Difference Does Not Become a Criterion: An Adversarial Review of a Novelty Claim about Gyaru Practice

“From evaluated difference to evaluating criterion.”

As a slogan it is strong. The number of lines a reviewer needs to write a rejection is about as short.

The turn from being evaluated by dominant criteria to making alternative ones is already established across the literatures on subcultural capital, counterpublics, feminist self-definition and self-valuation, and enregisterment in sociolinguistics. Beyond applying those findings to gyaru culture, what specifically is new here?

This note is a record of the search for a position from which that question can be answered. The provenance ledger is at source/review/gyaru-criterion-formation/papers.md.

Survey metadata

• Date: 2026-08-15; cross-cutting search and bibliographic confirmation on 2026-08-16
• Material: a report of an adversarial review of a novelty claim about gyaru practice (source/review/gyaru-criterion-formation/deep-research-report-gyaru-novelty.md)
• State of the sources: the report names a great many competing prior works, but its citations are internal markers carrying no bibliographic information whatsoever. Crossref, OpenLibrary, Google Books, CiNii Research, the NDL search, and institutional repositories were used to pin them down, and 20 were fixed as far as a DOI or a publisher. The nine books whose ISBN and relevant chapter had been unfixed at first pass were fixed as far as the ISBN and relevant chapter on 2026-08-16 (a reservation remains on the ISBN for Collins’s 1990 first edition and on Sontag’s ISBN)
• Correction to the initial judgement: the material on SHIBUYA109 lab. × CGO, judged at first pass as one whose source itself could not be identified, does exist. The published materials of both entities were reached on 2026-08-16. The initial judgement of “a conflation of two independent entities” was mistaken
• On confidence: this note confirms that the prior works exist and records their bibliography; it does not work from a reading of their contents. Only six were reached as far as an abstract or a full text

Every part of the claim already has prior work

Judgements first.

Claim under review	Judgement	Competing work
A marginal, low-valued difference comes to hold value	Not novel	subculture studies, feminism, valuation studies
The evaluated becomes the evaluator	Not novel as it stands	counterpublics, self-definition / self-valuation, design justice
Value is formed and shared through a vocabulary of one’s own	Not novel	Miller, Agha, Silverstein, Matsui
Deliberate amplification of difference drives criterion formation	Room, conditionally	overlaps with camp and subculture studies, but could be differentiated if the causal path from amplification to a rule of judgement were demonstrated
The criterion so generated updates the next decision about making	Most capable of novelty, but undemonstrated	frame creation and design justice come close, but no end-to-end demonstration within gyaru culture could be confirmed

The strongest competing works come down to three.

Thornton’s Club Cultures (1995, Polity Press) proposed subcultural capital in club cultures. That value scales differing from the mainstream arise inside a subculture and build an internal hierarchy becomes known here.

Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (first edition 1990) and Fraser’s “Rethinking the public sphere” (1990, Social Text 25/26) treat how a subordinated group, defined and evaluated from outside, comes to define itself and to form and circulate a counter-interpretive system. The reversal of subject position itself becomes known here.

Agha’s “The social life of cultural value” (2003, Language & Communication 23(3–4), 231–273) theorizes the process by which the value of a cultural form is formed, maintained, and circulated across social groups. That social value adheres to semiotic form also becomes known here.

The same thing happens inside gyaru scholarship. Laura Miller analysed kogal linguistic innovation in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology in 2004, as a challenge to dominant gendered language norms and as a contest with media assessments. “Gyaru deviated from existing norms and made meaning and value on their own side” is not new as gyaru scholarship either.

Revaluation and criterion formation are not the same thing

Two things are mixed together in the claim.

That value changes and that a criterion of evaluation is generated.

Tanned skin was held to be tacky, and in gyaru groups it was held to be cool. Up to that point this is a reversal of value, and the prior works listed above account for it.

Against this, if the word moreteru (“well amplified,” from moru, to amplify one’s features) evaluates hair, make-up, photo editing, clothing, conduct, and even product proposals — across all of them and apart from tanning — and functions as a rule of judgement that decides what to make next, the story changes.

