Despite being in a men’s magazine, Yone’s pages in egg became so popular among the girls appearing in them that ultimately the magazine made the switch to a periodical for girls in late 1996. Circulation spiked and issues like March 1997’s “high school girl photographer” special followed, featuring page upon page of Polaroids and snapshots of girls at school, asleep at their desks, and making funny faces with friends. Yone would ask schoolgirls if they wanted to be in the magazine, hand one of them a camera and tell them to take pictures of each other. This wasn’t a fantasy, it was real. The new formula was a hit, and later that spring, egg went from a struggling bi-monthly rag to a monthly must-read among high school girls. Egg became a tome of the times.

Much of egg’s appeal was the rampant reader participation. In an age before the internet, egg offered internetesque interaction: the reader-generated content was what made it so special. Schoolgirls could send along opinionated essays, sticker pictures, or Polaroids covered in colorful graffiti. The pages of the magazine became so personalized by the kogal readers that it became a forum in glossy print that girls could roll up and shove in their school bag.

Yone pounded the pavement, searching the streets in and around Shibuya for the coolest girls and the latest trends. He’d talk to shop clerks, guys passing out flyers, and kids hanging out, to find out which parties the cute girls were going to. And then he’d go to those parties. “I really had to study the street—and then keep studying it,” he says. As soon as one trend would start, everyone would copy it, and the trend would become tired. “Then I’d have to find a new trend.”

Kogals were not only defining a new type of fashion, but were changing the way magazines covered fashion. “Before kogals, Japanese fashion was mostly top down,” says Yone. “People were told what was popular each season, this design or this color. But with kogals, it was about what kids were wearing on the streets. That’s how we knew what was popular.”

Egg magazine became known for the snapshots that showed girls’ fashion in the real world. The “street snap” style (as it’s called in Japan) spread to other magazines, both men’s and women’s. “Egg,” says Yone, “is one of the reasons why street snaps are so prevalent in Japanese magazines today.”

But success had its drawbacks, as it led to escalation. “Egg began telling girls to put on shorter skirts or tan themselves darker,” says Yone. “I didn’t like that. Real kogals wouldn’t listen to editors—real kogals created their own styles.” According to Yone, many of the new girls just wanted to be in print—so if egg told them to hike up their skirts they’d do it.