Magazine
Essay Series “Walking Now” MISHIMAGAZINE #13 – Japanese Recruit Suits and Hay Fever
The original text was written in Japanese for MISHIMAGAZINE and published on March 29, 2019. This post is an English translation and republication of the original article.
Around the time hay fever begins to make itself known, students in recruit suits start appearing all over Tokyo. They are not students who will begin work in April, but students who have begun job hunting for positions starting in 2020. Or perhaps for 2021. There are constant calls to regulate the increasingly early schedule of job hunting, but no one seems particularly eager to obey them. Companies continue to recruit in all but name under the polite disguise of internship programs. It is, in the old phrase, a case of “where there is policy above, there is countermeasure below.”
On social media, I often see adults mock these students in recruit suits as “young people these days, too eager to fit the mold.”
If adults were criticizing students for thoughtlessly wearing suits merely to observe what is commonly called TPO, and if that criticism were directed at a kind of intellectual laziness, that might be one thing. But the act of wearing a recruit suit itself seems to carry, for some people, a vaguely unpleasant image.
I once read somewhere that the recruit suit became established as ceremonial attire for job hunting relatively recently, sometime in the late 1980s. Whether students today are more prone to fitting into a mold than students of the past, I honestly do not know. But the real condition of this fashion may be simpler: the recruit suit made it cheap and easy to acquire what students believed to be the dress code adults wanted, without having to think too much about it.
Every time I see students in recruit suits, I remember friends from my university days. Friends who had once dressed in all sorts of ways suddenly put on recruit suits, skipped class, and went out into the city. To be honest, the sight felt deeply strange to me. Before I knew it, I myself had drifted away from the front line of job hunting.
Among those friends was a person I will call Y, who after thinking carefully chose to attend job interviews in a somewhat unusual outfit. Y had always been deeply interested in culture, including fashion. For a long time, he had been considering whether to continue his studies in order to pursue the design field he had long cared about, or whether to prioritize financial circumstances and find employment.
I think it was still chilly, early in spring. I still remember how Y looked when I met him just after he had finished an interview at a listed company. He always had long hair, and he did not cut it even for the job interview. He tied it back, rather like Karl Lagerfeld, who had only recently passed away. His clothes were not a suit, but a slightly twisted jacket-and-trouser setup by Hussein Chalayan, a designer he liked. His shoes were black leather sneakers with rubber soles that might, from a certain angle, pass for leather shoes. His bag was the black nylon Comme des Garçons backpack he wore every day. With a necktie added to that outfit, he still did not look like a student in job-hunting costume. He looked like an extension of his ordinary self. There was a kind of resistance in it, like someone from a design office that stubbornly refuses to wear suits forcing himself to visit a conservative company on business. He must have stood out in the interview waiting room.
1 Karl Lagerfeld (1933-2019) was a German fashion designer and artistic director of CHANEL from 1983 until his death.
2 Hussein Chalayan (b. 1970) is a Cyprus-born designer known for conceptual fashion design. His 2005 New York Times interview remains worth reading.
Y said he never bought a suit for job hunting. Perhaps buying and wearing a standard recruit suit would have felt like cutting off the flow of the days he had lived until then. In his own way, he had searched for a point of compromise. “If I fail dressed like this, I will think about what to do then. If I pass, then perhaps that means there is some kind of affinity,” he said. A few weeks later, he received an offer. More than ten years later, he is active internationally and in all directions.
Many people say one should observe TPO. It is surprisingly little known that TPO, an acronym for “Time, Place, Occasion,” is a piece of Japanese-made English. The phrase is said to have been coined by Kensuke Ishizu, the fashion designer who founded VAN Jacket, and one of the important figures who shaped mass fashion in postwar Japan.
3 Ishizu was involved in producing TAKE IVY, the photobook of Harvard and Princeton students now treated as historical material for menswear. amzn.to/2Jvw132
When we speak of TPO for men’s workwear, it generally means a dark suit and leather shoes, a shirt and tie, short hair, and a clean-shaven face. Yet even while following these rules, one encounters countless adults in the city whose suits are, frankly, startling. Shirts, jackets, and ties in terrible color combinations. Pointed leather shoes or loafers like the tips of anteater noses, utterly mismatched with the suit. Bags in strange colors and shapes. Outfits that show no understanding of the wearer’s own image or character.
Perhaps students have come to wear only recruit suits because, after seeing adults dressed so badly, they have half given up on the visual intelligence, or even the perceptual capacity, of those adults.
If there are many adults who would decide that a student lacks manners simply because that student is not wearing a standard recruit suit, then of course it becomes difficult for students to show up to interviews in their own clothes.
Looking back now, Y’s unusual outfit was a hidden message to the adults interviewing him. It was a nonverbal declaration: this is the kind of person I am. Some adults may have found it impertinent. But his manner was, in the original sense of the term, the result of self-analysis, and entirely reasonable. The adults who were able to read it had the proper measure of culture and tolerance.
One of Japan’s leading fashion designers once said that to choose clothes is to choose a life. Today, too, each person goes on living by choosing a life in their own way.