Behavior #10: Inability to Dance Except on Specific Cues

Dancing and music usually go hand in hand, but strangely, for fangirls, this is not the case. While Japanese people are the first to admit that they tend to be self-conscious in public, a weekend visit to any Tokyo nightclub will show you all the dancing you could ever hope to see. Shibuya ravers spin glowing poi to hardcore techno, gay guys in Shinjuku Nichome bounce to Katy Perry, psychobillies at Anti-Knock dance by careening into each other and staggering away, and the goths at Tokyo Dark Castle swirl their skirts and wave their hands to vinyl crying the lost wails of the 80's. Every club has that stick-in-the-mud who stands in the corner and declares “I don't dance, I don't know how” – but it's not like you actually need to “know how” at all. Just feel the rhythm in your body and bop to the beat.

Until I met Japanese fangirls, I thought that bopping to the beat was a reflex, harder to ignore than to indulge. But at Japanese concerts, the dancing, to the extent that it happens, is extremely codified, rigid, and not really much like dancing at all. To me, this seems like proof that for fangirls, it's not really about the music. If it were the music that moved these women down deep in their hearts, wouldn't the dancing flow automatically?

Yet it doesn't. Instead, fangirl dancing takes the form of synchronized hand-waving, and precious little else – no hips or sideways movements are involved, and when not dancing, fangirls stand nearly motionless. But when they do move, it's amazing how they all manage to do the same move at the same moment, and also collectively decide which songs are “dance songs” and which ones are not. Strangely, oftentimes, songs with overt dance beats are branded “not dance songs” by fangirls due to unfamiliar rhythm structures. Latin rhythms were made for dancing, but any rhythm that isn't a straight for beats is likely to prove too confusing for fangirl dancing. Ditto for hip-swaying mid-tempo numbers, and the verse sections of up-tempo songs. Basically, fangirls only ever dance on the choruses to songs, even if the verses are every bit as danceable. Fangirls also have a strong preference for singalong or call-and-response sections, and anything involving counting, or simple words like “yeah yeah yeah.” Anything beyond this seems to be too complicated.

In this way, the synchronized dancing could be seen as a demonstration of group loyalty, rather than an individual response to the music. By dancing the “right” moves at the “right” time, a fangirl can demonstrate that she's a True Believer in her idol's cult, and she knows The Rules. Also, the dancing can become an attention-seeking or dominance-asserting behavior, if the fangirl goes out of her way to either 1) dance more energetically than the fangirls around her, 2) keep her arms in the air for the entire song without moving them at all, and/or 3) dance in such a way as to accidentally-on-purpose get her fingernails into the eyes of the fan standing next to her.

Paradoxically, if you're at a concert full of fangirls but ignoring those fangirls in order to dance to the songs as you please in your own style, you'll stand out far more than any of the fangirls will. Furthermore, band members tend to pay a lot of attention to audience members who dance a lot – which only makes sense, since dancing a lot is an indication that you're enjoying the show, and what the band wants most is for the audience to enjoy the show. Therefore, ultimately, the fangirl self-consciousness about dancing is self-defeating.

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