Footnotes to Chapter One
Prewar Japan
Sakoku “closed country” policy (p.1) : As much as the world talks about Japan being closed off for the entirety of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), the country actually maintained a quite complicated series of trade routes. But it still stands that almost no one traveled abroad, and the only Westerners were a few Dutch traders held offshore Nagasaki on a small island called Dejima. (Learn more here.)
The Tokugawa Shogunate…micro-managed the nation’s vestments (p.2): A good example of Tokugawa-era garment regulations is the 1615 Laws of Military Households, which includes: “Without authorization, no retainer may indiscriminately wear fine white damask, white wadded silk garments, purple silk kimono, purple silk linings, and kimono sleeves which bear no family crest.” (Learn more here.)
Rokumeikan (鹿鳴館)(p.3): This club (“deer-cry hall”), important for cultural exchange between Japanese and Westerners, opened in 1883. But its symbolism was always more important than its actual function: it was already obsolete a decade later, especially after the 1894 earthquake. The building was demolished in 1941. (Illustration of Rokumeikan.)
Gakuran (学ラン)/ Tsume-eri (詰め襟) (p.4): The gakuran (“study-Dutch”), also called the tsume-eri (“stuffed-collar”), is the traditional student uniform design for men in Japan, starting in the 19th century and enduring to today. Almost always in black, the serge wool square-collar jackets are matched with black pants and a square hat. Japanese educational institutions borrowed the design from the French army. (Learn more here [Jpn].)
Most university students actually preferred their gakuran uniform to wearing suits because it revealed their affiliation with elite colleges.
Hakuraifuku (舶来服): During the Meiji Period, Western clothing was often called hakuraifuku (“clothing that comes from boats”). This term eventually fell out of parlance, unlike the term hakuraihin (“goods from overseas”) which lasted much longer. (More on etymology [Jpn])
Tailoring as a profession. According to Kensuke Ishizu, tailors were very attractive to women in the early 20th century.
Mixing of Japanese and Western fashion: At the end of the 19th century, Japanese clothing was still in midst of its transition between indigenous garments and Western accouterments. Women in kimono rode bicycles and carried umbrellas. Men threw long shosei haori (書生羽織) overcoats on top of their suits. From the 1890s forward, urban white-collar workers started to wear British-style suits to work, but as soon as they got home, they changed back into traditional clothing, which worked better for sitting on the floor in Japanese houses. Hairstyles, by comparison, changed much faster: 60% of Japanese men wore short hair within five years of the Meiji Restoration.
Haikara (ハイカラ): A good example of culture trickling-down from elites to the middle-classes in the Meiji Period is the term haikara. At first it referred to affluent Japanese men copying the “high-collar” shirting style of Edwardian Britain but after much media hubbub, haikara came to mean “fashionable and new” across all of society. (Learn more here.)
Kensuke Ishizu’s fashion obsession as a child (p.4): In his 1983 autobiography, Kensuke Ishizu claims to have been very fashion conscious as a child. When he was seven, he decided to stop going to the prestigious elementary school near his home because he had to wear kimono and wooden sandals. He convinced his parents to transfer him to a school thirty-minutes away so he could wear the gakuran jacket with gold buttons. He also ordered patent leather boots — probably the only child with such shoes in all of Japan at the time. Upon entering middle school, Ishizu scrutinized the dress code and discovered he could shorten the jacket, put square flaps on the pants’ back pockets, and widen the pant hems. The only feature Ishizu could not add to the trousers were side pockets, believed to encourage masturbation.
Kensuke Ishizu’s Marxist brother (p.4): For length, I was forced in Ametora to gloss over why Kensuke Ishizu — the second son — took over the family business. His older brother Ryōsuke went off to Tokyo’s Keiō University in 1925, and once in the big city, became obsessed with the exciting new art of cinema. He loitered around film lots looking for scriptwriting work. Within months, Ryōsuke became a compatriot to the young idealistic Marxists of the Tokyo cinema scene. In the jargon of the time, Ryōsuke went “Red.”
After that point, Ryōsuke decided not to run the family business, so father Tadazō ordered Kensuke to immediately quit high school and start his apprenticeship. After hearing the news, Kensuke ran sobbing to his mother and grandfather, who intervened with a compromise. Kensuke would attend college in Tokyo, but only a three year program instead of the standard six. After that, he would return to Okayama to run Kami Ishizu.