Difference by itself does not become a criterion. A rule of judgement abstracted from practices directed at difference becomes one.

Without this step in the theory, the compressed line “from evaluated difference to evaluating criterion” keeps a category error inside it.

An operational definition would run as follows.

A value criterion = a generalized rule of evaluation, applied repeatedly with a consistent direction, in comparing, selecting, and rejecting among several different candidate objects

On this definition the stages separate. “I thought this one was cute” is an individual evaluation. “Flashier is cuter” is a local preference. If the rule “choose the one that is more moreteru” is applied repeatedly to hair, eyes, photographs, ornament, and advertising proposals, that is a criterion.

Assessing the causal chain stage by stage

The claim contains the sequence “difference → amplification → externalization → naming → sharing → criterion formation → design update.” The state of the evidence differs by stage.

Stage	Evidence	Assessment
Difference: evaluated low by existing criteria	Miller and Kinsella treat media assessments of kogal language and conduct	Supported. But which criteria the low evaluation came from (adult-female norms, school norms, the male gaze, fashion-magazine norms) needs specifying
Amplification: emphasizing the low-valued difference further	strongly visible styles such as ganguro are historically observable	Supported as form. The motive is unproven. Being flashy can also be explained as an effect of fashion, imitation, pleasure, or the supply of goods
Externalization: making it visible as body, clothing, and photograph	the ACROSS fixed-point observation (4 July 1998, three locations in Shibuya, Harajuku, and Shinjuku, 13:30–14:30. Reached and confirmed as a primary source), street snaps in egg	Strongly supported. But externalization is a property of fashion in general and is not novel
Naming: evaluating in a vocabulary of one’s own	Miller reports kogal linguistic innovation	Partly supported. Category terms and evaluative terms need to be distinguished. Matsui’s research suggests reverse causation
Sharing: evaluations are shared among peers	magazines, street snaps, and social media are observable as circuits of sharing	Sharing is supported, institutionalization is unproven. Being circulated many times and holding binding force as a shared norm are different things
Criterion formation: the word becomes a rule of judgement	the source for the contemporary case offered as grounds could not be identified (below)	Unproven
Design update: the new criterion changes the next act of making	as a general mechanism, frame creation and design justice are known	The weakest link. Evidence of a time series in which the concrete attributes of goods or magazine pages changed after the criterion of evaluation was established is required

From difference through sharing can be supported to a considerable degree. Sharing through criterion formation and the updating of decisions about making, which is the core that would establish novelty, is not supported.

The grounds offered for criterion formation

The report had judged the stage of criterion formation as follows.

In the contemporary case of “gyaru-style self-analysis” by SHIBUYA109 × CGO, one can observe a practice of putting one’s own and others’ characteristics into words and evaluating them using framings of their own such as age [uplift, hype] and kaaii [a stylized spelling of kawaii, cute]. … suggestive in the contemporary case

The initial review could not identify this material, and judged it a conflation of two independent entities, SHIBUYA109 lab. and CGO dot com. That judgement was mistaken.

The event is real. “SHIBUYA109 YOUTH SUMMIT: Gyaru-Style Self-Analysis” was held in August 2023 at the SHIBUYA109 Shibuya store, co-hosted by SHIBUYA109 lab. (operated by SHIBUYA109 Entertainment Co., Ltd.) and CGO dot com. Both entities confirm this independently in their published materials. Participants built a “gyaru-style résumé” created for the event, and came to recognize their own traits by relabelling their strengths as age and their characteristics as kaaii-toko (“the cute bits”). The material’s description — that framings of their own were used — was accurate.

Even so, it is weak evidence for criterion formation. The vocabulary was prepared by the organizers, not by the participants. Both age and kaaii-toko are components of a programme designed for the event; they are not words the people themselves generated and shared within their own practice. That a vocabulary was handed out at a one-day workshop designed by a company does not show that a rule of evaluation was generated within a community and came to be applied repeatedly to the next judgement.

