Those Naughty Teenage Girls: Japanese Kogals, Slang, and Media Assessments by Laura Miller

■ Laura Miller
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
Those Naughty Teenage Girls: Japanese
Kogals, Slang, and Media Assessments
This article examines Kogals, young Japanese women who challenge dominant models of
gendered language and behavior through linguistic and cultural innovation. The article
describes the linguistic resources Kogals use to construct female-centered subcultural
identities and the condemnation and fetishistic interest they provoke in mainstream me-
dia. Media focus on these “misbehaving” girls places them at the center of an ongoing
struggle over female self-definition and autonomy. The study of Kogals contributes to
scholarly analysis of youth subcultures and to understanding of linguistic diversity and
cultural heterogeneity in Japan. [adolescent subculture, gender, slang, representa-
tions, Japan]
Introduction
AmongthemanysubculturalidentitiesavailabletoJapaneseyouth,perhaps
none has become the focus of such mainstream anxiety and voyeuristic interest
as the young women known as Kogals (kogyaru). This article examines critiques
and displays of the Kogal, with a particular focus on the way her gender-transgressing
identity and language style challenge longstanding norms of adolescent femininity.
In addition to providing evidence of Japanese heterogeneity and documenting the
current struggle for female self-definition, I argue that Kogal subculture is significant
as an unusual case of female-centered coolness at the forefront of cultural and linguistic
trend setting.
A few years ago, a Japanese journalist decided to work against the model he char-
acterized as “girls created by the old-guy press” by documenting, from her own
perspective, the everyday life of a 17-year-old high-school student named Asuka. He
asked Asuka to write down her activities and thoughts during a one-week period and
subsequently published her unfiltered journal as the “diary of a kogyaru” (Yoshid ˆo
1998). Kogyaru, which is not a term that belongs to those it describes, is usually ren-
dered in English as Kogal. It is the mainstream media label used to describe young
women between the ages of 14 and 22 who project new types of fashion, behavior, and
language. Asuka writes about meeting friends in the hip Shibuya section of Tokyo,
going to restaurants, spending time in karaoke boxes (private rooms for rent by the
hour for karaoke singing), getting photos taken, and shopping. Asuka also expresses
hatred of her teacher and school and worries about how to juggle two boyfriends,
one of whom she accompanies to a “love hotel” for sex. The journalist’s effort to un-
pack the behavior and philosophy of the Kogal is one of many attempts by the media
to make sense of Japan’s vibrant new female subcultures. In this article I approach
the Kogal from two directions—as an identifiable subcultural group with distinctive
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 14, Issue 2, pp. 225–247, ISSN 1055-1360, electronic ISSN 1548-1395.
C 2004 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
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cultural and linguistic practices, and as the object of media attention. Asuka’s diary,
the actual words of a Kogal embedded in male-authored media, represents both foci.
My goal is to examine Kogals with respect to the language and resistant practices
used by women labeled as such and to trace how their challenges to dominant con-
ceptions of gender and sexuality are critiqued by their parents’ media. My aim is
not to specify how Kogals speak, but rather to describe some of the linguistic re-
sources they draw on to fashion their identities, to paraphrase Penelope Eckert and
Sally McConnell-Ginet (2003:2). The media serves as an impetus for attention to such
“aberrant” girls, but media formulations in turn are shaped by the behavior and lan-
guage of real girls. Contemporary Japanese media is not simply a tool of hegemonic
mainstream culture but is extensively diversified into numerous micromarkets, in-
cluding Kogal-oriented and Kogal-produced media. These new media micromarkets
help establish and maintain youth subcultures, which in turn contribute to a stronger
sense of subcultural identity. As Angela McRobbie states, there is a “labyrinthine
web of determining relations which now exist between social groups and the media,
‘reality’ and representation” (2000:181).
