Abstract
The culture includes every possible objective forms created by humans and their shared aspects of ideas, feelings, and behaviors, beliefs and etc. The dress and its ornaments are part of the culture that expresses the relationships in objective ways and in formless immaterial ways. The school uniform represents significant meanings to the students in their school years, and it is the way of expressing their individuality and full filling their needs for self-presentation. Therefore, understanding and analyzing youth culture means understanding students' school uniform along with fast changing twenty first century civilization. Korea and Japan are very close nations to each other. Both Korean and Japanese girls' school uniform style were adopted western clothing style and went through many changes based on cultural differences between two countries. They are affected by different peculiarities between two nations and youth cultures from different cities. Therefore, this research is on analyzing how different visual values of girl's high school uniforms in Seoul and Tokyo and understanding youth cultures through macro-analysis. The youth cultures in Korea and Japan are mostly similar but there is special development on animation in Japan and possibly can find many styles of girl's high school uniform. Both nations are varying to be opened to sexual culture of adolescents but Japan is more uninhibited than Korea. In Japan, sailor-uniform can be found in fetish way in public culture. On one hand, because of most private girl's high schools in Tokyo takes an entrance examination, top-ranking students are very proud of their school uniforms and even students from other public high schools get private high school uniforms to attend school festival. This analysis showed that private girl's high school uniform in Seoul appealed as slim fitted silhouette which is close to modem woman's suit style while in Tokyo appealed as boxy style matched with short pleated skirt or sailor-uniform style. Comparing that to school uniform photos taken on the street, we can find that alikeness or more extreme styles as examples. These are influenced by different youth cultures in Seoul and Tokyo and cultural differences stands for different aesthetic norm being accepted or rejected.
