The girls who once strode through summer Shibuya tanned jet-black became, at some point, a permanent attribute of subculture. In a Japanese society that has held fair skin as the standard of beauty, dark skin began as a sign of rebellion and settled as an object of desire.

Kuro gyaru (black gyaru) is the term for the gyaru type of woman who darkens her skin to brown or black by tanning salon or heavy foundation, and for the fetish taste toward it. Derived from the late-1990s ganguro boom, it settled as an independent genre in adult video, adult manga, and the doujinshi field as an attribute type.

Overview

The visual core of the black-gyaru type lies in the contrast of “dark skin” and “bright hair and ornament”. Brown-to-black skin by tanning or heavy foundation, hair bleached blonde or brown, bright lip, flashy nails, and large accessories make up the fixed form. In makeup, glitter at the eyes, heavy eyeshadow, and false lashes stylise the method of stressing contrast against the darkness of the skin.

In fashion, high-exposure dress showing the skin (tank tops, miniskirts, short pants) is the fixed form. The very dress that emphasises tanned skin texture works as the visual icon of the type. Within gyaru culture, the black-gyaru type has been positioned as a faction set against the white gyaru and the natural gyaru. It flourished in late-1990s and early-2000s Shibuya and Ikebukuro, and after the fading of that trend now settles as a permanent attribute type in the subcultural field.

Etymology

“Kuro gyaru” is a compound of “black” and “gyaru”, denoting the gyaru type that darkens the skin. It sits in the lineage of “ganguro” (face-black, or a contraction of “intensely black”) that flourished in the late 1990s. Several accounts of the origin of “ganguro” run in parallel: a contraction of “gangan kuroi” (intensely black), and a euphonic form of “kao-guro” (face-black). From the late 1990s into the early 2000s, ever-darker derivatives such as “gonguro” and “bachiguro” were coined one after another, generating a vocabulary that finely subdivided the degree of skin darkness.

“Kuro gyaru” detached from the names of particular trends (ganguro, gonguro) and settled from the 2000s as a word covering the dark-skin gyaru type in general. After ganguro faded as a vogue word, kuro gyaru remained as a permanent subcultural attribute. In English, kuro gyaru, black gyaru, and ganguro are used in parallel, with the Japanese borrowed directly when stressing the Japan-specific subcultural context.

History and development

In the late 1990s, a trend of extreme skin-darkening among high-school and college women arose in and around Shibuya. The “Amura” style following Amuro Namie, then the kogyaru and ganguro derivatives, occupied the core of young women’s fashion in Japan around 1995–2000. The ganguro peak is placed around 1998–2000, gaining the scale of a social phenomenon: a surge in tanning-salon demand, the founding and popularity of the ganguro magazine egg, and the appearance of the comedy unit “Ganguro San-kyodai”.

In the early 2000s, the “white gyaru” style symbolised by Hamasaki Ayumi rose, and the mainstream standing of the ganguro line gradually receded. Styles directly succeeding ganguro declined, but the tendency to darken the skin continued in the subcultural field and certain regional cultures (Okinawa, Shonan), surviving as the black-gyaru type.

The black-gyaru genre in the AV industry formed in the wake of the late-1990s boom and has continued as an independent genre since the boom faded. Exclusive actresses billing the black-gyaru attribute appear continuously, and black gyaru is run as an independent category in label and series planning. In adult manga and doujinshi, the black-gyaru character is established as a fixed attribute. Supported by the permanence gyaru culture holds in contemporary subcultural space, the type survives as a mode of expression independent of real-world trend. In anime and adult manga, the black-gyaru character is stylised together with personality attributes (bright temperament, sexually assertive, friendly to the protagonist), forming an expressive tradition separated from real trend.

Derived forms

The ganguro and gonguro line succeeds the peak-boom style with extreme makeup and dress. The “tan-line” form emphasises the swimsuit-shaped colour left on the skin, with works that stress the tan line itself as a fetish visual, a standard summer or swimsuit-episode staging in doujinshi and adult manga. The black-gyaru married-woman form targets mature gyaru women, connecting to the “ex-delinquent wife” and “gyaru-type wife” lineages in AV. The dark-skin-character form leaves the tanning line and uses dark skin as a setting (dark elves, brown-skinned races in fantasy), an adjacent but separate lineage.

Reception

At the core of the black-gyaru taste, two sides are often discussed: deviation from the norm, and accessibility. The rebellious sign-value against the traditional Japanese norm of fair skin as the standard of beauty is cited as one core appeal. At the same time, the personality associations general to the gyaru type (“sexually open”, “friendly”, “easy to approach even on first meeting”) raise accessibility for consumers. There is also the argument that the contrast of skin colour forms the core of visual pleasure: bright hair and ornament against dark skin, the white swimsuit-mark peeking from dark skin, the visual contrast itself stylised as a sexual sign.

From the standpoint of subculture studies, the phenomenon of the black-gyaru type continuing in subcultural space after the real-world ganguro trend vanished is discussed. As a typical case of a mode of expression running independently of real trend, the black-gyaru genre is a reference point for the theory of bodily representation.

See also

• Doujinshi
• Chakuero
• Pansuto
• Bakunyu