The importance of the Kogal phenomenon lies not in numbers, for there has never
been a large percentage of the teenage population who followed the style, but in
how Kogals symbolize the ongoing redefinition of women in late capitalism. During
the 1990s the mainstream media incited a moral panic over Kogals, amplifying their
perceived deviant behaviors and language. Women have often been at the center
of societal fears, and the Kogal debate was preceded by fevered worries in earlier
decades. At various times in Japanese history, modernizing women and girls have
been categorized and denounced in ways that attempt to deflect their efforts to attain
autonomy and self-definition. One of the earlier types who engendered moral anxiety
was the Meiji-era (1868–1912) daraku jogakusei (‘degenerate schoolgirl’), who flouted
social rules for acceptable courtship behavior (Czarnecki in press). Most similar to
the Kogal, however, was the prewar Moga (derived from modan gˆaru, ‘Modern Girl’).
Moga were a new social class of working women who shocked Japanese society with
their independence, fashion, and suspected promiscuity (Silverberg 1991). In a precise
adumbration of the later characterization of the Kogal, the Moga was described as
decadent, hedonistic, and superficial (Sato 2003:65). The Moga was a challenge to
Japanese society because she sought autonomy and economic self-sufficiency, thus
signifying a transition in state policy toward women’s position within the family
system. Contemporary public claims about the moral and linguistic deficiency of
Kogals likewise suggest that a major change in women’s cultural position is also
under way. Each time they appear, these new types incrementally destabilize and
modify normative gender ideologies.
For data on Kogal slang, I draw on observations and field notes from informal con-
versations I had with Kogals in 1999, when I frequented some of their favorite bars
and nightclubs in the Roppongi section of Tokyo. I also rely on girls’ street magazines
such as Egg, which includes Kogals on its editorial staff. Egg started out in 1995 as a
venue for schoolgirls to submit photos, essays, and drawings. It eventually changed
publishers and evolved into a product-oriented monthly, but each issue still includes
pages of uncensored girls’ letters, e-mail messages, open-forum commentaries, ama-
teur essays, minipolls, self-help columns, and annotated photographs. The explosion
of sentiment found in such media occurs in a girl-generated sphere beyond parental
or institutional sanction. In addition to these sources of data, mainstream popular
culture sources such as television, film, newspapers, and journal articles are also ex-
plored for how the older generation understands the socially disruptive implications
of young women like Asuka. The speech and behavior of these new female identities
challenge prescriptive norms of gendered talk, yet despite the condemnation of the
parent culture, young women continue to create and use exuberant new forms of
expression.
Although language variation is a core theme in linguistic anthropology, it is only
recently that research from East Asian language communities has stressed linguistic

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Those Naughty Teenage Girls: Japanese Kogals, Slang, and Media Assessments
227
heterogeneity. In Japan, the notion of a singular women’s language was a longstanding
ideological construct stemming from Meiji-era social and educational reforms (Endo
1997; Inoue 2002). The examination of adolescent girls’ subcultural language and
behavior contributes to an expanding investigation of diversity, a trend marked by two
recent volumes on Japanese language and gender (Okamoto and Shibamoto-Smith
2004; Stanlaw and Adachi in press). The role of language in identity negotiation is
also a primary area of interest for linguistic anthropologists, and yet the part played
by language in East Asian subcultural identity-making has received little scholarly
attention. A study of Japanese adolescents whose marginal personae are achieved
through a combination of behavior, attitude, and language therefore complements
studies of Western youth and their linguistic practices (Eckert 1989; Mendoza-Denton
1996). Kogals also provide an opportunity to think about the gendered implications
of the linguistic practices of youth subcultures. They offer an arresting counterpoint
to the great cultural and linguistic innovation usually attributed to male subcultures
elsewhere.
Kogals are ushering into Japanese cultural history new ideas about femininity and
gender, and their linguistic innovations seep into mainstream speech, contributing to
general changes in the Japanese language. Kogals are a convincing example of how
speakers might interrogate cultural forms and social relations through language. Their
critique of gender conformity is expressed through language and other original and
provocative cultural products, including fashion, comics, and new script styles. These
endeavors provoke mainstream censure, and Kogals have been the objects of intense
scrutiny and social commentary. This article tracks how cultural processes are at work
in the representation and self-representation of these “misbehaving” teenagers.
