Hypernormalization

Would you pay $200 to experience life as a Japanese high school student in an authentic school?

A few years ago, I went with a friend to a bar in Shibuya. As soon as we entered a man in a track suit and a whistle, came out to yell at my friend. “Hey! You know you’re not supposed to wear your shoes indoors.” He spoke to us as children because he was playing the role of teacher and this was a bar where you pretended to be in school again. Oddities included an announcement system embedded into the wall and being interrupted mid-meal to take a pop quiz.

It was a fun, cheesy experience but not something I’d go out of my way to experience again. An alternative to a normal izakaya and not much more.

I was surprised, however, to see that there is now an upmarket experience being tailored to foreign people to pretend to be Japanese school students. You’ll don an authentic Japanese high school uniform, take actual school classes and clean up with your class. Just like in your favorite anime. All for the eye-watering price of 30,000 JPY.

Long time Twitter friend of mine Rara, posted about “Kimino High School”. I poked around their website and it seems to be a new service offered by a Japanese camping company. To be fair the “school packages” are marketed towards both Japanese and Western but the fact that this even exists at all is very incredibly strange to me.

When I was about 19, I took part in a group funded by the Abe Administration’s tourism board that held research sessions on foreigners interested in Japanese pop culture. At one of these sessions a girl proposed the idea of a white glove service for foreigners to experience Japanese culture. Fantasy baseball camp for weaboos. “We could even have someone escort them to an office on the crowded morning train, they could experience senpai/kouhai office dynamics…” At the time I thought the idea was neat but also didn’t believe people would pay for these services.

What does it mean that adults are willing to pay more than the average Japanese daily wage to pretend to be in high school again?

So much can be said about this in the context of the commodification of Japanese youth culture, escapism, Japan’s soft power as a cultural export, kidults… Will we see more of this in the experience economy?

What do you think?