Sick Otaku

Shopping with precision and steeped in style, a typical teen shows why lords of commerce follow young ladies

It’s 10:50 on a Friday morning, but in the frantic world of teenage trendiness, time is almost running out for Norie Ono. With a fistful of yen from her boyfriend’s account at the post office, where nearly all Japanese keep their savings, Norie starts her search for a new face at a sunglasses rack in a crowded suburban shopping mall. What is she really looking for? What does Norie want?

At 17, entering her last year of high school and attached at the hip to her teenage boyfriend, Norie is the kind of girl who propels the fads that have swept across Japan and Asia. She fell for the Tamagotchi, the virtual pet that was once all the rage. She is addicted to her latest gadget, a sleek silver NTT DoCoMo cell phone; three of four Tokyo high-school girls own a mobile phone and spend an average of $100 a month to use it. She is absolutely gaga over Hello Kitty, the beribboned feline that’s popping up all over the region. Her vocabulary is heavily populated by the word kawaii. It means “cute” literally, but so much more than that figuratively. Something kawaii is infinitely desirable, something to make a young girl’s life complete. The Kawaii Culture is what has made girls like Norie–and Japan has 3 million of them between the ages of 15 and 18–pop-culture icons.

Their every whim and impulse-purchase is religiously observed and analyzed by the titans of advertising, marketing, fashion, publishing and the cute-little-gadgets industry. What does Norie want? That’s what everybody wants to know.

“It’s not how much they spend,” says Yoshiyuki Ogino, editor of a teen magazine called, naturally, Cawaii!, spelled with a “C” because the editor thought it was even more kawaii that way. “It’s that they all buy the same things. So if someone has a $10 product, they can sell lots of them.” He and his staff figured out in 1995, when the magazine started publishing, that the best way to sell copies to girls was to ask them what they want. The strategy worked: circulation is now 300,000. So every afternoon, dozens of teenagers stroll into his editorial offices to smoke, play videogames and chat with the editors. Some, like Norie, end up modeling makeup and clothes, because the magazine wants to feature regular girls in its pages, not pop stars or professional models. “We see 400 girls every month,” says Ogino, 39. “It’s a great way to do market research.” If an item is hot, like pagers–they’re called pocket bells in Japan–a manufacturer can get almost 100% market penetration, and fast. “If it is really powerful, it can take less than a week,” says Ogino. Once 5% of the teen girl population takes a liking to something, he says, 60% will join the bandwagon within a month. A few weeks later, everybody will be on board. The hard part is predicting what the famously fickle teenage girls will next anoint as kawaii.

Miyuki Miyagi, the teenage-girl expert–and thus perhaps the most valuable employee–at Dentsu, Japan’s largest advertising agency, uses the pocket bell as an example. “These fads become a boom despite the intent of the manufacturers,” says Miyagi, who is in her 30s. “The pagers were supposed to be for emergencies.” Who knew girls would find them fun, indispensable, cute? “These girls come up with new ways of using products, totally separate from what the manufacturers intended.” Sure, Hello Kitty was meant to be a cute mass-merchandise image, and Tamagotchis were meant to be addictive toys. “But when people try to push an idea they think will be a hit, they usually fail,” Miyagi says. For example, fashion designers thought tailored suits would catch on with girls this past winter. “I asked the girls what color they liked,” says Ogino. Their response? Suits were decidedly non-kawaii. “These trends don’t usually get created,” says Miyagi. “They just happen.”

In the early 1990s, collegiate women were the arbiters of taste. Now, it’s high school girls. Some researchers think the age of influence will continue to decline, to junior-high-age girls. Which means Norie’s moment as a fashion arbiter could be fleeting. With boyfriend Shinichi Okubo at her side, Norie stops at a small shop selling sunglasses in a busy shopping mall. She tries on a pair. “Don’t you think the blue ones look cute?” she asks Shinichi. “They make your eyebrows look black,” he replies. Norie puts them aside. She moves on to a canary-yellow backpack. “Isn’t it cute?” Shinichi nods non-committally without saying anything. Norie puts it back on the shelf. The high school seniors, both 17, walk out hand in hand. From the back, it’s hard to tell one from the other, as both sport manes of shoulder length hair with frosted highlights, and Norie’s black suede platform boots elevate her to Shinichi’s height.

Norie wants new shoes, so she and Shinichi take their search to a shoe store. Norie asks the clerk which is better: sandals with chunky high heels or cork platforms? The clerk doesn’t know. Norie whips out her cell phone. “Akira,” she says to her friend on the other end of the phone, “which goes better with bell bottoms, sandals with heels or without?” There’s brief pause. Akira likes the heels. Norie tries on two pairs, can’t make up her mind and leaves. Thirteen minutes later, they’re back in the shoe store. She tries on the sandals with the chunky heel. Shinichi kneels down beside her to consult with her. She tries on a pair with cork platform soles. Then she tries sandals made with white khaki material. “Off white,” she announces. “Kawaii!” Roughly $75 later, Norie walks out with the shoes that will make her happy: the sandals with the chunky heels.

