This is GYARU. Seeing this kind of girl was definitely one of the most surprising things for me when I first came to Japan. I have wanted to write about gyaru girls for a long time, but I never knew what to say about them. I still don't really know what to say about them so I'm not going to make any comments. I'm just going to show you pictures and tell you what I have seen. You can make your own comments at the bottom of this post.
Gyaru are unique to Japan. They look and dress sort of like deeply tanned Barbies. There are a whole lot of different types of gyaru girls within the subculture, like Yamamba, Ganguro, Kogal and Himegyaru. Some gyaru look kind of like regular girls in sort of a Vegas-style way. Others have dark tans, tight, bright clothing, blonde hair extensions and too much makeup. Other more extreme versions have their eyes and lips painted with thick, white paint or have blue contact lenses, or have random pink and blue dreadlock hair extensions or have stickers of Stitch and other Disney characters platered all over their faces. Other gyaru subtypes are obsessed with African-American culture. They paint their faces black, get tight perms, braids or dreads and go to hip hop clubs.
They have their own style of text messaging, called "gyaru-moji" so that only other gyaru people can read what they write. It looks kind of like l33t and takes twice as long as regular text messages in Japanese. (Why? Well... for those of you who read Japanese, here's what Gyaru-Moji is. It's basically taking regular Hiragana, splitting up the individual characters and typing them using Katakana. For example, け is Hiragana for "Ke" and in Gyaru-Moji it is typed using two Katakana symbols, レナ so that it looks big and child-like and kawaii and all of that. Except that レナ is pronounced "Rena" so it's completely incomprehensible for a non-gyaru to read. Also, Hiragana characters are often replaced by random Kanji or even numbers and Roman or Cyrillic letters that look kind of similar to the Hiragana. For example, な is "Na" in Hiragana but in gyaru-moji it can be written like ﾅょ or †ょ or 十ょ or even ﾅg. Easily as annoying as l33t speak, possibly more annoying. ) 
Most gyaru girls like only progressive trance and sugary house music with really bad vocals. This video is a great example. My roommate and I went to a gyaru club once and we heard them play a trance version of "Part of this World" that song from Disney's The Little Mermaid. At gyaru clubs, the gyaru girls know choreographed dance moves with their arms and hands that they stand in a line and do all at once. It's totally surreal to see them do it. This video is by a group called Gyaruru and the blonde girl in the middle is the cute celebrity speed-eater Gyaru Sone that I wrote about a few months ago. I actually really love Gyaru Sone and I really do think she's completely adorable. She has the sweetest little voice and such a feminine baby face but she can eat more in 20 minutes than a huge man could eat in two days. Hime-gyaru is a different kind of gyaru. They look kind of like little, tanned Jon Benet Ramseys. Hime means princess in Japanese. They love this designer called Jesus Diamante and they wear blonde, curled extensions and diamonds on their fingernails and false eyelashes.
Ganguro literally means "blackface" and ganguro girls go to tanning beds every day, wear dark brown or black makeup and paint their noses, eyes and lips white. There are also male gyaru.
These guys hang out in Shibuya near the First Kitchen on the main street near Tsutaya. They wear platforms and makeup and have tans and blonde hair just like the girls. The gyaru guys and girls date each other almost exclusively. I have never seen a gyaru girl with a pale guy before. The gyaru guys are called Sentaa Guys or Yanki. A lot of people say that gyaru girls are really fun because they are loud and wild and they drink alcohol at clubs, which is not common for girls in Japan who usually stop after one or two drinks. I don't really know anything about that, though. Yamamba is another style of gyaru. Yamamba wear panda-style makeup, black faces with white paint circling the eyes. They love Hawaii and anything to do with Disney. So any kind of lei or flower or anything relating to Disney's Hawaiian-themed Stitch cartoon is something they like. I think Yamamba and Ganguro are the most extreme type of gyaru. 
Do you like it?
15 comments:
I teach a lot of this kind of Japanese girl now! They put on makeup in class and wear their sunglasses indoors and can barely type because of their long nails with charms and glitter dangling off them. But I like teaching them.
Living in the Kansai region, I never saw any gyaru girls. My friends told me that the majority of them live in Tokyo. I've seen many gyaru girls via youtube and on t.v., but I think it would have been interesting to have seen one in person. I don't mean to talk about them as though they're animals or objects to stare at, although my guess is that they like being recognized as unique compared to other Japanese girls, or else why would they dress and do their makeup like that in the first place?
The synchronised dancing you saw is called Para Para. Not only Gyaru girls dance like that, it is even known outside Japan.
People have the common misconception that Gyaru are popular girls...but many are not, many are made fun of or looked down upon for not being proper women. Gyaru are sort of rebels against the stereotypical quiet and respectable japanese women.
Yeah, the extreme gyaru girls like the Yamamba and the Ganguro and the girls in the pictures I showed you are scary to most regular Japanese girls and guys do not find them attractive. But they don't care. Kind of like goth kids back home, except they're dressed in tight, over-the-top-sexy clothes and bright colors.