Ishizu did not know how much was brother was involved with left wing causes. During the war, Ryōsuke — who had since made a tenkō conversion away from Marxism — went to Peking to take propaganda photos of China and was repatriated from there. He ended up becoming a famous photographer, editor of magazines Kamera and Shashin Bunka.
Kensuke Ishizu at Meiji (p.5): With his ¥35 per month as stipend — equal to the salary of most full-time female office workers — Ishizu played around in college. He coached boxers as a corner man. He founded Meiji University’s motorcycle club. Ishizu convinced a friend with a navy blue Ford to run an unlicensed taxi service, driving random strangers around Tokyo and giving attractive women free rides to hot spring resorts. When Ishizu and his friend showed up to find the car stolen one day, they just shrugged and moved on to a new hobby.
Shinseinen: Ishizu himself learned the fundamentals of style as a teenager from Japan’s first fashion column, “Vogue en vogue” by Shinjirō Nakamura in magazine Shinseinen (“New Youth”). Ishizu once read about an amazing new cologne in the column and bugged every department store until he got his hands on it. He proudly wore the cologne around town to the horrible dismay of his friends. Wondering why he smelled like a sweaty animal, he finally looked into the brand and realized he was dousing himself in pure musk oil. The writer Nakamura had messed up — and now Ishizu and all the other readers out there were repeating his mistakes. (Learn more here)
Kensuke Ishizu’s tailor in Tokyo (p.5): Ishizu used the mobos’ favorite tailor, Matsukō, at Noguchi Yofukuten near Keiō. With no one particularly stylish at his own Meiji University, Ishizu looked to his brother and other upperclassmen at Keiō as his fashion role models.
Chabuya (ちゃぶ屋): Ishizu’s taxi earnings fueled long nights with friends on the dance floors of chabuya — cheap motels for visiting foreigners near the Yokohama harbor, with ample bourbon and well-dressed prostitutes. The most famous chabuya, Florida, was the Studio 54 of pre-war Tokyo, filled with foreigners rich and poor, stylish actors, and a varied cast of demi-monde types. At Florida, Ishizu tossed back highballs and danced the Frisco and the Hop to the sound of rare foreign records. In the midst of these Gatsby-esque bacchanals, Ishizu felt transported to a foreign country. This came at a price; the sailors loved to pick fights with other guests. As protection, Ishizu brought along a boxer friend who secreted a bike chain in his pocket for when things got rough. (Learn more about chabuya here).
Mobo and Pre-War Fashion (p.5): “We mobo,” Ishizu wrote later in life, “were very particular about our haircut, clothing, and hats.” They wore their hair in a style called “all back” (オールバック) that slicked the hair back with pomade. The rest of society hated the mobo. A roundtable of thinkers in the January 1928 Shinchō spent pages debating the meaning of the moga but quickly decided that mobo were total “zeroes” (Miriam Silverberg’s Erotic Grotesque Nonsense p.60). (Pinterest page on mobo/moga).
Illustrator Yasuhiko Kobayashi told me, “Japan had a rich culture of clothing before the war. There were no ‘brands’ but everyone tried to imitate Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, and Humphrey Bogart with what was around. They could only imitate actors. My father would dress very well, all influenced from foreign films. Tokyo had many men who did their best to dress up.”
I wrote a short essay on mobo and pre-war fashion here.
Standard suits in the early Showa era: While most office workers at the time wore suits, they adopted the garment as thoughtlessly as prisoners put on their jumpsuits. The garments were drab, with big-shoulders with baggy pants.
Kensuke, Masako, and the Thought Police (p.6): While spending summer vacation at home during July 1929, Kensuke met the love of his life — Masako Kasai. His bride-to-be came from a wealthy Okayama family, and like Ishizu, was notorious for her “modern” style and behavior. Masako’s father had run a successful dry goods wholesaler but died suddenly when she was a teenager. Her oldest brother had no interest in following his father’s footsteps and just let the family business collapse. Her mother had to pull up the slack, eventually teaching tea ceremony lessons to get by. Masako thought this sudden poverty and social shame would prevent her from ever finding a husband — yet at the same time marriage was her only realistic path towards salvation.
