Travel Tip for Guys Considering Trip to Japan

Fashion guide, from this amateur trendspotter.

It was late afternoon, and a gaggle of teenage girls in their school uniforms, heading home or to other less determinate destinations, had entered the train car when one of them caught my eye. (Presumably, there was a troop of schoolboys as well, but for some reason it escaped my attention.) For an instant, I wondered why, but then I realized: the hem of that one girl’s skirt was longer than those of the others, though it still had a long way to go before it would reach her knees. In fact, all the other girls were wearing their skirts more or less to the same length; that was why the one girl had stood out.

Trend-watchers, the schoolgirl’s skirt has reached the upper limits of decency in the context of stairs and escalators, and there is now no other way to go but down. And go down it will—the hem that is. For if there’s any mortal who pays greater attention to how a schoolgirl looks than a guy, it’s another schoolgirl. And if there’s anything anyone hates more than being “different”, it’s being like everyone else.

So there you have it: short, short schoolgirl uniforms will go the way of the loose socks, the now-mercifully extinct, baggy polar-bear stockings—a reminder to guys trying to make up their minds about a trip to Japan this winter.

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Incidentally, I believe that the miniskirt look for schoolgirl uniforms apparently began with Michiru Yamana, one of the main characters in BØY, a very popular manga that ran in Shonen Jump between 1992-99. I remember reading it and thinking, they can’t get away with that. And in the early 90s, they couldn’t. But in fiction, she could.

Would I Enjoy This Even More If I Were Gay?

Who knows? Anyway, it’s funny, and cool. And to the point, I suspect, but what would I know? By way of Princess Sparkle Pony.

The Blog Plays Assistant as Trend Spotter Flies in from New York New York

JK is in town with his trend spotter wife. As far as I can gather from what he tells me, a trend spotter gets paid to go to fashion hotspots like Tokyo and Shanghai and walk around soaking up the latest next things. JK, who has the face of a Roman senator and the body of an Ivy League fullback, and I decide to help out by doing a little trend spotting of our own. We quickly agree that all the hot Tokyo women are wearing short shorts. That, and denim cutoff microskirts. And we mean micro. I later find out that there are no hot women in Ginza.

Hey, we were only trying to help.

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Smelly, dirty, noisy New York, where everybody walks as fast as the rest of the world runs; the big fat capital of the global community; the Naked City where The Naked Cowboy is but one of the eight million stories; what other place could be so American?

Ah, America, the only major power where a serious demographic crunch does not loom. No wonder Russia and China are scared. Russia has the more immediate problem, an imploding male population, but China does not have a natural resource crutch (curse?).