It’s 2021 and Vkei is a genre that’s getting older and further away from its mainstream peak, so it’s time to start looking back. There are lots of guides of varying quality written throughout the years chronicling basic show etiquette, furi moves, terms and other cultural information in Vkei, but old/lost bangya culture doesn’t really get enough of a spotlight in English despite a growing interest in 90s/00s nostalgia. Let’s take some time to look at the way bangya used to do things.
Black Trunks
Era: 1990s
A classic piece of bangya culture! Everyone should mourn the loss of these things, I yearn for them to be cool again so I can make my own. Day trips to other cities to catch your favorite band is a classic bangya activity, and in the 90s, you could carry what you needed to a show in style via these black trunks (黒トランク). Stickers were a popular merch item, so the obvious solution was to plaster your trunk in band logo stickers and magazine clippings to show your love. These things are iconic.
They haven’t exactly made a comeback, but many seasoned bangya still own theirs and share them on twitter as a fond piece of nostalgia. Also, interestingly enough, sukekiyo did release one as a merch piece in 2015, which is now vintage in its own right a whole 6 years later.
Anpintai/Fighting
Era: 1980s – 1990s?
Okay, putting “fighting” is kind of cheating, but 90s bangya were known for being pretty hard. Areas like Nagoya were known for having fans that fit the stereotype of tough older fans from bousouzoku motorcycle gangs (Soleil gya were considered especially dangerous), who supposedly carried knives, bats and wooden swords – although this may be an urban legend. Physical fights outside of venues or incidents of girls sequestering others to the venue bathroom to “have words” were known to happen, not to mention personal stories told online about gum in the hair, box cutter slashings, and platform boot foot-stompings. Obviously, this was discouraged by bands. Nowadays the warfare tends to be more psychological and done in the form of calling your target a slut over and over on an anonymous message board until she stops liking the same guy as you, although very rarely you might hear a story of gya assault that goes beyond excessive elbowing in a crowd.
“Anpintai” (安ピン隊) was a class of bangya known to bring safety pins to shows (presumably this was very easy to do considering the safety pin is a classic element of DIY punk clothing) in order to stab other attendees. Dir en grey and Pierrot were both known for Anpintai, and many stories of safety pin stabbing and full-on fistfights are told in relation to their famous rivalry & fanwars in the 1990s.
Tokkoufuku
Era: 1980s – 1990s?
Considering the association of bousouzoku motorcycle girls and early visual kei, this is a none-too-surprising entry on the list. Tokkoufuku (特攻服), literally “special attack clothing”, are the distinctive clothes worn by bousouzoku – generally some combination of boiler suit and military jacket. They are usually adorned with heavy embroidery including mottos and insignias. Visual kei fans have been known to get custom tokkoufuku with embroidery inspired by their favorite bands – this trend is especially notable among X JAPAN fans, presumably because the members themselves also wore tokkoufuku during the peak of bousouzoku culture.
Fans of Japanese and Korean idols (think TWICE, AKB48) and otaku (think Ensemble Stars, Love Live!) are also known to get customized tokkoufuku, so these badass pieces once emblematic of rebellious streetwise youths are now predominantly worn by nerds who couldn’t win a fight against a dakimakura. This trend is now mostly just a novelty/throwback when it appears nowadays in Visual kei, and it generally tends to be done for bands that have members firmly in their thirties or older.
Business Cards
Era: 1990s – early 2000s
Yeah, really. It used to be popular to make business cards (名刺) with your live name (few gya use their legal first name for gya activities even now). You would generally put your live name, contact information, and favorite member. Sometimes you’d find ones with cosplay photos or fanart if the individual was the artistic type. Exchanging these was how you kept in contact with gya friends! This was later usurped by the online Zenryaku Profile, which is also extremely dead.
Unofficial Fanclubs
Era: 1990s – Early 2000s
Official fanclubs are the standard now, but in extremely charming Web 1.0 fashion, the unofficial fanclub (私設ファンクラブ) was a big part of Visual kei – “President of an unofficial fanclub” appears on a lot of “How bangya are you? [90s gya edition]” style bingo sheets. It’s quite hard to find information on these now, but they seem to have ranged from simple fan groups with names (a practice that continued even after they stopped being categorized as fanclubs) to organizations with larger memberships and actual benefits like magazines, ticket information, membership cards, etc.
