Ametora

Extra notes and thoughts from the book Ametora: How Japan Saved American Fashion (Basic Books, 2015)

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The Very Early Postwar

At the 4:00 mark of this video, you will see the 1946 May Day celebration in Tokyo. What you’ll notice is that most of the men are still wearing their old military uniforms or kokuminfuku, sometimes mixed with pieces of civilian clothing. Someone wears a khaki military jacket and a tie, for example. Even nine months after the end of the war, most Japanese men struggled to wear anything other than the utilitarian garments immediately available to them.

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Kokuminfuku “citizen clothing”

(Photo from Mainichi)

From 1940, wartime Japan faced a materials shortage, and as a way to “rationalize” men’s clothing, the government introduced kokuminfuku (国民服) — “citizen clothing.” As seen above, there were various designs, but they all were military-like uniforms for non-military men, made in a khaki-olive tone called kokubō-shoku (国防色, “national defense color”). At first, many men declined to participate in this anti-style exercise, but by 1944, as American bombing campaigns intensified, the uniforms were adopted by almost all men on the home front.

Men continued to dress in the kokuminfuku after the war due to the lack of clothing supplies, but the Japanese government formally loosened its edict on dress in 1947. The idea of a national daily uniform, however, lived on in China with the Mao suit.

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The Bankara Student Look

(Click here for large size)

In early twentieth century Japan, the Japanese word for “high collar” — haikara — came to mean stylish and refined. At first, haikara described fussy, well-dressed gentlemen in the upper-class, but then anything foreign and fancy became haikara. 

Within a few years, the term became so widespread that an antonym developed —bankara (”barbarian collar”). The bankara look was embodied by college students who dressed daily in fraying black gakuran uniforms with schoolboy caps, capes, and high geta sandals (also called hei’i habō). This was an intentional rejection of gentlemanly fashion for a spartan military aesthetic.

In an era when the vast, vast majority of young people did not go to college, the black uniforms, especially in a disheveled state, represented long-time membership to an elite brotherhood of men. Much like Ivy League students after the war, they flaunted the wear-and-tear in their garments as a confident counter-reaction against shiny nouveau riche tastes. But since they wore the same outfit everyday, wear-and-tear was a natural part of life.

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Style in Prewar Japan

A group of men at Asamushi Onsen in Aomori, September 1930 (source)

I’ve recently been posting images on this very Tumblr of very dapper gentlemen from prewar Japan. Their existence, however, will seem to contradict a key point I lay out in my book Ametora: namely that Japanese authorities were extremely averse to the idea of men’s fashion up until the 1960s. I even call the first chapter “A Nation without Style.”

So why the discrepancy? Who were these stylish men in a “nation without style”?

First it is good to remember that the men in these photos were a minority limited to the very rich in big cities. They owned a few suits (all tailor-made), perhaps a few year-round ones in wool and a linen one for summer. And there were certainly tailors with a good sense of style who would have helped them keep up with trends. Illustrator Yasuhiko Kobayashi grew up in downtown Tokyo and 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 the clothing that was around. They could only imitate actors. My father dressed very well, taking influence from foreign films. Tokyo had many men who did their best to dress up.”

Many of the well-dressed men in the 1940s would have been former mobo (“modern boys”), rebellious young men of the late 1920s who took the suit and added stylish elements such as bold patterns or trumpet pants (rappa zubon). Kensuke Ishizu of VAN Jacket wrote later in life, “We mobo were very particular about our haircut, clothing, and hats.” His first suit in college was a green-brown tweed rather than a charcoal gray.

Japanese society, however, was not in any way comfortable with men going beyond the basics like this. Mobo faced law enforcement crackdowns and general contempt from the public. In Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, Miriam Silverberg notes that a roundtable of thinkers in the January 1928 issue of Shinchō spent pages debating the meaning of the moga but quickly decided that mobo were total “zeroes.”

Most men saw dressing expressively as “nampa” — in other words, a “feminine,” soft activity intended as a means towards lecherous ends. In Japanese Fashion: A Cultural History, Toby Slade shows how the men’s suit arrived with Japanese modernity to “rationalize” dress and help curb previous affectations of the Edo era. Most white-collar office workers wore suits by the Taishō period, but they adopted the garment as thoughtlessly as prisoners put on their jumpsuits. The garments were drab, with big-shoulders with baggy pants. 

So it’s fair to say that during the prewar, a handful of affluent style rebels in great suits — but there was not yet a society-wide blessing for men to dress up. And then the war destroyed what little fashion culture Japan had. After the country entered total war with the United States in 1941, the government forced most men into combat and the ones leftover had to wear bland olive kokuminfuku uniforms. All men got short military haircuts as non-functional hairstyles such as the “regent” pompadour hairstyle were banned. After the war, these restrictions were lifted, but poverty reinforced wartime notions of austerity; only delinquent youth and gangsters dared re-establish prewar styles.

