Japan - Japanese Fashion

The Japanese are a lot more fashionable than we are. A lot of this stems from their culture, especially with regards to Japanese women. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they see women as a lesser class of people, but they definitely have a more subservient role in the Japanese culture. To this end, women tended to dress extremely feminine and the norm was some type of skirt (usually very short), leggings or nylons, some kind of fashion boot with high heels, and a dressy blouse / jacket combo. This was not an unusual in Japan…




Men were also more fashionable than here in the U.S. and we would tend to say they had the “metro” look, but somehow the Japanese men tend to pull it off without looking gay. In fact, I didn’t see hardly any flaming gay Japanese guys until we got to Kyoto.

One thing that men tended to wear more than women were shoes that were excessively long. Apparently there either was, or is, an Italian fashion trend to extend the length of the shoe slightly. In Japan, they took it to the next level and the shoe, or boot, might be at least a third again as long as it needed to be. This gave people’s feet a very awkward appearance and I was reminded of the images you see of court jester’s. We asked our friend Daisuke about it and he said he thought it looked pretty stupid.

On the flight over I teased my g/f when the female interpreter would come on and speak in a soothing Japanese voice – “Oh, that is really sexy” I’d tell her and she’d roll her eyes at me. When we got somewhere in Tokyo a good looking girl walked by us with an eye patch on her eye and I said “now that is really hot!” and of course my g/f said I was pretty much a sick bastard. Little did I know I was onto something and that is an actual Japanese fetish / sub-culture. Check this link out:
http://www.thethinkingblog.com/2007/08/latest-japanese-craze-bandage-fetish.html

I also saw a little old lady at one of the airports with an eye patch on, but I don’t think it had anything to do with the bandage fetish.

The other thing we noticed about the women that an extraordinarily large number of them were bowlegged, pigeon toed, knock kneed or some combination thereof. As it turns out this was another sub-culture fetish. The bowlegged chicks obviously had inherited this, but the huge amount of pigeon toed girls is apparently an affectation that is supposed to be appealing to Japanese men. Combine all that together and then throw a set of heels on them and you get a bunch of women that look like they have a lot of trouble walking with some kind of shuffling gate – we were reminded of the old practice of binding of the feet and wondered if this whole phenomenon was a throwback to this now illegal tradition.

And of course, you can’t forget the catholic inspired school girls uniforms that the Japanese chicks wear. Seems they were always either coming or going to school, 7-days a week and perhaps in shifts. I never quite figured it out. Here is a “stealth shot” at some of the kids as they were let out of school one afternoon….



And almost nobody wears sunglasses…..ever. We read somewhere that this is a holdover from the Yakuza. Some younger people would wear them, but you won’t see many people wearing sunglasses no matter how bright it is outside. No wonder they squint all the time!