AMETORA: Remembering the Japanese Gentleman: The Rise, Fall and Revival of Ivy Style Fashion

Remembering the Japanese Gentleman: The Rise, Fall and Revival of Ivy Style Fashion

The enduring allure of Japan’s Ivy-inspired ametora style and the icons who shaped it

 

By Ynes Sarah Filleul

July 3, 2025

https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/fashion/remembering-the-japanese-gentleman-the-rise-fall-and-revival-of-ivy-style-fashion/

 

When Japan Met Ivy: The 1960s Fashion Revolution

In the summer of 1964, a group of teenagers was reported to the police and rounded up in a posh Ginza shopping street. Their crime? Wearing “strange clothes” like button-down jackets, tight chinos and brogues. These were the Miyuki-zoku, named after the street that they usually loitered on. Why were they arrested? Picture Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s: The country was rebuilding and modernizing but was still deeply conservative. As for men’s fashion, formal, no-frills suits in muted grays and browns dominated the style sphere. The idea that clothing could be fun, expressive or — heaven forbid — stylish was considered downright alien.

 

Enter Kensuke Ishizu, the man who would change everything. Born to a wealthy family in Okayama, Ishizu developed an obsession with Western clothing; moving to Tokyo in the 1930s, he often wore expensive British-style suits and lived a Gatsby-esque lifestyle. Later, he moved to Tianjin, working at a Japanese shop selling Western-style gentleman’s clothing until the momentum of the war turned against Japan, at which point, he enlisted and served in the navy until the war’s end.

 

Ishizu’s interest in fashion and Western-style clothing may have emerged during his youth in Japan, but it was a meeting in postwar Tianjin that sowed the seeds for what was to become an Ishizu-led fashion revolution in Japan. The crucial meeting of minds was between Ishizu and an American first lieutenant — a former student at Princeton — who introduced him to Ivy League style.

 

Ishizu returned to Japan in 1946 with radical ideas about how Japanese men could dress. In 1951, after several years of working in the garment industry, he founded his brand, Van Jacket, which embodied the fantasy of Ivy League preppies and American collegiate cool. In that same decade, he was integral to the establishment of men’s fashion magazine Otoko no Fukushoku — later renamed Men’s Club — which published articles detailing how to style formal business attire and Ivy style pieces. His brand also produced a lineup of coordinated East Coast college-inspired outfits — quite the innovation in a country where each article of clothing was still being made in dedicated shops.

 

Kazuo Hozumi and the Adorable Ivy Boy

In 1954, Van reached a turning point: Ishizu got in touch with Kazuo Hozumi, an architect turned cartoonist, to illustrate for his magazine. Hozumi was no stranger to Ivy style; he’d been introduced to the genre — and to fashion illustration — via Western fashion magazines. It was these magazines and, it’s said, the 1960 college campus-set movie Tall Story that inspired his work. His best-known creation — the iconic “Ivy boy” character — entered the public consciousness in 1963 as part of a parody of old woodblock prints featuring samurai; in Hozumi’s version, 14 round-eyed, smiling dandies dressed in various renditions of Ivy style replace the samurai. Though created for a group exhibition, the print — and Ivy boy — soon became part of Men’s Club history.

 

While at Men’s Club, Hozumi fell in love with Ivy League fashion, illustrated Van ads and became close friends with Ishizu. His work often graced the covers of Men’s Club, while he personally showed up at Van events, leading many to mistake him for a Van employee.

 

How Men’s Club Turned Delinquents Into Dandies

By the mid-1960s, something extraordinary was happening on the streets of Tokyo: Young Japanese men were abandoning their fathers’ conservative dress codes for button-down shirts, natural shoulder jackets and perfectly creased chinos. In 1964, Ishizu was even commissioned to design the uniforms for the opening ceremony of the Olympics, an honor that eventually changed public attitudes toward Ivy League fashion. Suddenly, the Miyuki-zoku weren’t delinquents — they were young, middle-class kids with good taste and posh clothes.

 

In 1965, Van Jacket collaborated with Men’s Club publisher Fujingaho to produce a photo book and film capturing real Ivy League students on campus. Titled Take Ivy — a nod to Dave Brubeck’s jazz hit “Take Five” — and photographed by Teruyoshi Hayashida, the book became a visual blueprint that would go on to influence Men’s Club photo spreads for years, shaping Japan’s vision of East Coast collegiate style.

 

What made Japanese Ivy style unique was its interpretation through local sensibilities. While Americans wore preppy clothes with casual confidence, the Japanese approached it with almost religious devotion to authenticity. The Japanese had a term for it: ametora, short for “American traditional.” Their version of American prep style was uniquely Japanese in its obsessive attention to detail and reverence for craftsmanship. They didn’t just copy, but perfected and created versions that were often more “Ivy League” than anything found at actual Ivy League schools.

 

Men’s Club magazine became the bible of this fashion movement, with Hozumi’s illustrations guiding readers through the subtle differences between a proper button-down collar and a regular dress shirt. Every detail mattered: the precise width of a tie, the correct way to lace Oxford shoes, the seasonal appropriateness of madras versus seersucker.

 

The Fall and Rebirth of Ivy in Japan

Like all fashion movements, the Ivy boom couldn’t last forever. By the late 1970s, European fashion houses, punk music and the flashy excess of Japan’s economic bubble had pushed preppy style into the shadows. Despite reaching record profits of more than ¥45 billion in 1975, Van Jacket began to slip into the red, and its 1978 bankruptcy symbolized the end of an era.

 

But fashion is cyclical. A new generation, raised on digital culture but craving tangible quality, rediscovered the appeal of well-made classics. In 2015, Tokyo-based American writer W. David Marx released Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style — a book that connects the dots between Ishizu, Hozumi and the obsessive Japanese approach to Ivy. In it, Marx argues that Japan didn’t just import American fashion — it preserved and perfected it. The book was subsequently translated into Japanese, its cover graced with none other than Kazuo Hozumi’s iconic Ivy boy characters.

 

Van Jacket filed for bankruptcy a second time in 1984, but the brand was eventually revived by outside parties in 2000. A global resurgence followed when Take Ivy, the cult 1965 photobook associated with the brand, was rediscovered by American fashion blogs in the late 2000s and reissued internationally. In 2010, the newest iteration of Van Jacket settled down in the quaint neighborhood of Kuramae. In 2020, a new Van Shop also opened up in Hibiya Okuroji.

 

Magazines like Popeye, 2nd and Men’s Club (still in print) keep the flame alive, while social media has created new kinds of Ivy influencers. Even the world of illustration hasn’t forgotten Hozumi. One of the clearest signs that Ivy lives on is the work of Mr. Slowboy, also known as Fei Wang, the Beijing-born and London-based illustrator whose charming watercolor gents channel the spirit of Kazuo Hozumi’s Ivy boy. Known for his sartorial illustrations for Barbour, Esquire, Christie’s, Uniqlo and Popeye, Mr. Slowboy published a monograph, Mr. Slowboy: Portraits of the Modern Gentleman, featuring an essay by Ametora author W. David Marx and an introduction by none other than Kazuo Hozumi himself.

 

In a moving 2023 Monocle Japan interview shortly before Hozumi’s passing, Mr. Slowboy met Hozumi in Tokyo. The two talked art, detail and the quiet beauty of menswear done right —  each holding the other’s work, connected by a shared devotion to the timeless elegance of ametora and the Ivy boy.