Also if its any consolation it wasn’t better in the 70s/80s (I grew up then!) and those Japanese kids are only going to get 2-3 years of “freedom” to dress like that.

The lucky ones are just going to end up sat behind desks or in labs at places like Toshiba, Sony and Panasonic doing 12-16 hour workdays to design our new laptops and MP3 players, and they will be back in normal suits rather than trying to dress like cartoon characters…

The unlucky ones are gonna think they’ve made it big in movies, but only end up in cheap porno done by some sleazy 50 year old man, and then when it ends up online and their horrified parents find out and disown them they will end up getting into worse addictions/mental health issues and even gassing themselves with a portable barbecue in their bedsits – this is the side of Japanese / East Asian street/alternative culture they don’t often tell you about… (ironically its now more chilled out in South China anyway!)

Yet here in England if you ignore the jealousy of your own agegroup you can in fact get away with being “different” for the rest of your life provided you are otherwise a decent person….