Popeye Magazine Turns 40. How Did It Come to Lead Japanese Pop Culture?

It defined urban life for men, and it gave rise to select-shop groups like Beams.

Tokyo Metro's Omotesando Station recently hosted a temporary exhibition marking 40 years since Popeye was founded. It traces how this legendary magazine, treated as one of the textbooks of Japanese men's fashion, has changed since its first issue.

As another part of the anniversary, a documentary called Popeye: 40 Years premiered on the night of June 17 on the website of Japan's WOWOW. Popeye also worked with Tsutaya on a few limited-edition T-shirts, sold on Tsutaya's website and in its stores.

Even with print in decline, each issue of Popeye still sells around 100,000 copies. It carries enormous influence in Japan's magazine world: 40 years ago it opened an era of general-interest men's magazines, and on that foundation titles like Brutus and Casa Brutus became big successes too. Popeye was never just a fashion magazine. What it talked about was life.

Popeye's own look back over these 40 years makes one thing clear: the magazine has never stopped changing.

In the first few years, both the cover illustration style and the contents were very American. From the 1980s on, Popeye seemed to change: it began paying attention to places outside America, Japan itself included. In 2012, after Takahiro Kinoshita took over as editor-in-chief, he overhauled the magazine. Popeye then broke with the traditional definition of a magazine and moved toward the special-issue format. Its themes grew far more varied as well; in 2015 alone it ran issues on "The Great Tokyo Adventure" and "Girlfriend."

They wanted Popeye's content to reach across age groups.

Popeye has a slogan, "Magazine for City Boys," which is both its target reader and its purpose. In Popeye's view, only young men who ski in winter and play tennis in summer, who love sport and love life, and who are popular with women deserve to be called city boys. And the magazine's job is to tell you "how to live happily in the city and become a proper city boy."

Tyler Brûlé, editor-in-chief of Monocle, said this about the redesigned Popeye: "Every month Popeye's theme is interesting, and around that theme it takes in people, cities, fashion. To me a fine magazine is one that still doesn't feel dated when you read it ten years later. Popeye has done that."

The newest issue, the 40th-anniversary special, goes back to its "starting point" and takes the same subject as the debut issue: the American West Coast. It also reprints a facsimile of that 1976 issue, so you can feel plainly how much both the American West Coast and Popeye itself have changed in 40 years.

The exhibition gives us a chance to look back at what actually happened that summer 40 years ago.

On June 25, 1976, the first issue of Popeye went on sale. It would later be seen as a landmark, revolutionary moment in Japanese pop culture. From that day, Popeye's young editors set out from Japan on a great adventure into the wider world.

But Popeye's success was no accident.

In the 1970s Japan's economy grew steadily toward its peak. Next to the Japanese of the 1980s bubble years, who spent heavily all over the world, the Japanese of the 1970s were still fairly cut off from information. In 1967 only 260,000 Japanese traveled abroad; by 2014 the figure was 16.9 million, 63 times as many.

The other side of that isolation was that the Japanese were not very alert to trends elsewhere. Plenty of young Japanese did not know what jeans were, and had little idea what a sneaker was.

Looking back on how Popeye came about, Yoshihisa Kinameri said: "After I joined Heibonsha in 1967, I became editor-in-chief of Heibon Punch. That was when I realized young Japanese men might need a general magazine carrying art, sport, cars and the rest."

So Kinameri and Jiro Ishikawa started the Made in USA series of magazines. It introduced fashion items made in America, and because it aimed straight at a gap in the Japanese magazine market for a general men's title, it won good reviews as soon as it appeared. Popeye was born out of it.

Kinameri deliberately put Popeye the Sailor on the cover of the first issue. Beyond the fact that the cartoon sailor shared the magazine's name, he thought Popeye, a classic figure of American comics, held enormous appeal for young people who loved American culture. He had a second reading of the name as well: "pop eye," meaning the magazine would be the eye through which Japanese people discovered pop culture, and would point the way to a fashionable life.

Back then the only channel Japanese people had for news of American fashion was the magazine Men's Club, and even that one merely compiled and translated slightly out-of-date information from America.

Against that backdrop, Kinameri hit on a new idea: "Why don't we try going to America and reporting on the ground? No Japanese magazine has done it so far, and we have no experience of it. But I thought — why not give it a try?"

