Kabuki-chō: a wonderland of desire and temptation, secrets around every corner. Japan’s biggest red-light district; a maze of neon-slicked pavement where tourist traps share elevators with whorehouses, loan sharks with blowjob bars. For the gen-z escorts whose faces plaster entire facades in advertisements boasting of their nightly earnings, it’s a place to get rich quick, or die trying. And for other zoomers with nowhere left to go, Kabuki-chō has become a place to try dying. A jacked-up couple, 14 and 16 years old, jumped from the APA hotel roof after announcing their double suicide on Tiktok. Dozens of women in their twenties have since jumped from Kabuki-chō rooftops, in some cases streaming their final descent to online audiences, or slamming into pedestrians below.
They are the “Toyoko kids:” the unstable subject matter of Japan’s latest moral panic, and when it is not their suicidal tendencies being problematized, it is their contagious nihilism. On any given day, flocks of youth gravitate toward Toyoko square, sandwiched between the Toho cinema complex’s Godzilla effigy and the Trumpian splendor of the newly-built Kabuki-chō Tower. At dusk they coalesce into an amorphous crowd that fills the square with shouts, shrieks of laughter and vocaloid beats from portable speakers. At dawn, limp bodies and piles of waste litter the squalid public space. Over the last thirty-six months, Toyoko square has become Tokyo’s Tenderloin, the quintessential gathering place for thousands of gen-Z losers who, like the protagonist of Shinkai Makoto’s Weathering With You, trickle down through post-growth Japan’s increasingly porous social safety net.
And then, in one corner of the square, there’s a white garden chair, drowning in flowers: the throne of Howl Kalashnikov, Fisher King of the Toyoko kids. Everyone knows Howl, but no one knows much about him. Like his Byronic namesake from Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, Howl dressed flamboyantly and sports a mane of shoulder-length hair that regularly changes color from blonde to red to purple. He sips chūhai absent-mindedly, inquisitive eyes scanning for activity on the plaza through thick designer frames and blue color contacts.
There is a certain lasciviousness to the tales of Howl’s charisma; a titillated silence as he indulges his underlings and disrobes, revealing an absurdly chiseled torso covered in a monochromatic hierarchy of angels, crowned by a backpiece of Saint Michael subduing a serpentine Satan above an ominous “dead or alive” blastover in outsized Chicano lettering. In the last known footage of Howl, angelic wingtips protrude from behind the heavyweight fabric of a jail-issued sweater as he shouts to the camera: “I’ll be out soon to cook you guys another meal.”
Perhaps this failed promise was Kalashnikov’s last gift to his subjects, since I have yet to meet a single person that liked Howl’s food. He always showed up on the same electric beach cruiser, unloading a folding table and tub after tub of his signature dish — a greasy tomato pasta, generously dressed in cheese powder and tabasco — enough to serve the entire square of freaks and delinquents. That’s how a lot of Toyoko kids remember Howl: they partook of his gift, acknowledged his authority, and even now that Howl is dead they can’t forget about his mediocre marinara.
Howl Kalashnikov was a terrible cook, but that’s not why the cops killed him. It is doubly ironic that he’d be brought in for statutory rape — suspected of seducing an underage runaway languishing in the square — because of course Howl and his posse, the Manjikai (e.g. “swastika society”), did not simply sling spaghetti. To the mass media, Howl portrayed himself as a big man, a pillar of law and order: “I stop fights when they break out, and I also monitor the Toyoko Kids to make sure that bad adults stay away from them”. In other words, he acted both as moral police dispensing vigilante justice in a youth movement celebrating decadence, sexual deviance, and self-harm, and as the guardians of vulnerable youth beset from all directions by predatory “adults.”
I ponder the possibility that, despite the ethnographic pretense of my “reaching out” to Howl and the street freaks that recognize his authority, I am one of the “bad adults” that he sees preying on the plaza’s population. After all, the various academics skulking about the square do have something in common with the pimps and johns, the content creators and liberal journalists also hovering vulture-like above the square: an expectation of misfortune, of the breadcrumb trails of tragedy and trauma that allow us to explain their current stupefaction, to generalize their plight and our pity. But it’s just not that simple: Sasaki Chihuahua, another resident scholar on the Toyoko square, remarks that the Toyoko kids have learnt to intuit these expectations, rehearsing, often adeptly, narratives of trauma that fit them. Here, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, our care and concern summons forth the very figure of delinquency we set out to find.
And to what extent is that expectation mystified by a strange yearning, our pity tempered by fascination, our appetite for misfortune palliated by an edgelord appreciation for horror and our moralism by the same salaciousness that surrounded street freak stories of Howl himself? There’s just something about the deviants huddling over bags and bottles in Toyoko square, as if their abandon points us in the direction of some vital excess… as if their pissing the time away here offers to reveal the contours of a new cultural paradigm – a Zeitgeist akin to the “endless everyday” (owari naki nichijō) decried by cultural critics in the late 90’s, through which high-school gyaru with no future prospects sought to escape a world obsessed with meaning. Even as we look askance at the street freak, we look to her as a harbinger of sorts; even, perish the thought, as if she’s on to something.
And yet, we cannot help but entertain the media-driven moral panics that laments the vulnerability and suffering of working-class youth, while simultaneously deploring them for their substance abuse, casual promiscuity, and self-harm. We did not demand answers when Howl was arrested last June, nor when he suddenly and inexplicably died in jail in November. And when ten dozen cops unceremoniously cleaned out the plaza this July, we had nothing to say about it. Howl Kalashnikov was no angel. He was probably a rapist. He was also an obstacle to the victimology insisted upon by us vultures; a mediator who dared suggest that the Toyoko kids are going to be alright and need neither help nor pity from the “adults” that already failed them. With Howl six feet under, with his empty garden chair bobbing in a sea of cheap flowers amidst the human flotsam of Toyoko Plaza, we retreat to well-rehearsed expectations of tragedy and trauma, reform and redemption. I miss him, his shitty marinara, and how hard he made that entire prospect.
– Love Oskarson Kindstrand, Tokyo University of the Arts
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