Why Heisei Retro Caught On: Building and Testing a Scale of Aspiration toward Gyaru-Mind

Shōwa retro has an explanation. From a present grown materially over-full, people look back to an era held to have been rich in other ways. For those who lived it, the feeling is autobiographical nostalgia; for younger people who did not, historical nostalgia.

What about Heisei retro? Loose socks and purikura albums are hard to call nostalgic. Too close to long for, too far to belong.

Motode Rino puts a different explanation here. What carries Heisei retro is not nostalgia but aspiration toward the values gyaru held at the time.

To say that, those values have to be measurable. Most of this paper is the work of building that measurement.

Someone had tried to measure it before

Before Motode built her scale, another attempt existed.

Nishii Mihoko of Dentsu’s Gal Labo had produced, in Pa-gyaru Shōhi (Nikkei BP, 2011), a thirty-item scale across three axes — “heart (love),” “technique (deco),” and “body (guts)” — with ten items each, and had run a survey with it.

Motode sets this aside for two reasons.

First, Nishii herself notes the wide variation in measurement conditions, which leaves item validity low. Second, many items ask about direct behaviours — “wears false eyelashes,” “often goes to Don Quijote and discount stores” — and few measure the mindset itself.

Counting behaviours does not measure a disposition. That criticism also lands on the later engineering work, as set out below.

Study 1: reading ten magazines

Where should a construct come from? Motode chose a content analysis of gyaru magazines of the period.

Three titles, ten issues.

• Cawaii!, two issues (September and October 2000)
• S cawaii!, four issues (October 2000; May of 2001, 2002, and 2003)
• Ranzuki, four issues (including June and August 2007)

The selection carries reasons. Hasegawa (2015) records that egg built its pages around ganguro, while Cawaii! carried white gyaru and black gyaru in balance. S cawaii! was created for readers graduating from Cawaii!, aimed at adult gyaru over eighteen; Ranzuki centred on ganguro. Setting three titles with different target readerships side by side is meant to cover gyaru culture as a whole from 2000 to 2007. The physical copies came from the holdings of the National Diet Library, Kansai-kan.

What was analysed: headline lead text, and the words of gyaru themselves as carried in interviews. The KJ method sorted these by similarity, keeping only what applies across the long history of gyaru culture.

No interviews with the people concerned were conducted, deliberately. The reason is stated. What Generation Z admires is not “gyaru now” but “gyaru then,” so the material should come from the fashions of the time rather than from anyone’s recollection. Matsutani (2018), who argues that magazine media played a role in reproducing and expanding the kogal boom, is cited in support.

The four characteristics that emerged become the construct.

1. Valuing one’s own way without minding others’ eyes
2. Wanting to stand out, to be noticed above others
3. Drawing confidence from the pursuit of “cute”
4. Prizing one’s friends

Study 2: building the scale, and reporting both hits and misses

In November 2022 a questionnaire was built in Qualtrics and run through the crowdsourcing service CrowdWorks. Respondents were women in their twenties or younger: 615 responses, 594 after removing incomplete ones (mean age 25.49, SD 2.91). Five-point items.

An exploratory factor analysis (maximum likelihood, promax rotation) followed, with the number of factors set from a scree plot and one low-loading item dropped before re-analysis. Four factors emerged as anticipated.

So far so good. What comes next is more interesting: each of the four factors was set against an established scale to see whether the predicted correlation appeared.

Two of four missed.

“Standing out” was predicted to correlate negatively with conformity to peers, since people who want to stand out should not conform. What appeared was a weak positive correlation.

“Own way” was predicted to correlate negatively with authenticity — the sense of being genuinely oneself. What appeared was no correlation at all.

Motode reports this, then judges that three factors have validity and the “own way” factor does not. That factor alone was rewritten and re-examined in Study 3.

Results that missed are not deleted; the factor that missed is not dropped; it is rebuilt and re-tested. This is what scale development is supposed to look like.

Study 3: testing the hypotheses on 893 respondents

The main survey ran on fastask. Women from age 15 through their fifties were recruited with quotas by age band (a target of 100 in their teens and 200 in each decade from twenties through fifties). From 944 responses, 893 remained after removing those who broke off (mean age 36.84, SD 12.78).

