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.

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 gyaru-mind-operationalization; for the wider map of gyaru scholarship, gyaru-culture-mindset-literature. For an examination of what this scale in fact measures, including the point that all forty-four items take the form of aspiration, see gyaru-mind-measurement-design.

Survey metadata

• 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]

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.

Factor	α	Mean (SD)
Cute	.865	2.15 (0.77)
Standing out	.863	3.18 (0.82)
Prizing friends	.762	2.44 (0.68)
Own way	.765	1.95 (0.59)
Whole scale	.88	2.43 (0.50)

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.

Subfactor	Scale applied	Result
Cute	”Makeup as fashion” factor of the makeup-consciousness scale (Sasayama 2015)	r = .496 (p<.01) as predicted
Prizing friends	”Self-protective way of relating without showing true feelings” factor of the friendship scale (Ochiai & Sato 1996)	r = −.408 (p<.01) as predicted
Standing out	”Conformity to peers” factor of the conformity scale (Kasai & Matsumoto 2010)	r = .138 (p<.01) opposite to prediction
Own way	Authenticity scale (Ito & Kodama 2005)	r = .015 (n.s.) not significant

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.

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.

	Motode 2023	Ikegami et al. 2025–2026
Deriving the definition	content analysis of ten magazines (KJ method)	one trade book decomposed through discussion among authors
Sample	1,487	69 (training) and 24 (experiment)
Factor analysis	two exploratory analyses, with parallel analysis	none
Reliability	α = .703–.904	not reported
Criterion-related validity	tested against five existing scales, misses reported	none
Venue	prize-winning article in a departmental bulletin	peer-reviewed international conferences (workshop and Extended Abstract)

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 gyaru-mind-operationalization.

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)

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
• 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 (not searched)