Shopping rebellion; what the kids want.(Letter from Tokyo)

Takeshita Street, in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, is the equivalent of Eighth Street in New York: it is a narrow commercial passageway, crammed with stores selling imported Levi's, baby-doll T-shirts, and platform boots that have all the charm of medical appliances. Such attributes naturally make it a favorite resort of Japanese teen-agers, who are the most avid consumers in a country where, since the end of the Second World War and in spite of a ten-year recession, consuming is a crucial part of the national identity. On the weekends, Takeshita Street is mobbed by thousands of fashion-conscious Japanese youths: boys who parade around in slouchy hip-hop clothes, and girls who wear thrift-store-style dresses layered over bluejeans, a look that really works only if you weigh less than ninety pounds, which most of them seem to.

It would be easy, while squeezing through the crowds on a Saturday afternoon, to miss a store called Brand Select Recycle, which is marked only by a blue sign pointing up a narrow staircase, painted with the names of designer labels -- Under Cover, Bathing Ape, Gucci, Prada, and, spelled incorrectly, Martin Margaiela. The store is about six hundred and fifty feet square, its peeling paintwork illuminated by fluorescent light; it is crammed with rack upon rack of secondhand clothing, with hand-lettered, improbably high price tags pinned on. A black hooded sweatshirt bearing an image of Mickey Mouse holding a microphone and striking a rock-star pose, made by a company called Number Nine, sells for a hundred and twenty-eight thousand yen, which is close to a thousand dollars. A T-shirt with the same Mickey Mouse image goes for more than four hundred dollars. Even in a society as affluent as Japan, where there's no poverty to speak of, these prices are enough to make a visitor wonder whether the yen underwent a catastrophic devaluation in the time it took to climb the stairs.

A thousand-dollar secondhand sweatshirt is, however, just an expression of market forces. "Six months ago, Number Nine was not as expensive as it is now, and probably next year it will go down in price," the store's owner, Akihiko Takeuchi, explained to me when I visited in November. Takeuchi is thirty-nine years old, which, in the world of Japanese youth culture, is decidedly middle-aged. His thinning hair bears all the signs of having been barbered rather than styled; he wears loose plaid shirts and gray flannel trousers and black sneakers, and even though he gets his shirts and sneakers from Hermes and his pants from Comme des Garcons, he wears them with all the aplomb of a man who shops at Sears.

He doesn't set most of the prices at Brand Select Recycle, he explained to me; they are established by the individual consigners of the items, who pay him a commission. By watching the buying and selling practices of his customers, who are mostly high-school and college students, Takeuchi has an unrivalled perspective on the fluctuating indices of Tokyo street fashion: the week I visited, for example, he'd found that boys were seeking out items from Head Porter, a Japanese luggage brand whose nylon snakeskin-patterned wallet was selling for a hundred and fifty dollars -- twice its original retail value. I found sixteen-year-old Koudai Matsuhita, who was wearing a school blazer and had shaved eyebrows, intently pawing through the Number Nine Mickey Mouse T-shirts; he explained that they had a "rock-and-roll feel" that he liked. Another hot label was Bathing Ape, a Japanese skatewear brand whose signature is a distinctive camouflage pattern; a Bathing Ape nylon blouson jacket was selling for ninety-eight thousand yen, or seven hundred and forty dollars.

But Takeuchi explained that his customers weren't simply slaves to a label: he showed me a Bathing Ape chunky knit cardigan, its wooden buttons carved with images of apes; the style hadn't taken off when it was first released to stores, and now Brand Select Recycle was offering it for just a hundred and ninety-four dollars, much less than its original cost. And a mainstream designer label like Comme des Garcons had little heat in the Brand Select Recycle marketplace; you could buy a secondhand Comme shirt for fifty-eight hundred yen, or forty-four dollars. Even after years of watching his clients' purchasing patterns, Takeuchi said that he was still unable to predict when one brand would surge in popularity while another fell out of favor. "It's kind of like the image of the capitalist economy -- the more desired it is, the more expensive it is," he said. "It cannot be accounted for rationally."

What is known in Japan as the bubble economy -- the economic boom of the nineteen-eighties -- provoked massive speculation in the ...