(This article was previously published in The Tokyo Shimbun . It has been modified from the original. Top photo: Uncle Schoolgirl in a photo shoot with a cosplayer in Harajuku)
If you’re not a fixture of the subculture promenades around Yoyogi Park, you’ve probably never heard of Uncle Schoolgirl. But as this middle-aged man tours Harajuku’s busy streets in his schoolgirl uniform, crowds start to form and smartphone shutters snap from every angle. “He’s so kawaii [cute]!” young hipsters in the area squeal. Local rumors are already claiming that an encounter with him can cure a person of life’s anxieties – but what does this unusual man want, and why does he do what he does?
I arrive in Harajuku, looking for a white mustache, a schoolgirl uniform, and a growing legend.
Sunday afternoon, Harajuku Station, Takeshita Entrance. Our appointment is in five minutes, but Uncle is already surrounded by a gallery of phone cameras. One leg lifted, he poses wryly for the onlookers, both his hands balled up into paws like a maneki-neko.*
*“Maneki-neko” – Beckoning cat. A type of cat statue, usually white, fat, and holding a giant gold coin. Often seen in shop windows or sold in souvenir shops.
“Nya~an!” he meows coyly.
Among the onlookers I meet Junna Ihara, 18, a graduate of an American high school who has returned to Japan to take his university entrance exams. “I learned about Uncle on Twitter,” he tells me excitedly.
Elsewhere in the crowd, I find Masatoshi Uchiyama, 23, a government employee from the city of Nagano. “When I go back home,” he explains, “These pictures will make for great stories to tell my coworkers.”
Foreign tourists line the streets as well, all photographing the unusual performance. “Where are you from?” Uncle Schoolgirl asks with a smile. “Have a happy trip!”
His fame, he explains, has skyrocketed since an appearance on Japanese TV this August.“The week after they broadcast the show, I came to Harajuku like I always do. But this time it took twenty minutes just to get to the ticket gate, and three hours just to make one trip around the town.”
The crowd today is so thick we can’t even move. I quickly give up on the photo shoot we’d planned for Takeshita-dōri, one of Harajuku’s major pedestrian streets. The crowd would never clear enough space for it.
By day, Uncle Schoolgirl goes by the name of Hideaki Kobayashi, a 52-year-old engineer who works for a printing company in Tokyo. He first became interested in women’s clothing, he says, during elementary school, when one of his classmates caused a huge sensation among the students when she was punished for lifting up her skirt.
Kobayashi, however, would have to wait a long time to indulge his curiosity. After elementary school, he enrolled in an all-male combined junior and high school, followed by an undergraduate course at the Waseda University Faculty of Science and Engineering that provided little interaction with female students. Kobayashi claims he was never very good with women anyway. He married after college, but the marriage did not last long. “I hated that the arguments were never logical.”
He then spent a long period experimenting with women’s outfits, at home and in secret. Uncle Schoolgirl’s “debut” came in 2010, when Kobayashi appeared in a schoolgirl uniform at an exhibition of doll photography, another of his hobbies. It felt good, he says, when people said he was “kawaii,” and before long he was showing up at ramen stands, wedding receptions, and even in the galleries at courtroom trials, dressed in his schoolgirl outfit. “I’m not really a woman, but who cares?” he explains defiantly.
In the summer of 2012, during a trip to France, Kobayashi went through customs and immigration in his costume. A frequent guest at anime conventions, this year he has already attended events in Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Thailand.
Word of his persona has spread quickly on social media, especially among middle and high school students. Every Saturday, he appears at media events in different parts of Japan.
“To be honest,” he confesses, “I don’t really know why I’m so popular. It’s not like cross-dressing is a new concept or anything.”
But Kiyoko Kato, his manager, suggests it is precisely this air of incredulity that makes him so appealing. “Uncle Schoolgirl is the kind of character who enjoys everything about his sudden fame – especially the ‘accident’ of suddenly being surrounded by crowds and not knowing why.” And his employers say he has gone out of his way to disassociate the character from his professional activities, noting that “from the beginning this has been an individual enterprise. As Uncle Schoolgirl, Kobayashi is conscientious about not revealing the name of his employer and operating on a scale that keeps his activities from harming the company’s reputation.”
Uncle himself, however, sees the schoolgirl persona as his “A-Side,” and describes his professional activities as Hideaki Kobayashi as his “B-Side.” As far as he’s concerned, Uncle Schoolgirl is his “main” personality. “Whether I become a worldwide spectacle or everyone suddenly stops paying attention, I want to keep doing this.”
For now, Uncle Schoolgirl strides majestically through crowded streets of Harajuku, armored in his favorite costume and endlessly nourished by that echoing word – “kawaii.”