Gothic Beauty
Beginning with Gothic Lolita, Anne Peirson-Smith notes in her 2012 article “Do Gothic Lolitas Just Wanna Have Fun?: An Examination of the Goth-Loli Style Tribes in Hong Kong and Tokyo”, that “Goth Loli” is “a fandom... [that] continues the Gothic preoccupation with clothes or costume in the search for self. The ‘look’ then is depicted by a hyper-feminine take on the Victorian porcelain doll...” (91). Peirson-Smith goes on to discuss the connection between the Gothic Lolita style and actual Gothic style. She asserts that “Goth Lolis continue the trend of utilising familiar Gothic motifs—black clothes, crucifixes, coffins, bats, pale skin, and dark looks—to signal and enact their identity in a liminal, performative and material manner, whilst also reflecting the shadow-like aesthetics and sensibilities of a Gothic world...” (92). There is certainly some element of fear of the unknown implicit in wearing these kinds of Gothic symbols: black or inverted crucifixes are one thing to wear in the U.S., but something entirely different in Japan, in that there is an outsider quality to wearing a plain Christian symbol in Japan, let alone a Gothic response to the plain crucifix. (Christians make up only about 2.3% of the Japanese population, according to survey data from year 2006.)[2] In this way, I argue that Gothic Lolita fashion uses Gothic beauty in combination with the already established Lolita fashion to add yet another wrinkle of nuance to their ensemble, creating their own Gothic world that can be cute and frightening at the same time.
As we have seen in class, Hebi ni piasu is a novella that also includes cute and frightening all at once in the form of its protagonist, Lui. Lui is described as a Barbie girl throughout the story, in that she insists on being called Lui (short for the high fashion brand Luis Vuitton) and also associates with one friend who is a true Barbie girl. In most other respects, however, Lui is a character that would be frightening for a Japanese person to encounter on the street, at first simply due to the presence of her “scary-looking” boyfriend Ama and later due to her tongue piercing. However, adding to the Barbie side of her persona, the tongue piercing and her tattoos can all be hidden away from view, as she frequently does for her job as a sort of after hours drinking companion for tired and overworked salarymen. The most interesting aspect of the novel for me in relation to the topic of Gothic beauty is certainly the conflicted nature of Lui’s identity as alternative or Gothic in some way contrasted with her Barbie girl persona: this is expressed narratively via her agency, or lack thereof.
It is very unclear (perhaps intentionally so, on the part of author Hitomi Kanehara) as to whether or not the decisions Lui makes are actually her own, or if she is feeling masochistically compelled to do things that make her uncomfortable, such as meeting Shiba-san for her tattoo sessions one-on-one. She is torn in this way between someone who is intentionally making taboo decisions (getting elaborate tattoos and refusing to eat, for example) to rebel, or doing so out of a sense of helplessness, as Ama and Shiba fight over who “possesses” her. While Shiba appears to win out over Ama at the end, it is then that Lui realizes her own power and agency: “I kept my eyes on [Shiba] as he slowly got out of bed, my mind still on the river that had grown inside me. I wondered if it would flow stronger if I were to stretch the hole in my tongue to a 00g” (Kanehara 120). While in previous instances in the story the tongue gauge had been something Ama and Shiba controlled by initially piercing her (in the case of Shiba) and advising on when to swap sizes (in the case of Ama,) at this point it is something only she controls, along with the “river” that perhaps serves as a metaphor for her understanding that Ama’s death was a crime and that she knows this and can do what she wants with that information.
As explored in this path, Japanese standards of beauty in music and fashion vary in many ways depending on the context. Whether it is a tube of whitening cream from a department store, an idol group performing practiced “amateurish” idol identities in a shopping mall, or a girl in Harajuku wearing ball-jointed doll tights, there are many messages sent in Japan through fashion and aesthetic choices. These messages can and do change in response to forces like globalization and capitalism, and they are also subject to interpretation in popular media like movies and works of fiction. The more we critically analyze these kinds of messages, the better we can understand how Japan’s Beauty Regime operates on the micro and macro level. How does Japan understand itself in relation to the rest of Asia through its beauty standards? Is Lolita fashion’s childish shoujo aesthetic liberating or hypersexualized? While I was not able to come up with conclusive answers to every question raised over the course of this project, it is my hope that I have contributed some meaningful insights to the overarching discussion regarding Beauty in Japan, which will certainly evolve and become increasingly complex as we approach the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and experience its aftershocks.