That's funny, though. I would never have thought a real extreme type of gyaru would be very popular with regular people. In my home country, if a girl painted her face with black paint, put white paint around her eyes, nose and mouth and wore colorful, skimpy Las Vegas clothes, people would probably just think she was really needy for attention.
The regular gyaru girls who look like the girls in Gyaruru, though, often have a lot of friends, guys and girls, people who dress like them and people who don't. The only thing they have to worry about is that a lot of people make fun of them for being ditzy. But they play up the airhead shtick, so the teasing just comes with the territory.
But just like blonde girls get stereotyped in Europe and America, not all gyaru girls play airhead. One of the most talented and fluent students in my A class comes to school wearing tight, purple tube tops, false eyelashes, huge Paris Hilton sunglasses, micro-minis with visible garters and stockings underneath, and inch-long glittery nails with miniature cakes and cookies dangling off of them. I think it's a ridiculous style, but as long as someone treats me kindly I really could care less how they dress.
And of course, it's always kind of entertaining to see someone who obviously puts so much effort into their appearance. As long as I am clean and fed, I can be completely ready to leave the house in 15 minutes on any given day, so my respect goes out to anyone who tries as hard as they obviously do to look the way they want to look.
Para Para is such an annoying dance style! My cousin told me that when he first moved to Japan 13 years ago, everyone in clubs was dancing like that and then it lost popularity. Now it's coming back again. The only thing I like about it is that when a song comes on that everyone knows the choreographed dance moves to, the ones who don't know the dance are left staring at the others and laughing in amazement (HOW does EVERYone KNOW this dance!!??) and that's when you can make friends. I have made friends with Japanese girls by having no dance skills when all the others are doing Para Para. Ha.
Just look stunned and smile and laugh at people who also look stunned and then laugh and say "Wakanai" to them and you'll make a new friend.
WOW. i've seen these girls/guys around in magazines but i never realized they belonged to their own little 'category', so to speak! i would've just categorized them as... harajuku girls/guys ;P haha. quite ignorant of me, i guess.
thanks for the enlightenment!
i really enjoy reading your journal, it's very educational and fun at the same time :)
my goodness... watching that video, i just burst out laughing. the japanese are SO hilarious/cute/weird... i just love it hahaha.
oh, i have a question: do you know what gyaru means? oh nvm, i just googled it and apparantly it means 'gal'? cool. :)
Yep, you're right. It's kind of like a really girly, Barbie type style and it just means gal. Hinagyaru means Princess Gal and they're the ones who dress like children in a Southern American beauty pageant. Gankuro literally translated means 'blackface' and yes, those girls paint their faces with black paint and wear weaves. I think Yamamba means mountain witch. But If I'm wrong, please let me know. They're probably the weirdest kind of gyaru, with the multicolors and piercings and black and white panda faces.
You don't really see gyaru in Harajuku as much as you see them everywhere in Shibuya. Harajuku is for the really fashionable kids. All the teenagers wearing Comme Des Garcons mixed with vintage. Harajuku is rad just to walk around in. If you want to see great style in Tokyo, walk around that area near Cat Street or near Kinji or else in Shimokita. Osaka's Horie area is also amazing and everyone looks like beautiful runway models. (how do you write that in English? Horiyay?)
You also see a lot of those gothic lolita girls and tacky teenagers in Tokyo, but really, you only see them near Harajuku station, outside Yoyoyi park and on Takeshita street. They want to be seen very badly so they go where there are open spaces and people to take their pictures.
I think it's really interesting. I mean, it looks like a lot of fun. But, I wonder what their parents think...
i don't like this style, i find it super unattractive and kindda ridiculous, but is obvious that they are a product of japan strict society..so that's cool.
but really, the only thing I can think is how much cancer they'll get with all those solarium sessions!! o_o
so, though i like gyaru and gyaru-o (the male version), just to further clarify your claim, they are NOTTTTT popular here at all! haha, everytime i tell japanese people i like them, i get responses like "ew, really?", etc.
but i still like them.
the two girls at the top are not real yamambas, but two swedish girls (judy super & lucky) that just dressed up that way one day and made a funny video.
That blackface thing is so incredibly racist towards Africans. HELLO does no one see that? Its so obvious
Hi, I wonder, did you take these photos yourself? I only ask because I am writing a chapter for a book about the cultural exchanges between Japan and the West, and would love to use pictures of the Ganguro!
If these are your own photos would you be so kind as to allow me to use one of them in the book?
Thanks,
Carol.
I think gyaru plus moji used by Japanese youth as a code for communicating outside of the majority of surrounding society members. The technique involves the use of the Latin alphabet, hiragana, katakana, kanji and Greek. Now while encoding communications is not new, the use of non-verbal signage to communicate emotions rather than precise information has a more recent history. Beginning with emoticons or 'smilies' in the so named, antiquated email systems, these emotional signs have been replaced or augmented by a variety of new very sophisticated coding systems. And while even non-verbal signage has been with us since the beginning of human communications, emotional sign language in the context of social networking is a new phenomenon.
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