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America, with a population 2.5 times larger than Japan, has fewer than ten magazines focusing on men’s style. Japan has more than fifty.
in the early 1930s. Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department launched a campaign to clean up juvenile delinquency, pledging to close every dance hall in the city. Law enforcement swept the streets of Ginza for overly-fashionable youth. The police arrested anyone doing anything suspiciously modern—going to cinemas, drinking coffee, or even eating grilled sweet potatoes on the street.
Baseball avoided persecution only by replacing its foreign-derived terminology with native Japanese terms for strikes and home runs.
the first group in Japan to adopt Western style were the Pan Pan Girls—streetwalking prostitutes who catered to American soldiers. As writer Kōsuke Mabuchi described, “The Pan Pan Girls were the de facto fashion leaders of the immediate postwar.” Pan Pan Girls wore brightly colored American dresses and platform heels, with a signature kerchief tied around their necks. They permed their hair, caked on heavy makeup, and wore red lipstick and red nail polish. Pan Pan Girls’ jackets had enormous shoulder pads in imitation of officers’ wives.
In 1953, a film adaptation of a national broadcaster NHK’s radio show Kimi no Na wa (“What Is Your Name?”) sparked a fashion trend where girls wrapped shawls around their
heads and neck like the film’s protagonist, Machiko.
Lacking any knowledge about fashion, men needed more than just visual inspiration. They needed detailed explanations on how to put together a basic wardrobe.
Ishizu joined the editorial team, and the quarterly publication Otoko no Fukushoku (“Men’s Clothing”) debuted in late 1954. The magazine offered fashion photography and articles, but the editorial tone was pure instruction—a textbook introduction to semi-formal wear, business wear, sportswear, and golf wear.
VAN customers in the first half of the 1960s came exclusively from three groups: celebrities, creatives at top advertising firms, and the sons of very wealthy families.
To make things easier on their pupils, Ishizu, Kurosu, and the others at VAN decided they needed to break Ivy down into a set of dos and don’ts. They summarized their mission thus: When you buy medicine, the instructions are always included. There is a proper way of taking the medicine, and if you do not take the medicine correctly, there may be adverse effects. Same goes for dressing up—there are rules you cannot ignore. Rules teach you style orthodoxy and help you follow the correct conventions for dress. Starting with Ivy is the fastest way to get you there.
Kazuo Hozumi explains, “We started to just make up rules like, ‘When you wear a button-down, you have to wear a plain knot, not a Windsor.’ But then, everyone believed us.”
VAN was so successful in using these definitive proclamations to get both readers and retailers on the same page that Japanese fashion today still retains this emphasis on rules.
Beyond spreading knowledge about Ivy clothing, this homosocial one-upmanship brought fashion—previously belittled as a “feminine” pursuit—closer to technical “masculine” hobbies such as car repair and sports.
TPO made particularly good sense with Ivy, which represented a comprehensive fashion system rather than a single look. One could be Ivy in class, Ivy at church, Ivy playing football, Ivy watching football, Ivy as a wedding guest, and Ivy as the groom. TPO also resembled the rules on wearing kimono and other traditional Japanese garments, making Ivy not sound so alien after all.
Sony passed out copies to every male employee.
Heibon Punch’s momentum propelled the once small Ivy cult into the mainstream,
During the quieter Men’s Club era before 1964, Ivy fans were scattered and inconspicuous as a trend, and comprised almost exclusively of the rich. Now there were masses of upper-middle-class teens in Ginza wearing Ivy gear and pulling money from paper wallets made from Heibon Punch covers.
Parents did not approve of their sons wearing stylish clothing, so young men snuck out to Ginza in a student uniform with their Ivy duds hidden in a rolled-up paper bag. They would change in café bathrooms and carry around the uniform all day. The paper shopping bag became a symbol of the Miyuki Tribe’s weekend transformation—and also, a vehicle for VAN to promote its brand.
These bags flooded the streets with VAN logos, and young shoppers came to fetishize the logo as much as the clothing it represented.
The Miyuki Tribe took the look to its casual extreme. The most striking change was high-water pants, with hems floating 10-15 centimeters above the shoe.
One snag: round-trip airfare to the U.S. cost ¥650,000 per person, approximately the price of a new car. Shōsuke and Kurosu calculated that they would need roughly ¥10 million ($200,000 in 2015 dollars) to make a film of the eight Ivy League campuses. This would be the most exorbitant promotional expenditure in the short history of the Japanese menswear industry.
During the twenty-four-hour voyage, Shōsuke sweated over the contents of his luggage—stacks and stacks of yen notes required to fund the project. Japan’s strict currency controls prevented tourists from taking more than $500 out of the country. The Ivy film would cost more than four-hundred-times more.