The couple became closer as authorities amplified their crackdown on dissidents. In 1931, Japan’s Tokkō thought police picked up Masako to extract information on left-leaning friends. To escape further questioning, Masako fled to Tokyo and stayed with Kensuke. Masako recommended that they stay at the house of Kensuke’s brother Ryōsuke, not knowing that he too was a Marxist and would also become a target if his apartment was discovered. Looking for the missing couple, the Tokkō brought Masako into detention to force her to reveal their location. After a day of brutal questioning, she broke down and admitted that they were hiding out in Ishizu’s brother’s apartment. Fortunately they were not there the next day when the police arrived, and the police failed to notice Ryōsuke’s political leanings.
Masako was released, but became incredibly paranoid that the Tokkō would come back and get her again. Kensuke invited her to Tokyo to escape the heat, and the two started living together. To the families in Okayama, however, it just looked like their children had eloped. After a week, Masako’s mother traveled all the way to Ryōsuke’s apartment to bring Masako back. And as punishment to Kensuke, the Ishizus cut his stipend in half.
Kensuke Ishizu’s love of geisha: Kensuke Ishizu took after his grandfather, who retired at the age of 42 to dedicate himself to the Japanese tea ceremony. And like his grandfather, Ishizu loved geisha. As Masako raised three sons, her husband spent his nights hanging around geisha tea houses. Masako watched her own brother fall into ruin after a decadent relationship with a geisha, but Kensuke allayed her fears with claims of an invented malady, “Even the smell of oil in geisha hair gives me headaches.” One night, he partied late into the night with friends and a few geisha, and when he did not come home, Masako went looking for him. Alerted to the situation, he woke up at the crack of dawn and took everyone, including the geisha, home in a convertible car — only to hit rush hour traffic and the horrified stares of his neighbors. Ishizu was already legendary in town for being up to no good, but this was an entirely new level. Despite the marital friction, Masako admitted later in life that Okayama was so boring that geisha were one of the few things that a man like Kensuke could do to pass the time.
Ishizu and military gliders: After moving back to Okayama from college, Ishizu spent weeks at a time in glider training camps and eventually became the 61st person in Japan to obtain a glider license.
The Ishizus in Tianjin (p.7): A year before Kensuke Ishizu moved to Tianjin (romanized as Tientsin at the time), he visited the city with his friend Teruo Ōkawa. When Ōkawa’s brother asked him to move to help out with Ōkawa Yokō, he was already enamored with the idea of leaving Japan. The Tianjin invitation was great timing for Teruo, who had just been kicked out of the house for punching out an annoying but critically important customer of his father’s. Poor Masako wanted her husband out of Okayama but did not trust the friend Ōkawa. He had been one of Ishizu’s party buddies in Okayama and would likely continue to be a bad influence on her husband in China.
When they arrived in Tianjin, the Ishizus were greeted off the boat by a horrible flood that had just killed 20,000 people. For a long time, lines marked the walls where the rising water levels had reached.
The Japanese took full control of Tianjin in 1937 but allowed the remaining British, French, and Italian concessions to operate independently until 1941. Tianjin experienced neither military battle nor Chinese Communist guerilla attacks, and yet, the city was suddenly no longer in Japanese control. There were also 50,000 other Japanese, enough to support Japanese-language schools and retailers like Ōkawa Yōkō that imported goods directly from the home islands.
In Tianjin, Ishizu fulfilled his lifelong dream of living like a Westerner. The family resided in a British-style home with a Chinese housekeeper. They ate oatmeal and toast for breakfast. The children dressed in adorable suits. Ishizu traveled to work in the back of a rickshaw like a British colonial official. Ishizu also swore off Japanese-style squat toilets for the rest of his life. Kensuke felt liberated from the “family honor” that constrained him in Okayama. “They’ll all say, that there is Ishizu’s son, so you need to be careful.”
Masako meanwhile thought the city was dirty. In the afternoons, Masako would go over to the British district and have afternoon tea at colonial buildings such as the Victoria. Tellingly, Ishizu went back to Japan around 10 times during his seven-year stay in Tianjin and during that time never really visited his family in Okayama. (Read an account of the Tianjin years from Ōkawa’s daughter [Jpn])
Ishizu made a lot of money in Japan. The department store was doing well, but he also claims that he made the modern equivalent of $50,000 in one night at a Shanghai casino.
Ōkawa Yōkō (p.8): The term yōkō (洋行) was used in China to denote foreign companies, but some older retailers in Japan use the word in their names as well. Ishizu claims that Ōkawa Yōkō was the highest grossing department store in the entire Japanese empire for a while, which may be true because department stores in the homeland were highly regulated in the 1940s. Eventually the elder Ōkawa brother sold off Ōkawa Yōkō to rival chain Kanebo.
