The Nightmare Princess of Harajuku
PONPONPON sounds like it was designed to short-circuit something in your brain—and it was, more or less. When Kyary Pamyu Pamyu released it in 2011, produced by Yasutaka Nakata of Capsule, the video was so densely saturated with eyeballs and teeth and pastel surrealism that it spread across the internet with the logic of a fever dream you can’t stop describing to people. She was twenty years old, a Harajuku style icon before she was a pop star, and the whole thing looked like someone had weaponized a six-year-old’s imagination.
What made Kyary genuinely interesting, beyond the initial shock of the aesthetic, was that she represented something specific: the global export of Harajuku culture in its most concentrated form. Harajuku—the Tokyo neighborhood that became synonymous with youth fashion subcultures through the nineties and 2000s—had been fetishized from a distance for years, Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Girls phase being the most unfortunate example. Kyary was the thing itself, or at least her own stylized version of it, arriving in Europe and America on her own terms and making it quite clear she wasn’t there to be understood on anyone else’s.
In an interview with i-D, she told Francesca Dunn that she suffers from recurring nightmares—always the same sensation of being followed, chased, unable to escape. Which tracks, somehow, with music that looks joyful but has an anxiety underneath it, a relentlessness in Nakata’s production that never quite lets you settle. She also mentioned that her crush on Draco Malfoy had expired and been replaced by one on Katy Perry, which feels like a very reasonable trajectory. And that her home is decorated like the bedroom of a six-year-old American girl—which, given everything we know about her, is probably the least surprising thing she could have said.
She remains one of the very few Japanese pop acts to have made any sustained dent in international consciousness—not because she compromised for a Western audience, but because she didn’t. The music is too strange to be comfortable, the visuals too committed to their own logic to be dismissed as novelty. PONPONPON is still in my head, years later. Some songs find a corner of your brain and stay there permanently, rent-free, blinking at you with too many eyes.