Kamikaze Girls: An alternative and queer retrospective

Light spoilers for Kamikaze Girls

Ah, Kamikaze Girls. I’ve shouted a lot in reaction to various Discotek rescues, from Gunbuster to Berserk among others, but nothing had me screaming and shouting around the room like the Kamikaze Girls announcement. I never imagined that Discotek would ever license one of my favorite movies, let alone the movie that completely changed the course of my life, and continues to help me reflect with every watch. The film was formative to me in my high school years, and rewatching it recently with the Discotek release made me realize the impact it had on my gender, my sexuality, my friendships with others, my self-expression, and self-acceptance.

For those unfamiliar, let me get you situated. Kamikaze Girls is a coming-of-age comedy film about two teenage girls in the rural town of Shimotsuma in Ibaraki Prefecture. Momoko, a lolita with a very dysfunctional family with a heart only reserved for fashion brand Baby The Stars Shine Bright, meets Ichiko, an intimidating bosozoku girl with a bike so modified you can’t tell it’s a moped. Ichiko admires Momoko’s defiant independence, even as Momoko is ungrounded and detached; and Momoko learns to admire Ichiko’s dedication to her individuality, even if it drives her up a wall. As they learn more about each other, Momoko and Ichiko grow and change one another as they journey through unrequited love, teenage rebellion, life-changing opportunities, working through their faults, and embracing themselves even more than before. Enhanced by iconic J-Pop and J-Rock music of the era from artists like Tommy Heavenly⁶, an original soundtrack by Yoko Kanno, super-saturated visuals, and utterly unpredictable yet great acting, you can see why it was impactful for many viewers and myself.

Like Momoko, I also grew up in the middle of nowhere, in deep rural Northern California for eight years and then in the Marshall Islands for another ten before moving back to the United States. Being one of the only two neurodivergent people I would ever meet in my K-12 schooling left me ostracized from my peers, so I spent my mostly lonely days on the internet. I spent a lot of my tween and teen years on Myspace and LiveJournal, among others. I remember looking through Japanese alternative fashion blogs and sites, and I would always flip through scans of Gothic & Lolita Bible to admire everything new from Black Peace Now, Union Jack, Na+H, and Atelier Boz. I remember feeling so amazed at the people who would wear aristocratic fashion and goth-punk. Eventually, I came across this street snap from the sixth volume of the GLB, and it made me stop in my tracks.

It was uphill from there. I fell in love so fast, and then, when I started the ninth grade at thirteen years old, I was led to a little YouTube link, in a crummy 360p resolution, and it was a movie called Kamikaze Girls. Just like how Momoko had a shot-at-point-blank moment in regards to how she fell in love with lolita fashion, Kamikaze Girls gave me that moment too, pushing my love for the fashion forward along with allowing me to look further into myself.

Around the same time, I was wrestling with my sexuality, and Kamikaze Girls was one of the many smoking guns as a teenager that shoved me closer to reality. The first thing I noticed the moment that Momoko and Ichiko met was the thick sapphic undercurrent between the two of them. Nakashima Tetsuya lays the “tough delinquent girl meets airheaded femme” trope on thick. The gay vibes of this movie hit you like a slap across the face—and they only become stronger with the Discotek release. One thing the old YouTube subtitles did not have were the song lyrics to any of the lyrical songs on this track. With the song lyrics included, the sapphicness is front and center in every scene. Calling it an undercurrent or subtext does it a disservice, even during scenes where the musical choices arguably don’t quite fit.

Even at the time, I always thought Momoko and Ichiko were going on dates. They often went to the “Forest of the Aristocrats” cafe, where Momoko would already go to tune out reality; while she was reluctant at first, she invited Ichiko into that space with her, letting herself be more vulnerable. As the film continues, Momoko slowly opens up more to Ichiko, even if that path was not necessarily linear. Looking back on it now, this certainly spoke to me on what I needed in a relationship: I wanted to let someone into the space where I found solace and share that space with them, and to join them in their safe space as well.  

Eventually, Momoko’s sweet teasing starts to come through: she teases Ichiko for her crush on Ryuji (because it was 2004, so a thin nod to heterosexuality was expected) by complimenting her on how beautiful she was; she even, quite literally, calls her “My dear Ichigo!” upon finding out her real “lame” name. Momoko lights up again when she realizes they share an appreciation for hand embroidery, opening up more as Ichiko also lets her dweeb flag fly.

With that,  my queerness swirled. All these realizations of what I wanted in a relationship affirmed to me that, yes, I not only wanted a boyfriend, but I maybe wanted a girlfriend, too! To be frank, it cemented my taste in girls. Oh, to have a partner with a tough, confident-ish exterior who was a dork behind closed doors!  Regarding Ichiko alone though, even with Momoko out of the picture, her admiration for Akimi, her biker gang’s beloved leader, also felt wildly queer to me at the time. This scene specifically contains both bisexual lighting and sparkles coming off her body. This was more concretely affirming to me that, yes, it was quite normal to feel this way about girls; this over the moon, and yes, this rabidly fixated. 

Another thing that Kamikaze Girls really helped me reflect on as a teenager was the topic of friendship. At the time, I had only just learned I was autistic, and that my family chose to not tell me about it. I felt kinship with Momoko when she imagined a talk show and stated she could not connect with other people because of who she was, or when she said she will likely die alone in a cheap apartment in a Baby dress. At the same time, I had a strong desire to connect with others, but I felt like I did not know where to start.