“devilish Anglo-Americans” (p.8): This is a standard translation of the famed Japanese expression kichiku-bei’ei (鬼畜米英)
kokuminfuku (国民服) (p.8): Civilian men during the war years in Japan had to wear their “citizen clothes” everywhere, even to weddings. Meanwhile Kensuke Ishizu was wearing three-piece suits in Tianjin, China. (more on kokuminfuku.) The “Mao suit” was a Communist Chinese take on the same idea. (Wikipedia)
Tianjin after the war (p.9): Ishizu’s eldest son Shōsuke remembers, “No part of Japan’s wartime experience came to Tianjin. At most we would have air-raid warnings when B-25s would fly overhead. But they were just passing over and had no reason to bomb Tianjin. I loved to go outside and watch them fly over.” As everyone waited for Chinese and American troops to arrive, Japanese feared the city’s Chinese population would take revenge on their former colonial overlords. Shōsuke Ishizu remembers, “We weren’t allowed a single foot outside the house.” To avoid trouble, Ishizu deviously dressed in a Chinese army uniform on the way to work, a deception for which, Chinese workers pelted him with rocks. As the Japanese awaited repatriation from Tianjin, Ishizu’s family spent their days playing volleyball and visiting with Americans at their homes. Ishizu gamed the rationing system, eating sukiyaki and other gourmet meals each night.
Lieutenant O’Brien (p.9): Back in 1995, Ishizu biographer Ichirō Sayama bragged that he was writing the authoritative work on Ishizu that hoped to reveal the identity of mysterious “Lieutenant O’Brien” who introduced Ishizu to the Ivy League back in Tianjin. Sayama’s work VAN kara tooku hanarete finally came out in 2012… without identifying O’Brien.
In most texts, Ishizu talked of O’Brien being a Princeton graduate, but my extensive combing of the Princeton alumni archives failed to find an O’Brien who would have been in Tianjin. In a few interviews, Ishizu also said that O’Brien went to Harvard, but no one seemed to match on that side either.
Paul Hasegawa was in Tianjin as a child and does remember that O’Brien existed (he was friends with Hasegawa’s father more than Ishizu), but I have still not come across a first name.
Ishizu on the boat home (p.10): On the boat back to Japan, Ishizu organized a talent show on the ship one night, collecting all possible instruments to form a rudimentary band. Ishizu entered himself in the talent competition, taking some of Masako’s clothes and performing a song-and-dance routine of famed Japanese female singer Noriko Awaya in drag. He won first prize.
Postwar Japan
Okayama after the war (p.10): Ishizu first task was to decide the future of the family business. Many great Japanese entrepreneurs, such as Akio Morita of Sony, used the social shake-up of the post-war period to free themselves from familial obligations and take a crack at new ventures. After his success in running retail and apparel operations for the Ōkawa Yōkō shop in Tianjin for seven years, Ishizu lost all patience with the world of traditional paper. He sold off Kami Ishizu and took a year to “recharge” his “life batteries.”
Since incendiary bombs leveled the family estate, he sold off its scraps and lived off of that for a year. (There is no trace of the Ishizu house in present day Okayama.) The family found temporary housing in an abandoned Mitsubishi Heavy Industries factory dorm and lived hand-to-mouth. When the money from the estate sale ran out, Ishizu sold off the goods he smuggled back from Tianjin.
Soldier fashion in the Occupation: In his book Trad Saijiki, Toshiyuki Kurosu wrote, “As an elementary school student, the GIs I saw looked really cool. They looked completely different from the Japanese soldiers I was used to seeing. They wore pants with an ironed crease on the front and brightly polished brown boots. They looked very cool while also looking very neat.”
Ishizu’s first post-war job (p.11): Ishizu took a job at Yūshin Jitsugyō (有信実業), a company that made money through locating specific assets like women’s stockings, asking GHQ for written permission to procure them, and then selling the booty to black markets. Ishizu’s English skills came in handy when filling out the paperwork. With no middlemen to set prices, business was very, very good.
At Yūshin, Ishizu made one of his most important life-long acquaintances — Kazuo Takagi. After a rough time on the front lines of the war in China, Takagi had been introduced by friends to Yūshin Jitsugyō and quickly became part of the core team. Despite being much younger than Ishizu or Ōkawa, all three worked well together.
