Graffiti photos, photographs supplemented with written words, are a widely popular "art form" in Japan mainly among teenage and college-age girls. In a perceptive essay, Miller argues that these photos provide a creative and powerful forum for girls engaged in a struggle over their autonomy and self-identity to forge social bonds and influence the trajectory of Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, language and technology.

A specialist in linguistic anthropology and Japanese studies, Laura Miller is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her recent publications include "Male Beauty Work in Japan" (Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan , 2003) and "Mammary Mania in Japan" (Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 2003).

After spending a pleasant day shopping together, Yasuko and her friend, 16-year-old Mie, decide to take a photograph of themselves with a Polaroid camera. They pull two freshly purchased white bras out of their shopping bags, place them on their heads, and shoot. When the snapshot is dry, Mie uses pink and turquoise markers to write “Idiots!! Damn, they wore them on their heads!” (Baka!! Kabutte shimatta!) in big characters at the top and bottom of the photo. I doubt this was quite what George Eastman had in mind in 1888 when he made the first cameras accessible to the everyday consumer. His slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest,” no longer applies in the world of many adolescent Japanese girls, because a photograph is not “finished” until it has been embellished with colored ink captions, naughty words, hearts, flowers and other decorative motifs. These annotated “graffiti photos” are a new expressive art form that reflects some unique linguistic and cultural features. This essay will survey a few of the ways in which graffiti photos exhibit new forms of girls' writing and self-expression, and how these new writing styles are intertwined with visual imaging.

Graffiti photos first appeared among a subcultural group whom the media termed “Kogals” (kogyaru). 1 Kogal was a handy classification for young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two who launched new forms of fashion, behavior and language. The Kogal mode began in the early 1990s, when high school girls first created a style made up of “loose socks” (knee-length socks worn hanging around the ankles), bleached hair, distinct make-up, and short school uniform skirts. Kogal culture surfaces in magazines such as Egg and Cawaii! , each of which has a readership of around 300,000. Although the impertinent panache, independence, sexuality, and self-confidence of the Kogal appalled older Japanese and made them the target of intense media scrutiny, many of their cultural practices eventually became aspects of girlhood culture in general, including a fondness for graffiti photos.

The number of websites featuring graffiti photos, the magazine pages devoted to publishing them, and the sales of photo-related services suggest that the art form is now widely popular. Although the majority of those who produce graffiti photos are junior high and high school-aged girls, many couples also make them during courtship, and some young mothers create graffiti photos of themselves with their children or spouses, indicating that they retain this aspect of girls' culture as they transition into adulthood.

Photographs supplemented with written words are providing a new method for forging social bonds and creating a community of girls separate from their parents' culture. In addition, together with other forms of popular culture, such as fashion and music, graffiti photos underscore a growing generational divide and point to a shift in values and attitudes. Graffiti photos are only one part of the culture of contemporary girlhood, yet they offer a point of entry into the complexities and concerns found therein.

Japanese girls are constantly bombarded with messages from a beauty industry and media that exhort them to be feminine and sexy. They are simultaneously admonished in home and school environments to be chaste and submissive through confining gender norms. Their disdain for the contradictory messages received from adult society is funneled through their own unique cultural products, including comics (manga), fashion, language, and graffiti photos. Within the space of the graffiti photo, girls resist the oppressive demands of adolescent femininity by producing images and writings that contest or parody traditional norms. Their creative expressions occur in a girl-generated sphere beyond the compass of parental or institutionalized control. Girls' critiques of societal rules about gender conformity surface in the graffiti photos' linguistic and nonlinguistic visual forms, provocative posing, and gendered and nonstandard language use. The transformation of photos into an expressive outlet for girls' concerns is predicated on new photographic technologies, which they also had a role in stimulating.

The easiest method for producing a graffiti photo is to visit one of the thousands of “print club” or purikura booths located in game centers, train stations and trendy shopping areas. Purikura, clipped from purinto kurabu , was invented by Atlus, a Tokyo-based game software company. A female employee named Sasaki Miho had noticed the popularity of stickers among schoolgirls, a craze that also generated huge sales. Stickers of favorite TV or comic characters, antique cats, or other cute images were purchased in sheets and used to decorate scrap books, cards, letters, or albums. Many albums created especially for collections of stickers had laminated pages so that peel-and-apply stickers could be removed and traded or given to friends. Eventually mini-albums for stickers were attached to keychains, handbags or purses, and these could easily be carried around and shown to friends. In 1994, Sasaki came up with the idea of combining stickers with photos and proposed it to her Atlus employers, but her male bosses did not think it worth pursuing until 1995, when they finally gave her concept a chance. The photo-sticker machine they developed was a major hit with girls, and, by 1996, these instant photo machines had generated 70% of the company's 36.5 billion yen sales. 2 One report claimed that in 1997, as many as 89% of high school girls in Tokyo were avid print club fans. 3 Judging by various non-scientific mini-polls, the craze for print club and graffiti photos continues unabated. For example, one magazine asked a hundred people: “How often do you use a print club machine?” Of the respondents, 68% said they frequent print club machines at least once a week. 4

The print club is essentially a coin-operated photo-editing machine. The cost ranges between 200 and 350 yen (US$2.00 to US$2.50) for a sheet of four to sixteen small, self-adhesive photos. The curtained booth is most often frequented by groups of two or more girls, who check it first to see if they like the available decorations, backdrops and text styles used in the machine. Inside, they gather in front of the camera and select from a menu of backdrops, camera angles and fanciful borders. Some machines are dedicated to particular celebrities and insert their images onto the photo. A video screen shows how the photo will appear on the sticker. There are hundreds of different print club machines that feature a variety of fake backgrounds that make it appear as if one were in some unusual setting. Girls are able to place themselves in the Swiss Alps, in front of Easter Island stone figures, or under a waterfall. The print club editing of one machine perches two girls on top of a huge pile of pancakes dripping with butter. The graffiti says “excellent” in nativized English (ekuserento).

Similar to the earlier sticker fad, there are now micro-albums attached to key chains, notebooks, and scrapbooks made for the archiving and display of print club stickers. Girls collect them in thick albums, and it is not unusual for a collection to include hundreds or thousands of pictures. People also write their cell phone numbers on the stickers and exchange them with potential friends and dates, the image providing a mnemonic cue of the new person. Print club stickers are affixed to diaries, letters, postcards, greeting cards and business cards. Unadvisedly, a few young women attach them to their job resumes in place of the customary portrait photographs. One girl told me she places print club stickers of friends on annual calendar pages corresponding to their birth dates in order to remember them. Another girl I spoke to said she placed photo stickers of her friends on her mini-CD disc cases. She could remember particular songs more easily if they were associated with her friends, as their favorite songs or songs they sang together at karaoke, rather than just from the names of the songs alone.