Popeye's debut issue took Los Angeles, on the American West Coast, as its theme, and for that issue the editors deliberately spent two weeks living there. They made friends with young UCLA students and learned what they liked to do with their days, what was popular in America at the time, where the hottest places were and who the coolest Americans were.

Those questions did a great deal to give them a "nose" for American youth culture. "The university was the best source of information," said Popeye's illustrator Yasuhiko Kobayashi. Every time the editors went to America to report, they took several oversized suitcases, so that on the way home the cases could carry back to Japan the hundreds of items they had picked out there.

The approach drew some doubt. Some people thought a fashion magazine could be put together from photographs, with no need to travel abroad to report. One advertising agency even declared, "What you're doing will never last."

Popeye was convinced otherwise: only by going into the shops and buying, in person, the goods it would recommend in the magazine, and by interviewing the people who made them, could it learn the stories behind those goods. Only that way could it write articles that truly "carried feeling and could move people."

Its stubbornness turned out to be right.

It is hard now to imagine how badly young Japanese people wanted first-hand fashion news in those years. Popeye tapped that appetite and kept enlarging it.

Popeye opened the era of on-the-ground reporting for Japanese magazines, and that was the other decisive reason it succeeded.

In the first issue they recommended Converse canvas shoes, Puma casual shoes, even UCLA baseball shirts. The prices sat under the photographs in dollars — goods that Japanese people who never left the country had no way of buying at all. "Even so, the magazine sold unexpectedly well," said Popeye editor-in-chief Jiro Ishikawa.

By then Popeye had become almost a synonym for fashion. Young men who chased city trends were called "Popeye boys." The magazine worked like a huge network, with Tokyo as its origin point, linking New York, London, Paris. And standing shoulder to shoulder across that vast web of information were all the Japanese who longed for pop culture.

In 1976, the year Popeye launched, another event worth noting took place: American Life Shop Beams opened in Harajuku. Picking hard-to-find clothes straight off the American West Coast, with no limit on brand or category, this select-shop approach made Beams extremely popular in a short time. In 1977 Beams opened its second store, in Shibuya. Today it has more than 70 stores in Japan alone.

This was no coincidence.

Yo Shitara, the eldest son of Beams founder Etsuzo Shitara, was working at Dentsu at the time, and his job brought him close to Kinameri and others in that circle. Seeing Made in USA first gave him the idea of opening a select shop for trend goods. Then Popeye launched, not long after, and it hit him harder than anything had before.

Beams brought on the golden age of the Japanese select shop, and Popeye's part in that should not be underrated.

In Beams' first years, Popeye was already at its peak. The magazine not only covered Beams repeatedly in its pages; the two also kept up another kind of relationship. Concretely: Popeye supplied the product information, and Beams imported the goods and resold them.

So it is not hard to see why early Beams and early Popeye chose such similar subjects. Nor is it any surprise that the pages of Popeye's 40th-anniversary facsimile are full of ads for Beams' own 40th anniversary.

You could say Popeye was the eye Beams used to watch trends. It stood for an ability to catch what was fashionable, and Beams put that ability to work in business and succeeded with it.

Yo Shitara, now Beams' president, wrote in Popeye's 40th-anniversary issue: "Beams is not a manufacturer, and it is not a designer. If I had to name one thing, the most important thing about Beams is probably its editing ability. That is why Beams and Popeye, though they are in completely different lines of business, have kept growing by holding each other up."

The two shared almost the same longing for Western culture, and the same plain goal: to bring Western culture to young Japanese people. One was a magazine, the other a select shop — different roads, the same destination.

A magazine is a mirror. It can reflect how an era changes.

Starting in 1970, Japanese designers such as Issey Miyake, Kenzo Takada and Rei Kawakubo began to make their names. At home, select shops spread, Japanese people grew more and more fashionable, and Japanese pop culture began to have a say on the world stage.

W. David Marx, an American writer living in Tokyo, wrote in Popeye's 40-year special: "Popeye built a bridge of information between young Japanese people and the world. Without Popeye, Japanese pop culture might not be as rich as it is today."

Popeye's path of growth runs close alongside the rise of Japanese culture. Sometimes it is even hard to tell which way it went — whether the magazine shaped what was popular, or what was popular changed the magazine.

Cover image from tumbnation and retrospectivemodernism.