We know we’ve done this to death a thousand times over, but Japanese street fashion still cannot fit into our brains. What the fuck is with these people? These photos weren’t shot at 3 a.m. after a Kuri Skull Yakamakooniro concert. They were shot totally unstyled, against a simple black cloth in broad daylight as these kids just milled around, smoked cigarettes, and spoke in a weird language we didn’t understand.
Exactly one year after we shot our 2002 photo issue’s “DOs and DON’Ts” in Tokyo we returned to Yoyogi Park (in front of the Harajuku train station) to discover that things have only become more ridiculous. Death and dying are still a big accoutrement. We still have the Victorian children with dead babies stuck to their arms, and there’s still the bleeding geishas and all that shit, but some of the dead kids are starting to mix it up a bit. Like the Victorian goth girl who had cleaned off her blood and replaced her dolly with a ventriloquist’s dummy, or conversely, the young man who kept his fake blood and teddy bear but updated the look 147 years to new wave. Goth harlequin clowns were something we weren’t familiar with, and, of course, I don’t think many people were accustomed to the overwhelming number of fascist equatorial geisha dictators, but for the most part, they are all as fucked-up-looking as last year.
The real challenge, however, is trying to predict what’s going to happen next time we come over. Our guess is the guy with the lamp on his head from the Glastonbury “DON’Ts” will be all the rage.
CHRISTINA SPARX
