`Gogaru` fashion

It was in the 1990s that Japanese high school girls, or the “Gogaru” generation, began to wear short skirts as school uniforms. “Go” is an abbreviation of high school students in Japanese and “garu” means high school girls in Japanese. Gogaru generally refers to women who were born in the early 1980s and went to middle or high school in the 1990s, an era of affluence. Significantly influenced by pop singer Namie Amuro of Okinawa, their school outfits were characterized by short skirts and loose socks. Statutory rape also grew as a social problem because of gogarus.

Gogaru fashion made a foray into Korea. Only a few girls followed the fashion in the early 2000s, but it has gained popularity among Korean school girls over the past 10 years to become a major trend in Korea. Loose socks were popular in Korea for a short period of time, however. Japanese sailor-style school uniforms go with long socks. As skirts got shorter, girls began wearing loose socks to highlight their legs but the fashion faded away in the 2000s in Japan as well.

The length of school uniform skirts was reportedly cut by an average of 10-15 centimeters over the past decade. A survey found that school girls in Japan`s Niigata Prefecture wore the shortest uniform skirts in their country. To make the skirts longer, the parent-teacher association of Niigata made a poster saying, “You can lengthen both (the duration of) study and (the length of) skirts if determined to do so,” in 2009. The Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun reported that school girls in Fukushima insist on wearing mini-skirts though they have to cover their legs with a blanket in cold winter.

Regulating the length of school girls’ skirts is not easy. They may wear short skirts as fashion without giving much thought, but teachers are embarrassed. In April, the education office of Gangwon Province decided to spend 820 million won (757,100 U.S. dollars) to place boards in front of all school desks. The BBC covered this story as a hot topic. Had girls worn long skirts at schools and made them short outside the school, boards would not have been necessary. In Japan, one proposal was to replace school uniform skirts with pants.

Editorial Writer Song Pyeong-in (pisong@donga.com)