Within a few years of the appearance of the print club, girls began to annotate their photo stickers with funny captions or racy commentary. The resulting graffiti photos were shared with friends or published in girls' street magazines. One magazine in particular, Egg – a magazine that, like many others, adopts an English title – was once famous for printing thousands of unedited and uncensored graffiti photos sent in by its readers, providing a unique forum for this popular art form. 5 The print club makers noticed this trend and began to add editing features to the machines that allowed users to add graffiti while taking their photos. Predetermined words and phrases, such as “lovely” (in English) or “good friends” (nakayoshi), as well as hearts, squiggles, bubbles, stars, and flowers can now be inserted onto the photo. There are also print club machines that have a pen feature to write original text before printing the photo. The outline-style pen (fuchi ari pen) is especially popular. The Cinderella print club machine will add letters or numbers formed with tiny glittering diamonds, called “sparkling characters” (kira moji).

The print club fad inspired other new developments, such as “costume play print club” (kosupure purikura). Manufacturers of the print club machines set up sites in game centers where girls can select from a menu of costumes to put on before getting into the booth to have their photo taken. The most popular costumes include Mini-skirted Policewoman, Santa, Chinese-style Girl, Nurse, and Bride. The Bad Girl costume features a low-cut dress with the Budweiser logo running down the front. Also available are stamp club (sutakura) machines that create small circular rubber stamps with a head shot obtained from a photo, to which text such as an email address or cell phone number may also be added.

From the beginning, girls were using the print club machines in unanticipated ways, and commercial enterprises were quick to exploit their desire for taking novel photographs through development of other photographic technologies.

Midget Cameras and Internet Phones

Although their subculture is trivialized by older Japanese, schoolgirls and other young women have been driving many contemporary media and communication industries in addition to the print club phenomena. 6 Since small portable cameras may also be used to create graffiti photos, instant cameras targeting this market were designed and released following the success of the print club machine.Young girls sometimes call these “mini Polaroid cameras” or chibi pora (combining Japanese chibi , undersized or midget, with a clipped form of the English word Polaroid), which they find easy to carry around in their bags. The two most popular mini instant cameras are the Polaroid iZone Instant Camera and the Fuji Instax Mini 10, nicknamed Cheki (Cheki is a slang term used for about a decade among young people, derived from the English “check it out”). Both are inexpensive cameras that use costly photo sticker film. Film with decorated borders and cute characters such as Hello Kitty may also be purchased. Older Japanese view the quality of these instant camera photos as poor, but these products are successful among girls because the photos will be altered with graffiti and decoration, thus rendering their grainy quality less important.

Because teenagers in Japan are the primary users of cell phones, some analysts link the development of the cell phone camera to the print club craze. 7 According to the Nomura Research Institute, 95.7% of women under the age of twenty had a cell phone or a pager in 2003. 8 Girls occasionally buy camera attachments for their existing cell phones, such as the DoCoMo Camesse Petit digital camera attachment, which is housed in a dainty pink or white molded body. Once the photo is taken, it can be edited from the camera's LCD touch screen, with added borders, text and other decorative elements transforming it into a graffiti photo. The photo is saved on a smart media card and is later transferred to a computer or printed out on special photo printers. Additional graffiti can also be added after printing. The photos are similar to print club photos in size but are often of poorer quality.

Eventually both DoCoMo and the J-Phone Group produced cell phones with built-in digital cameras. The design engineers at these cell phone outfits wanted to enable the sending and receiving of color photos through the cell phone's e-mail function. Because girls were the primary users of cell phones, and because of their avid interest in the print club, designers wrongly assumed that this feature would be an enormous success among girls. This service, named “photo mail” (shamêru , clipped from shashin mêru), was not a big hit with girls. They prefer to use the phone camera to take photos which are then printed out as photo stickers for graffiti treatment. This pattern of use did not affect sales of the digital camera cell phone but, rather, merely the manner in which the camera feature was put into practice. Print club-style photo stickers from cell phone-captured images may also be produced through kiosk printing. An example is the purimôdo , a kiosk that makes stickers from cell phone photos with various optional borders and text captions.

One of the drawbacks of the cell phone camera is that graffiti cannot be added as easily or in the preferred ways. Cell phone manufacturers made the mistake of fixating on the photograph alone, neglecting the equally important textual aspect of the graffiti photo. It is not only through the photograph that girls express their dreams, desires, and humor, and the engineers who developed the cell phone camera did not understand that it is a transformed photo that is the object of interest. The cell phone editing features are simply not up to the demands of this new graffiti art form.

Although Japanese women continue to be placed in marginal or subordinate positions in political and employment spheres, the Japanese consumer market has been dominated by female tastes since the 1980s. Advertising agencies and research and development departments of major corporations began employing female work teams and focus groups in an effort to understand female tastes and desires. One market research company, Boom Planning, specializes in focus groups composed solely of high-school girls. The DoCoMo phone was specifically targeted at females, and Matsunaga Mari, one of the key inventors of DoCoMo's “I-mode” Net-connecting mobile phone, said she specifically had a young female consumer in mind. 9 With these new technologies at hand, girls have been able to elaborate on the possibilities of the graffiti photo form, particularly in their fusing of photo images with unique script styles.

Deviant Script Styles

Graffiti, stripped to its most common meaning of writing or drawing scratched on a wall or surface, has a long history in many cultures. We find it on the walls of Pompeii , where inscriptions take the form of quotations from poets, salutations, satirical remarks, and pornographic notes. Graffiti has influenced identity formation in the US , especially among Chicano gangs in Los Angeles and elsewhere, where we find original script styles and textual interpretations. Graffiti is essentially a form of defacement, of placing writing where it was not intended. Instead of subway cars or city walls, Japanese girls are using photographs as the canvas for text that surprises, bewilders, or offends. Graffiti photos are a new medium for the display of girls' writing styles, which have evolved from innovations that began appearing in the 1980s.

The expressive power of the Japanese language is perhaps given its fullest play in the area of orthography, because a writer has four writing systems to draw on as resources – Chinese characters (kanji), two syllabic scripts (hiragana and katakana), and the Roman alphabet. The plurality of scripts available to graffiti photo writers allows creativity and innovation on a scale not possible in single script languages such as English.

