To Understand 40 Years of Japanese Pop Culture, Don't Miss This BEAMS Short Film

When a clothing brand becomes a cultural symbol, don't underestimate how far its influence reaches.

On October 21, BEAMS, Japan's most influential streetwear brand, posted a short film called Tokyo Culture Story on YouTube, the first installment of its 40th-anniversary project. Within days it was being talked about on websites in China and abroad, and the original video passed 500,000 views on YouTube.

The film runs only five minutes, and in that time it looks back at 40 years of Tokyo street culture, from BEAMS' founding in 1976 to today. It was shot in Harajuku, Shibuya, Omotesando and other neighborhoods that define Tokyo fashion, brought together 1,200 people, and took more than 300 hours to make.

The soundtrack is Konya wa Boogie Back (Smooth Rap) 《今夜はブギー・バック》, a Shibuya-kei hit from the 1990s, reworked through 15 musical genres performed by 17 acts and strung together in different arrangements. The way the film was shot is just as playful: 82 models under exclusive contract to fashion magazines, led by Nana Komatsu and Sosuke Ikematsu, work with professional stylists to act out four decades of Tokyo street trends, each look paired with a keyword.

Take a look:

Follow the film and you can see what changed in Japanese pop culture over these 40 years.

1976-2016: Keywords in Japanese Pop Culture

1976-1979

UCLA Style / Heavy Duty / Outdoor Style / Folklore / City Boy / Disco Style / Surf Style / Mannish Style

1980-1989

Takenoko Zoku / Rockabilly / Karasu Zoku / 1st DC Boom / Pirate Look / Vivienne Westwood / Punks / Olive Girl / 2nd DC Boom / Big Shoulder Look / New Romantic / Hip Hop / Shibuya Casual

1990-1999

Antwerp Six / Import Brand Mix / Grunge / Outdoor Mix / Country Style / French Casual / Undercover / Military Mix / Ura-Harajuku / Shino-Rer / B-Boy / Amu-Rer / Electro Mode / Boyish Style / New Vintage / Ganguro Gal

2000-2009

UK Skater Style / Relax For Girls / Layered Military / New Grunge / Underwear Style / LA Celebrity / New Heritage / Otona Gal / London Military / Mori Girl / Electro Style / Rude Style

2010-2016

High End Street / Yama Girl / Edgy Style / New City Boy / Pastel Color / One Point Luxury / Normcore / Mixture Style / 90's Sports Style / Unbalance Style

In the late 1970s, the years when BEAMS was just starting out, foreign culture still set the terms of Japanese fashion. In 1976 the lifestyle magazine POPEYE was born, and its first issue introduced readers to what was popular on the American West Coast. The West Coast look, typified by UCLA Style, swept Japan in no time. So did the Folklore style then popular in the United States — denim, headscarves, long wavy hair — along with the American sporty looks of Outdoor Style and Surf Style.

A number of Japanese designers were making their mark abroad in the 1970s, but at home, the cult of homegrown fashion had not yet arrived.

The 1980s were another picture entirely. As Japan's economy entered its bubble years, people had spare money and paid more and more attention to what they wore. The most distinctly Japanese styles of the period were Takenoko Zoku, Karasu Zoku and Shibuya casual. Takenoko Zoku meant people dressed in showy clothes built on bright primary colors and huge patterns, with makeup just as hard to miss; because most of these clothes came from a shop called Takenoko, the wearers were named after it (the "Bamboo Shoot Tribe"). Karasu Zoku, known for dressing all in black, stood for a different kind of defiance: bold cuts that ignored the lines of the body and a subversive way of presenting them, which drew attention from designers around the world, Yohji Yamamoto among them. Shibuya casual, shortened to Shibu-Caji, was a way of dressing common among young people in Tokyo, more relaxed than punk.

Once the fashion culture of the 1980s had settled, the 1990s turned Japan into a society where everyone did "fashion." Each person had their own reading of it, instead of simply chasing the eye-catching and the exaggerated. Military styles began to rise, and casual sportswear built on jeans and sweatshirts took over.

Other voices cut through that trend, and the loudest was the GAL culture brought by the pop singer Namie Amuro. A miniskirt with over-the-knee boots was called Amu-Rer, and the Japanese girls who loved the look were Amu Gals. GAL originally meant a girl who was childish and rebellious; today it is a force in Japanese pop culture that no one can ignore.

In menswear, a crop of Japanese street brands carrying youth culture grew up with Harajuku as their base. The most influential was probably A Bathing Ape, founded by NIGO. It has since won countless fans around the world.

In the 21st century, the internet made it far easier to shop across borders, fashion elements from everywhere began to blend, and style grew more varied. The decade from 2000 to 2010 in Japanese fashion can be summed up as Mix Fashion. It mixed styles from several countries and gave older fashion statements new definitions: LA Celeb, standing for the luxury of America's upper class; UK Skater Style, popular on British streets; and richer takes on London Military and New Heritage.

Women's fashion in Japan grew more changeable over the same decade. A natural way of dressing appeared, typified by "Mori Girl," and the more grown-up, urban "Otona-kei" look also became a trend.

