#B-Style

[good-smile-company]

桜島麻衣 バニーVer.

http://www.goodsmile.info/ja/product/7862

[vicemag]

'B-stylers' Are Japanese Teens Who Want to Be Black

Dutch photographer Desiré van den Berg has spent the past seven months traveling around Asia. She lives in Hong Kong at the moment but when she was in Tokyo, back in December 2013, she met Hina, a 23-year-old who works at a trendy Tokyo boutique called Baby Shoop. Hina's shop has the tagline “Black for life.” She describes its products as “a tribute to Black culture; the music, the fashion, and style of dance.”

Hina's appearance is also loyal to what the Japanese call "B-style"—a contraction of the words "Black" and "Lifestyle" that refers to a subculture of young Japanese people who love American hip-hop culture so much that they do everything in their power to look as African American as possible.

I called up Desiré to find out more about her time photographing Hina and her gang.

VICE: How did you meet Hina? Desiré van den Berg: She appeared in a documentary about B-style a couple of years back, which I happened to watch. This is what got me interested in the culture. It took a lot of effort, but I eventually got in touch with her on Facebook, through other B-stylers. I said I wanted to take photos of her, and she actually thought that was pretty cool. It was all a bit of a hassle though, because Hina and the other B-stylers didn't speak a single word of English. We needed a translator both to make an appointment and at the actual first meeting, too.

How does that work in terms of translating rap lyrics? Hina speaks some English but not fluently. She does like to use some English slang when she speaks Japanese with her B-style friends, like finishing a sentence with "man" or using bad words like "motherfucker" jokingly.

Continue + More Photos

[blackfangirlsunite]

Black Fangirls Reviewing: B-gal style

B-style or B-gyaru is black style that is popular in Japan. From what I've gather this is the closest definition to what it's all about: emphasizes black culture in America especially music and dance related. Bgyaru usually do not wish to be black, they just admire the culture and the culture that hiphop has created within Japan.

Often in cultural appropriation, they say they are "appreciating" something. I don't really feel like this is the any sort of appreciation. The before stated link says this infamous video is a good source for how B-gals that work at b-styled stores,

The girl in the video, Hina, says “part of B-Style is that you do not look Japanese.” So there is a conscious effort in SOME cases to look black. Gyaru styles in general, you know the girls in animes/mangas with tan skin and blonde hair, often are based around tans but B-style is one of the dark, more permanent dark skin as going to tanning salons instead of just using concealer. The people who videoed young Hina also states B-gals “want dark skin like American hip hoppers,”

This doesn't sit right with me because their dark skin is to emulate hip hop and rmb stars so what makes it different than black face minstrel shows? African Americans have a complex history of hating their skin to light skinned, mulatto slaves being treated better, from team light skin and dark skin, skin bleaching, and light skinned African Americans still be given advantages in the work place and socially. Light skin people stay making fun of, mocking, and degrading dark skin. 

The problem with b-style isn't the hip hop or liking a certain type of style. It's the selling and commodifying of black culture, the cultural appropriation of black style is shameless when, if I were to act like that, I could risk getting fired, kicked out of school, being discriminated against or not taken seriously. Their fashion sense and co-option  of the history that came and shaped b-style and it's kind of insulting. But then again these are using the american experience(But there is a lot of anti-black sentiment in a lot of Asian countries and I know people how have had terrible experiences in Korea, China, and Japan)

But I feel like the whole sentiment can be summed up in "It's all fun and games until someone calls the police" then no one wants to be black, no one wants to be treated the way black people are treated, they just want the style, the hair, the talk, the body(since we all come in one shape, curvy but not fat) but none of the shit. This is speaking for white people who proudly call themselves wiggers. 

Also with this it's like

Japanese girl is into black culture: so cute and stylish! So cool

Black girl is into Japanese culture: eww what?! She doesn't belong here wrong! ugly!*enter racist comment here*

I've experience this first hand and a lot of shame comes with it.

(Also, you can't divorce certain aspects of hip hop. The hood is apart of hip hop. It it's, plain and simple. Call it what you like but that is part of hip hop.)

Things I like about B-style

I think it's actually pretty cute. It's stylish and I like a lot of the hair styles they pick because it does look nice.

You know T.I's wife Tiny? She looks just like her

But anyway, the main thing is that this in and of itself isn't bad. It's awesome that we have people admiring dark skin and black culture, things that get us demonized and hated here in America. I think there is a better way to appreciate black culture than this. This is fetishism to the highest degree. And Japanese (girls especially) people experience extreme fetishism as well. Part of the reason why I think that people are willing to accept B-gals doing this is because they feel like they are innocent little bunnies that are just having fun instead of treating them like real people who make real mistakes. Japanese girls aren't delicate flowers, they are breathing, thinking people. (I just need to start having this clause for all WOC because apparently it's not a given)

So maybe if it wasn't so disrespectful and just plain ignorant in some respects, it really reminds me off all those stupid woobies swearing their Japanese because they have a "japon" dress and say like four phrases in their language and love anime.