In Japan , girls have played a pivotal role as cultural innovators in spheres in addition to the development of photographic technologies. During the 1980s, the girl-driven kawaii or “cute” aesthetic leaked into mainstream culture, as a result of which even items in the adult universe, such as bank books, heavy machinery, and household appliances, were designed with pink and pastel colors and decorated with bunny and kitty motifs. Adolescent girls in Japan have also pioneered many new linguistic trends, including novel ways of writing. 10 For example, an orthographic fashion that was popular in the 1980s, rarely seen on graffiti photos, is writing extravagantly round characters, called “round script” (marumoji). 11 This globular writing style was part of a cult of cuteness that was reflected in other cultural products such as speech, clothing, food and music. 12 Although the cute aesthetic remains in some cultural domains in a somewhat less saccharine form, puffy script has ceased to be as fashionable as it once was. More enduring are other unconventional orthographic practices, including stars, hearts, emoticons, and non-native punctuation (especially exclamation points) used in wild abandon. 13 One longstanding practice found in girls' writing is to use the notation that represents the concept of “squared” in mathematics (x 2) to express intensity. A photo that has “cute 2" (kawaii 2) written on it would be read as “cute cute” (kawaii kawaii). Unusual sizes, colors, or script elements also are called on to indicate emphasis or emotional intensity.

Graffiti writers frequently make modifications in standard writing practices. A close examination of the details of their script styles reveals deviant usages and augmented markings that are strategically selected to communicate rejection of the regulated system of writing they are taught in school. These script innovations are small but confident manifestations of transgression. For example, in some cases the girls' graffiti employs one of the two syllabic scripts for words that would normally be written in the other. Stand-alone words, particularly auxiliary verbs, inflectional endings, or other suffixes, are usually written in the hiragana syllabary, while exclamations and foreign words are written in the katakana syllabary. An example of writing that departs from this rule is found on a photo of two girls opening their tops towards the camera lens, displaying a slight decolletage. Written over the image, it says “sexy shot” (SEXY shotto). “Sexy” is written in Roman alphabet capital letters, but the borrowed English word “shot” is written in hiragana instead of katakana . The type of self-proclaimed sexiness seen in this photo is a radical departure from traditional norms that stress maidenly virtue and modesty. Within the confines of the graffiti photo, girls are free to express impermissible sauciness in a frank departure from expected girlish innocence. When girls are willing to convey adult sexuality and self-confidence through image and text, it is a form of empowering self-expression. Although provocative poses and body display may also be read as forms of socialization into sexualized femininity, these displays, within the context of the graffiti photo, are almost narcissistic, intended for consumption by girls and not for an imaginary male spectator.

Another example of both script variation and unusual audacity is found in a photo of two girls in their mini-skirted school uniforms and big white socks hanging from their ankles. They are sitting on the ground facing the camera with their knees bent, with icons commonly used to alert tourists to the presence of hot springs obscuring a view of their panties. “Looking is hateful!” (Mitcha iyan!) is penned at the top, while below, the word “nasty” (eitchi) is written in hiragana instead of either the conventional katakana or the Roman letter “H.” The icons, of course, have the effect of drawing attention to that which is not supposed to be looked at. The tableau reflects the creators' taunting awareness of the male eroticization of the schoolgirl uniform, a sexual fetish seen in many forms of Japanese popular culture. 14 Japanese girls are submerged in a culture that objectifies female sexuality and commodifies it in putatively illegal yet openly condoned sex-for-sale services. Prominent among these are the market for pre-worn schoolgirl uniforms and underwear sold in specialty sex shops, and the spread of a “Lolita complex” found in men's pornographic media. The sexualized poses seen in many graffiti photos are poking fun at assumptions about sexual propriety and an ideology of “natural” female modesty and restraint. They also underscore the hypocrisy of adult morality and unveil girls' increased experience with many forms of sexuality.

The relative size and shape of writing is also exploited for expressive purposes. The writing on graffiti photos expresses a broad range of emotions and attitudes, including excitement, embarrassment, ridicule, and brazen self-confidence. In place of the reserve and non-assertiveness expected from girls, one finds defiantly expressed raw emotion. Words in a sentence may be written in radically different sizes or colors instead of the uniformity taught in school. In a photo of a girl with many pink hearts surrounding her, the words “it is~~~the fifteenth birthday!!” (Kakei da yô ~~~!!) are written. The first word is written in red ink with a yellow outline, while the last part of the sentence is in monochrome blue. Another example is a photo of two girls in which one has a stuffed Winnie the Pooh bear positioned between her legs. The graffiti above her says “when giving birth to Mr. Pooh” (Pû-san shûssan toki). “Giving birth” (s hûsan) is written in enlarged writing, while “the time when” or “while” (toki) is written in much smaller characters and in a different color. The other girl in the photo is facing the childbirth scene and has the words “give it your best Older Sister” (Onêsan ganbare) written in a callout bubble drawn next to her. Graffiti photos with this type of structure, containing a comment or question that is paired with a response or assessment, are quite common and transform a common photo into something with interactive properties. The birthing enactment makes fun of girls' presumed future roles as reproducers in heterosexual marriages, especially in a culture that is currently consumed with anxiety over the declining birthrate and a dangerously low population replacement level. Graffiti photos afford an unrestrained space for girls to grapple with the pressures of feminine socialization, providing a common discourse for them to deal with issues such as potential fecundity in a society which seems to value them for that above all else.

Writing in different colors and sizes is an aspect of girls' resistance to the world of standardized print media, with its emphasis on typeset uniformity, orderliness, and perfection. By eschewing standard “correctness” in writing, they are also symbolically undermining other rules of propriety. Japanese conventions for writing kanji as taught in school are usually modeled after the classic kaisho style, a form that tries to achieve an overall balance in the perpendicularity and alignment in the elements of each character. The kaisho script resembles the font for characters seen in mechanically produced texts. By contrast, girls' writing on graffiti photos is malformed and contains messy errors and glitches. It departs from the pleasing symmetry of kaisho style, but without the beautiful flow of the gyôsho style, a semi-cursive derivative of kaisho.

In part, the distorted, uneven writing on graffiti photos is the result of placing text in such a way as to avoid blocking out parts of the photo, especially faces. Without guidelines or an opportunity to compose writing carefully into available space, characters are oddly dilated or slanted as they wrap around the photo. Lines of writing become smaller and more scrunched up as the sentence approaches the photo's edge, or else the words are staggered in ragged vertical lines. Yet, even with the constraints imposed by the medium, there nevertheless appears to be little effort to make the writing pleasing or systematic. Perhaps the absence of linearity and predictability denotes spontaneity, authenticity, and immediacy, traits highly esteemed in contemporary youth culture. Although the graffiti photo is in fact created through mass-produced mechanical means, it nevertheless is most valued when it wears the marks of its individual creators.