Since 2010, Japanese street fashion has built further on all of that. The exaggerated Shibuya-kei look has faded, and loose and comfortable has become the first choice.

At the end of Tokyo Culture Story, when the actors Sosuke Ikematsu and Nana Komatsu meet, the slack, baggy Unbalance Style they both wear is the best gloss on this year's trend.

So What Part Has BEAMS Played in These Four Decades of Changing Trends?

If you want to understand 40 years of Japanese fashion, BEAMS is something of a shortcut.

As a trend brand, what BEAMS means to Japanese culture long ago outgrew the select shop itself. In a sense BEAMS has become a cultural symbol of Japan: both a place where trends gather and a place they are sent from, broadcasting fashion news out of Japan to the world.

In 1976, American Life Shop BEAMS opened in Harajuku. Its 6.5-tsubo space (about 22.45 square meters) held hard-to-find clothes that founder Yo Shitara had picked out himself on the American West Coast. The shop was tiny, but it deliberately conjured the crowded, restless feel of a UCLA dorm room. For Japanese people who idolized American culture, that was somewhere to experience American fashion up close, and BEAMS became hugely popular in short order. The next year, 1977, it opened a second store in Shibuya. Today the BEAMS group runs 16 in-house brands and more than 150 stores worldwide.

Japan's economy was growing stronger through the 1970s, and Japanese fashion was growing more varied along with it. Designers such as Issey Miyake, Kenzo Takada and Rei Kawakubo were making their names. As American culture, West Coast style above all, slowly seeped in, a batch of Japanese fashion magazines was founded too.

POPEYE and BEAMS were two lifestyle brands founded in the same year, 1976. One a magazine, the other a select shop, they carried a similar cultural idea in different forms, and each became a peak of modern Japanese pop culture in its own right.

BEAMS and POPEYE are tied so closely that no account of how BEAMS grew can avoid the magazine. Traces of POPEYE are not hard to find in Tokyo Culture Story, either.

We have written about POPEYE before ("POPEYE has been around for 40 years — how did it come to lead Japanese pop culture?"); if you are curious, that piece goes into the magazine's history in more detail.

The short version: when Yo Shitara, eldest son of BEAMS founder Etsuzo Shitara, was still working at Dentsu, his job put him in close contact with POPEYE editors such as Yoshihisa Kinameri. By the time BEAMS was finding its feet, POPEYE was already at its height. The magazine not only covered BEAMS again and again in its pages, the two also kept up other ties: POPEYE supplied product information, and BEAMS imported the goods and sold them on.

Like POPEYE, BEAMS grew early on because a newly rich Japanese public was hungry for news of what the world was wearing. As the first of Japan's select shops, BEAMS got there ahead of everyone else.

But select-shop culture caught on, and competitors arrived one after another. Drawing on what it had built up in its early years, BEAMS gradually stopped talking about fashion and started talking about a way of living.

That shift also tracked what was happening in Japanese society. In the 1990s, as Japan entered its "fashion for everyone" era, fast-fashion brands moved in, the old luxury houses fought over the Japanese market, and new select shops opened everywhere. For BEAMS this was both an opening and a threat.

BEAMS stuck to its "Basic & Exciting" way of choosing stock while pushing hard to expand its own brands, and found its place in the empty ground between luxury goods and fast-moving consumer products.

The taste for lifestyle was rising as well. Beyond clothes, BEAMS took in bags, shoes, watches, home goods, stationery and records, and through collaborations with one brand after another it widened its reach step by step.

As Yo Shitara, BEAMS' current president, has put it: "BEAMS is not a manufacturer and not a designer. If I had to say, the most important thing about BEAMS is probably its editing ability." Following whatever is popular while holding on to its own view of it — that is the "editing ability" BEAMS values, and perhaps the secret of why it has always managed to lead.

Beyond the Short Film, What Else Has BEAMS Done?

For BEAMS, the 40th anniversary is not just a big occasion. It is also an excellent chance to market itself.

As noted above, BEAMS knows how to work with other brands. Besides releasing Tokyo Culture Story, it has run a string of 40th-anniversary events, starting in early 2016 and continuing to now.

Those include 40th-anniversary collaboration collections with several big names: the Desert Trek shoe with the British classic Clarks Originals, and a white Stan Smith with a green logo made with adidas Originals. There is also a watch with G-Shock, in a special gray-and-white colorway whose backlight reveals a BEAMS 40th-anniversary design in contrasting colors.

POPEYE, of course, turns up in this round of collaborations too.

The biggest surprise is BEAMS EYE, a special project that promotes fine Japanese goods from an unusual angle. This time BEAMS has teamed up with Beppu, a city in Oita Prefecture on Kyushu, for BEAMS EYE on BEPPU. From November 1 to November 30, the BEAMS JAPAN store that opened this year will sell traditional crafts and local specialties from Beppu, and every weekend it will truck in hot-spring water from Beppu for a BEAMS foot bath inside the shop.

And if five minutes of film is not enough history of Japanese pop culture for you, BEAMS plans to release a commemorative book on the 40 years of change in Japanese fashion, What's Next, on October 31.

Images from: BEAMS