The company eventually came to the attention of Kiyoshi Onoue, the head of Sasaki Eigyōbu, the largest manufacturer of undergarments in prewar Japan. Onoue had been sent to Tianjin as a soldier back in the war, and Ishizu and the Ōkawa brothers took him out for many late nights on the town. After the war, Onoue had rebranded Sasaki Eigyōbu as “Renown” and was looking to reposition the company from an underwear maker to a broader apparel concern. The only problem is that Onoue knew nothing about fashion and did not know what people would actually want to wear. He remembered the great success Ishizu and the guys behind Ōkawa Yōkō had selling to Japanese in Tianjin and asked them to help out.
“living like a bamboo shoot” (p.11): The so-called takenoko life.
monpe (p.11): Monpe pants came to prominence in the wartime era but they were originally samurai hunting clothing.
Black market clothing (p.11): Black markets in Ameyoko started to see large-scale imports of American clothing in 1947. A ticketing system started up again in 1947, but that just encouraged a lot of non-regulated black market activity. People needed “clothing tickets” to buy uniforms and children’s clothing. Men had trouble sourcing cloth for new suits but could buy unworn suits from a decade prior that had been thrown in storage once the country moved en masse into military uniforms. Due to regulations, import levels dropped to 1/100th of prewar.
Postwar womenswear: The postwar brought new talk of gender equality and an enhanced role for women in Japan, and most did not want to go back to wearing the traditional and constrictive kimono. They needed fashion that matched the needs of their active daily lives, and American womenswear seemed to fit the bill. With this new move towards a more American style, monpe slowly started to disappear around 1949, and by the early 1950s, no one would be caught dead wearing their farming pants in Tokyo anymore. Men had already made the transition to Western suits in the early 20th century, but women still wore kimono on a daily basis.
There is still debate about how much American influence changed womenswear after the war. A revisionist side points out that women in the 1930s were already moving towards more Western styles, but the war stopped the transition as everyone had to wear functional work clothes. Perms were banned in 1939, and other restrictions on textiles stopped any further momentum.
Dressmaking schools: Women hoping to dress like Americans after the war sewed their own garments, leading to an explosion in dressmaking schools. Designer Yoshiko Sugino reopened her Doreme academy in early 1946 with over 1,000 women lined up outside to fill 30 seats. Between a new set of institutions and home instruction, nearly all young women in the post-war learned how to sew. They passed around a pattern collection called the “American Stylebook” from house to house, and each month, read fashion how-to magazines like Souen and Soleil.
Women in the late 1940s were able to start hitting the streets in homemade long flare skirts cinched tightly at the waist with wide belts. This basic feminine silhouette of 1940s Japanese fashion echoedChristian Dior’s voluptuous and luxurious “New Look” debuting in 1947. Japanese women, however, had very little idea that these styles came from the glamorous world of European fashion. They were just copying Americans. And for the next few decades, this would be how fashion ideas came to Japan: Parisian ideas filtered into Japanese society only after being mediated by the American apparel industry.
Pan-Pan Girls (p.11): In preparation for the U.S. occupation, the Japanese government decided to quietly, yet expeditiously open dozens of brothels throughout the country with the purpose of protecting Japan’s “virtuous women” from the GIs’ certain rampage. The U.S. army tacitly let these brothels operate through 1945, but on March 25, 1946, General Douglas MacArthur’s General Head Quarters (GHQ) officially pulled the plug on the RAA, making all houses of prostitution off-limits for the troops. These 150,000 women, however, did not have legitimate work, and there was latent demand from the huge occupying forces. So most of the former brothel workers found it profitable to continue their profession — just this time as free agents. (To learn more, read Japan’s Comfort Women.)
Hamilton (p.13): Ishizu claims that he relied on a Harvard-educated soldier named Hamilton to buy him fabric from PXs in Osaka, but similar to O’Brien, I could not find any obvious people in Harvard alumni databases that match this description. Ishizu’s claim may be dubious in that he says that Hamilton was a relative of the “Hamilton Watch” family. But if you read about Hamilton watches, there was no family named Hamilton.
Ishizu’s first post-war clothing: Ishizu bought a loom and made imitations of G.I. pocket T-shirts. He also says he manufactured denim pants as work clothes in the late 1940s, and in hindsight, this may have been the first time anyone in Japan actually produced American-styled denim pants. (But without true denim-like material, we should assume they were more like chambray work pants.)