It is in relation to mainstream expectations of female concern for proper writing that unsightly script on a graffiti photo is perceived as deviant. Good calligraphy has traditionally been viewed as an aspect of ladylike accomplishment. Along with the writing of kanji , Japan also inherited the Chinese idea that good penmanship is a reflection of a person's inner self, character, and background. In Japan , it was traditionally thought that women in particular ought to study the art of calligraphy, which became part of the obligatory curriculum in middle-class bridal training. By flouting the pressure to carefully attend to handwriting, graffiti photo writers are also defying gender expectations. During the postwar era, middle-class women studied arts such as flower arrangement, tea ceremony and calligraphy as part of their socialization into “ladylike” genteelness and refined sensibilities. Study of elite arts also served to establish women in the role of guardians of Japanese cultural heritage. When they “degrade” the art of calligraphy, girls are defying a constraining model of gender, and are refusing to be caretakers of a cultural tradition that they associate with adult expectations of gender conformity.

There are many interesting instances of script mixing on the photos. A photograph of two girls sanding a surfboard has the graffiti “while repairing my surfboard!” (my board ripeachû!) written on it. The English phrase “my board” is written in the Roman alphabet rather than in katakana , while the English word after it, “repair” (ripea), is written in katakana , and “while” or “in the middle of” (chû) is written with a Chinese character. Another photograph shows three young women giving the peace sign, with the words “our first overseas trip in California" (hajimete no kaigai torippu in karuforunia), written on the white border of the photo. The loanword “trip” (torippu) is transliterated into katakana , yet it is followed by the English preposition “in” written in the Roman alphabet. In these cases, it is not linguistic logic that determines choice of script, but rather a marked juxtaposition of different scripts, providing graphic contrast. 15

Graffiti photos may have some unexpected consequences for the Japanese media in general. The advent of typeset text during the Meiji era (1868-1910) transformed the way written language was consumed and appreciated. According to Kida, “people fell in love with the orderly beauty of the printed word.” 16 Typeset text in magazines became the norm, with natural handwriting rarely reproduced in their pages. However, this girls' cultural practice has now leaked into mainstream media, and, increasingly, magazines are imitating their uneven and idiosyncratic writing. In place of typeset text, feature articles and advertisements are using writing that resembles that found on graffiti photos. Recently, McDonald's hamburger restaurants and SkinLife acne medicine have both used pseudo-graffiti in their advertisements. Some critics fear that one consequence of new technologies such as the computer is that Japanese have fewer occasions to use handwritten text, and that they are therefore becoming more proficient in recognizing characters but are losing the ability to write or produce them. 17 Perhaps the popularity of the graffiti photo will retard this trend, as the production and value of hand-written text spreads outside the orbit of girls' culture.

Language Texture

Graffiti photos are fascinating, weird, cryptic and saturated with many possible meanings and interpretations. It is a genre that allows girls to write what they want in any way they please, divorced from the rules of correctness drilled into them through an unrelenting educational system. Part of the charm of graffiti photos is their impenetrable opacity and offbeat nature. Graffiti often features the English word “lovely,” but it is hard to tell whether it is meant as a description of the people in the photo, or in the British colloquial sense of a smashing good time. Used alone, novel words, expressions and script may have no obvious meaning, but the context of the photo will sometimes provide information that allows interpretation by someone removed from its inception.

At times, the combination of cryptic and messy writing makes reading or understanding difficult. An example is a graffiti photo sent to a magazine that shows five girls making ugly faces at the camera. The graffiti written on the photo uses an unknown word. The magazine editor published the photo with a note asking, “What the heck is fûmen?” The contributors explained that they made the photo right after taking an exam, as if to excuse its incomprehensibility. 18 In a photo of a girl with her boyfriend at the new Disney Sea theme park, we find the words “on a date at Disney Sea” (ne no SEA dêto) written at the bottom. The direction of the script begins left to right with the first three words “at Disney Sea” (ne no SEA), but suddenly switches direction to top-to-bottom with the word “date” (dêto), while the name Disney itself is stripped of all but its last syllable. Group-bonding often involves the creation of a repertoire of insider linguistic practices, and graffiti photos reflect this. Nicknames, unique terms, catch phrases, and unique clipping as seen in the Disney photo are part of the shared context of those who create graffiti photos.

Along with English and other foreign words and script, other novel elements are often found in graffiti photos. A musical clef is a popular sign inserted at the end of sentences, giving the expression a jaunty or lighthearted feeling. English-derived punctuation, including ellipses (....), the ampersand (&), and spaces between words, is prevalent as well. Some types of non-Japanese punctuation, such as commas, hyphens, brackets, quotation marks, and question marks, began to appear in everyday Japanese writing in the early twentieth century. Japanese texts, which had previously contained little or no punctuation, changed as novelists and essay writers came under the influence of Western-style writing, and experimented with various paragraphing and sentence structuring. 19 Today, the Japanese period, quotation marks, and comma are different in shape from English equivalents, but graffiti writing contains both Japanese and English forms. 20 Because graffiti photo text is generally short, the inclusion of many types of punctuation, in addition to other signs, gives it a somewhat cluttered or busy appearance.

Another element of the graffiti photos' distinctive appearance is the layering of script and non-script elements, which graphically portrays linguistic nuances. This practice has its roots in other forms of popular culture, especially the widely-read “girls' comics” (shôjo manga). One critic said of girls' writing: “The characters, too, aren't the characters we learned in calligraphy lessons, instead, they're graphical.” 21 By this, he meant the type of script that is found in comics, where words in a single phrase might appear in various sizes, shapes or outline styles, and drawn in unusual spatial configurations. In order to illustrate the varieties and manner of speech used by their characters, Japanese comic artists have developed their own set of orthographic conventions that attempt to portray natural speech elements such as hesitations, glitches, self-repairs, overlapping talk, pauses, and other paralinguistic phenomena. For example, many use the long dash not to show the phonemic long vowel, but rather a stressed or drawn out syllable that indicates strong emotion or loudness. Likewise, the lowercase katakana character for the syllable tsu , used to represent the geminative or double consonant, is often written in comics to express a sound that is akin to a glottal stop, like when an English speaker quickly says “oh oh.” Both of these conventions are common in graffiti photos as well.

Similar to comics, graffiti photos include onomatopoetic words such as dokidoki , the sound of rapid heartbeat, to suggest that the photographed person is excited or nervous. Photos might have the expression jajajan written on them. This is a sound imitation of an orchestra prelude, something like the English use of tatata for the drum roll that precedes an announcement. Photos that show people smiling or laughing often have kyaha , the way maniacal or snide laughing is indicated, written on them. Other expressions used in graffiti are “pukey” or “nauseous” (mukkâ), “kiss” (chû), and “argh” or “yuck” (gê). Extra lines and squiggles clue the reader into intonation or emphasis. A photo of a girl sitting on the hood of a truck parked in a Texaco gas station reads: “Here I am in California" (jajaja~~n in karuforunia , using the English preposition “in”). In another photo, the graphic representation of a prolonged sound is seen in the word for “everyone” (minna), which is written with a squiggle inserted between the “n” syllabic character and the “na” syllabic character, as min~~na .