There is a case to be made that the Japanese fashion explosion of the 1960s “restored” a burgeoning culture of well-dressed men in Japan from its wartime nadir. But we should not backwards extrapolate to think that all men were on the verge of fashionable clothing in 1939. The 1960s Ivy movement was critical for breaking many long-standing taboos that helped fashion go beyond a niche upper class activity and into the middle-class mainstream. 

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Summer in Prewar Japan

An image from the August 8, 1940 issue of Asahi Graph of urban office workers in light suits and boater hats. Once Japan entered total war with the U.S., the government started to outlaw this kind of menswear and demand everyone go into uniforms or kokuminfuku citizen clothing.

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Pre-war Summer Suits

Two Japanese dandies in light-colored summer suits, around the end of the Taishō Era or beginning of Shōwa Era. (source)

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Mambo

(Illustrations and photos of the mambo fashion boom from Mukashi no Yosōi)

In the summer of 1955, Japan underwent a boom for the Cuban musical style mambo. Delinquent kids in tapered drop-crotch pants (men) and Capri pants (women) danced to latin beats in dank clubs across Tokyo. The fad died off by the end of the summer (replaced by calypso in 1957), but the association of the music with the clubs' high density of juvenile delinquents made the word "mambo" synonymous with "young punk" for the next several decades.

The instigator of the entire mambo craze, oddly, was the 1955 Jane Russell adventure movie Underwater! When I heard this fact, I imagined the entire film was built around a mambo soundtrack, when a quick glance on YouTube revealed that mambo music is limited to a single scene.

This shows, however, the degree to which films in 1950s Japan had an almost monopolistic influence on the zeitgeist. A five-minute part of a now obscure film spurred a notable fashion and music movement. The rise of Taiyō-zoku fashion the next year in 1956 from the film Taiyō no Kisetsu (Season of the Sun) only further proves it.

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U.S.A. '76 Do Catalog

U.S.A. ‘76 Do Catalog was publisher Sankei’s attempt to get on the bandwagon of Yomiuri's Made in U.S.A. catalog 1975. Where the latter focused on material goods, Do Catalog is a truly hippie-dippie dive into mid-1970s “alternative living” in the U.S. There are sweat lodges, loft beds in bedrooms, nude friends enjoying a skinny dip in a hot tub, and tips on what to do with your parsley harvest. 

The Japanese editors behind _Made in U.S.A. _went on to bring this materialistic pro-American world view to Popeye, but interestingly, the editor-in-chief behind Do Catalog was an American named Thomas F. Smith — an army vet who moved to Japan in the 1970s to study martial arts. After his work on Do Catalog, Smith went on to work on solar homes and advise companies on corporate security. Smith passed away earlier this year.

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Vinylon

A sign for student uniforms made in Kurashiki Vinylon and Teijin Tetsuron

In the 1950s, Japanese clothing manufacturers lacking access to cotton — especially school uniform makers in Kojima, Okayama — started making garments with a synthetic fiber called vinylon. Japanese and Korean scientists invented vinylon (or vinalon) in 1939, extracting it from limestone and anthracite, but companies did not really mass produce it until the early 1950s.

Vinylon was pretty terrible stuff — as Wikipedia says, "stiff, uncomfortable, shiny, prone to shrinking, and difficult to dye." Many Japanese school students therefore rejoiced when the majority of Japanese manufacturers switched to the vastly-superior, British-invented Tetoron polyester in the late 1950s. From there, vinylon essentially disappeared from Japanese clothing. This transition indadvertedly caused the birth of Japanese denim. Kojima-based uniform powerhouse Maruo Hifuku got cut out of the Tetoron monopoly and started making jeans under the name Big John to create a new revenue stream.

Vinylon found a new home, however, in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Yes, North Korea. Vinylon's original inventor Ri Sung Gi defected from South to North Korea after the war and became a great national scientific hero under "The Great Leader" Kim Il-Sung (until killing himself in 1977). Vinylon thus became part of the North Korean origin myth, known as "juche fiber" because the ability to locally source the raw material well symbolized the country's philosophy of self-sustenance. As late as 1998, North Korea was still opening vinylon factories and sadly subjecting people to wearing its terrible, terrible cloth.

Kim Jong-il inspects vinalon cotton (Photo:KCNA)

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VAN Mini Ad

Ad from the mid-1970s for VAN's line for boys VAN Mini. 