Harvard refused to lend them any support. To play it on the safe side, the crew pretended to be photo-happy Japanese tourists.
the first students to exit their dorms that hot Monday morning slumped into view wearing frayed cut-off shorts and decaying flip-flop sandals. Maybe these were the class derelicts, Kurosu thought. But then the next group appeared, and they looked just as sloppy. Kurosu remembers, “I was shocked at how dressed-down they were—actually, it was absolute despair.”
Hasegawa had warned Kurosu, “Jacket and ties were for Sunday chapel, the occasional date, or when you wanted to impress someone,” but Kurosu refused to believe him.
The crew found students in madras blazers and khaki pants filing out of Memorial Church.
Others were incredulous that Japanese employees came all the way to America to ask them about classic Ivy League style in 1965, a year when the Vietnam War and the hippie counterculture were pushing traditional clothing towards complete extinction.
American Ivy League students demonstrated status through their nonchalance. After seeing this firsthand, Kurosu believed that Japanese Ivy could learn to relax from the Americans. “After
Kurosu proposed Take Ivy—a joke on the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s famed jazz piece “Take Five.” In Japanese, “Ivy” (aibii) and “Five” (faibu) sound vaguely similar, but the fluent English speaker Hasegawa countered that “Take Ivy” would make no sense to Americans. Like always, VAN employees ignored Hasegawa’s proper English corrections when they got in the way of artistic ambitions. To this day, Kurosu still proudly claims, “Someone who knows English never would have thought of that name!”
The book came out in late 1965, priced at a hefty ¥500—ten times the cost of Heibon Punch. It was far from a success.
The lackluster response to Take Ivy belies the influence the work had on Japan. Retailers and fashion insiders changed their mind about Ivy after seeing real images of healthy, elite Americans wearing madras blazers and chino pants among the majestic brick and stone buildings of old New England campuses. And from 1965 onward, Ivy fans treated the Take Ivy photos as canonical representations of Sixties East Coast prep style. From the perspective of sales impact, the campaign was an unbridled success. Teens snapped up VAN’s campus-inspired fashion in late 1965 unlike in any previous year.
(Even the New York Times covered the controversy, calling them “a weird bunch of wealthy teen-agers who dress in black… and roam Miyuki Street in search of one-time bedmates.”)
Ishizu’s franchises across Japan created local Ivy indoctrination centers for young men who would have otherwise been disconnected from big city trends.
in 1966, he opened a restaurant, VAN Snack, in Ginza, which offered hamburgers three years before McDonald’s opened its doors down the street.
Kurosu smartly recast the Kent style under a new term—“Trad” (traddo).
During the Occupation, American soldiers often paid Pan Pan girls in old clothing rather than cash, and the streetwalkers went straight to Ameyoko stores like Maruseru to sell it off.
At the time, most men’s pants came in wool, and the cotton jiipan were much better suited to Japan’s temperate climate. The blue color also stood out
the Hiyamas noticed that boxes sent from America to family members stationed in Japan often contained torn-up jeans as packaging material. They bought up these scraps and hired companies to patch the holes.
Thus began the dual identity of blue jeans in Japan—an exclusive, rare garment simultaneously marred with the seedy connotation of black markets.
Japanese shoppers were not impressed. They liked washed-out denim with a soft touch and complex fade. The new jeans’ starchy fabric was rigid, dark, and uncomfortable.
Cone Mills used something called “rope dyeing,”
Since 1968, Japanese aesthetes had rejected the United States’ monopoly control of global culture—but now classic, quintessential Americana was back. Instead of East Coast collegiate clothing, however, this new American trend focused on rough-and-ready outdoor gear, classic regular fit Levi’s 501s, work boots, and sturdy backpacks slung over shoulders.
Made in U.S.A. also established the “catalog magazine” format—one that still provides the basic form for Japanese fashion media to this day.
Kobayashi and the other editors may have intended the format to help introduce the “tools” needed for an American lifestyle, but readers simply used the catalog as a detailed map right back to pre-Oil Shock materialism.
Kobayashi’s prominent use of “heavy-duty” resonated with readers, and within months, the term became the de facto name of the new American-inspired outdoor look.
Unlike the 1960s, however, the cultural pioneers were not the founders of clothing brands, but a small clique of rogue freelance magazine editors.
Kinameri saw the cartoon character Popeye’s name written out in English for the first time, and realized that it split into “pop eye.” This would make the perfect magazine name—keeping an “eye” on “pop.”
The much younger Ishikawa hated it, imagining the phone calls he would have to make in Los Angeles that started with, “Hi, I’m calling from Popeye magazine… no, it’s not a comic book.” Kinameri ignored his junior’s naysaying
Popeye helped establish a true skate culture in Japan.
Critics complained that Made in U.S.A. and Popeye bred a generation of “monomaniacs”—a bilingual portmanteau from the Japanese word mono meaning “goods.”