The writing on graffiti photos visually represents the texture of spoken language, freely incorporating the above as well as other strategies. Overlaid on these orthographically enervating forms are numerous exclamation points, hearts, stars, clefs, pentacles, rosettes, sunbursts, and tear drop signs. The graffiti photo thus includes a non-linguistic yet nevertheless important symbolic and semiotic stratum.

Girls' Resistance

As a form of unregulated cultural production, graffiti photos are a domain where anything of interest to girls, from the most mundane to the philosophical, is a suitable topic for photo-textual representation. Graffiti photos display parodic cuteness, intended grotesqueness, and naughtiness that simultaneously celebrate and mock the world of female adolescence. 22 Graffiti photos are a deposit for the cheeky spirit that imbues much of contemporary girls' culture. 23 They admit visual-linguistic access to a writer's sentiment, and are a shared arena for girls to contest gender norms they are taught to aspire to, such as restraint, docility, modesty, and elegance. It is primarily through the structures of the family and school that girls are socialized into norms of female gender identity, although media and peer pressure also play a role. The anthropologist Takie Sugiyama Lebra named this process “femininity training,” in which girls are socially rewarded for being self-sacrificing, cheerful, empathetic, meek, and gentle. 24 They are the recipients of negative sanctions when they express strong opinions, think of themselves before others, or openly parade sexuality or knowledge of carnality. Graffiti photos play off these norms with their aggrandized celebrations of girls' everyday concerns, narcissistic commemorations of the self, and assertive or daring exhibitionism.

There seem to be two conflicting impulses in graffiti photos. One is to look cute or sexy, and the other is to look grotesque or ugly. Both forms are infused with an underlying sense of self-parody that undermines notions about femininity, although in divergent ways. The cute or sexy aesthetic is a form of mimicry, with an abundance of over-the-top markers of sweet femininity. The smothering prettiness of the constructed photos approaches drag-queen camp and brings to the forefront the constructed nature of gender. The grotesque or ugly aesthetic presents a behavior that inverts cultural models of beauty, which “normal” girls are taught to value and strive to attain. It is in stark counter-point to the ideal of girls as soft and delicate, and also serves to deny the “naturalness” of gender stereotypes.

Many of the print club machines offer features that are meant to enhance the appearance of those photographed. One series is famous for making the skin look better; another will change the color of the eyes. An editing feature on the Cinderella unit allows the customer to attach hair extensions, braids, or twinkling diamond tiaras to her image. The cute aesthetic is seen in a photo of two girls with their dyed orange hair tied up Terrier-fashion in little ponytails on the top of their heads. They have their tongues hanging out and hands posed in front of their bodies like paws. The graffiti reads: “waiting in front of the Hachiko statue” (machi awase Hachiko mae). The Hachiko statue at Shibuya Station in Tokyo , built to honor the memory of a faithful dog, is a popular meeting place. The text verifies the impression that the girls are attempting to look like cute puppies. Their cuteness is consciously and unabashedly staged.

Graffiti photos often express an underlying dissatisfaction with the dominant culture's premium put on female beauty and cuteness through a radical reversal of expected feminine appearance. Far more common than beautifying photos are those meant to portray girls in intentionally bizarre or unattractive ways. The competing ugly aesthetic is created through the pose or with the assistance of graffiti. Girls often make scrunched up or freakish faces with the help of their hands, such as pulling down the eyes or pushing up the nose. The face and body are also distorted through use of various camera angles. These calculatedly ugly photos are sometimes called yabapuri , a clipped form of “repulsive print club” (yabai purikura), or kimoburi from “print club that gives you the creeps” (kimochi warui purikura) . Moustaches, cat whiskers, animal ears and noses, food items, and other objects drawn on the people in the photos also assist in the process.

An example of repulsive print club is a photo with a close-up of the faces of two girls which are partly cut off on the side. The lips, on which little speckles of something dark green has been added, are pursed towards the camera lens. The graffiti scrawled on the photo says: “The lips enchanted by dried seaweed” (kuchibiru nori bakasutte). The text suggests that the green stuff on the lips is the dried and seasoned seaweed commonly used as a topping on dishes such as fried noodles or octopus dumplings. The seaweed-encrusted girls openly traverse the premium put on cleanliness and daintiness in women, and sabotage the social value of appearance. When girls deliberately create repulsive images of themselves, it subverts the framework and terms of evaluation that are normally used to evaluate and control them.

In another photo, two girls have drawn black moustaches and black pipes on their faces. The text, which is in English capital letters, says “WE ARE BOSS.” Their photographic cross-dressing is easier to understand, as they try to replicate the stereotypical male “boss” of some 1930s American gangster movies. In cases such as these, we detect a desire to create absurdist scenes that display girls' imagination and humor.

One way that the Japanese language is associated with gender identity is with the attachment of sentence particles. These particles indicate speaker stance or tone. One of the supposedly “male” sentence particles is zo , which is attached to the end of a sentence to make it seem especially forceful. According to the linguist Okamoto, young women's speech in Japan is increasingly characterized by the use of such “male language.” 25 In one photo, two girls pretend to climb the curtain in the print club booth. The sentence marked on the photo is, “Today I'm gonna climb it!” (Kyô wa noboru zo!) . What is notable is the use of the male-associated particle zo . The same putatively “male” particle zo is seen in another photo of a young woman holding a very small stuffed bear to her mouth. Pink and purple ink is used to write “I'm hungry so I'm gonna eat Mr. Bear!!” (hara hetta kara kuma-san kû zo!!). The expression used to say “I'm hungry” (hara heta) is also considered part of male speech. Because language is a key method for creating or displaying gender identity, the use of “male” or “inappropriate” forms represents a resistant identity. According to popular Japanese conceptions of language, women's speech is thought to be more polite and to adhere more closely to the standard than does men's speech. Within this model of language, men have more freedom to be flexible and creative in their use of dialect and nonstandard forms. Girls are usurping this male prerogative.

Girls also write things in regional dialects or with non-standard forms that they would never be allowed to use in writing done in institutional settings. They use unsanctioned forms in the face of a deeply held folk belief that, given a choice, anyone (but especially women) would logically prefer to use the non-stigmatizing standard language. Language violations and refusal to obey this principle make possible the creation of a new girls' idiom. For example, a photo of two girls has the words “we went to karaoke” (karaoke iku nen) written on it, in which the Kinki dialect's neutral sentence particle nen is used. In another case, two girls making ugly faces in a photo have written “cute” in English and “it's not icky” (yabai yan) in Japanese. The phrase includes a slang term for “wretched” or “awful” (yabai), as well as a Kinki regionalism that ends the phrase (yan), which is the equivalent of standard Japanese “is not” (janai). Because writing involves choice, girls are using regional and vernacular language to show affiliation and solidarity with peers, overriding the value of the standard language as a marker of class, educational achievement and femininity. The language seen on graffiti photos redefines the borders of linguistic possibility while concurrently expressing cohort identity.

