Abstract

This essay examines the questions that existing high-teen related studies are missing: “What is high-teen?”. It is a foreign language originated from Japanese, spoken only in Japan and Korea among the post-war pan East Asian pop culture scenes. High-teen is based on the ‘teenager’ formed in the United States. It should be understood not just as a subcategory of popular culture but as an important ideological allegory of post-war Japanese politics. To learn this concept, this essay archeologically researches the origin of high-teen’s meaning and analyses the political meaning of the early high-teen contents of Ueda Hirao which related to postwar politics and ideology in Japan. Existing research regarding high-teen tends to be limited to the peripheral and fragmentary areas. On the other hand, this paper will be the beginning of a discussion on high-teen in a more expanding perspective as an East Asian postwar history.