Girl Typologies
The English word girl, transliterated as either gyaru or gˆaru, is a vintage loanword
in Japan. In addition to the prewar Moga, during the 1920s there were Kiss Girls and
Boat Girls who exchanged kisses for a modest fee (Nakayama 1995), as well as movie
theater ushers called Cinema Girls (kinema gˆaru) and female clerks known as Shop Girls
(shoppu gˆaru, Kitazawa 1925). As the 1950s drew to an end, independent and pleasure-
seeking postwar young women were called Mambo Girls (mambo gˆaru) (Time 1959:24).
By 1956, as Jan Bardsley (2000) notes, there were types called Salary Girls (sararii gˆaru),
women who focused on their work lives instead of making plans for marriage. Salary
Girls prefigured the postwar Business Girls (bijinesu gˆaru), later renamed Office Ladies
or OL (ˆoeru) in the 1980s when women’s magazine editors realized there might be an
unintended negative meaning for the earlier term. They discovered that Business Girl
was used in American slang to refer to prostitutes and were concerned that foreigners
and Japanese men involved in sex tourism might confuse an office worker with a sex
worker. Other Girls of the era were the Body-Conscious Girls (bodikon gyaru), young
women who worked hard at creating sexy and fit bodies, and the flamboyant Stage
Girls (otachidai gyaru) who danced in nightclubs. By the 1990s there was the Three
Negatives Girl (san nai gyaru), who did not work, did not get married, and did not
bear children (hatarakanai, kekkon shinai, kodomo o umaranai). The Old Guy Girls (oyaji
gyaru) were young women who affected middle-aged male pastimes such as playing
golf and going to pachinko parlors and race tracks. Akihiko Yonekawa (1996:151–153)
also lists the 1986 term Three-Beru Girl (san beru gyaru), derived from the word for
three combined with the verbal ending beru, for girls who think only about eating,
talking, and getting into trouble (taberu, shaberu, toraberu), and the 1991 term Old Bag
Girl (ofukuro gyaru), which refers to a young woman who is totally dependent on her
mother. A recent type is the Pajamas Girl (jinbei gyaru), a young woman who lazes
around the house wearing old-fashioned old-men’s-style pajamas.
The unrestrained and creative hybridity of Kogal language and fashion, in which
diverse global elements are freely incorporated, is viewed as irresistibly cool by some
Japanese observers. Catherine Driscoll (2002:293) suggests that Kogal is derived from

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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Figure 1
The Kogal aesthetic. Photo from Egg magazine, August 2000.
English cool girl, with the “inflection of ‘colored girl’ as well,” but this does not accord
with Japanese phonology. If the source were cool girl, the form would be k ˆuru gyaru; if
colored girl, it would be karˆado gyaru. It has also been suggested that Kogal is derived
from the morpheme ko (‘small’) (Jolivet 2001; Watrous 2000). I prefer another candidate
etymology—that it was coined around 1990 by workers at discos and music clubs,
who called the under-18 crowd kˆokˆosei gyaru (‘High School Girls’), a term that was
later clipped to kogyaru.
The label Kogal is most often elicited because of a girl’s appearance and consumption
patterns, which may overshadow her linguistic construction of a subcultural identity.
The Kogal aesthetic (see Figure 1) is not straightforward, for it often combines elements
of calculated cuteness and studied ugliness. The style began in the early 1990s when
high-school girls developed a look made up of “loose socks” (knee-length socks worn
hanging around the ankles), bleached hair, distinct makeup, and short school-uniform
skirts. Kogal fashion emphasizes fakeness and kitsch through playful appropriation
of the elegant and the awful. Kogal tackiness is also egalitarian because girls from any
economic background or with any natural endowment may acquire the look, which
is not true of the conservative, cute style favored by girls who conform to normative
femininity.
Kogal taken to an extravagant limit yields the ganguro (‘blackface’) style. The deeper
saddle-brown tan of this style accentuates the use of thick, garish white lipstick and
eye shadow. The ganguro presumptuously challenges female beauty norms with her
anticute aesthetic that questions the naturalness of gender stereotypes. Some U.S.
media pundits confound the ganguro look with another variation on Girl subcul-
ture, the “black” vogue of the B-Girls, who model their appearance after African
American celebrities. B-Girls study imported American videos and read domestically

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Those Naughty Teenage Girls: Japanese Kogals, Slang, and Media Assessments
229
published magazines such as Hip Hop Style Bible and Black Music Review, to locate
cool Americanisms. One is the concept of “real,” now used in phrases such as riaru
de tadashi (‘keep it real’). The hip-hop context is referred to as the shiin (‘scene’), and
many speak of the importance of risupekuto o suru (‘showing respect’) and nori ga ii
(‘having a good groove’).
