. This group is becoming more visible due to movies like The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, due to the links to drift racing. A related subculture is those of yankiis.
• Lolita fashion, including "Gothic", "Sweet", "Classical", "Punk", and a number of other variants.
• Cosplay, in several forms. Anime and J-rock (Japanese rock music) cosplayers and lolis gather around Yoyogi Park in Tokyo on Sundays.
  • Kigurumi -- Also called animegao ("animeface"), this is the practice of cosplaying human and humanoid anime characters using masks and body stockings. The effect is often rather creepy, as it seems to back into the Uncanny Valley from the human side; that many of its devotees are males who crossdress as female characters makes it just a shade creepier. Doubly so since, with the body stockings, you can't tell.
• Ero kawaii, another fashion subculture.
• Hikikomori - Young people who withdraw from active life outside their home. They often withdraw into isolated existences with no face to face contact and a refusal to leave their homes or rooms. While not specifically a subculture per se, their behaviour and living styles tend to follow similar patterns. Many of them hang around the notorious 2ch (ni-channel) web boards. Most anime is aware of the subculture, but because it also often includes some otaku it's a sensitive topic to address.
• Otaku - In the Japanese sense, obsessive enthusiasts of a particular hobby -- not necessarily anime. Generally follows the same tone as older, more derogatory meanings of the Western word "geek". Still, these enthusiast groups are extremely organized and, at least within their own area of interest, highly social. Recently some otaku have taken to calling themselves Akiba-Kei or "Akiba style", in reference to the Tokyo neighbourhood of Akihabara where electronics shops, anime merchandising and maid cafes abound. Female otaku, and especially those interested in BL, are called sometimes fujoshi or otome, the latter because they cluster around Otome Road in Ikebukuro and the former being a derogatory term for a Yaoi Fangirl derived from an alternate reading of "unnatural woman", which such fans are now reclaiming for themselves.
• Visual Kei: More elaborated upon on its page, musicians (generally of some permutation of rock music ranging from Heavy Metal to Power Pop) who dress in very elaborate and artistic styles, often intentionally trying to create Viewer Gender Confusion. Along with bosuzoku and yankii (which helped birth it in their own ways) one of the older subcultures, being, along with them, pre-Internet with its origins in the 1980s. Also unique in being one of the two first Japanese subcultures (along with Otaku) to gain true non-Japanese adherents worldwide (Lolita fashion was next). While some non-musicians are involved, usually some level of artistic or musical interest (if not competence or skill) or at the very least interest in the musicians is a prerequisite for involvement.

For further study into Japanese Subcultures, there's a free online course - ["An Introduction to Japanese Subcultures"]. The book Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation by the half-Japanese writer and journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld may be a good read as well.

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Examples:

• Detroit Metal City is focused on the Heavy Metal and Visual Kei subcultures. It's actually gotten at least one Shout-Out from an actual Visual Kei act.
• Super Gals is focused around a trio of gyaru, with occasional conflicts slash comedy relief from three ganguro/yamanba girls.
• Initial D focuses on drift racers.
• Great Teacher Onizuka's eponymous character was a leader of a bosozoku gang.
• Gravitation also features an arguable Visual Kei band.
• The US film Tokyo Pop is actually most noticeable (and most remembered now) for its cameo by the members of X Japan, which was at the time one of the very first Visual Kei bands as the subculture began.
• Rozen Maiden has a protagonist who is at least strongly implied to be hikikomori, though they never outright use the term. For an example of how strongly they imply it, in one episode he has to visit the school library to get a book. Entering the school and walking to the library is treated as a Metal Gear-style sneaking mission, and involves no less than two flashbacks. If he had simply walked in the front door and directly to the library, it would have taken less than a minute. Instead, it takes half the episode.
  • There's also an episode early on where Jun goes outside to get Hina Ichigo's favourite snack, which she had been bugging everyone about since the episode began. Jun's fears of his classmates and the outside world are greatly emphasised- even the short walk to the door suddenly looks like a mile away.
• Many examples of cosplay can be found in the page for Cosplay Otaku Girl.
• Several of the main characters of Welcome to The NHK are otaku or hikikomori. The show delves into many of the darker social trends in Japan, and treats being a hikikomori as a mental illness.
• Pretty much every single Japanese man from the film The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is a hashiriya.
• Puni Puni Poemi briefly showed a Gyaru on a subsi-date before the title character violently showed her the error of her ways.
• Chaos;Head: the protagonist is a hikikomori and batshit insane. Well, it could be a mystery plot and there could be paranormal forces toying with him, and so he might actually not be a schizophrenic serial killer, but the fact that he has an imaginary girlfriend who is an anime character speaks a different language.
• The light Japanese novel (later adapted into a movie) Kamikaze Girls (which has an excellent translation available in English) is about the unlikely friendship between a yanki and a Lolita.
• Genshiken has a Gyaru: Keiko Sasahara, Kanji's Annoying Younger Sibling. It was, however, more of a subversion of the endearing little sister trope.
  • And Genshiken is of course one of the most notable anime series about otaku culture
• Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl parodies the ganguro subculture.
• Detective Conan often has people from one or anothe subcultures as victims or suspects.
  • A case featured the investigation of very violent attacks on ganguros and yamanbas, and the murder of one of the ganguros. And it brings memories of another case that happened 20 years ago... involving a now mostly disappeared subculture of The Eighties: the sukeban or girl delinquents. The Sole Survivor grew to marry Inspector Megure, who was one of the policemen investigating the case.
  • Another case had an otaku obsessed with Tokusatsu series (more exactly Kamen Yaiba, an in-universe show about a Captain Ersatz of Kamen Rider) as the Asshole Victim. Who was tricked into killing himself in front of his club by a guy whose little brother died after said otaku stole his most precious memorabilia piece while riding his motorcycle, which then caused the kid to try chasing after him and being hit by a car.
  • Another case is centered on Lolita Fashion, after a Gothloli fangirl is found dead in a restroom while wearing a GL outfit. Her beautiful Lolita gown is the key to sove the case.. Takagi even gets to give Megure a brief explanation of what Gothloli is, whereas Conan thinks to himself that Ai would make a decent Gothloli, and later Sonoko and Ran are seen in Sweet Lolita dresses.
  • A filler case has several people from different subcultures reunited in a mansion: a Cosplay Otaku Girl, an Idol Singer who started her career as a CGL, a male Gothic Lolita (Ouji), an Otaku who's the Idol Singer's biggest fan, a prospect Gravure idol... The singer had been accidentally killed by the Ouji, and the others are said to have helped him cover up the horrible incident. And then the singer's boyfriend started attacking and killing them...
  • In a canon case, a music company president is stabbed to death right before a TV show that a Visual Kei singer who worked for him was about to star in. Agasa, Ai and Conan heavily suspect the singer but, if he actually did do it, he has an excellent alibi that's almost impossible to prove fake. They still manage to find the trick, which involved a very smart plan where the VK singer, who was never ever seen without his make-up and stage outfits, used this to his advantage to disguise himself as a prop boy and be unnoticed - as he killed the cruel president of his music company for both causing the death of a fangirl that the singer cared a lot for and for trapping him in a very abusive contract.
• Kyouko from Kyojin no Hoshi can be said to be a proto-ganguro (save for the tan).