Gyaru: Japan's answer to a question no one asked

Last night at Frank's I posed an Unreasonably Difficult round question about the weird Al Jolson-meets-Paris Hilton look taking Japan's young women by storm. I wanted to know the name of the trend, which is gyaru.

This great short video from Japanorama serves as an excellent primer on ganguro and its gyaru subculture.


If for some reason this isn't odd enough for your tastes, witness the concurrent Japanese girl trend of kegadoru, literally "wounded idol," which revolves around being heavily (and completely unnecessarily) bandaged like the victim of recent violence. Useless eye patches for healthy eyes are common, such as the one worn by one of the schoolgirl dancers in the Japanorama video above. The psycho-social environment which produces that as desirable is indeed... interesting. Japan: the world's largest human radiation experiment? Sayounara for now!