The organizers report that 92.3% of participants answered, in a post-event survey, that their self-affirmation had risen — but this is the organizers’ own report, not independent verification.

The judgement itself does not change. The material offered as grounds is real. But what it shows is that a company organized a gyaru-style vocabulary as a product, not criterion formation by the people themselves. The stage of criterion formation remains unproven.

The naming may not have come from the people themselves

Matsui Takeshi discussed “social signs” in Marketing Journal 35(2) in 2015. A social sign is a word the media makes in order to express new movements and phenomena in society. As a concrete example, “kogal” is listed alongside “LOHAS.”

This bears directly on the causal direction of the claim. The line that “the people themselves named their own difference in a vocabulary of their own” may not hold, at least for the category term.

A distinction is required. Category terms such as “kogal” and “ganguro,” evaluative terms such as moreteru and age, and metapragmatic terms for the evaluative principle such as jibun-uke (being pleasing to oneself) cannot be treated alike. Even if the media named the category terms, the namers of the evaluative terms may have been the people themselves.

But no study that draws this distinction and tracks the first appearance and the users of each word was found, even when the search was run by different routes. Anglophone subcultural linguistics, computational social science research on lexical diffusion, lexicography’s dating of first attestations, and Japanese youth-language studies — none of these carries a procedure that separates category terms, evaluative terms, and metapragmatic terms before identifying who did the naming.

There is something close, however. Johnstone and colleagues traced, through historical sources and discourse analysis, the process by which a feature of the Pittsburgh dialect unnoticed by its own speakers came to be named “Pittsburghese.” The name was given not by the speakers but by T-shirt vendors and the media. Matsui’s point — that the namer of a category term need not be the people themselves — is observed in the same form in a case other than kogal.

Johnstone and colleagues do not, however, distinguish category terms from evaluative terms in their argument. This reframing is this note’s interpretation, not a claim of the original paper.

Whether moru is recursive

Excess and exaggeration as such are not peculiar to gyaru. The camp Sontag discussed in Partisan Review in 1964 takes artifice and exaggeration as central features, and values excess falling outside ordinary taste as a taste of another kind. The description “moru = amplifying difference” alone is not new.

To make a claim to novelty, what has to be shown is the recursion.

Amplifying makes the degree of the original difference continuously manipulable. Once it is a continuous quantity, an evaluative term for comparison becomes necessary. That evaluative term turns into the rule for choosing how to moru next. What is made under that rule updates the next evaluative term in turn.

If this loop can be observed, it is theoretically stronger than the linear “difference → revaluation.”

The contemporary “Gyaru-Mind” does not project back onto the 1990s

There is a historical problem here.

Scholarship from the 1990s and 2000s discusses kogal language, fashion, gender, rebellion, and media representation. It has not been confirmed to be the same thing as the combination of “one’s own axis,” “positive thinking,” and “Gyaru-Mind” used in the discourse of companies and workshops in the 2020s.

The “Gyaru-Mind” now in circulation cannot be projected back, as it stands, as the essence of 1990s gyaru culture.

This is not a weakness; it is material for research.

A practice centred on the body, clothing, and language in the 1990s was converted, by the 2020s, into an abstract protocol of evaluation called “Gyaru-Mind,” transplantable into different organizations and design domains. Making that conversion itself the question widens the theoretical reach beyond a mere history of gyaru.

The two scalings this wiki records (gyaru-mind-aspiration-scale, gyaru-mind-operationalization) are precisely products of that conversion.

Seven alternative explanations

The most dangerous thing for the causal model is the explanation that “in fact the gyaru did not make the criteria; some other mechanism selected and amplified a fashion.”

