Why teaching in Japan was so fun

Short skirts survive the deep-freeze in Niigata
BY ERINA DOI, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

NIIGATA--In this snowy area along the Sea of Japan, it has long been a mystery why high school girls insist on wearing their school uniform skirts so short, exposing bare thighs to freezing air.

The skirts round here were so mini that four years ago, a photo weekly magazine proclaimed Niigata Prefecture schoolgirl skirt lengths to be the nation's shortest.

The battle over hemlines is now heating up again between teachers and students.

Schools began a new prefecture-wide campaign this month to freeze out micro-minis for the sake of students' health and safety.

"Scholastic success and skirt lengths can both be lengthened if you have a can-do spirit," says one poster.

Another says miniskirts "lack feminine grace."

The moves came after a series of attacks last year on trains in which the uniform skirts worn by senior high girls were slashed by strangers.

After trying for years to convince students otherwise, teachers are still puzzled as to why girls prefer short skirts both summer and winter.

"It is not good for their health if their legs are too cold," said Hiroshi Uchikawa, principal at Niigata municipal Kohshi Senior High School and leader of the campaign.

But one 16-year-old named Eri says she doesn't care about the cold--or the leers men cast at her legs.

Eri, a first-year student at a private high school, said what she does care about is how other girls see her.

"At my school, some girls wear longer skirts, but they belong to a different group," Eri said. "My friends and I all wear short ones."

She was chatting with a friend in a family restaurant near JR Niigata Station. Her skirt was hitched up about 20 centimeters above her knees.

At school, it's a cat-and-mouse game, with teachers checking skirt lengths and girls complying--for a while.

During the skirt length examinations, the girls wear their skirts at permissible lengths. Later, when the checks are over, they roll up the waistbands.

Niigata schools, well aware of the tactics, once considered making the uniform skirt waistlines so bulky they would be hard to roll up.

Only a few schools adopted those skirt versions.

"Yet even at those schools, students resisted by somehow folding them," Uchikawa said.

Illustrator Nobuyuki Mori, 48, author of a book featuring girls' high school uniforms in Tokyo, agreed with Eri that how their peers see them does matter to students.

"To children these days, whether they look cool to their friends is important," he said.

But to Mori's eyes, Niigata skirts aren't really all that short. They just look shorter because of the short socks the girls wear with them.

Mori added that, in Tokyo, hemlines began creeping down in around 2000 and that now, uniform fashions are more diverse. Each school has its own "uniform culture."

Mafumi Usui, a professor of psychology at Niigata Seiryo University, says girls wear their skirts that short "only during high school years."

Because people want to fit into the roles society expects, young women quickly switch to more suitable clothing when they marry and become mothers, he said.

Eri and her friend Yui, 16, concurred that micro miniskirts would not look good on a 25-year-old, saying it would look "painful."

Kanae Higuchi, 19, who designed the posters at the Niigata College of Art and Design, used to wear her skirts mini when she was in high school.

But now the college student takes a different view.

"I'm worried they might freeze from those bare legs, and I think 'oh, no, their undies might be glimpsed' when they climb the stairs," she said.(IHT/Asahi: February 7,2009)

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