Posted on: Friday, August 23, 2002

'Bubble juniors' striving for style

By Yuri Kageyama
Associated Press

Natsumi Mase, 12, second from right, and her mother, Yuko, select stationery at Nicola, a Tokyo clothing store. Nicola sells lingerie in polka-dot fabric, designer cosmetics targeting children, and apple-shaped plastic handbags. Associated Press

TOKYO — The color of choice is definitely hot pink at Nicola, a Tokyo clothing store filled with glittery hearts and cartoonish prints, where teenage girls are dead serious about shopping and the fashion taste is precariously neither grown-up nor childish.

The clothing market for girls from 9 to 14 years old is growing so rapidly here the Japanese have even invented a term for the phenomenon — "bubble juniors."

It's a reference to the daughters of women in their 30s and early 40s who lived through the halcyon "bubble" days of the late 1980s, when speculative lending and soaring land and stock prices drove up individual spending in Japan.

Twenty years later, this nation is mired in an economic downturn. Consumer spending is flat — except for the bubble junior crowd.

Women who used to spend big bucks on designer wear back in the bubble days are now mothers eager to pass on the same passion for shopping and clothes to their teenage daughters.

"Sometimes we can wear the same outfits," said 35-year-old Ayako Sato, who said she spends as much as $3,000 on a wardrobe for her 12-year-old daughter, Erika. "I want her to develop taste in clothes."

In department stores and on bustling streets, brands like Angel Blue, Daisy Lovers and Chubby Gang are popping up, catering to young customers craving fashions bearing smiley faces, twinkling stars and strawberry designs.

Nicola sells lingerie in polka-dot fabric, designer cosmetics targeting children, apple-shaped plastic handbags and candy in pop-art-like packaging. The prices can be high — $75 for a pair of lime-green jeans — but that doesn't matter to young consumers.

"It's so cute," said Natsumi Mase, a sixth-grader trying on a denim miniskirt. "I want to become a star in musicals."

While the blossoming fashion craze offers some hope for the sagging economy, some observers worry that it doesn't bode well for progress by women in this long male-dominated society.

Although some of the more rigid traditions have faded, pressures are still high on women in Japan to be docile fashion plates. Serious careers are relatively rare for women, and nearly half of this nation's working women hold only part-time jobs.

Kazuhide Miyamoto, editor in chief of Nicola magazine — which boasts a circulation of 220,000 and is credited with nurturing the teen fashion market, in part, through its Nicola fashion store — insists the girls aren't victims of a manipulative fad.

"Up to now, Japanese women were like sad sheep who could only consume. Japanese women of the future are going to be trend setters," he said.

But marketers pursue boys in a very different way.

"Video games, personal computers, sports — boys develop their own individual interests," Miyamoto said.

Young Japanese girls can spend freely on fashion because they have access not only to their parents' purses but also to those of their doting grandparents. Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, giving girls a larger share of their grandparents' money.

The Nicola store has averaged about $60,000 in monthly sales since it opened in April, but raked in $102,000 in May, a month heavy on holidays in Japan when even dads get into the shopping act.

Other companies are also beneficiaries of bubble junior spending.

Narumiya International, a Tokyo clothing maker behind several teenage brands, has more than $187 million in annual sales.

"The clothes aren't in the best of taste, but I can understand why kids would want it," said 43-year-old Kyoko Okumura while examining a rack lined with fluorescent colored tank tops with her 13-year-old daughter.