Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on May 2010

Wielding an influence on everything from street slang to fine art, videogames to fashion, Japanese schoolgirls have, in the subtitle of Brian Ashcraft’s new book, “made a nation cool.” Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential puts these financial powerhouses and cultural arbiters under the microscope, offering foreign readers insight into topics both arcane (the history of sailor uniforms) and edgy (school-themed dating sims). In this exclusive excerpt, the author details the rise of ’90s kogal culture—and finds that it was nothing less than a loose-socked revolution.

Yonehara Yasumasa is sitting at his desk in his Harajuku office. His graying hair is cut close, and he’s decked out in hip-hop gear. Middle-aged or not, it suits him. “I’ve never liked the obligatory Japanese rules that say you need to dress like an adult—whatever that means,” he says. The room is packed with knickknacks, broken American toys, and boxes and boxes full of photos of women. It’s these sexy snaps for which Yonehara is most famous. Taken using Fuji Film’s Polaroid-like instant Cheki camera, this lo-fi eroticism is his work, and has appeared at exhibitions all over the world.

Yonehara—or Yone as he prefers to be called—was once an editor at egg magazine, the most influential girls’ magazine of the 1990s, and the kogal bible. He pushes a photobook forward. “See this,” he says pointing to a picture of a stoic, pale girl wearing a neat sailor suit, with her black hair in braids. Her gaze is empty, innocent. “This was the stereotypical image of a schoolgirl in the eighties and nineties. This was what salarymen at the time thought schoolgirls should be.” The stereotype was a pure, young girl that could be dirtied up. “Japan was a male-dominated society. Men controlled everything, and girls were supposed to appeal to their desires—until the kogals hit.”

“I remember the first time I saw a kogal,” says Yonehara. “I thought she was so cool—she was clearly not someone I could have imagined.” Ko was short for koukou (high school), and gyaru was gal. When they first appeared in the 1990s, he explains, they didn’t give a hoot what men thought. “These girls changed society,” says Yonehara, “it was a revolution.” He whips out a copy of the first issue of egg, dated September 1995. The tagline reads “Hyper Idol Station,” and the magazine was initially a pin-up rag for men, like a Japanese version of Western guys’ glossy Maxim. Yone flips past the photos of girls in somewhat dated swimsuits, looking for the section on schoolgirls he used to edit. Inside are photos of tanned kogals wearing frosted make-up, school uniforms with ultra-short skirts, and those ubiquitous loose socks.

Looking like they’d just washed up on a beach—with their streaked hair and tanned skin—the kogals were unlike anything Japan had ever seen. The look wasn’t created by girls trying to look Western, it was young Japanese girls challenging the traditional ideals of feminine beauty that had, for so long, dictated pale skin and thick, black hair. Just as Western teens might dye their hair green to make a statement, kogals were taking a stand with their lightened locks. In the early ’90s, dyeing one’s hair lighter wasn’t widely accepted in Japan. Kogals were not merely pushing the envelope but tearing it up into tiny pieces and setting it ablaze.

According to Yone, the first kogals were rich, private schoolgirls rebelling against conformity. “They weren’t the type of schoolgirl men could come up with,” he says. “It was the result of girls getting together and coming up with a new style they thought was cool.” Yone was the first person in the mainstream media to catch on. While the other pages of egg were covered with curvy models posing for decidedly male fantasies, his section was filled with realistic, fly-on-the-wall images of high school girls in the street or at home. These girls were stylish, cool, and incredibly photogenic. “They didn’t need stylists,” he says. “They were their own stylist.” This was girls’ fashion for girls by girls, entirely from the ground up. This look was for them. The photos in egg, like the Cheki stacked all over Yone’s office, look amateurish, raw and real. For Yone, that was the point—the sole, true, and honest point. He wanted to capture these girls and show how they existed in the wild.