Developing a Taste for American Ways? : Trends: Japanese youths love Schwarzenegger and yuppie labels, but they’re hardly clones of U.S. teens, observers say.

On an early evening edging toward the weekend, a smattering of young people gather in a small music store to explore the curious sound of Japanese rap.

Doubt flits across the faces of the youths dressed in a collage of styles--jeans and sweat shirts, Greenwich Village black, Ralph Lauren polos, short-and-tight fluorescent dresses, dark suits and baseball caps. Some sport yuppie briefcases. Others tote backpacks.

“I don’t think it works,” says a young Japanese man wearing a UCLA baseball cap turned backward. “Japanese (words) make the beat sound funny,” he says, laughing, after lyrics about a young man’s unrequited love awkwardly linger beyond a sharp beat.

His friend, in a Lakers sweat shirt, echoes the thumbs-down. “I think we stick to M.C. Hammer,” he says, shaking his head as he looks at the floor.

While M.C. Hammer’s name brings broad and knowing smiles to Japanese youth, hip-hop , the rap culture of American inner cities, brings puzzled stares.

It’s more than just linguistic disjunction, according to Akio Izawa, music editor of a popular magazine for young men.

“We don’t understand the social concerns of American rap,” Izawa says.

Japanese rap does not carry such broad social messages as its American parent, he explains. Instead, it focuses on the more immediate concerns of young Japanese, such as strict supervision in school, the controlled work environment and, of course, love.

“We aren’t interested in politics or the environment,” says Izawa, a young man in jeans and a T-shirt, “and we don’t have any such problems as racism. In fact, there are few problems here” in Japan, he says.

Many Japanese youths would disagree with Izawa’s assessments, particularly his denial of racism, but they agree that Japanese youth culture resembles its American counterpart only in its growing diversity.

For example, on a recent night in the heart of Tokyo, ‘50s rock music poured out of a McDonald’s restaurant where high school students clustered by gender, eagerly discussing Nintendo, cars, fashion and Japanese rock stars.

In a neighboring Tokyo ward, slightly older youths were gathered, again by gender, outside a club with spinning lights and disco music. The men were smartly turned out in baggy suits and short haircuts. The women wore high heels, form-fitting short dresses and long hair.

At first blush they seem to mirror American youth. They even mimic the American craze for abbreviations, naming their dress style “one len body con,” which means “one length (for long hair) body conscious (for tight clothes).”

But some Japanese believe this country has ingested Western pop culture and modified it to suit its own social conditions. Sakio Suzuki, the editor-in-chief of Japan’s most popular young men’s magazine, Men’s Non-No, maintains, for example, that “Japan is now coming up with its own culture.”

A striking difference between Japanese and American youth is that young women here are more interested than young men in foreign culture, says Yamato Shiine, editor-in-chief of the popular young women’s magazine Hanako.

Young men sit at home playing computer games, Shiine says, while young women, who are entering the work force at unprecedented rates, are traveling abroad with money they save by adhering to the Japanese tradition of living at home until married.

Last year a report by the U.S. Commerce Department found that the largest single group of tourists to visit the United States were young Japanese women. The report also found that Japanese women spend the equivalent of what five European women spend in the States.

“That proves that Japanese women eat a lot,” Shiine laughs. But more seriously, he says, they’re bringing fashions back to Japan.

Changes in Japanese youth over the past 10 years have gone beyond pop culture, however, according to Takao Sofue, a professor of anthropology in Tokyo.

“Today young people are more socially conscious,” says Sofue. The number of young Japanese who raise money for Third World countries is gradually increasing, for example, and the blanket acceptance of the traditionally hierarchical Japanese social structure is starting to crack, Sofue points out.

But some constants remain. Though young Japanese tend to be more independent and individualistic than their elders were in their time, they are still overwhelmingly group-oriented, Sofue says, and still tend to flock together according to sex.

What are young Japanese men interested in today?

Interests change year to year. A few years ago it was clothes. Today it’s music, New Age spiritualism, car racing and computer games.

There is no single popular idol. Arnold Schwarzenegger has replaced James Dean as an arresting image, but no one wants to be like him.

“For one thing,” explains a high schooler, “he’s ugly.”

And what’s popular among young Japanese women?

“European men,” one university student giggles with her friends. “Those (men) who are romantic--not traditional Japanese men who want women to be meek and stay at home.”

Another popular trend, adds her friend, is “staying single as long as possible.” Today, the median age of women getting married is 27, four years older than in 1986.

Last year, after several Japanese politicians were unseated by scandals involving mistresses and women were elected in their place, the media proclaimed the ‘90s to be “Onna No Jidai,” or the “Era of Women.”

But many young women here say that while they would welcome shedding the old ways, they expect to follow in the footsteps of their mothers, to become, as one said, “respectful daughters and good wives. Fashion can’t change that.”