The “own way” factor, which had shown a floor effect in Study 2, was rebuilt with eight new items. More items were written that only someone genuinely committed to living their own way would endorse, and reverse-scored items were added. A fresh factor analysis with parallel analysis produced these alphas:

Cute .885, standing out .904, prizing friends .828, own way .703, whole scale .888.

The “freedom from constraint” factor of the free-will belief scale (Watanabe & Karasawa 2022) served as an additional validity check.

Appeal of Shōwa and Heisei retro was measured on an eleven-point scale against photographs of scenery and popular objects from each era; nostalgia was measured on six-point items.

Hypothesis 1 was not supported

Hypothesis 1: those less satisfied with their present lives find Shōwa retro appealing, mediated by nostalgia proneness.

The result was negative. Lower present satisfaction did raise nostalgia proneness, but no significant relation appeared between nostalgia proneness and the appeal of Shōwa retro (β = .05, n.s.). The indirect effect estimated by bootstrap was not significant either (z = −1.289, n.s.).

The widely circulated account of Shōwa retro — that longing generates the appeal — went unsupported in these data.

Splitting the additional analysis by decade, only the forties showed a marginal effect (β = .15, p<.10; indirect effect z = −1.753, p<.10). The analysis follows the finding that nostalgia peaks between thirty and forty (Kusumi, Matsuda & Sugimori 2010).

Motode points out the confound herself: being in one’s forties and having actually lived through the Shōwa retro boom cannot be separated in these data.

Hypothesis 2 came out half right

Hypothesis 2: among Generation Z, those less satisfied with their present lives and more dissatisfied under COVID-19 find Heisei retro appealing, mediated by aspiration toward gyaru-mind.

The first half came out the other way. People more satisfied with their present lives showed higher aspiration toward gyaru-mind.

The second half came out as predicted. Greater dissatisfaction under COVID-19 raised aspiration toward gyaru-mind (β = .29, p<.01), and higher aspiration raised the appeal of Heisei retro (β = .32, p<.01). The bootstrap indirect effect was significant (z = 3.066, p<.01).

Aspiration toward gyaru-mind was thus confirmed as a live pathway behind the Heisei retro boom.

Dissatisfaction with life in general and dissatisfaction under COVID-19 push in opposite directions. Motode reads this as a sign that Generation Z may treat “dissatisfaction from lives upended by COVID-19” and “satisfaction with life as a whole” as separate things.

Neither era evokes much nostalgia

The photographs were compared for how strongly they evoked nostalgia (n = 893).

Shōwa retro 2.996 (SD 1.011), Heisei retro 2.646 (SD 1.167), t = 10.280, p = .000.

Shōwa scores higher. On six-point items, however, both averages fall below 3. Motode records this as a problem and points to the criteria used to select the photographs, proposing that future work use several images per keyword and photographs actually taken at the time.

She does not read her own results in the most favourable light; she states the weakness of the measurement first.

How generations receive the boom differently

Using Matsutani’s (2012) placement of the kogal boom’s peak among those born between 1978 and 1981, three generations are distinguished.

• Generation X (non-gyaru generation, born before 1977, aged 45 and over): the more nostalgia-prone, the lower their rating of Heisei retro. They hold negative views of the gyaru of the time, and may not be able to call Heisei retro “the good old days”
• Generation Y (the gyaru generation, aged 27 to 44): those more satisfied with their present lives rate Heisei retro higher. As a generation that understood the value of being “a young woman,” those who are satisfied may be able to view their own youth positively
• Generation Z (aged 15 to 26): those more satisfied with their present lives rate Heisei retro higher

The same boom is received as different things depending on whether one lived it.

What can and cannot be said

What can. A scale measuring gyaru-mind in four factors exists, with alphas and criterion-related validity reported. A pathway in which aspiration toward gyaru-mind — not nostalgia — underlies the appeal of Heisei retro was confirmed across 893 respondents. The widely circulated account of Shōwa retro, that longing generates appeal, went unsupported in these data.

