Culture4 min read
Popeye, the Tokyo Magazine That Taught City Boys to Shop California
In 1976 two Tokyo editors went to Los Angeles to study how American teenagers lived, came home and named their magazine after a cartoon sailor. Fifty years on, it is still on the newsstand.
In the summer of 1976 a new magazine appeared on Japanese newsstands with a cover line that sounded like a promise. It was called Popeye, and under the name it said Magazine for City Boys. Inside were California sports, skateboarding, surfing and hang-gliding, and a visit to Jeff Ho's Zephyr surf shop in Los Angeles, the shop that sponsored the Z-Boys skateboarders.
The writer W. David Marx, author of the Japanese menswear history Ametora, dates the first issue to June 1976. Wikipedia's entry gives July. Either way, by the end of that summer young Japanese men had a guide to a life most of them knew only from a distance.
Two editors in exile
The magazine came from two men at Heibon Shuppan, the publisher now known as Magazine House. Yoshihisa Kinameri was the senior editor and Jirō Ishikawa his younger protégé. In Marx's telling in Valet, the pair had been sent off to a subsidiary that made playing cards. There they edited two titles that sold far better than anyone expected, Ski Life, about American ski culture, and Made in U.S.A., a catalogue of American consumer goods.
Success brought them back to the main office with permission to make their own magazine. They went to Los Angeles to research it, aimed it at young men drawn to the outdoor, athletic life of West Coast teenagers, and merged what they had learned from their two earlier titles into one.
Why a sailor
Ishikawa wanted to call it City Boys, a buzzword at the time for sophisticated urban young men. Kinameri noticed that Popeye split neatly into pop and eye, which suited a magazine that kept an eye on pop culture. King Features Syndicate, which owned the character, gave permission for both the name and the drawings. That is why the publisher's later sister titles were called Olive and Brutus.
City Boys survived as the tagline. Seiichi Horiuchi drew the logo and, according to Wikipedia, designed every issue through the rest of the 1970s. The magazine came out every two weeks at first and later settled into a monthly schedule. Marx also passes on an old rumor that the CIA secretly paid for the magazine as a kind of soft propaganda for American goods. He does not confirm it, and neither can we, but the rumor says a lot about how American the early issues felt.
A catalogue with opinions
What made Popeye different was the format. Marx traces its long product pages, hundreds of items shown with prices and the shops that sold them, to the Whole Earth Catalog and to L.L.Bean's mail-order books. Readers did not just see a look. They were told what to buy and where.
The look kept moving. Marx lists the stages in Valet: UCLA campus gear in the mid-1970s, preppy clothes later in the decade, European and Japanese designers in the 1980s and street fashion in the 1990s. Preppy, in those years, meant American campus pieces like the oxford cloth button-down, shown with a price and a shop name so a reader in Tokyo could go and find one.
The circulation war
Popeye did not have the field to itself for long. In 1979 the publisher Kodansha launched Hot-Dog Press as a direct rival, and by 1982 Hot-Dog Press was outselling it. The two fought through the bubble years. Wikipedia records a Popeye circulation of 700,000 in 1991, a year in which Hot-Dog Press still reported higher sales, and 220,000 by 1999 as both titles struggled.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1976 | First issue in June or July, featuring Los Angeles |
| 1979 | Kodansha launches Hot-Dog Press as a rival |
| 1982 | Hot-Dog Press outsells Popeye for the first time |
| 1991 | Popeye circulation of 700,000 |
| 1999 | Circulation down to 220,000 |
| 2012 | Takahiro Kinoshita becomes editor-in-chief |
| 2016 | 40th anniversary issue reprints the 1976 first issue |
| 2018 | Kinoshita leaves for Fast Retailing |
By our arithmetic the magazine lost more than two thirds of its circulation between 1991 and 1999, a fall of 480,000 copies.
The 2012 reset
The revival came with Takahiro Kinoshita, who became editor-in-chief in 2012 and began a redesign. Marx describes the look of those years as trad-chic, and Wikipedia records circulation climbing back to 100,000 during his time in charge. In July 2016 the 40th anniversary issue reprinted the whole 1976 first issue alongside a collaboration with the Tokyo retailer Beams, which was marking its own 40th year.
Kinoshita left in 2018 to join Fast Retailing, the company behind Uniqlo, as an executive officer. Marx writes that he went on to run Uniqlo's LifeWear magazine. Another Popeye alumnus, the stylist Akio Hasegawa, pushed the big silhouette in the late 2010s and now runs his own label, Cahlumn.
Today Popeye is a monthly with digital editions and, since an announcement in April 2022, an online shop and its own merchandise, and Marx notes that its readers now include older men, women and readers outside Japan.
Reading it now
You do not need to read Japanese to use Popeye. The product pages work in any language, and the city issues, especially the Tokyo ones, double as shopping maps. Back issues turn up with dealers in Japanese magazines, and the 1970s ones are worth the hunt for the layouts alone.
Start in the neighborhoods it has always covered with our Ura-Harajuku streetwear guide and our guide to Daikanyama and Nakameguro. For the California end of the story, see our Fairfax Avenue guide, and for a Tokyo designer who grew up on this kind of American fantasy, our profile of Nigo. More in Japan and menswear history. Marx's own account is at Valet.
Popeye began as a guide to how other people's teenagers lived. Fifty years later readers abroad buy it to find out how Tokyo's city boys dress, which is about as complete a reversal as a magazine can manage.