Most Kogals and ganguro, however, are not trying to look African American, or like
anything ever seen before. They have created their own suprahistorical syncretisms,
using retro and borrowed styles to assemble a unique look. Dusty Springfield–
style chartreuse and yellow shifts might be combined with oversized jackets or
denim along with orange hair in spiky abandon. Kogals are adept at stylistic sam-
pling in order to achieve an aesthetic of mukokuseki (‘stateless globalism’). Their
mixing echoes that seen in the recombinant white British punk subculture of the
1970s, which incorporated black diasporic Caribbean themes (Hebdige 1979). The
Kogal’s racial and temporal hybridity, in which styles from different places, ethnic
groups, and eras are exuberantly appropriated, disturb mainstream notions of na-
tional identity and represent metastatements about the supposed purity and homo-
geneity of the Japanese. The mukokuseki aesthetic is present in other contemporary
Japanese cultural products, such as anime (animated cartoons), popular music, and
television, which have achieved success in Asian markets outside Japan (Iwabuchi
2002).
A Kogal variation is the Surfer Girl (sˆafa gyaru), who self-consciously adopts chintzy
accoutrements such as aloha-print fabrics, koa-seed necklaces, and plastic leis. With
regard to appearance, language, and consumption of magazines such as Fine Surf
& Street Magazine, there is no rigid boundary between pseudo–Surfer Girls who do
not ride the waves and bona fide surfers who authentically participate in the sport.
However, only surfers use terms such as hˆomu pointo (‘home point’), the main beach
where one hangs out and surfs, and ii nami o meiku dekita (‘be able to ride a good
wave’).
Regardless of style, young women are at the heart of contemporary Japanese cul-
tural interest and vigor, and it is girls who have been the impetus for many recent
technological innovations. Japan’s civic and economic woes have shifted attention
away from the once-glorified male salaryman and toward youth culture, which now
drives many salient culture industries.
Unregulated Cultural Production
Since the 1990s, teenage girls in Japan have dominated the market for brand-name
goods, cell phones, cameras, and a variety of other photographic products. According
to the Nomura Research Institute, 95.7 percent of Japanese women under the age of
20 had a cell phone or a pager in 2003 (Asahi Shimbun 2003:176). Kogals’ heavy use
of technology has resulted in some interesting script innovations. One is the devel-
opment of novel emoticons, combinations of punctuation marks and accent marks to
express affect in telephone text messages and e-mail. The emoticons, called kao moji
(‘face characters’), are more extensive and complex than the American “smiley-face”
emoticons typically created with a colon and a closing parenthesis to resemble a side-
ways face, and are processed differently: American emoticons are read horizontally;
Japanese ones are read vertically. A few examples are wai (‘wow’) \(8o8)/, itai (‘ouch’)
, hakushu (‘applause’)
, and kikoenai (‘I can’t hear you’)
.
Kogals are also credited with creating a unique text message code for their cell
phones, now referred to as gyaru moji (‘Gal characters’). It is a basic substitution system,
in which parts or combinations of characters, mathematical symbols, or Cyrillic letters
are used in place of the Japanese syllabic characters; there are several alternatives
commonly used for each syllable. For example, rather than being written in either
the Japanese katakana or hiragana syllabaries, the syllable ni, normally written as
in
hiragana or
in katakana, is written as (=, |=, L=, or I=. The following chart lists three
expressions in standard script and in gyaru moji versions:

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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Standard Script
Gal moji
ch ˆo-kawaii
(totally cute)
chibi-pora
(mini-Polaroid camera)
nakayoshi
(good friends)
One of the more noteworthy examples of Kogal consumption is the phenomenon
of purikura booths, from purinto kurabu (‘print club’), that manufacture strips of small
photo stickers, which are used to decorate objects and are exchanged with friends as a
form of social currency. Over time, Kogals began to amend their photos with colored
ink captions, taboo words, and unusual script elements. Other girls also create graffiti
photos, but Kogals are more risqu´e in their textual expressions. Their graffiti photos
contain a remarkable mix of spoofed cuteness and burlesque freakishness that defies
gender normativity. Examples 1 through 3 illustrate their unique characteristics.