What cannot. No confirmatory factor analysis was performed; the work stops at exploratory analysis. Whether the four-factor structure replicates in another sample has not been tested. The samples come from crowdsourcing and a web panel, with no guarantee of representativeness. The design is cross-sectional, so the mediation results cannot be read causally. And it has not been peer reviewed.

What remains weak. The “own way” factor failed its validity check in Study 2 and was rebuilt for Study 3, but the rebuilt version is not shown to converge with an established scale (the correlation with the free-will belief scale could not be confirmed for this note [unverified]). Its alpha, at .703, is also the lowest of the four.

Comparative studies with a control group belong to a different lineage

Study 1’s content analysis has no control group. Since only ten gyaru magazines were read, there is no way to separate whether the four characteristics that emerged there are peculiar to gyaru magazines or common to women’s magazines in general during the same period.

On 2026-08-16, a search across CiNii Research, J-STAGE, the NDL search, and Semantic Scholar looked for a comparative study that used a control group.

One exists. What it compares, however, is readers, not the content of the magazines.

Home economics and fashion-behaviour research carries a line of studies running from Miyatake Keiko and Tachibana Kyoko (2004), through Ono Koichi, Son Juhee, and Miyatake (2010), to Son Juhee (2013). Over the three years from 2008 to 2010, Son surveyed the magazine-subscription tendencies of female students at vocational colleges, junior colleges, and universities, and sorted the ten most popular titles into six categories: gyaru-kei, mode-kei, onee-kei, natural-kei, adult-gyaru-kei, and street-kei. The popularity of gyaru-kei titles (ViVi, JELLY) and mode-kei titles (Soen, FUDGE) shows a significant difference running in opposite directions across school type (p<0.001). A structural equation model shows a relationship in which higher fashion-behaviour consciousness predicts a preference for gyaru-kei, and lower consciousness a preference for natural-kei.

That is, the claim that “readers of gyaru-kei magazines differ quantitatively from readers of other lineages of magazine” has independent prior work built on a control-group design.

This does not fill Motode’s gap, however. What Son and colleagues compare is readers’ consciousness, not the content of the magazines. The titles studied are also ViVi, JELLY, Soen, and FUDGE — they do not overlap with Cawaii!, S cawaii!, and Ranzuki, the titles Motode used.

No study verifying, through a control-group design, how the headlines and voices of gyaru themselves in gyaru magazines differ qualitatively from the content of non-gyaru women’s magazines was found across the four routes searched this time.

Relation to the later engineering operationalization

Ikegami Momoka and colleagues (Komazawa University) proposed their “gyaru-mind level” in August 2025, roughly one year and ten months after Motode’s publication.

Set side by side, the completeness of method runs the other way.

The venues favour Ikegami and colleagues; the completeness of method favours Motode.

And the criticism Motode directed at Nishii (2011) lands on Ikegami and colleagues as well. Behavioural items — “wears false eyelashes,” “goes to Don Quijote” — cannot measure a disposition. Two of the heaviest of the eight factors in Ikegami and colleagues’ index (Emotional Intensity and Linguistic Creativity) are surface features of speech: exclamations, intensifiers, slang. What they measure sits at the same level as what Motode set aside.

Ikegami and colleagues do cite this paper in their non-refereed Japanese demo (WISS 2025), but it does not appear among the 37 references of their English peer-reviewed paper (CHI EA 2026). The details are in What Was Measured as "Gyaru-Mind": The Provenance of Eight Factors and Its Limits.

References

URLs retrieved 2026-08-15.

The subject of this note

1. Motode, Rino. 2023. (Yasuda Prize article) An examination of the effects of the “Heisei gal” mindset on contemporary women: with consideration of the background of the “Shōwa retro” and “Heisei retro” fads. Bulletin of the School of Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University 141, 89–124 (2023-10-31, ISSN 0452-9456, in Japanese). https://kwansei.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/2000128

The earlier scale Motode set aside

2. Nishii, Mihoko. 2011. Pa-gyaru Shōhi: Joshi no Nanawari ga Kakushimotsu “Gyaru Mind” Kenkyū [Pa-gyaru consumption: research on the “gyaru mind” seven in ten women hold in reserve]. Nikkei BP (in Japanese).

