What is Jirai-kei or landmine girl?

If you enjoy alternative fashion, then there’s a chance you might’ve heard of the style jirai-kei, as it is rapidly gaining popularity for it’s cute look and, frankly, sad reason to even exist. 

Jirai-kei is a girly and cute looking fashion. Typically, you’d wear a mix of black and some kind of muted color. The most common colors are light purple, light pink, light blue, creamy colors, deep reds, and white. If you want a more in depth description of what jirai-kei looks like, I recommend Lovely Lor’s video on it. 

Jirai itself translates to landmine, which is something that men in Japan have used in a derogative or insulting way towards women who they see as being emotionally unstable and “explosive” or sensitive. Though, like menhera fashion reclaiming the term menhera, the name jirai-kei is being used as a way to reclaim the term and make it something feminine, cute, and trendy. 

Jirai is relatively new, it officially started out in 2020, though you may be able to find some looks from 2019. Jirai came from Kabukicho, which is an area in Japan that is a party district. Due to this, there are some stereotypes linked to the fashion that paint people who wear jirai-kei as, to put it lightly, *adult* workers, y'all know what I mean. That isn’t necessarily true, as a lot of people who wear jirai-kei don't participate in this at all. Not to say it’s bad if you do do that, it just has a negative connotation to it, sadly. 

If you want a more in depth look into the history and culture of jirai-kei, I highly recommend watching cybr.grl’s video of the topic. Thank you for reading!