Writing on girls' photos frequently expresses a lack of feminine modesty and is straightforward and boastful. A photo of two girls has the words “it's women's knowledge” (onna no shiki yo) written under their self-satisfied smiles. Another photo of five girls in a costume play print club photo has them all dressed up in tight, white nurse's uniforms. The graffiti mockingly asks, “What about those huge boobs?” (oppai dô nan no yo ?). Here, the use of a crass term for breasts (oppai) coupled with ultra-feminine sentence final forms (nasalized na no yo) lends a particularly burlesque feeling to the graffiti. In another case, underneath a photo of two girls, the phrase “people good at sex” (H ga umai hito) is written in outline-style blue characters and a fat letter H. The assertiveness seen in these and other photos is in marked contrast to the mainstream ideals of female reserve, chastity, and self-effacement.

Given the manner in which girls regularly use the graffiti photo to challenge proscriptive norms about language and gender, it is ironic that a popular print club machine series is named Yamato Nadeshiko. The term Yamato nadeshiko (Japanese pink) refers to the ideal Japanese woman, who is as dainty and delicate as a flower. Yamato is one of several historic terms for Japan , and nadeshiko is the name of a flower (the common fringed pink). Traditionally, the ideal woman would be expected to express traits such as modesty, submissiveness, and meekness. In place of the uncomplicated sincerity and innocence expected from a girl, graffiti photo creators exuberantly defy this ideal when they express satirical repulsiveness, enact bizarre scenes or assertively dramatize themselves. One wonders if the manufacturers of the Yamato Nadeshiko machine envisioned girls entering the booth to lift up their tops or to make grotesque faces. The makers may have been aware of the sense of irony that permeates much of girls' culture; however, considering the way most adults in Japan devalue and ridicule girls and their cultural activities, this seems unlikely.

Birth of the Genius Camerawoman

During high school and junior high school, girls learn many forms of cultural knowledge which will serve as markers of prestige. Knowing the coolest fashions, music and language is an aspect of teen culture most often recognized as having the ability to confer status. Now, the graffiti photo is valued as a cultural commodity, as something that allows girls an opportunity to reveal standing through their ability to construct one that manifests a combination of textual wit, visual novelty, and general sassiness. Graffiti photos are an extension of an independent girls' subculture, encoding shared criteria for evaluation and status that have the liberating potential to empower girls' identity formation and group cohesion. It is an expression of their own issues as they define them.

On the ladder of distinction, an awareness of some forms of knowledge may not count as much as an awareness of other forms. For example, across a photo of two girls making droopy-eyed faces (by pulling the skin under their eyes downward) is written the name of a popular character, Tarepanda , which means “floppy panda.” Because virtually everyone in Japan knows about this chubby, squashed panda who lays around on his belly, the creators of this graffiti photo have not demonstrated more than an adequate handle on trendy coolness. On the other hand, in another photo, two girls have their hands pressed together and held near the heart with the word namasute written in hiragana across it. The word is the Hindu greeting namaste , perhaps familiar to them through a yoga class they may have taken together. Knowing about yoga and how to give the proper greeting is not everyday knowledge, so this is a better manifestation of cultural one-upmanship.

Part of the display of prestige involved in graffiti photo production is also in knowing its rules and conventions of expression. There is a formulaic quality to some of the stewed words, as if certain types of photos demand particular phrases. For example, many of the graffiti photos that entail the Chinese-style Girl mode taken at a costume play print club have the words “How are you?” in Mandarin written on them (nii hao ma) in katakana . Another phrase that occurs frequently takes the form of “people who are x” or “a person who is x.” The prior example of “people good at sex” (H ga umai hito) is one of these; others are a “person with a beautiful face” (bijin kao hito), a “person who is masculine” (otoko rashii hito , used to describe a girl), a “person who talks to herself” (jibun o hanashitte kureru hito), and “people good at parapara dancing” (parapara jôzu na hito). Parapara is a unique girls' dance form that combines traditional Japanese festival dancing with its emphasis on hand and arm movements, with contemporary club music.

The bits of writing, facial expressions and poses that constitute graffiti photos have also become a source of fascination and commentary for girls themselves. Teen magazines often carry reproductions of unedited graffiti photos with interpretations provided by girl connoisseurs of the art. For instance, in an issue of Popteen magazine, two experts offer remarks on the graffiti photos submitted by readers. 26 They make assessments on the text and the appearance of the girls, such as “overdone cuteness,” “they look like lionesses,” or “they look like Yankees.” (Yankii is a derogatory term for the belligerent or semi-delinquent youth who are said to emulate brash Americans.)

Teen magazines also run feature articles offering camera techniques and editing suggestions, and there are print club websites for the posting and discussion of graffiti photo art. When asked to rank their favorite machines, girls like to give assessments, such as a high school student who says about her favorite unit, “They take the cutest photos,” or a third year student who claims, “It upgrades the cuteness of everyone.” Other girls say that particular machines “make your eyes look sparkly,” or that “your face looks distinct.” 27 There are numerous internet sites that also offer user rankings, in some cases evaluating more than fifty machines. Favorites have included units named Aesthetic Revolution (Biteki kakume), Cinderella, Birth of the Genius Cameraman (Tensai kameraman tanjô), and Lightness (Hikaru).

Girls not only love to create graffiti photos but to critique them as well. The photos are often evaluated according to how well they convey a sense of fantasy, or project a particular feeling or sentiment. Girls use criteria such as how interesting, unusual and “perfectly fitting” (pittari) the words and images are, meshed together. In the case of a graffiti photo showing two girls facing each other with their checks puffed out with air, while behind them many pink hearts crowd the edge. The graffiti reads “staring girls” (niramekko). One of the creators said that it was a “naturally occurring print club” (shizen ni dekita puri), and that they did not talk about it first before making it. She suggests that, with the funny faces, “It's interesting, right?” A commentator who was not part of the photo felt that the inserted pink heart shapes really complemented the photo nicely. These assessments may seem banal to outsiders, but the point is not their nature but the very act of making them.

In another photo, two girls are facing the camera with their hands clasped together under their cocked heads in the universal gesture for sleep. The caption reads “good night” in English. Explaining the photo, one of the creators said that the machine they used had a black background curtain with stars on it that gave her a sort of “nighttime feeling.” So, she decided to use star stamps on the photo and the English phrase to convey a sense of “it's time to go to sleep.” However, not all graffiti photos are as successful. Commenting on one that depicts seven girls making ugly faces, a girl critic said that it “looks a bit forced, they seem to be trying just a little too hard.” 28 Here, then, is another layer in graffiti photo culture, that of analysis and meta-analysis. Websites and magazine articles that combine commentary from makers and connoisseurs of graffiti photos are providing a retrieval and synthesis of separate appraisals. The production and critiquing of graffiti photos enables girls to meld artistic, linguistic, and stylistic skills into one space.