1. H
H ga umai hito
(People good at sex)
2.
my board ripeach ˆu
(While repairing my surfboard)
3.
hajimete no kaigai torippu in karuforunia
(Our first overseas trip in California)
In Example 1, underneath a photo of two Kogals, the boastful phrase H ga umai hito
(people good at sex) is written in outlined blue characters and a fat letter H. The cap-
ital letter H stands for the term eitchi, which has both adjectival and nominal uses. It
has been popular since the late 1970s, when it originally referred to hentai seiyoku (‘ab-
normal sexual desire’) and meant ‘kinky’ or ‘sleazy’. Over time it has come to simply
mean ‘naughty’ or ‘sexy’. Eitchi is also used as a noun for sexual activity and is often
paired with the verb suru (‘to do’), as in eitchi ga suru (‘do the wild thing, have sex’).
The graffiti photos also contain many instances of script mixing. Because it has
four writing systems to exploit—Chinese characters, two syllabic scripts (hiragana
and katakana), and the Roman alphabet—Japanese orthography permits extensive
expressiveness. In Example 2, written on a photograph of two Kogals sanding a surf-
board, the English phrase my board is written in the Roman alphabet rather than in
katakana, whereas part of the word ripeach ˆu (‘repair’) is written in katakana (the suffix
-ch ˆu ‘while’ is written in kanji). Working on surfboards is usually a male activity, so this
writer is also proclaiming her bold gender transgression. In the third example, found
on a photograph of three teenagers, the loanword torippu (‘trip’) is transliterated into
syllabic katakana, yet it is followed by the English preposition in written in the Roman
alphabet. Perhaps these and similar examples constitute a new genre of writing that
is the counterpart of oral code-switching. In any case, their polygraphic juxtaposi-
tion presents an aesthetically pleasing balance and contrast, something seen in many
Japanese writing genres (Miller 2003a; Stanlaw 2004). Beginning in the mid-1980s,
young women began to audaciously use many unconventional orthographic prac-
tices. They continue to substitute Roman letters in novel places and liberally use stars,
hearts, emoticons, Roman script, and nonnative punctuation such exclamation points,
ellipses, ampersands, and word spacing in their writings (Horiuchi 1985; Ishino 1985;

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Those Naughty Teenage Girls: Japanese Kogals, Slang, and Media Assessments
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Kataoka 2003, 1997). Japanese texts originally contained little punctuation, but dur-
ing the early 20th century, writers began to experiment with borrowed Western forms
and eventually created their own marks (Twine 1984). Kogals use both Western and
Japanese punctuation in their writing and graffiti photos.
Kogals highlight the importance of categories of youth in Japan’s culture of ad-
vanced consumerism, yet Kogals themselves determine how the products of the cul-
ture industries are used to articulate their own identities as Girls. Not only in their
consumption patterns and writing practices, but also in their use of language, Kogals
are creatively contributing to their society.
Kogalesque Speech Style
It is in relation to mainstream expectations for female language use that the Kogal is
set off as deviant. According to the dominant ideological model, girls’ speech should
reflect qualities of innocence, modesty, docility, and deference. Kogals’ disdain for
these societal expectations surfaces in the use of nonstandard forms, novel coinages,
and explicit reference to sexual or taboo topics. Of course, young women do not ma-
terialize as prepackaged types, but select from a menu of possibilities from which
they craft their own self-presentations. Age-based styles, cultures, and identities are
achieved at the local level through language, interaction, and context (Eckert and
McConnell-Ginet 1992). Kogal is not just a fashion but a performance that encapsu-
lates various forms of resistance, from language use and behavior to body display.
Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992) note that linguistic resources are called on to con-
struct styles in order to place individuals within their social worlds. In looking at
the features usually associated with Kogal speech, I am not suggesting that there is
a strict correlation of Kogal identity with bits of language. Categories such as Kogal
do not simply reflect a priori social locations but are socially constructed through a
combination of showy style and consciously selected language. The playwright Ai
Nagai allows her Kogal character to explain her choice of language: “My identity
is to use contemporary speech that I’ve finally attained after studying things and
making adjustments. These words signify my lifestyle. They express my humanity”
(2000:116). Susan Gal has written that “Resistance to a dominant cultural order occurs
in two ways: first, when devalued linguistic forms and practices. . . . are practiced
and celebrated despite widespread denigration and stigmatization. Second, it occurs
because these devalued practices often propose or embody alternate models of the
social world” (1995:175). Japan’s Kogals are a good example of exactly these processes
of resistance. They maintain their own language forms in the face of negative sanc-
tions and openly endorse a denigrated philosophy that celebrates the self above any
other social concern, rejecting the premium put on female self-sacrifice in mainstream
Japanese culture.
An interesting feature of Kogal speech is their practices of self-reference. In a manner
similar to how the Riot Girl network in the United States appropriated punk style for
confrontational feminist ends in the 1970s, adopting the denigrating label Girl and
reinvesting it with new power, Kogals usually refer to themselves and others in their
subculture as gyaru (‘Girl’). In a graffiti photo, two Kogals with orange hair confront
the camera with impudent poses; over the top of the photo is written gyaru desu!
(‘We are Girls!’) in pink ink. Kogals also use gyaru as a prefix, suffix, and all-purpose
descriptor that celebrates their positive energy. A few of these are gyaru-ko (‘Girl Kid’),
used as a sort of endearing diminutive; the plural form gyaru-tachi, used in the sense
of ‘Girl Buddies’; Naniwa gyraru (‘Osaka Girl’); and onˆe gyaru (‘Older Sister-Like Girl’),
usually used for someone over 20 years old. There are increasingly large numbers of
young women who decide to have children on their own, and those with new babies
are termed gyaru mama (‘Girl Moms’).1 Others are gyaru y ˆujin (‘Girl Friend’) and
shˆojiki gyaru (‘Authentic Girl’). A yangyaru is a Girl who likes Yankii-style men instead
of ikemen (‘cool dudes’), Yankii (‘Yankee’) being the derogatory term for belligerent
female or male subcultural types who are said to emulate brash Americans. Gyaru

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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
is also used as a modifier, as in gyaru-kei shoppu (‘Girl-style shop’), gyaru-fuku (‘Girl
clothes’), and oshare gyaru na onna no ko (‘trendy Girl type of girl’). Gyaru also appears
in other constructions, such as gyaru-do appu no tame ni (‘in order to increase the degree
of Girlness’) and gyaru yatte (‘do the Girl thing’). These examples illustrate that Kogals
have a sense of themselves as different from others. Some Kogals also use the term
sˆakuru (‘circle’) to describe a small group of Kogals who frequently interact with one
another. There is no symmetric male counterpart to the Kogal. A boyfriend of the
Kogal may have dyed hair, tanned skin, and trendy clothing, but the common label
used for the Kogal partner is ikemen (‘cool dude’), which may also be applied to young
men not part of the Kogal’s orbit. Although the term gyaru otoko (‘Girl Man’) originally
meant a feminine man (Yonekawa 1996:73), I have sometimes heard it used to refer to
the young men who hang out with and date Kogals.
Kogals and other young Japanese are accused of destroying their language or of
having forgotten how to speak it (Sakurai 1985). Linguists, however, believe that it is
not linguistic decay but new dialect formation that is under way. They believe that
lexical, grammatical, and phonological changes are evidence of emergent shinhˆogen
(‘new dialects’) and pidginlike sociolects generated among the younger generation
(Inoue 1986a, 1986b; Maher 1997). Kogal speech, as one of these new dialects, is a
style of speaking that overlaps with youth language in general, but is still marked as
different with its own notable lexical forms.