• Commercialization: fashion magazines, advertisers, the 109 brands, editors, and the supply side of goods selected the signs that sold, and what looks like “the gyaru criterion” may only be that, seen after the fact
• Media gatekeeping: egg and others may have selected a subset of styles and words and made them norms by repeated exposure. The reader-model format raises the standing of the people themselves, but it does not erase editorial selection
• External naming: the category terms may be social signs made by the media (Matsui 2015)
• Imitative diffusion: what spread may have spread not because it became a value criterion but because it was easy to copy, conspicuous, and heavily exposed
• Subcultural capital: no new criterion of evaluation may have been born; the positioning by which one is recognized as “knowledgeable” or “authentic” within existing youth culture may simply have shifted (Thornton 1995)
• A redistribution of class and gender: it may be a classificatory struggle holding only within a group of a particular age, gender, urban space, and spending power (Bourdieu)
• A design-justice-type transfer of subject position: if people who were objects merely move onto the design side, existing research accounts for it (Costanza-Chock 2020)

Listing these as related work is not enough. What ought to be observed if each alternative explanation were correct has to be written down in advance.

What observation would reject the claim

The falsification conditions go first.

• If naming precedes the amplification of difference, the mechanism “amplification demanded naming” is rejected
• If the first appearance of the word on the magazine or advertising side precedes use by the people themselves, the part running “from naming among peers to media diffusion” is rejected
• If changes in product design precede the diffusion of the evaluative term, the causal direction “from new criterion to design update” is rejected
• If the word is used only as the name of a single object, it is not called “criterion formation” but demoted to “category formation”
• If the word evaluates several objects but does not predict choices in making, “a shared vocabulary of value” is granted but “a design criterion” is not
• If editors or companies other than the people themselves are the principal selecting agents, the claim is revised from “gyaru generated the criterion” to “co-generation by gyaru, the media, and the market”

On the measurement side, the following have to be operationalized separately.

Construct	Operationalization	State that falsifies it
Low evaluation by existing criteria	the proportion of negative descriptors in contemporaneous general magazines and newspapers	it was already positive on the mainstream side
Amplification	quantitative indicators of the degree of the same attribute becoming extreme over time (depth of tan, hair colour, contrast of make-up, number of ornaments, height of soles)	the difference shrinks or stays constant
Deliberate amplification	testimony from the people themselves about their intent in making, before/after choices	it can be explained by the constraints of commercially available goods, or by chance
Naming	first appearance and frequency of emic terms, and who used them first	media naming always comes first
Evaluativity	the frequency with which the word is used not merely to describe an object but to judge it good or bad	the word is a mere category name
Criterion formation	the same evaluative term is transferred to the evaluation of several kinds of object, and agreement arises among evaluators	it is used only for the one original object
Design update	after the criterion appears, the shapes, colours, compositions, and specifications chosen change systematically	the design change comes before the criterion

Without a control group, changes that occurred across Japanese fashion as a whole from the late 1990s into the 2000s will be misread as peculiar to gyaru. Not only egg but contemporaneous non-gyaru women’s magazines have to be set alongside it.

Every stage takes the people themselves as its subject

Reading the sequence again, amplification, naming, sharing, and criterion formation all begin with “the people themselves.”

That is, this novelty claim presupposes the reality of tojishasei, the standing of being one of the people concerned.

Yet that standing itself is not measured. Who holds the legitimacy to define “what Gyaru-Mind is” is a question the claim presupposes without asking. And Matsui’s research on social signs shows that the presupposition may collapse, at least for the category terms.

An account dividing tojishasei into ten dimensions is at tojishasei-agency-literature. Applying the distinctions available there gives the following.

• Self-definition of needs: who put the low-valued difference into words as “a resource of another reality” rather than as a deficiency
• Epistemic agency: whether the people themselves held the authority to fix the meanings of the evaluative terms
• The power of participation: who decided what appeared in the magazine and what did not. As long as editorial selection enters, sharing is not the achievement of the people themselves alone

The third is particularly hard on this claim. The street snaps and the reader-model format of egg are mechanisms that raise tojishasei, but they do not erase the gatekeeping of editing.

The core worth keeping

Not all of it has to be thrown out.

What should be dropped is the claim that the reversal of subject position is itself novel. Fraser, Collins, and design justice compete with it directly.

What is worth keeping is the following restricted sequence.

The process by which deliberate amplification of a low-valued difference prompts the generation of evaluative terms among the people themselves, those terms are generalized into a rule of evaluation that compares several objects, and that rule of evaluation is recursively applied to the next decision about making

Writing in English, it is safer to put criterion formation, criterion emergence, and evaluative rule formation forward rather than revaluation.