They move on to a boutique called The Love Boat, which sells accessories like seashell bracelets and beads. It’s the latest rage among Japan’s teens, a new fashion that combines cruise wear, Aloha casual, hippie counter-culture and, with an emphasis on pastels, the cute quotient girls crave. Norie now sports the kogyaru look–it translates roughly as “young trendy woman.” The fashion statement of the moment for kogyaru is the antithesis of anything naturally Japanese: hair streaked with gray, skin tanned to a deep shade of caramel, silver-speckled eye shadow, frosted lips with sparkles of silver, mini-skirts or bell-bottom jeans, high-heeled suede boots, a knee-length wool coat and a tiny Louis Vuitton backpack that holds a pink compact case decorated with Hello Kitty. But that look has been popular for, oh, several months now, an eternity in a culture where fashion winds shift with the blink of a blue-mascaraed eyelash.

Norie confides she has already decided to change her attire because too many other girls wear the same fashion armor. “I want to be different,” she says. She tries on some lipstick endorsed by pop sensation Namie Amuro. “Now selling well,” the advertising poster reads. Norie stops, inspects the lipstick tubes but moves on without buying any. She and Shinichi stop at McDonald’s for double cheeseburgers.

The two met in junior high school. They have been dating for two years, and Norie already wears two platinum bands (one from Cartier) given to her by Shinichi for her birthday on her left-hand ring finger. She intends to marry Shinichi, though not right away. “We don’t have any money,” she says. Shinichi works at a butcher shop; he is thinking of quitting high school. Norie recently started working part-time for the same butcher and earns about $675 a month. A week before her next monthly payday, she’s already out of cash. She spends a quarter of her income on dance lessons and dreams of going to New York to dance professionally. Her monthly phone bill is more than $80. She paid $67 to get her hair dyed with the streaks of gray. She spends $17 for an hour of tanning but doesn’t return as often as her friends do, two or three times a week, because her skin is a naturally darker tone. She lives at home with her parents, an older sister who is studying to be a nurse and a younger brother who has just entered high school, but she stayed the night at Shinichi’s house the night before they went shopping. Shinichi, whose parents are divorced, lives with his father, who Norie says doesn’t pay much attention to what he and Norie do.

At 7 p.m., Norie and her friend, 17-year-old Megumi, step into a purikura booth, a curtained stall where a camera pops and their picture is printed eight times on a sheet of stickers. They pay nearly $3.40 to take two sets of prints that are decorated with pink bubble borders; $2.50 to make prints that look as if they’re standing in a shower; $5 to make two sets featuring rainbows; and $3.40 to look as if they are in a rock band. “Kawaii!” Norie coos. She says she has “thousands” of purikura prints at home. Norie’s phone rings. It’s her mother. She wants Norie to bring home gyoza–dumplings–for dinner.

“I respect her very much,” Norie says. Her mother works at a computer design firm and, to make extra money, teaches lessons to computer students on weekends. Norie’s parents have separated but are not yet divorced. In a custom common to Japan, her father continues to live with the family, on the third floor of their home. But the children rarely see him. He doesn’t hold down a regular job, and works infrequently. Recently the family had a meeting and decided it was time for the father to move out. “We’re sick of watching him hang around doing nothing while my mother works so hard,” she says.

That isn’t the life Norie wants for herself. She thinks Shinichi will be a better husband than her father. But she’s envious of her older sister, who has chosen a vocation, nursing, and seems to know what she wants to do. Norie hasn’t figured out her life. She is still looking. She knows one thing, though: that her look, the currently popular kogyaru, has nearly run its course. “The kogyaru boom is over,” confirms Akiko Togawa, a director at Dentsu Group’s marketing arm. “I don’t think we’ll see many girls with tanned faces and wearing camisoles this coming summer. The straight-and-serious look is spreading now.” On the doorstep of adulthood, Norie finds her acquired identity to be wearing thin. “Ash brown,” she says, explaining the hue she has decided on for her hair once the gray streaks grow out. “Like gaijin. But not tea hair,” she insists, distinguishing “ash brown” from the reddish-brown hair that was popular a few years back.

Norie fusses with samples of foundation makeup in a department store. She smears some onto one cheek. Too dark. She wrinkles her nose. The second sample doesn’t look right, either. The saleswoman at the cosmetics counter cleans Norie’s face with a tissue and applies another tone. She turns to her friend Megumi, who shrugs. For the next 65 minutes, Norie fingers makeup boxes, dabs lip gloss and gazes at her tanned complexion in the mirror, searching for a new face that will give her a new identity.