The ノギャル crowd: scary or cute?
No-one really knows why, but for some reason, Japan’s gyaru crowd of perma-tanned teenage girls and young women has recently been taking a keen interest in farming and agriculture. As well as innercity mini-farm schemes, there have been a few countryside-based projects where gyaru groups head out to rural constituencies and work as volunteer farmers, all the while maintaining their fashion sense and refusing to dispense with their impractically long nail chips. Their leader is Shiho Fujita, a designer of gyaru-oriented clothing and accessories. The media is referring to these Shibuya-based cultivators as ノギャル (nogyaru), prefixing the term ギャル with a shortened ノ (no) from 農業 (agriculture).
And what does this have to do with games, you counter? Not a lot, really, but it does kind of tally with this new TV ad for Bokujou Monogatari: Futago no Mura, which features, yes, young women enjoying some agriculture:
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