Established scales used in the validity checks

3. Ito, Masaya & Kodama, Masahiro. 2005. Authenticity scale. [unverified] (full record not recoverable from the text)
4. Kasai, Makiko & Matsumoto, Mari. 2010. Conformity behaviour in adolescent friendships: constructing a conformity scale. Bulletin of Naruto University of Education 25, 189–203 (in Japanese).
5. Sasayama, Ikuo. 2015. The relation of approach-avoidance orientation to makeup consciousness and makeup behaviour. Bulletin of Fukuoka University of Education (64), 21–27 (in Japanese).
6. Ochiai, Yoshiyuki & Sato, Yuko. 1996. Developmental change in ways of relating to friends in adolescence. Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology 44. [unverified] (pagination)
7. Watanabe, Takumi & Karasawa, Kaori. 2022. Free-will belief scale. [unverified] (full record not recoverable from the text)
8. Terasaki, Masaharu, Tsunashima, Keiji & Nishimura, Tomoyo. 1999. Present satisfaction scale. [unverified] (full record not recoverable from the text)

Theoretical background and grounds for magazine selection

9. Matsutani, Soichiro. 2012. Gyaru to Fushigi-chan Ron (in Japanese). [unverified] (publisher and subtitle)
10. Matsutani, Soichiro. 2018. [unverified] (record)
11. Hasegawa. 2015. [unverified] (record)
12. Takano, Kohei. 2018. [unverified] (record)
13. Kurita, Nobuyoshi. 1999. Purikura communication: a quantitative sociological analysis of photo-sticker exchange. Journal of Mass Communication Studies 55, 131–152 (in Japanese).
14. Kusumi, Takashi. 2021. The cognition of nostalgia: affective basis and function, individual differences and change with age. Japanese Psychological Review 64(1), 5–28 (in Japanese).
15. Kusumi, T., Matsuda, K. & Sugimori, E. 2010. [unverified] (journal and pagination)
16. Sato (Sakuma), Rika. 2002. What “gyaru-kei” signifies: the media environment around “high school girls” and the self-image of adolescent girls. Journal of the National Women’s Education Center (6), 45–57 (in Japanese).
17. Kobayashi, Masanori. 2021. Evoking nostalgia: elicitation methods, measurement, individual differences. Japanese Psychological Review 64(1), 115–130 (in Japanese).
18. Aoki, Kumiko. 2011. The changing “Shōwa 30s boom”: from kitsch to ideology. Shakaigaku Ronko (32), 83–107 (in Japanese).
19. Katagiri, Shinji. 2007. Dissecting the “Shōwa boom.” Bulletin of the Faculty of Sociology, Kansai University 38(3), 43–60 (in Japanese).
20. Baker, S. M. & Kennedy, P. F. 1994. Death by Nostalgia: A Diagnosis of Context-Specific Cases. Advances in Consumer Research 21, 169–174.
21. Sedikides, C. & Wildschut, T. 2016. Past forward: Nostalgia as a motivational force. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20(5). [unverified] (pagination)

Comparative studies with a control group (added in the cross-cutting search of 2026-08-16)