And claiming this core requires two demonstrations. Not evidence that it was shared but evidence that it became a criterion; not evidence that the criterion existed but evidence that it changed making.

Neither exists yet.

What can be said and what cannot

What can be said. Every part of the claim has strong prior work behind it, and as it stands no novelty holds. The stages from difference through sharing can be supported to a considerable degree by existing materials. Criterion formation and the updating of making are not supported.

What cannot be said. This note confirms the existence and the bibliography of the prior works; it does not verify their contents by reading them. Only Miller 2004, Matsui 2015, Kuwamoto 2003, ACROSS, the materials concerning egg, and Vargo & Lusch 2004 were reached as far as an abstract or a full text. Statements of the form “Thornton argues thus” therefore rest on received accounts and carry [citation unverified].

What was corrected. The contemporary case the report offered as grounds for criterion formation turned out to be real. Judging it, at first pass, a conflation of two entities was a mistake. The report’s own judgement (suggestive in the contemporary case) is still not adopted in this wiki, however. The vocabulary for the event was prepared by the organizers, and that is not evidence of criterion formation by the people themselves.

References

URLs were retrieved on 2026-08-15. Books whose ISBN and relevant chapter remain unfixed carry [primary source unverified]; works whose full text or abstract was not reached carry [citation unverified].

The strongest competing works

1. Thornton, S. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Polity Press, Cambridge (jointly with Blackwell). ISBN 978-0-7456-6880-2 (ebook) / 0-7456-1442-6 (pbk) / 0-7456-1443-4 (hbk). The theoretical development of subcultural capital appears in the section “The Social Logic of Subcultural Capital” within Chapter 3, “Exploring the Meaning of the Mainstream” (confirmed from the book’s colophon and table of contents).
2. Agha, A. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication 23(3–4), 231–273. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0271-5309(03)00012-0 [citation unverified]
3. Collins, P. H. 1990 (first edition, Unwin Hyman) / 2000 (second edition, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-92484-7). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. The chapter treating “self-definition” moves number across editions: Chapter 5, “The Power of Self-Definition” (p. 107ff.), in the 2000 and 2008 editions; Chapter 7 (same title) in the 2021 thirtieth-anniversary edition (https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003245650-7). The ISBN for the 1990 first edition returned by OpenLibrary’s edition record, 0-415-90597-4, does not sit well with a UK Unwin Hyman imprint carrying a Routledge-family prefix [primary source unverified].
4. Fraser, N. 1990. Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text 25/26, 56–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/466240 [citation unverified] (the page range is fixed by agreement across three independent sources; the primary JSTOR page has not been reached)

The sociology of evaluation and value

5. Lamont, M. 2012. Toward a comparative sociology of valuation and evaluation. Annual Review of Sociology 38, 201–221. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-120022 [citation unverified]
6. Boltanski, L. & Thévenot, L. 2006 (English translation; French original 1991). On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton University Press (trans. Catherine Porter), published 16 April 2006. ISBN 978-0-691-12516-9 (pbk) / 978-0-691-11837-6 (hbk).
7. Bourdieu, P. 1984 (English translation; French original 1979, Éditions de Minuit). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press (trans. Richard Nice). ISBN 0-674-21280-0.
8. Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Methuen, London. ISBN 0-416-70850-1 / 0-416-70860-9 (which of the two is the hbk is not distinguished).
9. Becker, H. S. 1982 / 2008 (25th anniversary edition). Art Worlds. University of California Press, Berkeley. ISBN 978-0-520-25636-1 [citation unverified]
10. Silverstein, M. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3–4), 193–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0271-5309(03)00013-2 [citation unverified]
11. Goffman, E. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-090372-4 (1986 Northeastern University Press reprint: 0-930350-91-X).
12. Callon, M. 1984 (first publication) / 1986 (reprinted in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief). Some elements of a sociology of translation. The Sociological Review 32(S1), 196–233. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1984.tb00113.x
13. Sontag, S. 1964. Notes on “Camp”. Partisan Review 31(4), 515–530. (collected in 1966 in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). ISBN 978-0-374-52040-3 [primary source unverified] (the ISBN system was not yet in circulation in 1966, so this number may be a later retroactive assignment)