Enduring Youth Slang and New Kogalisms
Although much of the Kogal lexicon is tossed aside as quickly as last year’s
Hello Kitty keychain, it also includes slang dating back several decades and used
by most youth. The reliable dasai, along with its variations dassˆe and dashˆa, has been in
steady use since the 1970s with the meaning ‘uncool’, ‘frumpy’, or ‘decidedly nerdy’
(Yonekawa 1996:1051). A word from 1979, wanpatˆan (‘one pattern’), meaning ‘repet-
itive’ or ‘boring’, as in kare wa wanpatˆan da ne (‘He’s a real drag’), is still around and
surfaces in Kogal speech, but now in the clipped form wanpa. Other popular words and
expressions are mukatsuku (‘nauseating’ or ‘disagreeable’), used as a qualifier in many
sentences and often suggesting an underlying note of anger or disgruntlement, and
yabai (‘stupid, no good’). Asuka’s diary published by the journalist Hiroe Yoshid ˆo is
overflowing with common youth slang as well as Kogal-specific words such as bakkure
(‘play innocent’), uzattai (‘fussy, strict’), and katarui (‘wiped out’).
A characteristic feature of Kogal speech is the liberal use of emphatic prefixes and
other intensifiers. One is maji, the clipped form of majime (‘serious’), to mean ‘really’,
‘honestly’, or ‘no shit’, in circulation since 1983. Another is the prefix meccha, used in
constructions such as mecha ky ˆuto na (‘awesomely cute’). There is also the unavoidable
chˆo, an emphatic prefix used since 1988 to mean ‘super’ or ‘ultra’, found in phrases like
honto chˆo yabai (‘really ultra-idiotic’), chˆo maji de mukatsuku (‘really super nauseating’),
and chˆo gyaru shita ko (‘a girl really into the Girl thing’). When chˆo is combined with
abbreviations, it becomes especially opaque to older Japanese. An example is the
expression chˆoSW (‘super bad personality’), formed with the initial Roman letters for
the words seikaku (‘personality’) and warui (‘bad’). The English loanword s ˆupˆa (‘super’)
used as a prefix is also quite common, but the infectious chˆo remains the preeminent
Kogal intensifier.
In addition to novel words, Kogals are known for widespread lexical truncation.
Some forms are created by clipping the initial syllable, such as panion from konpanion
(‘companion’) and riiman from sarariiman (‘salaryman’). Place names for areas of Tokyo
are often shortened: Bukuro for Ikebukoro (see Figure 2), and B ˆuya for Shibuya. There
is also clipping of back syllables, as in hazui from hazukashii (‘embarrassing’), urui
from urusai (‘noisy, fussy, picky’), muzui from muzukashii (‘difficult’), mendoi from
mendokusai (‘pain in the ass’), and kimoi from kimochi warui (‘creepy, repellent, gross’),
with the Kansai region variant kishoi.

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Figure 2
A comic Kogal uses the clipped form Bukuro for Ikebukuro. Image from GALS! c 1998
Mihona Fujii/Shueisha Inc. Used by permission.
Compounding is thought to be one of the most productive word-formation pro-
cesses in Japanese. An example of a new compound used by Kogals is shibutaku,
formed from the name Shibuya and the term for the public lottery, takarakuji. The term
emerged when a new outlet selling lottery tickets opened in 2001 at the east exit of
Shibuya Station, and Kogals began buying tickets there with dreams of winning it
big. Another new compound, kimuta-ko (‘Kimutaku Kid’), is used to refer to young
men who imitate the appearance of handsome celebrity Takuya Kimura, known by
his nickname Kimutaku.
Kogals and others also create new words through affixation of the Japanese verb-
class suffix -ru. Everyday nouns are changed into verbs by attaching -ru, found at the
end of the dictionary form of many verbs. In these cases, the first two syllables of the

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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
noun are used with the -ru suffix, eliminating the object maker o or the locative particle
ni. Examples given by Yonekawa (1996) are tako-ru (‘eat octopus fritters’), maku-ru (‘go
to McDonald’s’), oke-ru (‘do karaoke singing’), rˆame-ru (‘eat ramen noodles’), and deni-
ru (‘go to Denny’s’). Yukiko Hayami (2000) also mentions kyodoru, a clipped form of
kyodˆo fushin (‘act suspicious’).