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Vitalis

Greasy pomade was for Après-zoku delinquents with "regent" pompadours. Ivy men used American hair liquid Vitalis to style that perfect 7-3 part. 

Almost every Japanese onsen still offers a selection of hair tonics and liquids for the Japanese men of this generation. Younger Japanese now use a dizzying array of waxes and gels. 

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"Come on Sportsman!" vs. "Come on in. Coke"

From 1971, VAN Jacket started an advertising campaign called "Come on! Sportsman," emphasizing the sunny outdoor quality of its clothing and the overall brand. 

Here are a few choice promotional images:

There was also even a few 7" promotional singles for the campaign as well: 

A year later, in 1972, American beverage company Coca-Cola ran a TV campaign called "Come on in. Coke" with an extremely similar set of images. 

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VAN Music Break

By 1966, VAN dominated a lot of cutting-edge media in Japan. The brand basically sponsored the entirety of magazine Men's Club and ran a weekly radio program called "Ivy Club" and a daily ten-minute "Music Break" show on a few obscure stations across Japan. The next obvious step was a TV show.

From October 1966, VAN produced a weekly 11pm half-hour Sunday night music show on the channel NET (now, TV Asahi) called "VAN Music Break" that featured performances from top Japanese jazz, folk, and pop musicians. 

Comedian Takehiko Maeda — who later went on to form Japan's "Laugh-in" clone "Geba! Geba" — appeared as the MC.

Famed jazz musician Sadao Watanabe acted as the show’s Music Director and his quartet often backed up the guests. He also did a nice bossa nova theme for the show.

Other segments included models walking around in VAN clothing, films of trendy teenagers out in Tokyo and American football games, short skits, and fashion lectures from VAN founder Kensuke Ishizu. A nine-year old half-American "cover girl" singer Mei "Barbara" Shinkawa (or Arakawa) was also a regular performer. (She seems to have never done anything major after this show, at least under that name.)

Unfortunately there do not seem to be any publicly available videos of the program still available.

Information and photos from Ishizu.jp and n-project. 

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LASS

Another great VAN-ripoff brand from the mid-1960s: LASS. The logo looks identical to VAN's, but the logo is the near-English phrase "The lass is secretary of your dandy for men."

From an ad in Heibon Punch circa 1966

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Iena Bookstore

Photo from here, Iena the building on the right

Back in the 1960s, Ginza bookstore Iena was the place to go to find foreign books, and many young Japanese interested in Western fashion would go there to thumb through the latest issues of Esquire, GQ, and Men's Wear.

Iena closed in 2002 with the management blaming "the Internet" on sluggish sales.

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JUN

Unlike VAN, the Japanese apparel company JUN still exists and continues to be a major player in the contemporary fashion world. 

In the 1960s, however, it is easy to see why people considered the brand to be highly derivative of VAN. The logo is nearly identical — stencil diagonals, middle letter is red. The only real graphic distinction is the addition of serifs. The catch phrase is also very similar "Designed by young men for young men" compared with VAN's "For the young and young-at-heart." 

JUN made very similar Ivy items during Japan's First Ivy Boom, at slightly lower prices, but soon found a better competitive hook to VAN by promoting "continental" European styles rather than American traditional ones. Thus began the VAN Aibii vs. JUN Konchi war.

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Five 6 Seven

Men's Club was the first true menswear magazine in Japan, but by the early 1960s, it refocused almost exclusively to a younger collegiate audience. First publishing in January 1963, Five 6 Seven basically stole the writers and illustrators from Men's Club, mixed in sexy girls, and targeted the same fashion material to hip salarymen. VAN JACKET was the primary advertiser and created unique ads for each issue. 

A lot of original Ivy fans have fond memories of Five 6 Seven, but it was short lived, and as you can see from my Pinterest board of covers, became increasingly dedicated to pinups of Caucasian women. Five 6 Seven was basically a cult item in the Sixties and even more so now. (There is barely any information about the magazine online and back issues are few and far between.) Where scans are available, the work from illustrator Kazuo Hozumi stands out.

In 1965, the magazine morphed into a much less interesting weekly men's magazine called F6Seven: Entertainment for Men, sponsored by VAN-rival JUN. 

See some images below:

Nice red-and-black illlustrations on Ivy from Hozumi with text by VAN's Toshiyuki Kurosu. Lark About has more images from this series.

Back cover VAN ad from August 1963 that plays on the cover model image.

"Pictorial Encyclopaedia of 'IVY'" with art by Hozumi and text by Kurosu (from VAN Site) . Interesting to see that the half-placket in the drawing of the button-down shirt.

Classic VAN from November 1963 issue. Art looks to be Hozumi. The last sentence says, "If you're someone who wants to wear Ivy, you can't go wrong with VAN."