Creating Cohort Identity

In one graffiti photo of five girls in school uniforms, they are giving the peace sign with the words “seriously, we are the best” (uchira maji saikô ~) written in big characters. The phrase uses the colloquial, non-standard term for “us” (uchira) and the incredibly popular teen slang term “seriously” (maji). Here, succinctly, we see a priority of the graffiti photo art form, the documentation of one's circle of friends. Anthropologists such as Richard Chalfen and David Plath have examined the Japanese love of self-photography, often called “home media.” 29 They find that in general, people like to take many photographs of themselves while visiting tourist destinations or to mark special ritual events. They like to share copies of photos with friends, coworkers and family as a form of reciprocal exchange to strengthen social solidarity. This last function certainly seems to be true for graffiti photos as well, because photographic images and writing together create and buttress friendship networks and express cohort identity. When graffiti photos are in the form of stickers from print club machines, they are printed onto sheets in multiple copies that are easy to divide up among those present at their creation, or perhaps later when they are handed out to other friends who missed the event.

Girls frequently write or talk about the circumstances or occasions when the graffiti photo was produced. Although dates or outings with boyfriends are occasionally documented this way, it is mainly the activity of getting together with female friends that is memorialized. Graffiti on the photos may itself do this, as in the many instances in which those pictured write things such as “our first print club” or “the first time we did print club since entering high school.” In a photo of two schoolgirls, the graffiti says simply, “Lord of the Rings” (Rôdo obu za ringu), and serves to document that they had just gone to see the film of that name. In another, the graffiti underneath two girls says, “we went to Tomato today” (kyô Tomato ni itta yo), Tomato being the name of a popular karaoke spot. In some ways, the graffiti photo is augmenting or usurping the role of the diary.

In giving commentary on their graffiti photos, girls often talk about how long they have known the friends pictured with them: “My friend from the second year of grammar school,” or “my friend since high school days.” An important point revealed here is how friendship ties are substantiated through the graffiti photo. Although he wrote them before the advent of the print club, the following words from David Plath apply to the graffiti photo as well: “The Japanese may respond to an occasion with an apt sketch (haiga) or any of various modes of terse phrasing. Often enough, words and images are both inscribed in a visual-verbal mode seldom found in the West, though evident in the work of a Blake or a Ben Shahn. Perhaps, this heritage of readiness not just to ‘read' moments but to compose them makes it easier to understand the modern Japanese passion, which otherwise seems so extreme, for making snapshots.” 30 Graffiti photos are not simply recording friendship, but are also constitutive of what being friends is all about through the creation of shared sentiments, feelings, and representations. Female bonding has always been strong in Japan , and friendship groups are usually retained into adulthood and form a major part of many women's social lives even after marriage. As a bonding-ritual, creating and exchanging graffiti photos that celebrate girls' cultural milieu, and engaging in evaluations of their quality, is a more constructive and empowering bonding activity than commiserating about body image or boys.

Not your Mother's Photography

As a popular culture form, graffiti photos are of interest because they depart from anything older Japanese, particularly women, have ever done with photographs. For example, the president of the company that developed the print club machine said: “At the time, I wasn't interested in the idea, because I disliked being photographed myself. Even after giving it the green light, I wondered who would give away their photos and what purpose the stickers would serve.” 31 The phenomenon of the graffiti photo shows some interesting divergence with the thinking of older Japanese such as this executive. The capacity to let themselves be seen enacting a range of fantasy identities and styles, and of sharing them with others, is completely alien to those of his generation. Identity is now something that can be played with, made fun of, and creatively produced through fashion, style, language, or graffiti photo art.

A notable generational shift is seen in the willingness of girls to engage in inventive forms of self-display, and to be viewed in less than beautiful modes or engaged in forms of gender parody. I recall a Japanese friend thirty years ago who would tear up photographs of herself that she thought made her look anything but sweetly adorable. While their parents would have feared ridicule of efforts to create funny and amusing images, girls today fearlessly welcome critiques and discussion of the scenes they portray in their photo-textual constructions. Graffiti photos are shared with many people, including boyfriends, but they are primarily circulated in girls' friendship groups, and they are rarely shown to adults. Moreover, the idea of taking photos of themselves in revealing poses, regardless of whether or not obscuring images prevented full exposure of panties or breasts, would have been unthinkable. The girls who create graffiti photos like this show an astonishing lack of anxiety about social censure of their naughty posing and risqué words. The eyes of society, so effective in keeping their mothers in line, are of no consequence to them. Graffiti photo creators appear to dissociate their oppositional behavior from any future consequences, and do not feel exposed within the safe confines of graffiti photo production and distribution. As illustrated by the many essays in a book on Japan's generation gap, Japanese youth in general are experiencing a widespread disillusionment and are refusing to slide into the social grooves that structure their society. 32 The grotesque and sexy graffiti photos are therefore not simply individual acts of deviance, but are a manifestation of general dissent among girls, who have little desire to follow in their mothers' footsteps.

Older Japanese keep personal photos in albums and rarely display them openly in homes or in workplaces (one exception is the photograph of a recently deceased family member, which is placed in the household Buddhist shrine). As Chalfen notes, there is nothing like the “wallet photograph” in Japan. 33 He found that people are reluctant to carry personal photographs and are not comfortable showing photos in wallets or schedule books. But the way girls use graffiti photos extends well beyond these uses, and graffiti photos are displayed in even more public ways, particularly when they are mailed to magazine forums and are subsequently published.

Furthermore, the type of risqué textual expressions we find on graffiti photos would have been unusual to find in any girls' writing decades ago, let alone directly associated with the writer's image. This change in how photographs are used suggests that young people have different ideas about acceptable female conduct. The creation of photo-text stories of giving birth to stuffed bears or assuming a new persona as a sexy nurse constitutes a fantasy world shared by a girl and her friends, but incomprehensible to the adults around her. The dissenting voices of Japanese girls are emerging in the unlikely and tiny space of a photograph, and the sentiments they express are defiantly self-centered and intentionally provocative.

Graffiti photos are only one avenue through which girls are influencing the trajectory of Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, language and technology. Sandwiched onto a piece of paper, these small rebellions, creative innovations and visual-linguistic diversions nevertheless have the ability to powerfully confront dominant cultural meanings. The impressions that emerge from girls' graffiti photos are naked energy, playfulness, and insurgent gender critique. This is a popular art form created and ratified by a community of girls who, even if only within the limited sphere of the symbolic, are engaged in a struggle over autonomy and self-identity.

