Youth fashion in Japan used to march in lockstep from trend to trend, led by magazines with names like pandas (An An, Non No). No more. Tribes of conformist individualists still exist, all wearing the same styles and sporting the same attitudes in defiance of the world, but they are smaller and more diverse than a generation ago.
Harajuku on a Sunday afternoon swarms with teenage nails that refuse to be pounded down, in everything from biker leathers to Little Miss Bo Peep frocks. Come Monday morning many of them are back in their sailor dresses in the classrooms of Saitama or Chiba, looking very pounded down indeed -- until next Sunday.
It's easy to laugh at these weekend rebels -- and Tetsuya Nakashima's "Shimotsuma Monogatari (Kamikaze Girls)," based on a novel by Novala Takemoto, has cheeky fun with its two fashionista heroines, who occupy opposite ends of the sexual role-playing scale. But Nakashima, an in-demand TV commercial director who made the 1998 family comedy "Natsu Jikan no Otonotachi Happy Go Lucky," goes beyond cleverly designed, cartoony sight gags to uncover his heroines' psychic underpinnings, from their messed-up childhoods to their philosophies of life.
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