The History of Amekaji: From Ginza Ivy to Heavy Duty and the Shibuya Schools

Amekaji, the Japanese contraction of ‘American casual’, is usually told as a story about jeans. It is better told as a story about teaching. Over forty years, a handful of Japanese tailors, editors, photographers and shopkeepers taught a country how to dress like a Princeton undergraduate, then like a Pacific Northwest woodsman, then like a Californian surfer, and finally how to make the clothes more faithfully than the Americans had. This is that history in order, with the dates that accounts agree on and a note wherever they do not.

Occupation and the first jeans

After 1945, American surplus and used clothing entered Japan through the black markets that grew around the stations. In Ueno, the stalls of Okachimachi’s ‘America Alley’ sold jeans to a public that had seen none, and the district merged into Ameyoko; whether that name comes from ame, candy, or from America is undecided. These were the first Levi’s and Lee jeans most Japanese people ever saw. When import rules eased in 1956, trading houses began to bring in Levi’s and Lee officially, and in 1963 the Canton jeans of Ishi Trading are judged the likely first true American-style jeans made in Japan. Big John, from Maruo Hifuku in Kojima, is also called the first; Heddels dates Big John to 1967, while another account gives April 1965. The claim is unresolved.

Ishizu and the Ivy school

The central figure is Kensuke Ishizu, born in Okayama on 20 October 1911 and dead on 24 May 2005. He opened Ishizu Shoten in Minami-ku, Osaka, in 1951, and it became VAN in 1954, a name taken from the tabloid Vanguard. That same year he joined the editorial team of Otoko no Fukushoku, the men’s magazine that became Men’s Club. Between the shop and the magazine he built the first Japanese fashion system: a look, a retailer and a publication that agreed with one another. The look was Ivy, the button-down, blazer and chino of the American college. It is often said that Ishizu designed the blazers of the 1964 Olympic team; Japanese Wikipedia calls that inaccurate and credits a Kanda tailor, Yasuyuki Mochizuki.

Ginza, summer 1964

In the summer of 1964 young people began to gather on Miyuki-dori in Ginza carrying VAN paper bags and wearing the Ivy uniform. They were called the Miyuki-zoku. W. David Marx estimates about 700 at the peak. Heibon Punch had launched on 28 April. A VAN meeting at Yamaha Hall drew about 2,000, and Ishizu is reported to have told them to stop loitering. In September the police cleared the street ahead of the Olympics: Marx gives 19 September and Japanese Wikipedia 12 September, with some two hundred taken to Tsukiji police station. Whichever date is right, the pattern was set. Japanese youth style would be a street phenomenon, photographed, named and policed.

Take Ivy, 1965

The following year the photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida travelled to American campuses with the writers Toshiyuki Kurosu and Hajime ‘Paul’ Hasegawa and Ishizu’s eldest son, Shosuke, on a trip planned as a VAN film. Eight campuses were planned and six reached, mostly Dartmouth and Princeton. Take Ivy, published by Fujingaho in 1965, was a catalogue of what American students actually wore, and the title is a joke on Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’. The book reached a wider Western audience through the 2010 powerHouse edition.

From Ivy to Heavy Duty

By the 1970s the Ivy look had hardened into uniform, and the illustrator Yasuhiko Kobayashi proposed an alternative: an outdoor version of Ivy, drawn from American mountain and outdoor wear. Men’s Club named it Heavy Duty Ivy, and within months it was simply Heavy Duty. It is the first appearance of the idea that American casual means American workwear and outdoor gear, which is where amekaji went next.

California arrives

  • 1975. The Made in U.S.A. catalogue, from the staff of Heibon Shuppan and edited by Jiro Ishikawa, ran to 274 pages and sold about 150,000 copies. It borrowed the format of the Whole Earth Catalog, and a second volume followed in 1976.
  • February 1976. Beams opened a small ‘American Life Shop’ in Harajuku.
  • 1976. Popeye began, edited first by Yoshihisa Kinameri, and moved the taste from mountain gear to California.
  • 1978. VAN filed for reorganisation on 6 April and was declared bankrupt on 12 October, with debts of about ¥50 billion; Ralph Lauren was licensed to Seibu the same year.
  • 1979. Brooks Brothers opened in Aoyama and Hot-Dog Press launched on 23 May.

Shibuya casual

Here the accounts part company. Marx says that affluent Tokyo teenagers devised amekaji in the mid-1980s as a looser, sportier alternative to the Preppy look, with Shibuya as its headquarters. Japanese Wikipedia says that shibukaji, Shibuya casual, spread nationally and was then renamed amekaji, absorbing earlier American styles after the fact. Both agree on the mechanism: teams formed on Shibuya’s Center Gai from about 1983 to 1986, magazines carried the look nationwide in 1989, and around 1990 it divided into kirekaji, the clean, East Coast branch, and ‘hard amekaji’, the biker branch. No first printed use of the word amekaji is documented, and none is claimed here.

The reproduction age

The final turn was from wearing American clothes to making them. Toyo Enterprise, founded by Susumu Kobayashi on 18 November 1965, launched Sugar Cane in 1975 and Buzz Rickson’s in 1993. Studio D’Artisan began in 1979 and made its DO-1 jeans in 1986; Evisu was launched in 1991, Warehouse in 1995, The Flat Head in 1996 and Samurai and Pure Blue Japan in 1997. The belief that Japan bought Levi’s old shuttle looms is a myth, according to Mikiharu Tsujita of Fullcount. What these makers did was more modest and more important: they read the originals closely and reproduced them stitch for stitch. Details are in The Osaka Five and Popular Amekaji Brands.

Where the story stands

Nepenthes opened in 1989 and United Arrows in 1989 to 1990; Ron Herman’s first Japanese store followed in 2009. W. David Marx’s book Ametora, published in 2015, carried the story back to America. The wardrobe itself now covers every period at once: Ivy blazers, Heavy Duty parkas, flight jackets, selvedge denim and the repro boots to go under them. The guide to amekaji explains how to wear it, and our Ametora essay takes up the book.

Why Japan

Japanese wardrobes kept what Americans threw away. Many of the jackets, jeans and boots bought in Tokyo and Osaka as acts of devotion were stored with their tags, boxes and papers, which is one reason a flight jacket or a pair of Evisu from Japan so often arrives in good condition.

In the archive now

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Index terms: history of amekaji · amekaji origins · ametora · take ivy · van jacket · kensuke ishizu · miyuki-zoku · heavy duty ivy · men’s club japan · popeye magazine · shibukaji · japanese reproduction denim · american casual japan

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