Ura-Harajuku: A Reader’s Guide to the Back Lanes and the Labels That Made Them

Harajuku is the name the world learned. Ura-Harajuku, the back of Harajuku, is the name for what lay behind it: lanes too narrow to be famous, which became, from the early 1990s, the address of a small circle of friends and of the labels they made. A magazine of Japanese street culture describes the district as a labyrinth of lanes and narrow alleys, and sets it against Takeshita Street, the vivid street most people picture when they hear the word Harajuku. The name is shortened to Urahara.

This is a reader’s guide to that district as a story rather than a street: nineteen names, set in the order of their beginnings, and the people who stand between them. It is a chapter of The Fashionista Bible, kept inside the Japonista Universe, and each name has a room in the shop where pieces gather as the archive grows. The chapters that follow take the labels in clusters; this page gives the map.

The dates here come from the labels’ own pages and from named articles, listed under References. Where they disagree, the text says so, and interpretation is marked as our reading.

The Lanes Behind the Street

The same magazine places Cat Street in the area, running between Omotesando and Shibuya, and records that it held vintage shops, galleries, independent boutiques and cafés. Its account of the 1980s is a brief one: Tokyo was urbanising fast and consuming harder, and young people in the alleys pushed back against mainstream brands, drawing on punk, skate and hip-hop. It credits Hiroshi Fujiwara, Nigo and Jun Takahashi with turning Harajuku into a hub of youth fashion, and describes the district today as a place of street art, stickers, independent boutiques, galleries and pop-up shops, with newer names such as SK8THING and Cav Empt.

That is nearly all the geography the pages give, and this guide adds none. It is enough. A district of this kind is better described by who passed through it than by where its pavements run.

Before the Labels

The story begins with a column rather than a shop. In 1988 Hiroshi Fujiwara and Kan Takagi, performing as Tinnie Punx, released a song called “Last Orgy” on the Major Force label, and were then invited to write a column of the same name for Takarajima, a magazine devoted mainly to subcultures. It covered whatever its writers were interested in: fashion, films, music. A later column, begun in 1991 under the title “AZ” and renamed “Last Orgy 2”, was written by Nigo and Jun Takahashi and ran until 1994. The page that tells this says the column inspired Nigo to move to Tokyo and enrol at Bunka Fashion College, where he met Takahashi, and that it helped create the Urahara scene. Treat that as one writer’s account; it is a good one. The full circle is drawn in The Fujiwara Orbit: Goodenough, AFFA and the Making of a Scene.

Nineteen Names in the Order of Their Beginnings

Above the line below are the thirteen Tokyo labels; beneath it are the six houses from Paris and the United States that the Tokyo labels read, answered or, in two cases, brought home. Markers are placed by year only, and the year is the one this guide settles on, with the disputes noted in the table.

Two Lanes, One Conversation

It would be tidy to say that the back lanes invented themselves. The record does not allow it. Fujiwara was, in the words of one account, the Tokyo member of the International Stüssy Tribe, and the Californian label’s first tribe party was held in Japan, dated to 1990 by one of its members. Supreme opened three stores in Japan within a single year, 1998. Ron Herman, a Los Angeles shop, entered Japan in 2009 and was bought by its Japanese partner ten years later. And in Paris, Martin Margiela made a boot from the divided-toe tabi sock of Japan, while Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto stood behind the whole idea that clothes could be an argument.

Our reading: the district is best understood as two lanes that ran side by side. In one, Tokyo friends made labels from records, motorcycles, uniforms and vintage; in the other, foreign houses were taken in, translated and sometimes returned with interest. The chapters on Stüssy: Surf Origins and the International Tribe, Supreme in Japan: Six Doors and a Kinship with the Back Lanes and Ron Herman: California as Curated from Tokyo follow the second lane. The first runs through everything else, and through the earlier essays on Harajuku and irony, Undercover, visvim and the streetwear field guide.

