Wearing Gibberish

I spent a lot of time looking at t-shirts in Tokyo. Not because I was looking for t-shirts, but because once you start noticing the English printed on them, you can’t stop. And almost none of it means anything. Not in a broken English way—fully incoherent. Power. Beagle. Wonderdrug. Just words arranged like they were supposed to make sense.

The kids wearing them had no idea what they said. They didn’t care. English had this imported shimmer to it, something that read as cool and international whether or not it translated to anything real. The meaning wasn’t the point. The point was the sound of it, the visual weight of foreign words.

A Japanese TV show tested this exact thing, intercepting teenagers in Harajuku and asking them to explain their own clothes. Blank looks. Bad guesses. A lot of I dunno, it just looked cool. And genuinely, no one seemed bothered by this. You don’t wear English for definition in Tokyo. You wear it because it looks right.