You don't know Japanese culture unless you actually immerse yourself in ALL aspects of it, not just the ones that are extra kawaii desu

You don't know Black culture unless you actually immerse yourself in ALL aspects of it, not just the Hip hop ones

Stop reducing people into one trait. It's terrible and just wrong. So no, I don't support b-gals or b-style and think it has some real major flaws that can't be ignored. That being said that with most things, as long as you are conscious of these facts, they aren't poisonous.  You can still love b-style and want to do it as long as you know and understand that your style doesn't exist in a bubble. It has a real effect.

So the conclusion: Consciously consuming a style like b-style is okay as long as you are aware of the real world implications it has.

Rebecca

[sakurafigures]

♡ Anis (Goddess of Victory: Nikke) - FREEing

[yamashitarules]

Starless - Mamiya Marie - B-style - 1/6 (Dragon Toy, FREEing)

[nprhuddle]

The story, in brief: Teen girls in Tokyo have started a trend of styling themselves in the mold of hip-hop. In contrast to the prevailing beauty ideals of light white skin and straight hair, "b-style" girls are tanning to darken their skin tone, braiding and cornrowing their hair.

Ran across this video in a MetaFilter thread in the middle of the night, and then found myself in one of those Internet wormholes where all of a sudden it was two hours later and I still just wanted to read more. There is so much that is fascinating about this phenomenon. E.G.: Hair extensions are a pretty entrenched part of black American fashion and the hip-hop aesthetic these girls are emulating, and many of those extensions are made from the hair of Asian women. E.G.: Beauty ideals in general, and how they get made, reinforced and subverted. E.G.: How notions of race and culture get translated from the US to Japan and vice-versa.

One commenter in the MetaFilter thread who seems to understand Japanese said that the video's translation is pretty rough, so take the subtitles with a grain of salt. But read the whole thread, it's fascinating. I'm going to excerpt one comment in particular:

We had maybe ten black people that I knew of in our school, and they always seemed interesting and with-it, and my grandmother had inadvertently (at first) taken me to see a string of blaxploitation films at the then-ruinous grand theater in downtown Baltimore, so I was primed for a keen interest in the curious world of blackness. Read through my Malcolm X and I was set. The man was not going to keep me down anymore—no sir.

I bought a couple dashikis at a yard sale up the street where the first multiracial couple in our neighborhood lived, and they were lovely, albeit the kind of funky plastic fantastic seventies dashikis you say in, say, a Pam Grier film, and not the properly traditional kind. I got up one morning, intent on honoring my African ancestry, which I presumed I had since all of humanity had sprung from the mother continent, and spent a good hour in the bathroom doing something atrocious and painful to my hair. I had hair that had a bit of the old oirish lilt to it, but nothing kinky, so I used my mother's turquoise rattail comb and ratted the [$%#@!] out of my hair until I had a huge, fluffy, off-center orb of hair-don't hanging around my pimply face like a cloud.

Pulled on the dashiki, touched up my frightening wad of hair, put on sandals because sandals seemed blacker than chukkaboots, and wore the bell bottom pants that were a hand-me-down from a girl cousin that my mother always claimed looked perfectly masculine, despite the embroidered butterfly on the backside, and walked to school instead of taking the bus, so I could maximize my reveal. I was fairly sure I looked superfly, though I suspect I was deluded in this belief.

Read through my special ed session in giddy anticipation, and was vibrating like a tuning fork in anticipation of being embraced in my new and hip identity, and— <read the rest at MeFi>

Also read through this very interesting thread at Clutch Mag. What's powerful about both this thread and the MeFi thread is that folks seem to very quickly reach the conclusion that "Is this racist blackface, or mostly harmless cultural appropriation?" is a really limited question, almost the least significant question this story raises. Instead, people are really wrestling with its causes and effects, which seems to be much more fertile territory.

[thefigureresource]

Anis [Goddess of Victory: Nikke] 1/4 scale from FREEing coming September 2024.

[sachi]

☆ Lum // Urusei Yatsura ☆ B-style / 1/4 / FREEing ☆ March 2024 ¥33,000 ☆ Sculpt Morikura Paint Yozakura Cooperation Dragoncraft

[good-smile-company]

纏流子 バニーVer. （再販）

http://www.goodsmile.info/ja/product/6145

[viceuk]

'B-STYLERS' ARE JAPANESE TEENS WHO WANT TO BE BLACK

[figurecollection]

Marisa Kirisame 1/4 Scale by FREEing, from Touhou Project

[sakurafigures]

♡ Usada Pekora (Hololive) - FREEing

[yuuyu1964]

Satoh Takeru  B-STYLE scan

[womackcreates-blog]

For those that don't know about the growing "B-STYLE"  aka Black Style in Japan, here is a video giving a pretty good insight into the lifestyle.

[yamashitarules]

To LOVEru Darkness - Sairenji Haruna - B-style - 1/4 - Bunny Ver. (FREEing)

[sachi]

☆ Creamy Mami // Mahou no Tenshi Creamy Mami ☆ B-Style / 1/4 / FREEing ☆ June 2022 ¥30,000 ☆ Sculpt Kohirou Paint yozakura