♡ Gyaru Doll ♡

I have no one to talk about irl this so here's a blog post about my first time at Kinokuniya!

Long post and ramblings ahead:

I recently moved to NYC and there is a Kinokuniya in Manhattan. In case you don't know, Kinokuniya is a store that sells Japanese books, magazines, manga, stationery, stickers and so much more. I was so excited to visit because there aren't any where I'm from. It was my first time actually reading Japanese magazines in person and physically holding them in my hand. The whole experience felt surreal - I have been a huge fan of J-fashion magazines since I was 11 and here I am at 26, 15 years later, finally getting to read them irl.

While I was there I read Larme, Ageha, Egg, Vivi, and Non-no. I was a little sad that there weren't many Harajuku / street fashion magazines like Kera, Zipper or Fruits (but many have went out of print so not surprised). There weren't any issues of Popteen either, which I was shocked by given it's popularity - but maybe it's not popular anymore?

It was so weird seeing the models being born in 2007; I felt so old lol. Pretty much all my J-fashion inspirations (like Sakurina, Tsubasa Masuwaka, Risa Nakamura, etc) were born in the 80s and early 90s, so it felt jarring to be older than the models instead of younger...

If you were on the internet and into J-fashion from around 2002 to 2014, you remember how easy to find and abundant J magazine scans were online. That was my only access to them (and I'm sure the same was true for many others). After blogging died it was significantly harder to find scans. People used to scan every page in every issue for the whole year, then it dwindled down to only a couple pages every so often. After 2017 it seemed like everyone stopped scanning magazines altogether. So there's like a black hole in my mind from 2018 to now when it comes to J-fashion trends.

Egg is only doing seasonal volumes now, but they only had issues from 2024 and 2025. I didn't see any published in 2026 which makes me sad :/ I hope they aren't stopping publication. EDIT: Egg put out the 2026 Spring/Summer Volume in April, meaning it's still in print and the store is probably is getting copies soon :)

Overall it was a great experience and I definitely see myself going there regularly. They had so many other things including cute stickers, art books, Studio Ghibli merch, cute stationery - all of which I love. It's awesome to read other iconic magazines like Popeye and Brutus too! Thanks for reading this if you did and I'd love to hear about your experience if you have one or something similar in your city!