A Story from the Early Heisei Era When Subculture Was Mainstream ①: Between Yankees and Gals

Introduction

As I touched upon in my previous note, "A Story about the Subculture Manga Scene in the Late 90s," I believe thatsubcultureis something extremely fluid and ambiguous, varying by era, categorized differently based on individual values and standards, and even changing for the same person depending on their age or the timing of when they encounter it.

What I am about to write is based on my own memories of what I experienced at the time. However, since I am not relying solely on my own concrete records from back then (like diaries), I suspect there may be misunderstandings, confusion with later memories, alterations, fabrications, or errors in referenced information (like Wikipedia).
Since this was before the internet, I don't mean to say that "all junior high and high school girls were like this back then!" and there were surely many things that were not generally common in society, but I want to record the scenery thatI saw with my own eyesat the time.

Please listen to this as a story of one girl who was just an ordinary local public junior high and high school student in the early Heisei era (1989–1995), who was not in any particularly special environment.

Junior High First Year (1989, First Year of Heisei)

Around April 1989, when I entered school, among the students who stood out in the third year, in addition to the types that are universal in every era—those who were good-looking and those who were good at sports—there were stillyankee-typesamong both boys and girls. Koji Matoba was popular in the drama "High School Rakugaki" aired from January to March 1989, and I think the popularity of delinquent-looking boys was generally high in society at that time. Furthermore, with the massive hit of the drama's theme song, The Blue Hearts' "TRAIN-TRAIN," the popularity of The Blue Hearts also grew, and with the start of "Ikatten" in February 1989, the world was already in a band boom, and at this time there was also an image ofband ≒ rock ≒ delinquent.

As I wrote before in this post about band T-shirts below,

At the time, band T-shirts in my local area were sold atshops frequented by yankeeswhere modified school uniforms and lint brushes with dragon patterns were sold. Also, the upperclassmen who formed bands (even after BOØWY disbanded in 1988, they still tended to copy them) and performed at the school festival were the yankee-leaning types.

The mainstream look for third-year yankee girls when I entered school was a hairstyle likeShizuka Kudo around the time of 'Arashi no Sugao'and I feel like their uniform skirts were still on the longer side, but there were no people with extreme long skirts like Showa-era sukeban, or flashy hair colors or perms. The girls' uniforms were blazers with pleated skirts, but the modified skirts hadmore pleatsand the yankees wore those skirts. I don't know why having more pleats was proof of being a delinquent now. Not limited to yankees, a hairstyle where the hair around the face was curled outward with rollers, the top was curled, and the sides were swept and set with Cape hairspray was popular, and all the glamorous third-years had that hairstyle; the more beautiful the flow of the hair, the cooler it was. Even with tied-back hair like ponytails, they prioritized loose strands and made the area around the face fluffy. On top of that, yankees had lighter hair colors (bleached with hydrogen peroxide), wore makeup, and had pierced ears (done by cooling with ice and piercing with a quilt needle).

School bags had already changed from leather handbags to Boston bag styles, soyankee-like traits like crushing the bagwere not seen there. However, since they were leather until a few years prior, I have seen the flimsy school bags of my friends' older brothers.

Third-year yankee boys also didn't have Showa-style delinquent hair or shaved lines, and the mainstream was... what is the name of that hairstyle? It's not quite a pompadour, but a style where they use gel or something to lift the bangs and let just a part of it hang down.

Many third-year yankee boys had hairstyles like Miyamoto (the boy on the right) above. They would set it with Gatsby-like gel, and instead of having no bangs, they would let a little bit hang down. Or, they would lift one side and let the other side down. Even if they weren't quite yankees, it was popular for upperclassmen who wanted to stand out to use hair styling products to make it stand up or use a hair dryer to make it fluffy and flowing. There were also those with brown hair (of course, the method of putting hydrogen peroxide in a spray bottle and spraying it repeatedly while drying with a hair dryer to bleach it).

Since our uniforms were gakuran (military-style school uniforms), the male yankees wore modified uniforms like Ben Cougar brands, but there were no Showa-style students wearing long jackets (cho-ran) with baggy pants (dokan or extreme bontan). Instead, they wore slightly shorter jackets (tan-ran) with pants that had a slightly tapered silhouette (sometimes called banana pants), wore colored socks (though school rules mandated white only), and crushed the heels of their indoor shoes. I feel like they also wore enamel belts, but that might be an image planted in my mind later on. I also have a feeling they were cheap cloth buckle belts without holes. They, of course, didn't wear the collar inserts. I think low-collared jackets, which were shorter than the standard, were popular. There was also talk about the number of tucks in the trousers. Anyway, I wonder if it was important to express a rebellious spirit by wearing clothes that weren't standard or compliant with school rules.

The third-year female yankees were mature, beautiful, and scary, but kind (it's a common trope that third-years are kind to first-years). At the time, Takako Tsutsumi's previous work "Hot Road," which was being serialized alongside "Mabataki mo Sezu," was popular in class, and with the aforementioned popularity of Koji Matoba, there was still a trend where delinquents were cool when we first entered school, so I think many first-years admired yankee-like things. Or rather, the mature and beautiful female role models close to us were yankee-types, and the cool, standout upperclassmen were also yankee-types. The top-tier group among the third-years was definitely the yankee-type upperclassmen. The top-tier group is the flashy, prominent group that stands out at sports festivals and school festivals. In other words, even though they were called yankees, they weren't the school outcasts. They were people who, despite often getting scolded by teachers, were somehow on good terms with them and would cry more than anyone else at graduation.

