Chapter 3

So there's an easy assumption that one could make here, right?

You could say, oh well, of course Japanese teenagers started dressing like Americans because

Japan was occupied by America immediately after World War II

But that's not the reason why Japanese teenagers would start to dress like Princeton students

The American influence of just being like I'm gonna see it and then dress like that

It's it wasn't possible that didn't happen. That's W. David Marks author of Amatoria and he says that right after the war

It wasn't like the average Japanese citizen could afford to dress like an American even if they had wanted to

Everyone was poor

Nobody had access to enough money to dress like them anyway

Also American soldiers didn't exactly dress preppy

They're all just wearing

Standard uniforms if you could get onto the base, which was not something that everyone was able to do

You could see them dress casually if you went to the black markets

You could buy some of their use clothing, but it wasn't like you could just look at American soldiers and say I want to do that

But eventually American clothing shiny new trendy American clothing

Did become popular in Japan and it was not an inevitability

Honestly, it had to overcome a lot of obstacles to get to that place

The reason Ivy League style became big in Japan in the 60s was a coordinated marketing effort to

Basically indoctrinated young people into being Ivy League converts and that can be traced to literally a single person

Kensuke Ashizu eventually got out of the prison camp in China and in

1946 when he was 34 years old Ashizu his family and hundreds of other Japanese expats were put on a cargo ship and sent back to Japan

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