HARAJUKU
Tokyo’s most famous district is the spiritual home of self-expression in the city, filled with quirky emporiums and indie clothing boutiques
The well-documented pressure in Japanese society to conform is sometimes summed up by the idiom ‘the nail that stands out gets hammered down.’ For a long time, Harajuku, the celebrated fashion and shopping neighbourhood in the west of Tokyo, was blissfully hammer-free. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, it became the international poster child of Japanese eccentricity, a hub of genuine counterculture where young Tokyoites spectacularly rejected the standards of so many of their peers by dressing in madly creative costumes.
Today, the commitment to bombastic fashion has lessened and the fashionistas are becoming an endangered species in their one-time stronghold. Clinging on to the petticoated Lolita styles of that era are Ai Akizuki and Hamuka (the latter, like all good eccentrics, refuses to offer her age or surname). The ladies are committed to their looks, which is to say that they dress up with Victorian-style bloomers, bonnets and parasols every day — for them this is an unending lifestyle, not just an option for events or, worse, Instagram.
“Things are definitely become more boring,” says Ai, who’s leading me on the Harajuku Kawaii Tour around the neighbourhood. “It was inevitable that things would change — that’s how fashion works.”
‘Kawaii’ means ‘cute’ and is properly spelled with just two ‘i’s but is typically said with many more, elongated as though someone has stepped on the speaker’s toes. “Kawai,” says Hamuka — whose style is a gothic take on the Lolita look, featuring dark eye makeup and plenty of black lace — as she attaches a large magenta badge to my shirt to signify that I’m part of the tour. The ladies are extremely into anything that is kawaii and, even though Harajuku may be evolving into something else, there’s no shortage of things that still qualify.
In Alice On Wednesday, a multistorey shop themed exclusively around Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there’s a near-infinite number of trinkets and accessories that are indisputably kawaii. Why Wednesday though? “Wednesday is the worst day of the week, so the owners wanted to make it more exciting,” explains Ai without a hint of irony. Back out on Takeshita Street, my guides are less enthused about the new fad for ‘poop’ ice cream, which is poured in such a way as to resemble the turd emoji. Hamuka frowns — this may not be quite so kawaii.
As we walk around, the girls get plenty of attention. Their brightly-coloured dresses are so striking and the number of similarly dressed people now so low that they really stand out. Ai explains that part of the reason for the changing fashion is pragmatic. The carefully curated costumes, the wild accessorising — none of that comes cheap. “It’s getting really expensive