Surfer types, who were likely the origin of the gal style, were probably also representatives of cool youth at this time (the Super Cup commercial where a surfer said "Grazie, Grazie" was also in 1989), but since we didn't live in an area with a beach where you could surf, there weren't any. Given the era, there might have been some Nagomu-gal style upperclassmen, but they weren't in the prominent top-tier group. The beautiful yankee upperclassmen were people with fair skin who looked good in red lipstick.

However, during 1989 the skirts of those third-year yankees started getting shorter, and some yankees switched from a Shizuka Kudo style hairstyle to a Kyon-Kyon style short bob.

The hairstyles of the prominent third-year boys, which used hair styling products, were also becoming less yankee-like and more band-oriented in appearance.

Just like Kyon-Kyon's "Gakuen Tengoku," things with a pop and cute impression were appearing in living rooms to the extent that Go-Bang's and Jitterin' Jinn became popular even among junior high students in the provinces in the first year of Heisei.

However, no matter how much they shortened their skirts or leaned toward band styles, the third-years at this time were from an era when the yankee culture was still strong when they were first-years, and the mindset itself was yankee. Even if they had a bob like Kyon-Kyon, they were people who still had burn scars on their arms or traces of carving their boyfriend's name with a safety pin, and they also had some pretty hardcore first-experience stories.

While everyone around them was shortening their skirts, there was one upperclassman who didn't stop her yankee style—long skirts, bleached hair with color, and heavily styled layered curls—until graduation. Thinking about it now, I think she had her own strong aesthetic. She might have belonged to some ladies' gang. By the end of 1989, she was quite an outlier.

People who were doing it because the yankee look was popular for fashion followed the trend and became band-like or incorporated punk elements, but men with a yankee mindset had the impression of always wearing yankee-like clothes. Or rather, maybe if you want to wear clothes that deviate from the standard, you have no choice but to go for a yankee style if you're wearing a gakuran.
I just remembered, there was a third-year in 1989 who wore his pants low, and he wore both his uniform and gym clothes pulled down to an outrageous position. It probably didn't come from hip-hop culture, but was born out of a desire to "wear clothes that are different from others." I can sort of understand the value system that sloppiness equals toughness.

Now, in the midst of all this, what were we first-year girls in 1989 like? We were just plain innocent. Or rather, for a first-year girl, something scarier than parents or teachers, and something that had to be followed more than school rules, was the second-years in the club and the rules decided by the second-years.

Lengthening or shortening the uniform skirt, or showing individuality with socks, shoes, or school bags was taboo, and if you even tried to dye your hair brown, you would be called in. In any case, you must not do anything that makes you stand out. I feel like even the open-collared shirts for summer, which were allowed by school rules, were not allowed for first-years.
I was in the soft tennis club, and first-years weren't allowed to change the color of the gut or the grip tape.

Given that environment, most first-year students, both boys and girls, had a childish atmosphere, like an extension of elementary school. Even so, I remember that around summer vacation, a friend bleached only a part of the inside of her hair(thinking back, it was an inner color). Of course, there were tough, bad-mannered kids with a strong-willed, yankee-like attitude, but in terms of appearance within the school, I think they were kept in check under the rule of the upperclassmen. (*However, this excludes influential yankees who were dating pretty first-year girls. That was extraterritoriality.) Even outside of school, I feel like there were stories of people being caught and disciplined by upperclassmen for showing off at
local festivals while dressed in flashy clothes.

Regarding casual clothes, since it was a time when band culture and yankee culture were nearly equal, and I was in my 'chuunibyou' phase, I certainly had a period where I liked delinquent-style tastes, such as buying band T-shirts at that famous yankee-frequented shop. Budweiser T-shirts and miscellaneous goods were also popular, perhaps because of the feeling that alcohol equals delinquent equals cool!

Due to the nature of the area, there were many people who liked cars and motorcycles, and a fair number of people who went to work instead of continuing their education after graduating from junior high school. I was surrounded by people with wild appearances who strongly retained the yankee culture of the era, such as the older siblings of classmates, neighbors, and relatives. At the homes of friends who had such older siblings, we would read Champ Road (a bosozoku magazine) and Elteen (which had erotic personal stories). I also have memories of cutting cutting sheets. I don't remember where I stuck them since I didn't even have a motorcycle, but I definitely made a “Ø”. Perhaps we were the last generation to realistically smell the
lingering scent of Showa yankee culture, and while it likely depends heavily on the region and environment, I have never been able to share these stories with peers from Tokyo.

While there was a period where I admired yankee and delinquent culture, the era changed rapidly as we entered the Heisei period, and as the yankee-like upperclassmen changed their focus, our group of first-year girls also moved away from admiring yankees.

As I mentioned earlier, first-year students couldn't dress outside of the standard school rules because of the eyes of the upperclassmen, but I don't remember the top of the hierarchy group in my grade (though that term didn't exist back then) being yankee-related. And the top hierarchy group in my grade was the
girls' basketball circle. They were tall, strong-willed, relatively wealthy for a public junior high school, and had strong older sisters. Even among them, girls who were pretty and had good sense naturally held positions of strong influence. By the way, the soft tennis club I belonged to was the largest faction among the sports clubs, and it was a group where everything was average for junior high school girls.

Next time, I would like to write about the things that influenced us as we shifted from the yankee culture of 1989-1990 to preferring cute and pop things, as well as what junior high school girls were like at the time.