Design theory

14. Dorst, K. 2015. Frame creation and design in the expanded field. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 1(1), 22–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2015.07.003 [citation unverified]
15. Dorst, K. 2015. Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. MIT Press, published 27 March 2015. ISBN 978-0-262-32431-1.
16. Costanza-Chock, S. 2020. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001 [citation unverified] (the full text of the open-access edition could not be reached)
17. Vargo, S. L. & Lusch, R. F. 2004. Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing 68(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.1.1.24036

Gyaru and Japanese youth culture studies

18. Miller, L. 2004. Those naughty teenage girls: Japanese Kogals, slang, and media assessments. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(2), 225–247. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2004.14.2.225
19. Kinsella, S. 2002. What’s behind the fetishism of Japanese school uniforms? Fashion Theory 6(2), 215–237. https://doi.org/10.2752/136270402778869046 [citation unverified]
20. Kinsella, S. 2005. Black faces, witches, and racism against girls. In L. Miller & J. Bardsley (eds.) Bad Girls of Japan. Palgrave Macmillan.
21. Namba, Koji. 2006. On postwar youth subcultures (5): kogal and the Ura-Harajuku scene. Bulletin of the School of Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University 100, 101–132. [primary source unverified] (CRID unconfirmed)
22. Namba, Koji. 2007. A Genealogy of the “Zoku”: A Postwar History of Youth Subcultures. Seikyusha. A5, 404 pp. ISBN 978-4-7872-3273-1. Chapter 12, “Kogal, Gender (Un)troubled,” treats kogal directly (section structure: the process by which “kogal” was formed / the media aroused by kogal / high-school girls resonating with the media / (ko)gyaru and gyaru-o. Confirmed from Seikyusha’s official bibliographic page).
23. Matsui, Takeshi. 2015. Four types of social signs. Marketing Journal 35(2), 5–19. https://doi.org/10.7222/marketing.2015.044
24. Kuwamoto, Yuji. 2003. On the characteristics of youth language, based on a morphological and semantic analysis. Tohoku University Linguistics Journal 12, 65–78. https://hdl.handle.net/10097/00129666
25. 古賀令子, 北方晴子, 田中里尚, 濱田勝宏 [Koga Reiko, Kitakata Haruko, Tanaka Risao, Hamada Katsuhiro — readings of the given names not verified]. 2011. A study of the present state of fashion magazines. Journal of the Japan Society of Fashion Business 16, 67–77. [primary source unverified] (DOI not obtained)

Primary sources

26. ACROSS fixed-point observation, no. 211. PARCO Co., Ltd. Conducted 4 July 1998, three locations in Shibuya, Harajuku, and Shinjuku, 13:30–14:30. https://www.web-across.com/observe/srnrj2000003pd12.html (reachability confirmed. Note that the publisher is a retailer and this is its own marketing medium)
27. A retrospective account of the founding period of egg. HJ Inc. (the current publisher; not the publisher at the time of founding in 1995). https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000143.000020107.html (founded September 1995; the origin of the title; peak circulation of 500,000. A retrospective inside a press release for the company’s own campaign; only the factual portions extracted)
28. Report on the implementation of “SHIBUYA109 YOUTH SUMMIT: Gyaru-Style Self-Analysis.” CGO dot com Co., Ltd. (PR TIMES, 20 November 2023). https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000007.000117362.html (held August 2023, co-hosted with SHIBUYA109 lab.; “gyaru-style résumé”; age = strengths, kaaii-toko = characteristics; 92.3% of respondents reported increased self-affirmation in the post-event survey. The organizers’ own report, not independent verification. Full text reached and confirmed on 2026-08-16.)
29. Announcement of “SHIBUYA109 YOUTH SUMMIT: Gyaru-Style Self-Analysis.” SHIBUYA109 Entertainment Co., Ltd. (27 July 2023). https://www.shibuya109.co.jp/news/ (confirms co-hosting with CGO dot com from the organizer’s own side as well.)

