New Teen Queens of Culture in Japan

TOKYO — Several times a week, they scour this city’s teen shopping havens, armed with portable telephones, beepers and up to $500 in monthly spending money. For Nozomi Seko and Japanese high school girls like her, the mission is clear: to be the first to find the greatest new gizmo, cutest fashion, best restaurant, hottest new hobby--and to spread the word via a far-flung network of 1,000 or more friends.

According to their recent intelligence reports, Fendi is in, Vuitton is fading. Loose white socks, Ralph Lauren sweater vests, pleated miniskirts and Burberry mufflers are de rigueur garb for the trendy.

The pastimes of choice are taking pictures--preferably with a digital camera or a photo machine called Print Club--and passing out business cards showing their blood type, considered as revealing here as one’s sign of the zodiac is in America.

Tamagotchi? Old hat. Japan’s high school girls started the craze last year for this electronic device, with which youngsters, as part of a game, “raise” and care for a chick; it is now causing a sensation from Rome to Taipei. But the Japanese have moved on.

“We want to be cute. We want to have fun. We like the same things,” Nozomi, 17, says with a beaming smile as her three companions bob their heads in agreement.

Call them Japan’s Boom Brigade, now the hottest trendsetters in arguably the most faddish country in the world. High school students make up only 4% of the population here. But these young women in particular command a disproportionate share of the media and marketing spotlight. Firms are targeting them in hopes of sparking national and even international consumer crazes, ranging from fashionable fishing gear to anti-bad-breath tea.

Boosting these girls to center stage is a potent combustion of intense media interest, social changes bringing them unprecedented freedom, and economic factors that have made other consumers less attractive.

Along with the marketing spotlight, however, high school girls have also come under intense sociological scrutiny. They are assailed as being the spoiled products of smaller families and an affluent society, who mindlessly shop, slather on makeup and hitch up their skirts to perilous heights--dismaying those who hanker for the misty days of more modest Japanese girlhood.

But today’s female teens are also praised as more adventuresome than their male counterparts, who are still seen as being more hamstrung by societal expectations and pressures. The boys are described as being zombied out on video games and “cram” schools that help them get the grades they need to rise in Japanese society. Nozomi says the girls will shape a Japan more tolerant of differences: “It’s too much trouble to forge consensus. If people are different, let them be different.”

Part of the media fascination with high school girls may be sheer titillation: Reports that some date older men and even sleep with them to earn money for their designer goods and portable-phone bills have not died down. A March survey in Views magazine of 1,000 high school girls indicated that 42% had called the telephone clubs through which such assignations are made, although only 9% admitted to trying the “compensated dating”--ranging from providing companionship at karaoke bars to full-blown prostitution.

The media spotlight may simply reflect Japan’s relentless hunger for the new, as it shifts from chronicling the habits and hobbies of female office workers to examining college coeds to the current obsession with high school girls.

Katahira Otaka, a Tokyo University economics professor, argues that the astonishing pace of trends--and their exceedingly short shelf lives--is rooted in a culture that worships freshness: sashimi served while the raw fish is still wiggling; an aversion to used cars and goods; ever-younger female consumers, models and entertainers.

Money and Curiosity

But the hubbub is also grounded in growing evidence that the girls do carry considerable consumer clout. Marketers here say that Japan’s high school girls are blessed with ideal consumer attributes: money, a curiosity about the new and the time to indulge it.

“High school girls have the most money to spend, and [they] spread word about new booms the most quickly,” says Fujio Minegishi, a director of Atlus Co., in explaining why his firm targeted them in developing the popular Print Club photo sticker machines. The machines make stickers emblazoned with photos of the users, their friends and characters such as Felix the Cat and Bugs Bunny.

Even as Japan’s limp economy has cut bonuses and reduced job opportunities for 20-something females--once the nation’s most conspicuous consumers--more teens are receiving allowances and income from part-time jobs than ever before, says Masaki Matsuda of the Japan Credit Rating Agency. About 68% of Japanese teens get regular allowances from their parents, averaging $220 a month, compared with just 28% of American youths, the Japan Youth Research Institute reports.

In addition, many teens are showered by what Matsuda and others call the “six pocket” phenomenon: regular gifts of cash from doting parents and two grandparents on each side. Those presents may be as much as $1,700 for entering high school or $90 to celebrate birthdays and New Year’s.

And all that money is spread around smaller families, with Japanese women on average now bearing fewer than two children each. Freed from the poverty that plagued their elders, the majority of teens enjoy their own rooms, televisions, phones and beepers.

In Tokyo’s trendy teen district of Shibuya, for instance, high school senior Kazumi Maruyama--who gets about $700 a month from her parents and grandparents--spends freely on clothes, Gucci bags, calls on her portable phone and such hobbies as photography, snowboarding and karaoke.

Teens without such well-heeled relatives are benefiting from an explosion in part-time jobs now available because of a wide relaxation of school rules that banned such work and an expansion in convenience stores, family restaurants and other youth job havens.

McDonald’s, for instance, has more than doubled its number of restaurants in Japan, to 2,006 in 1996 from 867 in 1991, and gives 30% of its 80,000 part-time jobs to high school students.

Nozomi used to earn $600 a month working as a waitress five nights a week at a sushi restaurant, but she switched to a twice-weekly convenience store job when she found she had no time to play and shop.

Her Mita High School teacher Noriaki Ishida figures that 60% of female students and half as many males now work part time--reducing the hours they might once have spent at after-school clubs that long served to forge group bonds. As a result of such trends, along with fewer siblings, teens today are losing their ability to work together and consider others before themselves--critical social skills in Japan, he says.

