Hasta La Gadget!

We often hear the phrase “Only in Japan!” when describing some peculiarity about this country. Well, I’m not sure if this is a world-first but it still caught my eye (not in that way, I hasten to add)…

Japan is definitely known for its scrupulous attention to the niche market, whether that be in mobile phones, lifestyle goods, or fashion. Here’s a consumer base that could certainly be called niche, if not underground: crossdressers or jyosouku (女装子).

The crossdresser maid cafe New Type in Akihabara has only been open less than two years but it is thinking big. In fact, it’s just started its own e-commerce fashion site especially for otoko no musume ko (男の娘, literally “boy’s daughter”, and a play on 男の子, or “boy”, which has the same reading) customers, lagrangel.

As you might expect, there is plenty on offer for cosplay fans: uniforms, maid outfits and so on. But there’s also a wealth of “normal” fashion items too, like coats, dresses — to my layman eyes, at least, quite attractive stuff.

From what I could tell, most products seem to sell for between 10 and 15,000 JPY (about $118-170), making this niche fashion pretty reasonable too.

Japan, not having the biblical background of other cultures, often seems refreshingly free of any let-ups about this kind of area. So even though, needless to say, this fashion won’t be for everyone you are very unlikely to hear any moral complaints about it either.

Editor’s note (Michael): I changed ‘transvestite’ to ‘crossdresser’ due to reader comments, as well as after finding that lots of the jyosouko in the Japanese blogosphere actively call themselves crossdressers when they use English. Transvestite makes me think of Rocky Horror, but these are boys who like to dress like cute girls…and I must say pull it off rather well. To be honest, this could be a whole series, since crossdresser blogs are numerous, and there’s a bit of an underlying trend going on here. We’ll give this topic more attention I think. The #2 blog on the miscellaneous section of the blogmura ranking is this pretty young man, and the rest of the list is full of crossdressers!