Registering a word and the agent of naming

30. Johnstone, B., Andrus, J. & Danielson, A. E. 2006. Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”. Journal of English Linguistics 34(2), 77–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424206290692
31. Johnstone, B. 2009. Pittsburghese shirts: Commodification and the enregisterment of an urban dialect. American Speech 84(2), 157–175. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2009-013
32. Agha, A. 2005. Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1), 38–59. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.38 [citation unverified]
33. Preston, D. R. 2004. Folk metalanguage. In A. Jaworski, N. Coupland & D. Galasiński (eds.) Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives, 75–102. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110907377.75 [citation unverified] (a framework dividing metalanguage into three layers: explicit language commentary, unasserted folk belief, and unasserted pragmatic meaning)
34. Eisenstein, J., O’Connor, B., Smith, N. A. & Xing, E. P. 2014. Diffusion of lexical change in social media. PLoS ONE 9(11), e113114. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113114 (tracks the geographic diffusion of 2,603 words. Its abstract states explicitly, however, that it treats the rise and fall of popularity rather than first attestation, and it draws no distinction among word types)
35. Nakamura, Momoko. 2022. Atarashii kotobazukai wa dō yō ni kihan to naru no ka: aidentiti, metagoyōronteki gensetsu, ideorogī [How does “new usage” become a norm: identity, metapragmatic discourse, ideology]. Yuriika 54(10), 140–146. Seidosha (in Japanese). https://cir.nii.ac.jp/crid/1520574677200153088 [primary source unverified] (a commercial-magazine essay. Whether it actually distinguishes the three categories, and whether it empirically tracks first attestation and users, was not reached in the text)
36. Yonekawa, Akihiko. 1997. Wakamono Kotoba Jiten [Dictionary of youth language]. Tokyodo Shuppan (in Japanese). ISBN 4-490-10449-9 [primary source unverified] (contains 1,150 words centred on female-student slang. Whether each word carries a date of first attestation and a source is unconfirmed)

Unverified items

• This note confirms the existence and bibliography of the prior works; it does not read their contents. Only references 17, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, and 29 were reached as far as an abstract or a full text
• The ISBN for Collins’s 1990 first edition returned by OpenLibrary’s edition record, 0-415-90597-4, does not sit well with the fact of a UK Unwin Hyman imprint [primary source unverified]
• The ISBN of the 1966 collected edition of Sontag may still be a later retroactive assignment [primary source unverified]
• Which of Hebdige 1979’s two ISBNs is the hbk and which the pbk is not distinguished
• The DOI and direct URL for Koga et al. 2011 [primary source unverified]
• Nakamura Momoko 2022 was not reached in full text. Whether it actually distinguishes the three categories, and whether it empirically tracks their first appearance and users, is unconfirmed. It may respond directly to Matsui 2015’s reverse-causation argument and is the next primary source to read [primary source unverified]
• Whether Yonekawa Akihiko 1997, Wakamono Kotoba Jiten, carries a date of first attestation and a source for each word is unconfirmed [primary source unverified]
• A study distinguishing category terms, evaluative terms, and metapragmatic terms, and tracking their first appearance and users, was searched for but not found across Crossref, CiNii, NDL, Semantic Scholar, and WebSearch. OpenAlex’s citation-network tracing could not be run owing to a rate limit (Retry-After of roughly eight hours), and this route remains unsearched
• A comparative study placing contemporaneous non-gyaru women’s magazines alongside egg as a control group was searched for in gyaru-mind-aspiration-scale. It exists in the lineage of reader surveys; none was found in the lineage of content analysis
• The source for the report’s statement that “kogal were already discussed as trend-makers as of 1996” was not confirmed in this collection
• The “92.3% reported increased self-affirmation” and “100% reported increased confidence” reported at the SHIBUYA109 lab. × CGO event are the organizers’ own report, not independent verification