“Rather than doing things with others, they would rather make money,” Ishida says. “They evaluate choices based on whether it profits them or not . . . a new self-centeredness.”

But the attraction of female teen consumers here is not only their buying power. It is what marketers call their phenomenal ability to create hits through kuchikomi, or lightning-fast word-of-mouth not only among their peers but among parents and siblings.

As adults mature into more sophisticated consumers who increasingly make their own choices through mail-order catalogs and the like, teens represent the last bastion of potentially profitable group-think, consumer analysts here say. At no other point in their lives will Japanese have so many contacts--friends, classmates and co-workers--whom they see on a regular basis and with whom to swap so much information, the analysts say.

Indeed, Japan has spawned a layer of marketing firms that use high school students to ignite booms for clients ranging from auto makers to cosmetics companies.

High school senior Mie Kobayashi works for one such firm, Teens Networkship. Sporting fashionable hennaed hair and a Ralph Lauren sweater, Mie says she has test-marketed a digital camera, handed out samples of a chocolate candy and a juice drink to scores of friends and modeled Revlon products for the teen trend magazine Cawaii.

Mie says she derives great pleasure--even a superiority complex--from being the first to tell friends about a product. “I like the feeling of being the only one who has these things ahead of everyone else,” she says, collapsing in giggles.

Hiroaki Morita, the firm’s fast-talking 27-year-old president, calculates that his 2,000 registered teen employees reach at least 300,000 high school students in Tokyo and three surrounding prefectures to push everything from new toys and magazines to cosmetics and consumer electronics. Telling girls to keep a product a secret is a sure-fire way to spread the word about it, he says.

Once a fad reaches a certain stage--often aided by product pitches from teen idols--Japan’s voracious mass media usually pick up the scent and spread the news nationwide.

Boom Planning, another Tokyo marketing firm, recently used some of its 8,000 registered high school girls to help a major beverage maker reshape a sales campaign for tea aimed at combating bad breath. With the girls’ advice, the maker changed its slogan from the self-conscious “Be Concerned About Your Breath” to the breezier “Refresh Your Breath.”

Already, the girls have spread word of the tea to their mothers--prompting many of these women to plan major purchases for their stale-mouthed husbands when the product hits the market this summer, says Boom Planning President Yasuko Nakamura. Older women have also picked up on such other teen hits as eyebrow templates aimed at producing a perfectly plucked brow.

Analysts say such symbiotic relations among industry, the media and youth lie behind many of Japan’s ever-changing fads, from Tamagotchi and Print Club to snowboarding, NBA basketball, black culture and the dirty dancing craze--at a nightclub called Juliana’s--that provoked young women into frenzied gyrations in G-strings and feathers a few years ago.

But behind many of the trends is also a subtle psychological pressure that preys as much on insecurities as on the desire to find new products. Atlus, for instance, encouraged multiple use of its Print Club photo machines by spreading the message that “People with lots of seals are happiest; people who are disliked can’t collect many.”

As a result, many girls boast more than 1,000 photo stickers; the firm’s 15,000 machines nationwide now average 100 uses a day, compared with 20 when they were unveiled in 1995. Minegishi claims that Print Club has even reduced the perennial problem of school bullying as teens determinedly widen their circle of friends.

The firm plans to expand distribution of Print Club machines beyond the Southern California market to other U.S. cities this summer in hopes of reaping the same success enjoyed by Japanese youth products built around fantasy characters such as Sailor Moon and the Power Rangers.

“High school girls don’t want to be told: ‘Eeeehhh? You don’t know about this?’ ” says Aki Maita of Bandai Co., a leading toy manufacturer and maker of Tamagotchi, in explaining why fads spread so rapidly among them. New Bandai products on the horizon--again targeted at girls--are cameras, yo-yos and colorful fishing gear, she says.

Other firms are aiming to hit it big with aromatherapy machines and a new game modeled after Tamagotchi called Pocket Love, whose players raise not electronic chickens but people to fall in love and marry.

But Japan’s Material Girls have raised eyebrows among many adults. “They think they are the center of Japan’s society,” scoffs Nihon University social psychologist Masao Omura.

Dentsu, Japan’s leading advertising firm, concluded in a recent study that high school girls today lack an inner core and suffer from the boredom of acquiring whatever they want without having to sweat for it.

Live for the Moment

Tamotsu Sengoku of the Japan Youth Research Institute bemoans a lack of goals and a genzai shiko, or live-for-the-moment mentality. In cross-cultural surveys, his institute found that American girls have stronger career goals and a greater sense of self-sufficiency than their Japanese counterparts.

But he blames Japan’s rigid society for not encouraging girls to have professional dreams, by limiting their alternatives. “My opinion is very clear,” Sengoku says. “With teens like these, Japan is finished.”

Kazuyo Miyoshi, 16, a freshman at Tokyo’s International High School who spent five years in Arizona, is not much more optimistic. She says her contemporaries don’t listen to her when she tells them to be more original and to ignore inane trends such as the “loose socks” fashion, worn by 81% of high school girls surveyed by Views magazine.

She also says her American friends form more intimate friendships through frankness, while Japanese girls restrict conversations to superficial gossip to avoid conflict and being disliked.

“Japanese girls feel insecure if they don’t do what other people are doing,” says Kazuyo, who plans to be a journalist or essayist and has started writing articles. “I ask my friends what they want to do in the future and they say: ‘I don’t know. I’ll think about it later.’ What they are most concerned about is what they look like. They want to be skinny and pretty.”

For her part, Kazuyo finds her own trademarks. “I’m into aliens now,” she says, jangling a key chain with bulging-eyed plastic monsters.

Etsuko Kawase of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.