Endnotes

1. There is much debate about the origin of the label, but a likely etymology is that it is the clipped form of “high school girls” (kôkôsei gyaru).
2. Saitô Sayuri, “Print Club Creator Changes Focus to Future,” Daily Yomiuri Online . Electronic document, http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/intview/0204dy27.htm, accessed May 20, 2003 .
3. The Japan Times , December 12, 1997 .
4. “Fotojenikku teku oshiechaimasu” [Teaching you photogenic techniques], Cawaii!, May 2003, p. 147.
5. Until 2000 , when it changed publishers , Egg was primarily a site for schoolgirls to publish graffiti photos and other self-expressive writing. Although it still publishes some its readers' unfiltered writings, especially their graffiti photos, the new format focuses mainly on fashion and other types of consumption.
6. For example, discussing young women's extreme fashion, one commentator said: “These girls almost seem to be wearing placards that say, ‘I'm stupid.' Meeting someone who so overtly insists on her own idiocy tends to scare people.” From “The Emperor's Decennial: Stuff and Nonsense ‘99,” Japan Echo , Vol. 27, No. 1, originally published in Bungei Shunjû , December 1999, pp. 200-208.
7. “Taking Pictures with Your Phone,” by correspondent Jon Wurtzel, specialist on digital technology. Aired on BBC News, UK , Tuesday, 18 September, 2001 , 12:58 GMT 13:58 .
8. Asahi Shimbun , Japan Almanac 2003 (Tokyo : Asahi Shimbun, 2003), p. 176.
9. Matsunaga Mari, I-mode Jiken [The I-mode Affair] (Tokyo : Kadokawa shoten, 2000).
10. The linguist Horiuchi Katsuaki noted that, in the 1980s, girls and young women often inserted stars, hearts, and exclamation points into their personal writing. Horiuchi Katsuaki, “Amerikanizumu kara dasseiyôka e” [From Americanism to Post-Westernization], Gengo , 14:9, 1985, pp. 70-77.
11. Yamane Kazuma, Hentai shôjo moji no kenkyû [Research on Abnormal Girls' Characters] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1996).
12. For more on the cuteness aesthetic reflected in speech, see Laura Miller, “You Are Doing burikko!: Censoring/Scrutinizing Artificers of Cute Femininity in Japanese,” in Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People , edited by J. Smith and S. Okamoto (Oxford : Oxford University Press) (in press).
13. Emoticons originated among Email users to denote a variety of emotions with combinations of punctuation marks and accent marks. The Japanese have developed their own versions that are different from those seen in the U.S. For example, the “smiley face” in Japan is (-) instead of :-). In his study of girls' letter-writing styles, language scholar Kataoka lists many features that are also seen in graffiti photo writing. See Kataoka Kuniyoshi, “Affect and Letter Writing: Unconventional Conventions in Casual Writing by Young Japanese Women,” Language in Society , 26, 1997, pp. 103-136.
14. The status of the schoolgirl uniform in mass culture is discussed in Sharon Kinsella, “What's Behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms,” Fashion Theory , 6 (1), 2002, pp. 1-24.
15. There appears to be a lot of English used in graffiti photos. Generally, the English-derived language material in graffiti photos is not the result of a normal contact situation and borrowing. Japanese girls and young women are not using English because of some lexical gap or for social prestige. Instead, they are exploiting available linguistic resources for their own aesthetic, expressive, humorous, visual, and affective meanings. See Laura Miller, "Wasei eigo : English ‘Loanwords' Coined in Japan,” in The Life of Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright , edited by J. Hill, P.J. Mistry and L. Campbell (The Hague: Mouton/De Gruyter, 1997), pp. 123-139. Also highly recommended is the forthcoming book by James Stanlaw, Japanese English: Language and Culture Contact (Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press).
16. Kida Jun'ichirô, “Japanese in the Age of Technology,” in The Book and The Computer: The Future of the Printed Word . Online journal, January, 1999. http://www.honco.net/japanese/index.html , accessed May 17, 2003 .
17. Ishii K., "Kompûtâ to kanji kyôiku" [Computer and Kanji Education], Nihongogaku , 19, 2000, pp. 40-48.
18. "Yabapuri" [Repulsive print club], Cawaii! magazine, January 2003, p. 148.
19. See Nannette Twine, “The Adoption of Punctuation in Japanese Script,” Visible Language , Vol. 18 (3), 1984, pp. 229-237.
20. The Japanese period is a small circle, and the Japanese comma is a short line. Quotation marks look like small right angles at the bottom left (open quote) or upper right (closed quote) of the text.
21. Mukôda Kuniko, Mumei kamei jinmeibo [Directory of Anonyms and Pseudonyms] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1980).
22. There are aspects of graffiti photos that are beyond the scope of this essay but which still deserve brief mention. For example, food is a common theme. In one photo, two girls reverently hold bowls of noodles with both hands, with the word “lovely” inscribed nearby. Another photo shows a smiling girl amidst a barrage of swirling strawberries with the lone word “strawberries” (ichigo) written in big, red characters. Girls find these images of delicious food delightful. Single-character graffiti is also common with meaning-laden concepts such as “love” or “cute.” For example, a photo portrays two girls with red hair, both wearing black tops, standing in front of a bright pink backdrop surrounded by many tiny human skulls. The single character for “life” (inochi) is centered in front of them in sparkling blue ink. Photos like these are terse yet heavy with implied meanings.
23. For a discussion of impertinent forms of fashion, see Laura Miller, “Media Typifications and Hip bijin," U.S.-Japan Women's Journal , No. 19, 2000, pp. 176-205.
24. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984).
25. Okamoto Shigeko, “Tasteless Japanese: Less ‘Feminine' Speech Among Young Japanese Women,” in Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self , edited by K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 297-325.
26. Popteen magazine, July 2002, p. 192.
27. "Sukina purikura kishu" [Print Club Machines We Like], Cawaii! May, 2003, p. 148.
28. Bisha Club Purikura website (Changing postings of print club and graffiti photos with commentary). Online, http://bisha.jp/top.php, accessed July 26, 2003 .
29. David W. Plath, “Durable Snapshots, Mutable Selves: Or Is It Vice Versa?” Paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, March 31- April 3, 1995 . Richard Chalfen, “Japanese Home Media as Popular Culture,” Paper presented at the Japanese Popular Culture Conference, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, April, 1997.
30. David Plath, “Takes from Distant Fields,” Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly , 17 (1), March 1992, p. 20.
31. Saitô, ibid.
32. Gordon Matthews and Bruce White eds., Reproducing a Shaken Social Order: Young People in Japan Today and the Creation of Japan Tomorrow (London : Routledge/Curzon Press, 2003).
33. Chalfen, ibid.