No one who remembers the ganguro (black-face) girls of the mid to late 1990s will be shocked by Friday magazine's little article on the hadeko (loud kids) of today, but it all gives rise to a bemusing question: How did the age-old quest for beauty become transmuted into a quest for weirdness?

It's a kind of antibeauty that prevails in Shibuya-Harajuku, Tokyo's teen mecca. Hair blue, orange and/or shocking pink; spectacles stylishly unstylish, clothing multicolored, facial expressions expressive of ... something, no doubt, but it would take a rash outsider to presume to say what. Maybe simply expressive of expressiveness.

So that's loudness. The ganguro of yesteryear were more grotesque than loud. Their name suggests it — guro means black but also signifies grotesque, and no cultivator of the look would have been offended at the description. The characteristic features were a face artificially tanned to near blackness set off by bleached hair, whitened lips and false eyelashes that acknowledged no limits. It died out around 2000. There followed a period of relative restraint, but the hadeko prove the cyclical nature of fashion outbursts, and no ghost of ganguro past revisiting her old haunts need feel out of place among her successors.