With this, I began to root for Momoko. I wanted her to learn to love connecting with others, or maybe just one other, even though I struggled greatly to make friends at the time. This is why I loved her unlikely friendship with Ichiko right from the beginning, obvious sapphic elements aside. Even though their dynamic had a lot of friction at the start, I wanted their friendship to grow and blossom so much. I wanted to find unlikely friendships in the same way that Momoko did, or even new acquaintances, like Ryuji. While it might have taken a while, I did manage to make lifelong friends myself, and I’d like to think my teenage self would be rather proud of me.

Out of every friendly scene in this movie, the montage of Momoko and Ichiko in Daikanyama together hit me hardest as a teenager. I love how it was filmed with a camcorder home-video look, like a teenager filming a fashion video in the style of an old-school lolita street snap. It feels intimate, something you keep in a memory box and pull out for old time’s sake. It helped me reflect on what I wanted in a friend; I always seek out this kind of intimacy in a platonic sense. I love people, and loved them then too, and this movie truly pushed me to continue to never give up hope in people despite the obstacles, despite dark times in the world like right now, despite anything.

The most important aspect of Kamikaze Girls to me is how it molded my own self-expression. To preface, one thing that I picked up on on my most recent viewing is that everyone in Shimotsuma dresses several years behind the times. The movie was released in 2004, and the fashion sense in that small town is very turn of the millennium. I felt that way growing up in a very remote part of the world. Everyone wore the same thing that felt a little, or very, dated, and anybody who had a modicum of difference in self-expression was either ostracized by their peers, made fun of, or treated like they did not exist. However, Momoko still wore lolita, proudly, and in turn paved her own identity (flaws and all) despite her surrounding society and very immature parents. I always admired how she persisted, and that helped me persist in learning to understand myself more, especially my queerness and how I wanted to express all of me, all the time.

That brought more thoughts regarding my gender as well. As I was discovering how to really express myself, I started realizing I was experiencing gender dysphoria, too. I had always felt this way to a degree, but I didn’t really understand what it was or where it came from. It felt like my real self was trapped in cellophane; or like a piece of my soul was peeling off like the bark of a madrone tree. It was less of an oppressive feeling and more of a confusing one. While the realization didn’t hit me immediately, as I learned more about the fashion I eventually had another shot-at-point-blank realization. I realized that the separation that I was experiencing was a lifelong disconnection from womanhood itself, despite that femininity not peeling away. 

In fact, that femininity grew stronger and stronger as that separation widened until I cut off the frayed ends. Lolita fashion’s defiance of traditional feminine norms, and call to embrace femininity despite what patriarchal society tells you, regardless of gender, spoke to me. There was no going back, for Momoko or for me. Lolita fashion’s relationship with my gender changed as I grew older. Despite being attached to lolita fashion from the beginning, I worried that I’d lose my love for the fashion as I got to know my gender better. Fortunately as I grew older, my attachment to lolita fashion’s very feminist origins took root deeper in my mind, and I actually clung to it more, embracing that hyperfemininity even further. As I moved out, and continued to reflect on Kamikaze Girls with every rewatch, that connection to political and gender expression grew even stronger from before. I wish to hold that sense of lifelong rebellion alongside my identity eternally.

To close out, I want to discuss Kamikaze Girls as it speaks to my own pursuit of self-acceptance. I love the scenes of all the people Momoko meets or observes through her life—whether it’s other townspeople or people she sees on television—speaking to her as her internal monologue. They are sometimes cruel or critical of her in her mind, reflecting her own doubts, but as Momoko dives deeper into her relationship with Ichiko and lolita fashion, those messages slowly become more encouraging. Momoko learned more about herself, whether she liked it or not. She couldn’t use her cold, dismissive attitude to push away her problems any further if she wanted to be closer to others—to Ichiko. She had to be brave, to learn to let complicated feelings in and to take risks in order to truly like herself and others. 

Through her friendship, her care, and even her queerness, she learned to love herself as well. She took those risks, and those rewards of closeness with others enriched her life, even if those people connected with her in an unconventional way. Lolita fashion, with its feminist roots, already enriched her life significantly, but being pushed by circumstances and her own actions, helped her find both her creativity and people who valued her whole self, whether that was Ichiko or Akinori Isobe, the co-founder and co-designer for Baby the Stars Shine Bright himself (a brand that, incidentally, has continued to embrace gender nonconformity and queerness over the years).

I think about that quote from Momoko’s younger self near the end of the film: “Instead of just enduring your misfortune, you need courage to hold on to happiness.” I think about all the mistakes I made from my teenage years and onward, even in the recent past, with friends and loved ones, and especially with myself. However, I still feel like every risk I took ended up being worth it. Whether it was my own foray into wearing lolita fashion even as I near my thirties, any time I have been honest with a friend, every tough conversation I have had, or any confession that went poorly, it was worth it. Lolita fashion and what it inspires really helped me learn to love and express myself, and to accept myself as I am. 

There were many times I wore lolita, and pushed myself creatively with it, and it didn’t work. I was a sweet lolita for some time, but I always wondered why it never worked for me, particularly in terms of my gender. But as I started to wear more classic lolita, I was able to experience gender euphoria and my confidence again, and was able to flex my creative muscles in a way I hadn’t before. Even when Momoko battles a group of  bosozoku girl gangs during Ichiko’s challenge, she finds the ability to bullshit her way through trouble, and does so with confidence. Watching every step of her journey through lolita fashion, her new friend, and her creativity gave her newfound strength. As a teenager I wanted that strength for myself, that radical queer self-acceptance, and lolita fashion truly gave it to me.