Fan-Launched Magazines/Doujinshi
Era: 1990s – Early 2000s
Back in the day, it wasn’t that uncommon for an enterprising bangya to just fire up her computer and launch her own magazine or news site. Many sites that were something like a fanmade version of visunavi.com cropped up in the early 00s, containing things like Q&As, interviews, serial columns, and new band spotlights. This isn’t something you see too often in the Japanese scene anymore – bands tend to go through sites run by corporations, industry people, or at least anonymous maintainers, as opposed to the named individuals of these past sites. Interestingly enough, the Western scene has managed to keep up the trend – our friends at vk.gy and Paradox Translations have started publishing original interviews after establishing themselves as reliable fan-maintained sources for visual kei information. A personal favorite of mine back in the day was Ark Project, which had a public folder full of (relatively) high quality flyer images available at one point. Even more interestingly, some of these sites launched mail order print publications simultaneously. Devil’s Night is a good example of a magazine and website initiative that produced physical issues run (at least originally) by a fan that still circulates once in a while.
Doujinshi (同人誌) was another part of the homemade printing culture of Vkei that deserves space here to be pondered over. In the 90s, Visual kei bands were insanely popular but also much more distanced from their fans than bands are now, plus they often adopted backstories straight out of a shoujo manga. Many fans expressed their fantasies of bandmen with their beautiful and seductive 500 year old vampire personas in the form of art, and this included doujinshi. Doujinshi are essentially fanmade comics – the word tends to be immediately associated with NSFW themes in the West, but the reality is that they range the gamut from simple slice of life/gag comics based on the members’ public images to dramatic R-18 BL stories. This culture mostly died out in favor of online art and story sharing, although if you attend lives and make bangya friends, you may be given postcards, stickers, or other self-produced printed fanart pieces as a gift, a practice that is somewhat reminiscent of the doujin days.
Personal Sites/Site Rankings/Zenryaku Profiles
Era: 2000s
If you didn’t have a site that had official, approved content, you probably had one that contained all your personal stuff and a little bit of fan content, too. Or maybe you ran an image uploader, where people could share their favorite pics. Perhaps you ran a messageboard. Blogs, lyrics, flip phone wallpapers, ringtones, pixel art, graphics and templates for websites, poetry, fanfics, fanart, you could find it all during the personal site boom. This was the fun, wild west internet where people had their own space independent of specific platforms.
Site Rankings
The discoverability solution for those looking to share their content online at the time was often to submit your site to a ranking, which counted clicks in and out from websites and ranked them accordingly. These were generally fractured into pretty specific categories – while there were certainly general Visual kei rankings, you were a lot more likely to get found if you submitted to a band- or member-specific ranking. Sometimes these would get pretty granular, which sort of undermines the point of ranking the best sites when there’s sometimes only two Hitsugi cosplayers in their little category on the Nightmare slash fanfiction-only site ranking, but that was part of the magic.
The Western fandom and Japanese fandom were actually pretty similar in this regard, with the Western equivalent being a combination of personal sites (remember when everyone in the early 2000s had a .nu domain?), fan sites, webrings, and fan listings. The major difference was really that Western sites tended to be heavy on images and fancy graphics/stylesheets, while Japanese sites were usually at least somewhat mobile friendly. I obviously refuse to move on from this golden era of Visual kei content availability because I run this blog and a lynch. fansite in 2021 when a normal person would just use Tumblr or Twitter, but I don’t trust anyone. We have to go back…
Zenryaku Profiles
Zenryaku Profiles were simple flip phone browser-ready sites that people used to share information about themselves. Basic information like names, birthdays, texting addresses, blood type, and bands of choice were common, but it was possible to add basically an infinite amount of information in the form of a Q&A. Bandmen would use these as well and link to them from their dinky mobile personal sites. The service that hosted these closed in 2016, long after they’d fallen out of style. These are generally remembered as places where people embarrassed themselves beyond the point of no return in their teens, but you can find some nostalgia for them here and there.