A Reading Order

• The Fujiwara Orbit: Goodenough, AFFA and the Making of a Scene: the circle round one man: a column, a record label, a T-shirt label and a shop.
• Neighborhood, WTAPS and the Militarisation of Streetwear: two Tokyo labels that borrowed the vocabulary of uniform, and what the borrowing meant.
• N.HOOLYWOOD and SOPHNET.: Two Houses of Considered Uniform: a vintage buyer’s house and a football club that does not exist.
• Rock, Print and Reverence: Hysteric Glamour, Number (N)ine and WACKO MARIA: three labels that wear their records on the outside.
• Stüssy: Surf Origins and the International Tribe: the surf mark that went round the world and found a tribe in Tokyo.
• Supreme in Japan: Six Doors and a Kinship with the Back Lanes: six Japanese doors and a quiet kinship.
• Ron Herman: California as Curated from Tokyo: a Los Angeles shop that Tokyo took up and later bought.

For the wider frame, the The Japonista Thesis sets the district in the longer story from Japonisme to Japonista, and the Encyclopedia dates every label named here.

Finding the Pieces

Every label above has its own room in the shop, with a black-square cover. A room fills as pieces arrive, and its description records season, size and condition, because for labels of this kind the season on the inside tag is often the best guide to dating a piece. Nothing here is a promise of stock; the rooms are simply where a piece will be found if one exists.

After a particular label, season or collaboration from this district? Our Hunting Salon™ searches across Japan's private collector circles on your behalf.

Questions and answers

What does Ura-Harajuku mean?

It means the back of Harajuku: the lanes behind the famous street. It is shortened to Urahara.

Which of the nineteen labels began first?

Comme des Garçons dates from 1969 and Ron Herman from 1976. Among the Tokyo labels of the back lanes, Hysteric Glamour is the earliest, launched in 1984.

Where do these labels sit in the shop?

Each has a room, linked in the table above, and the Fashionista Bible Encyclopedia gives the dates and founders for each.

References

Dates and figures in this chapter were checked against these pages. Where accounts differ, the text says so.

• Yokogao: The Complete History of Ura-Harajuku
• Yokogao: Nowhere, the Tiny Tokyo Shop That Revolutionized Streetwear
• Yokogao: Who Is Hiroshi Fujiwara
• Sabukaru: Last Orgy, the Legacy of Japan’s Most Important Fashion Column
• Sabukaru: An Ura-Hara Champion, Goodenough
• Wikipedia: A Bathing Ape
• Highsnobiety: Neighborhood
• Heddels: WTAPS
• WTAPS: feature
• Hypebeast: Hirofumi Kiyonaga, HB100
• END.: SOPHNET. 20th anniversary
• Hypebeast: AFFA
• Fashionsnap: Daisuke Obana
• Mr Porter: WACKO MARIA
• Sabukaru: WACKO MARIA, the Anti-Hero of Fashion
• NSS Magazine: Hysteric Glamour
• Complex: Stüssy oral history
• Highsnobiety: Supreme store guide
• MR Magazine: Ron Herman turns 45
• Wrong Weather: Maison Margiela’s Tabi

Continue reading

• The Fujiwara Orbit: Goodenough, AFFA and the Making of a Scene
• Neighborhood, WTAPS and the Militarisation of Streetwear
• N.HOOLYWOOD and SOPHNET.: Two Houses of Considered Uniform
• Rock, Print and Reverence: Hysteric Glamour, Number (N)ine and WACKO MARIA
• Stüssy: Surf Origins and the International Tribe
• Supreme in Japan: Six Doors and a Kinship with the Back Lanes
• Ron Herman: California as Curated from Tokyo
• The Fashionista Bible
• Encyclopedia
• Directory of Japanese Fashion Designers
• Collector Guides

Index terms: ura-harajuku · urahara · harajuku backstreets · japanese streetwear history · goodenough · nowhere · a bathing ape · undercover · neighborhood · wtaps · sophnet · n.hoolywood · wacko maria · hysteric glamour · number (n)ine · stüssy · supreme japan · ron herman · maison margiela tabi · hiroshi fujiwara · nigo · jun takahashi · cat street