05/10/2023
Harajuku 🎀
We have gotten multiple messages of harassment in the past few days over “jojifuku”, foreigners claiming this is sexualising children.
First of all, 女児服 is just a regular term meaning “girls’ clothing”, similar to how 制服 means “school clothing”, and a quick Google search will greet you with shops selling clothing for girls age 7-18, nothing dramatic.
However, how did the term get associated with a specific type of fashion? The origin of that lies in Nakayoshi, which is probably the world’s most-known shoujo ma(n)gazine. While it originally is aimed at young girls and teens, it also has a large following of adult women. Besides manga, it also contains beauty and fashion pages, generally resembling what the heroines of the stories would wear. Many of the brands featured are super expensive, owning anything shown in Nakayoshi is like an unreachable dream for most of the younger readership as there is no way their parents would buy them something like a 30.000yen Mezzo Piano tee they will quickly grow out of. Someday, those young readers would eventually become adult readers, and fulfill the dream of their younger selves buying from the brands they always wanted to own as child (most of them do sizes up to the jp female adult height of 160cm anyways), and that’s why jojifuku became also used for adults wearing the typical Nakayoshi brands. Of course, like with everything else “kawaii”, there will be people who abuse it for the means of fetishizing, but that’s not much different to ddlg accounts invading kawaii-related tags in the english-speaking part of the internet. Japan is by no means a stranger to abuse of terms either, in fact “fairy kei boy” (フェアリー系男子) has a degoratory meaning since 2016, and many of the tags associated with kawaii fashion are also flooded with gravure contents.