Koseifuku (更生服) (p.14): Even prestigious department stores such as Mitsukoshi stocked shelves with kōseifuku in the late 1940s, converting kimono silk into skirts and military cloth into coats.
VAN Magazine (p.15): The magazine VAN — short for “vanguard” — was a cheap tabloid started in 1946. When VAN ceased publishing in 1949, Ishizu wanted to use its name for his Ishizu Shōten clothing line. Ishizu’s brother Ryōsuke, at that point a famous photographer, helped broker a deal with VAN’s founder, and in 1951, Ishizu re-christened his clothing company VAN.
Cotton textiles: Japan imported almost all of its cotton and then exported the textiles to the United States.
Old-school clothing industry: Until the rise of VAN, if you needed a garment — a shirt, a tie, socks, shoes — you would go to a hitotsumono-ya, a store that specialized solely on that item. Companies that sold everything, like VAN, were denigrated as kazumonoya — stores that made everything and therefore expert at nothing. Making everything suggested that the quality had to be inferior. Japan’s clothing business was very old-fashioned, and there were long-standing traditions like this. All the industry lingo came from century old slang from the Meiji period.
By 1955, however, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry realized that Japan’s growing garment industry needed a bit of a branding boost and decided to recast it as the more exciting-sounding “apparel industry.” This gave the slightly decrepit and not particularly respected sector of the economy more credibility.
VAN and stage actors: There is an important part of the VAN story that I had to cut out from Ametora: The brand first rose to prominence in the 1950s thanks to stage actors. Back in the Tianjin repatriation camps, Ishizu befriended a young aspiring thespian named Kinzō Shin who put on volunteer plays to entertain the Japanese prisoners. While on a business trip to Tokyo in the early 1950s, Ishizu spied a theater poster with Shin’s name on it and barged backstage to say hello. Thanks to the strong wartime bond, the two men quickly reignited their friendship, and Ishizu invited him to visit his house next time he was in Osaka.
Shin often came to Ishizu’s Osaka home with actor buddies in tow. Ishizu would pass around the latest VAN samples to them and solicit opinions. Actors were desperate for fashionable clothing that did not look like jazz musicians’ bold Hollywood-inspired suits. These avant-garde artists wanted something new and distinct. Night after night, Shin and his friends ran off with the VAN prototypes and then told all their other actor friends to ask Ishizu for their own free clothes. Hundreds of samples disappeared from VAN’s factories to satiate the hunger of these actors, but this was marketing gold.
Ishizu on TV: In 1954, Ishizu started to appear on television as fashion advisor to the masses, explaining the latest in men’s style to wives who would be picking out their husband’s outfits.
Hepburn mania (p.17): Everything Audrey Hepburn was huge in the early 1950s. In June of 1953, the department store Shirokiya held a Hepburn Lookalike Contest, giving an unprecedented ¥10,000 to the winner. Ice cream took off when they saw Hepburn enjoying a cone on the Spanish Steps in Roman Holiday. In September 1954, Hepburn’s new film Sabrina caused a rush on toreador pants and flat ballet shoes, items that came to be known as “Sabrina pants” and “Sabrina shoes.” In opposition to the extreme femininity of the earlier American style, the Hepburn-influenced look preached a more sophisticated and neutered boyishness. This would embed deeply into the Japanese fashion DNA. Even today, Audrey Hepburn remains a style icon for Japanese women looking for a bit of Continental grace.
Otoko no Fukushoku origin (p.17): In searching for a fashion guru, Fujin Gahō’s Tatsuo Kumaido kept hearing the same name — Kensuke Ishizu. Kumaido took a night train to Osaka in search of the VAN boss. Once he located Ishizu, the editor explained that his company needed someone who knew about off-the-rack clothing. Ishizu was their only hope. Their conversation started over dinner, then drinks, and then spiralled into a serious bender. At the crack of dawn, they proclaimed in a drunken glee, “The era of ready-to-wear is upon us!” Then they got to work.
At the time, Fujingahōsha was a tiny 30-person company. The idea for Otoko no Fukushoku was to not just to sell men a guide on how to dress for certain events, but the editors thought they could make money from mail-order sales from the back of the magazine. Ishizu knew how to write articles thanks to his days doing copy for Okawa Yōkō ads back in Tianjin.
Yūjirō Ishihara in VAN: In 1959, Teruo Ōkawa of VAN confirmed to a magazine reporter that hot young actor Yūjirō Ishihara was wearing a pair of black pants from VAN. The brand doubled-down on this approach of courting actors, opening small sales corners within top film studios such as Nikkatsu.
