The Harajuku Girls are teenagers from Harajuku, Tokyo, Japan, or at least that is what Gwen Stefani want people to think. Really the four girls Maya Chino, Jennifer Kita, Rino Nakasone, and Mayuko Kitayama, or otherwise known as Love, Angel, Music, and Baby are from Tokyo, Los-Angeles California, Okinawa, and Osaka. The way Gwen Stefani shows the Harajuku Girls may also be the way she sees them as, and so what if she has altered them a little bit, it isn't hurting anyone. So there looks are different than the Harajuku Girl in Japan but they all do not dress the same. Some harajuku girls may dress gothic lolita, gothic maid, wamono, decora, second-hand fashion, and cyber fashion, so who knows, maybe Gwen's Harajuku Girls are dressing the way they would if they were actually from Harajuku, Japan.
The Harajuku Girls did not originate from Japan. They first were in England and then Japan adapted them in to their own culture, but do you hear anybody picking at them? Didn't think so. Though people may think that Gwen Stefani is torturing them she really isn't, in the one music video she is complimenting them, and they were the ones who signed the contract saying that they would act like 'dolls' so to speak, they knew that they were not going to be able to speak to the public.
Margaret Cho said. “I think it is totally acceptable to enjoy the Harajuku girls, because there are not that many other Asian people out there in the media really, so we have to take whatever we can get”. According to Seventeen Magazine issue May 2007, 84% of the people in the ads were Caucasian, and 0.5% were Asian, so that just goes to show we do not see many Asians in movies and hot TV shows now a days. Also, in the rationality assignment that we had a while back, where we had to watch TV shows and determine what races were shown in them and which weren't, there were not a whole lot of Asians, and again, the majority were Caucasian and Latino.
MiHi Ahn said, “Four Harajuku girls, or rather, Stefani's interpretation of Tokyo Street fashion in the Harajuku district”. Though I may not agree with what she MiHi Ahn said, many other people may think that she is just interpretation the Harajuku style.
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