• Son, Juhee. 2013. Kōzō hōteishiki moderingu shuhō o mochiita joshi gakusei no fasshon kōdō to kōdoku josei zasshi no kentō: 2008-nen kara 2010-nen no keikō o chūshin ni [An examination of female students’ fashion behaviour and subscribed women’s magazines using structural equation modelling: centred on trends from 2008 to 2010]. Journal of Home Economics of Japan 64(3), 147–156 (in Japanese). https://doi.org/10.11428/jhej.64.147 (author, formal title, and volume/issue/pages confirmed from J-STAGE’s bibliographic metadata; sample size unconfirmed [unverified])
• Ono, Koichi, Son, Juhee & Miyatake, Keiko. 2010. Fasshon o mananderu joshi gakusei no ishiki, kōdō ni kansuru kenkyū: Nagoya, Keihanshin, Kyūshū no san chiiki-kan no hikaku [A study of the consciousness and behaviour of female students studying fashion: a comparison across Nagoya, the Keihanshin region, and Kyushu]. Journal of the Japan Society of Fashion Business 15, 57–66 (in Japanese). https://cir.nii.ac.jp/crid/1050001202928400128 [unverified] (text extraction from the full-text PDF failed; whether it was peer reviewed is also unconfirmed)
• Miyatake, Keiko & Tachibana, Kyoko. 2004. Joshi gakusei no fasshon zasshi ni motozuita fasshon ishiki ni tsuite no kenkyū [A study of fashion consciousness among female students based on fashion magazines]. Proceedings of the Japan Society of Home Economics 56, 191 (in Japanese). https://doi.org/10.11428/kasei.56.0.191.0 (a conference abstract. Nine women’s fashion magazines are cluster-analysed and sorted into eight clusters including gyaru-kei; the names of the nine titles are unconfirmed [unverified])
• Hasegawa, Shoichi. 2015. Gyaru to “Bokura” no Nijūnenshi: Joshikōsei Zasshi Cawaii! no Tanjō to Shūen [A twenty-year history of gyaru and “us”: the birth and end of the high-school-girls’ magazine Cawaii!]. Akishobo (in Japanese). https://ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I026981951 (cited by Motode as grounds for her choice of magazines. A nonfiction account by a former member of the Cawaii! editorial staff — testimony from someone with a stake in the matter, not peer reviewed)

Scope and Method of the Survey

• Date: 2026-08-15. The full 36-page text (PDF) was consulted
• Venue: Bulletin of the School of Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University 141, 89–124 (2023-10-31, ISSN 0452-9456). A prize-winning article in a departmental bulletin, not a peer-reviewed journal
• Confidence: every figure and procedure here was taken directly from the text. Cited works whose full records could not be recovered carry [unverified]
• The nature of the Yasuda Prize (whether it is a student thesis award, and how it is adjudicated) has not been confirmed [unverified]

The record: Bulletin of the School of Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University 141, pages 89–124, 31 October 2023. It carries the heading “(Yasuda Prize) award article” — a departmental bulletin paper, not a peer-reviewed journal article. The provenance ledger is in section M of source/review/gyaru-mind-operationalization/papers.md. For the relation to the later engineering operationalization by Ikegami Momoka and colleagues, see What Was Measured as "Gyaru-Mind": The Provenance of Eight Factors and Its Limits; for the wider map of gyaru scholarship, How Gyaru Have Been Studied: A Map of 61 Works and the Gap Around "Gyaru Mind". For an examination of what this scale in fact measures, including the point that all forty-four items take the form of aspiration, see How Might Gyaru-Mind Be Measured: What the Two Existing Scales Leave Out.

Unverified items

• The nature of the Yasuda Prize at the Kwansei Gakuin University School of Sociology (whether it is a student thesis award, and how it is adjudicated) [unverified]
• Whether this paper derives from an undergraduate thesis, and how far a supervisor was involved [unverified]
• The correlation between the rebuilt “own way” factor in Study 3 and the free-will belief scale. Whether validity was recovered could not be confirmed [unverified]
• The content of the item dropped in Study 2 (item II_6)
• The full item list of the scale (given in Tables 2 and 4; this note covers only factor names and statistics)
• Complete records for references 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, and 21 [unverified]
• Whether any study has applied Motode’s four factors and Ikegami and colleagues’ eight factors to the same sample (not searched)
• Whether any subsequent research uses this scale was searched on Semantic Scholar and WebSearch, and none was found (2026-08-16)
• No study comparing the content of gyaru magazines with the content of non-gyaru women’s magazines through a control-group design was found across the four routes of CiNii, NDL, J-STAGE, and Semantic Scholar. A study comparing readers does exist (see “Comparative studies with a control group belong to a different lineage” above)
• Son 2013’s sample size, the names of the nine titles studied in Miyatake & Tachibana 2004, and whether Ono and colleagues 2010 was peer reviewed [unverified]
• Whether gyaru magazines are included in the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics’s magazine corpus (BCCWJ and others) could not be confirmed, since the freely available documentation carries no list of titles [unverified]
• Whether Motode’s grounds for choosing Ranzuki derive from Hasegawa 2015 is unconfirmed [unverified]