The Ability to Make It Work

Itoi

So you were in your twenties when you built up your own business, right?

Masuda

It’s actually taken twenty years for me to get where I am today. I opened the 6%DOKIDOKI shop in 1995, and that had moderate success as an original fashion brand. I felt more confident in my business skills and opened five shops around the country. We did made a lot of wholesale deals, too. But as I traveled around the region meeting with various CEOs, I realized they were on a major-league level entirely different from where I stood.

Itoi

The major-leaguers of the business world.

Masuda

Exactly. I thought I had business skills when I was running a shop in my twenties. But once I became active in the business world and met all those amazing people, I realized my business skills were limited to someone who runs a little stationery shop along a shopping street. I was acutely aware of the fact that I could never live up to them.

Itoi

Ah.

Masuda

So I pondered what it would take for me to match up to the major leaguers. I realized the only chance I had at making it big was as a creator, so I closed all my shops outside of Harajuku.

Itoi

The book only touched on that very briefly but that takes amazing courage.

Masuda

Well, I was 30 at the time, so I figured I better start now. If I were to invest in something new in my 40’s or 50’s, I wouldn’t be able to retire, so I knew it was now or never.

Itoi

So it wasn’t courage as much as it was a stipulation that made it easy to make a decision.

Masuda

Yeah. Either way, I wasn’t all that satisfied with my situation at the time. I wasn’t yet in a position to express my own words to the rest of the world, which I needed.

Itoi

I see.

Masuda

Plus, I wanted revenge.

Itoi

Revenge.

Masuda

Back when I didn’t have any influence or experience, when I was around twenty, people really tore me to pieces. It was the 80’s, so everyone treated American and European culture as superior. The trend was monochrome colors, and people were really into black. I was completely helpless at the time—people would immediately reject my work and call my use of colors childish. I was still bitter about that as I got older, so I wanted revenge on all the people who insulted me.

Itoi

You wanted them to accept your work the way it was.

Masuda

Yeah, and I believed that day would come. It ended up taking an incredibly long time, but things changed fairly suddenly with the debut of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

Itoi

Did you start working with her as just another one of your usual jobs?

Masuda

By 2010, I was also working independently as an art director in addition to running the store. I was also the director of a magazine when the editor asked me if I knew of any especially Harajuku-esque girls. I told him that Kyary was a really interesting kid.

Itoi

Was that right after she debuted?

Masuda

She was still in high school, so she hadn’t debuted yet. Kyary was originally a regular at the 6%DOKIDOKI shop. A really intense kid who stopped by once a week. I heard from the staff that we had a cute girl coming by every week, and she always wore a huge ribbon on her head.

Itoi

So her ribbon was there from the beginning.

Masuda

Yeah, she came with that. So I checked out her blog and saw what a Harajuku-esque, free-spirited girl she was. Honestly, most of the kids in Harajuku are the ones that stay cooped up in their rooms. But it was interesting seeing someone who exhibited such freedom around Harajuku, so we had her model for the magazine cover.

Itoi

I see.

Masuda

She became an overnight hit, and before long there were plans for her to put out her first record. That’s when her agency called me. They told me about her music debut and said, “She loves your work, so we’d like you to be her art director.”

Itoi

I see. So that’s where things went after 2011.

Masuda

That’s basically been my life since the disasters. Kyary debuted with her hit song PONPONPON and its music video July 2011, and that’s all led up to where I am today.

Itoi

I’m sure there was a big effect from the way the March 2011 tragedies happened so close to her debut.

Masuda

I think the Great East Japan Earthquake made everyone acutely aware of the possibility that tomorrow may never come. Before the earthquake, everywhere you went you’d hear the old hit song “Ashita ga Arusa” (There’s Always Tomorrow) that was making a comeback. There was this undertone that it was silly to work too hard. But once the earthquake hit, we all realized that there may not be a tomorrow after all.

Itoi

And everyone reflected on that.

Masuda

I believe so. But at the time, the kids in Harajuku were already doing whatever they wanted and weren’t concerned about tomorrow. So when the entire world turned their eyes to Japan to see what would happen to us, I think they found these kids in Harajuku still living true to their own styles. It was also right when YouTube was getting really popular, so the timing was ripe for Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s music and imagery to turn her into an idol.

Itoi

Where were you on March 11th?

Masuda

I was in Harajuku at the time. The first earthquake hit, so I went to check on the shop. That’s when the second big quake hit, and the ground, the alleyways, everything was shaking. That night I saw on the news how many refugees there were, and I realized the extent of what was happening. I knew I had to do something about it, so I wanted to go to the disaster zone. But my staff stopped me the next day and said that without any background in emergency response, I would only get in the way. So I started to think what I could do from where I was.

Itoi

What you could do from Harajuku.

Masuda

Right. Harajuku completely shut down after that. All the tourists and the foreigners disappeared, and the convenience store shelves were stripped bare. I saw a lot of social media posts from people overseas worried that the tsunami had swept away all of Tokyo and took with it the pop culture they all loved so much. After all, Tohoku and Tokyo look very close when viewed on a world map.

Itoi

Yeah, Japan’s just so small.

Masuda

That’s when I thought it would be good for me to clear things up and let the world know that Tokyo was lucky to escape most of the damage, and that we were all doing well and our culture hadn’t gone anywhere. I wrote a blog in English and Japanese to show people how Harajuku was doing, and people started following the blog and offering moral support.

Itoi

Yeah.

Masuda

This was my Mighty Harajuku project. I made a bunch of pins that said MIGHTY HARAJUKU! on them and passed them out around town to shops and passerbys. There’s a lot of media snapshots taken in Harajuku, so I thought it would be good to have these buttons show up to spread the word that Japan would be okay. So that’s one of the ways I promoted Harajuku. It was actually the first area in Tokyo to see the return of foreign tourists, and I heard later on that the Mighty Harajuku project played a part in that.

Itoi

That’s also when a florist across the street from our office was handing out yellow daisies on the street. They said that now was the time to have bright flowers around. So they were handing out flowers while you were handing out pins.

Masuda

Yeah.

Itoi

Come to think of it, I also made a point to write every day, “Tokyo is doing well.” Sure, there were people in Tokyo that were freaking out, but I wrote it every day with the thought, “Sure, things are hard, but can’t you see that here in Tokyo we’re the ones in a position to be helping out?” But in the end, people just got very angry with me about that.

Masuda

I, too, got a lot of e-mails telling me I had no tact. But the project made waves all over the world when a girl in Australia uploaded a picture of her holding a sign that said “We vow to ‘MIGHTY HARAJUKU!’ Stay genki!” So people in Los Angeles and cities all over the world followed suit and started uploading pictures of their support on social media. That’s when I first realized how incredible social media could be.

Itoi

I only used social media when I had to, and I didn’t really give much thought to it in that regard. But the energy surging through social media around that time practically had it rattling. It was amazing.

Masuda

It really was.

2016-12-06-Tue

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