VAN office in Tokyo: The office eventually settled into an attractive two-story brick building in Nihonbashi, just down the street from the major department store Mitsukoshi. Before VAN, the space had been a stuffy warehouse, but Ishizu appointed it in a modernist style, complete with a shiny steel table on the second floor. Japanese “office ladies” in three-quarter sleeve blouses and tartan check dresses brightened up the atmosphere.
Sun Tribe (taiyō-zoku) (p.21): The true idea of a Japanese “teenager” started with the 1956 Japanese film Taiyō no Kisetsu (Season of the Sun). The motion picture was based on the best-selling 1956 novel of the same name, written by elite 23 year-old Hitotsubashi law student and future right-wing Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara. The book won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for Literature in January of 1956, sold over 300,000 copies, and was quickly turned into a film. The story follows a wealthy college student Tatsuya Tsugawa and his relationship with an even wealthier and decadent girl Eiko. Their love affair finds them bouncing between hotel rooms and dance clubs — leisure activities far removed from the average youth at the time. More blatantly extravagant than that, a lot of the story revolves around Tatsuya and his older brother’s small sailboats docked at Shonan Beach, which conveniently set the scene for nautical lovemaking between Eiko and Tatsuya. Eiko ends up pregnant, however, and dies from a late-term abortion. The film’s final scene represented the ultimate in youth defiance, with Tatsuya telling the funeral audience that “None of you understand!” before storming off.
Japanese teenagers ate all this up, and the Ishihara brothers became instant stars. Younger brother Yūjirō Ishihara was a highly-delinquent student attending elite Keiō University, but his brief cameo in Season of the Sun launched him into stardom. Yujiro took a starring role in the next Ishihara’s cinema adaptation Kurutta Kajitsu (Crazed Fruit) in 1956 — using an almost identical cast and even deeper references to the Ishihara clique’s decadent lifestyle and fashion sense. With the films’ popularity, the rebellious beachside milieu of the well-to-do Ishihara brothers became the dominant fashion inspiration for young Japanese men.
The Ishihara style attracted a huge group of followers, resulting in a national fashion subculture known as the Taiyō-zoku — the Sun Tribe. The Ishihara brothers wore aloha shirts with raised collars, slim trousers or black bathing suits, and “Wellington frame” sunglasses — a beach fashion that grew directly out of their sporty seaside lifestyles. The brothers’ shirts were all custom — picking out the wildest fabrics they could find and having Yūjirō’s girlfriends sew them into custom shirts. Their hair also became a major fashion innovation. Called the Shintarō-gari (“Shintaro cut”) after the young writer, the hair was long on the top, but buzzed short on the side.
Shintaro Ishihara described membership to the Sun Tribe as “not just the width of the pants or the way you cut your hair. When we decide to do something, we make sure it connects to our real feelings.” In a similar tone, Yūjirō quipped to the press about his film career, “Whatever. I can quit doing movies whenever I want.”
At a time when Japan was essentially writing the social blueprint for the rest of the century, the Ishihara brothers represented an extremely dangerous deviation. The Ishihara clique was not just young punks doomed to a life of poverty, but extremely successful punks. Needless to say, adults hated the whole Sun Tribe phenomenon and were not silent about it. The PTA, women’s groups, and educational committees railed publicly against the book and film, calling for stricter censorship on motion pictures. In Season of the Sun’s most infamous sequence, the main character seduces his girlfriend by punching a hole in a sliding paper door with his erect penis.
But it was the third Sun Tribe film The Punishment Room’s scene of men spiking a girl’s drinks with sedatives that pushed the adults over the edge. While feminists disliked Ishihara’s tough-guy misogyny, older conservative men had a fit over the Ishihara brothers’ disobedience, which they somehow blamed on the formal outlawing of legal prostitution in 1957. They argued, if men had a legal sexual outlet for these violent urges, Japan would be free of menacing groups like the Sun Tribe.
hei’i habou (弊衣破帽) (p.22): Literally “ragged clothes, tattered hat,” the term referred to the chic disheveled look of bankara Japanese college students in the early 20th century. (Japanese etymology, read more in English here)
Princeton students’ athletic shoes: Ishizu noticed that Princeton students’ athletic shoes were basic sneakers made in Japan, likely from Moonstar, Onitsuka, or other early factories.