Tereko
Era: 1990s – 2000s
From “tape recorder”, tereko were essentially bootlegged live audio. Photos and audio/video recordings are generally banned at shows, but it was pretty easy to just pop a recorder in your bag unnoticed. These were popularly traded during the Winny and Soulseek .mp3 sharing days, with many “elite” (ugh) Japanese and Western traders holding thousands of unique recordings. The file sharing scene has become a lot less public over the last 10 or so years, meaning that fewer copies of these rare recordings are circulating right now and new ones are not often being produced despite covert handheld recording technology being better than ever. I guess now you can just facetime your friend from a show and keep your phone in your bag so they can hear it in real time without needing to record anything – not that I would ever do that.
Ameblo Culture
Era: Mid? 2000s – Mid 2010s
Ameblo is a blogging platform that still exists today, but is no longer the hub of all visual kei activity that it once was now that most have moved on to Twitter. Ameblo had a number of features that allowed bangya and bandmen to connect.
Peta/Cinderella Peta/Peta Traps
“Peta” refers to the onomatopoeia for leaving footprints, and was a feature of Ameblo that seems like a holdover from old internet guest book/hit counter culture. Basically, once a day, you could give someone a “Peta” which would show that you visited their blog. Peta counts were a good way to assess and boost the popularity of a blog and also a good way to show your desperation to get noticed. Cinderella peta were peta given at exactly midnight – some bandmen would return the favor only for the person who peta’d them first after the beginning of a new day, so this was a completely asinine but fun way to compete with other gya. Seeing bandmen leave peta for each other was also a treat for those who enjoyed cross-band friendships, especially if they decided to join in on the Cinderella peta competition.
Peta traps were invented when sly users from the Tanuki message board realized you could use a link shortener and link directly to the “leave peta” link of a blog, which would give you peta from any logged in user without them needing to consent to it. This misleading link was frequently paired with salacious messages sent in ameba DMs – picture something like “___-san, click here to see the sexy pictures I took just for you!” or “I want to be your mitsu, send me a message here!” – and then the list of horny/greedy dudes who left peta while trying to get the goods would be aired out to everyone later. If someone in your favorite band didn’t get caught in a peta trap at least once, then were they even really a vkei band?
Ameba Pigg
Ameba Pigg was a Flash game/avatar service connected to Ameblo. You were given a room you could decorate and that others could visit, where you could chat and spam various emote actions. This used to be one of the only ways to enjoy real-time chat with bandmen and other fans in a pre-livestream era, and as a bonus you could also be harassed by random Japanese men as a young girl while trying to play the fishing minigame. Because this was during the neo-vkei golden age, there were a number of official collaborations for users to obtain cosplay pieces or furniture relating to real visual kei bands, which probably should have been archived. TFW you will never again know the joy of taking a screencap of you and your honmei’s avatars hanging out in his virtual room.
Sidenote, I once got kicked from from Yuh of vistlip’s Pigg room because I accidentally sat too close to him and I will NEVER let it go.
Jinguu-bashi AKA The Harajuku Cosplay Bridge
Era: 1990s – Late 2000s
Last, but certainly not least, is the former mecca of all Visual kei hangouts, Jinguu-bashi bridge in Harajuku. This bridge was extremely well-known for attracting groups of harajuku fashion kids, bangya, and visual kei cosplayers. You could even catch impromptu performances by notable vkei shitter Maria Cross, if the stars aligned in your favor. This was so widely known that it was published in many tourist guides for Tokyo at the time – I owned a pocket travel book with Shinya and Toshiya cosplayers as the cover image. The expectations were insanely high for visiting foreign Visual kei fans looking forward to seeing “their people”, but so many visiting Japan for the first time in the late 2000s to early 2010s were shocked to find out that the cosplay and lolita groups once known to frequent the bridge had all but vanished. It is perhaps tourism itself that killed the desire to meet there – more and more the cosplayers and lolitas there found themselves turned into a spectacle, modeling for tourist photos or having their photos taken without permission. This combined with the declining popularity of Visual kei after the neo-VK boom probably explains why Jinguu-bashi is just a regular bridge now. Considering most of them probably just wanted to hang out with friends that had similar interests, it had to be off-putting to now be an item on every other tourist’s Tokyo itinerary.
Recently there have been some smaller groups of lolitas and bangya who have started hanging out on the bridge again for photoshoots in old school fashions with 90s VHS filters, and they deserve everything good in this world.
There are no doubt many more dead customs I don’t know about or have failed to recognize as truly dead due to being old, but I hope this short list was entertaining.