Such a form is also used to refer to a particularly distinctive Kogal behavior that
goes against the cultural model of women as cute and dainty, a sort of self-parody
in which Kogals make ugly, screwed-up faces for the camera. This behavior is called
uni-ru, for kao ga uni no yˆo ni gocha-gocha ni naru (‘make your face scrunched up like
a sea urchin’). Yonekawa (1996:63) notes that there are precedents for -ru-constructed
words in earlier girls’ lexicons and gives the example of enbi-ru (‘to envy’), found in
Meiji-era (1868–1912) schoolgirl speech.2
A new derivation process in Japanese is to attach the suffix -ˆa, transliterated from
the English morpheme -er ‘doer of x’, as in player or drinker, in order to create new
words for types of people. For example, a common term used to describe a slacker who
casually works at a low-level temporary or part-time job after graduation from high
school or college is furiitˆa (‘freelancer’). New Kogal forms based on this process include
gˆemˆa (‘gamer, player of video games’), messhˆa (‘one who has a messh ˆu [‘streaked’] hair
style’), kurabˆa (‘club-goer’), and chiimˆa (‘team member’ or ‘teamer’), the latter referring
to scruffy, semidelinquent boys who hang out on the street in areas such as Shibuya.
In Japanese, number is not an obligatory category and sentences do not require an
indication of whether nouns are plural. However, plural forms for some human nouns
and pronouns may be created with the suffixes -tachi and -ra. For example, gakusei,
which may be understood as either ‘student’ or ‘students’, can be marked as plural
with either suffix: gakusei-ra or gakusei-tachi (‘the students’). Although analysts believe
some new coinages for human nouns derive from the agentive -ˆa suffix described
above, there are cases that may also be derived from the -ra plural suffix.3 A few that
Kogals have used are narurˆa (‘narcissists’); kitirˆa (‘those who love Hello Kitty goods’);
and semerˆa (‘Seimei followers’), that is, fans of the historical figure Seimei Abe, a tenth-
century Taoist shaman famous for yin–yang philosophy and prophecy. Seimei recently
became popular among Kogals after a crop of books, comics, and movies about him
were released. Similarly, an agoraphobic condition of young Japanese, in which they
shut themselves up in their rooms for weeks or years, is termed hikikomori (‘shut-
in syndrome’); those suffering from this new epidemic of disconnectivity are called
komorˆa. Another new type of affixation is to attach the English suffix -ing, rendered as
-ingu, to the base form of a Japanese verb, creating a new hybrid verb. An early and
rare instance of this was the 1960s verb kanningu suru (‘to do cunning, to cheat’). In
1979 I occasionally heard the verb osharingu (‘being fashionable’), from oshare (‘trendy,
fashionable’). Yonekawa (1996:66) documents many of these new verbs used among
young women. A few are komaringu (‘being troubled’), nemuringu (‘going to sleep’),
bentoringu (‘eating a box lunch’), and wakattingu (‘is understanding’).
In addition to making up their own vocabulary, Kogals and other young women are
said to violate language structure itself. Shigeko Okamoto and Shie Sato (Okamoto
1995; Okamoto and Sato 1992) describe the parent culture’s distaste for women who
use putatively “masculine” language forms and who also fail to use correct honorific
speech. However, unlike the college-age women they studied, Kogals do not qualify
their use of “strongly masculine” forms by giggling or using hedges or quotatives in
order to indicate a lingering discomfort in breaking gendered language norms. Kogals
are not attempting to be masculine; they are changing the definition of femininity, a
point Yoshiko Matsumoto (1996) has made about women’s changing speech in general.
An example of Kogals’ structural changes to Japanese is found in the avoidance of
certain infixes. In prestige dialects, the potential form of a verb is formed by infixing
the two morphemes ra and re. Thus, the verb miru (‘to see’) becomes mirareru (‘can be
seen’), and the verb taberu (‘to eat’) becomes taberareru (‘can be eaten’). Although the
derivation process is different, the potential and the passive forms for the class of verbs
that have the dictionary endings -eru or -iru will both end in -rareru. But Kogals often

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