First off, let's put our cards on the table: The girls who hang out with gwen, are, regular run of the mill Los Angeles girls, tarted up to look like Gwen's version of Japan--- A sort of West meets West vision of urban style. It's a marketing thing, a banal, boring, racist, white, marketing ploy aimed at making Asian girls the same sort of fetish object that they've always been.
But, guess what? Japan doesn't care--- really, unless they are just skipping the subtext of the whole thing, they're quite pleased and within the last three months even ran a front page spread (ed: in Asahi Shimbun) with Gwen and her dancers, proclaiming that the world was catching on to 'kawaii'... This is true of most things that Westerners (like me), think that the Japanese should find offense to--- things like Lost in Translation, which I've not met a single Japanese person to say a negative word of.
Japanese fashion is about repressing the idea that you're going to be stuck at home raising kids for the rest of your life while your husband goes off to a horrible job, an hour a day in the morning, and one comming home on the train, working long hours--- Maybe you're female and you get a job, and you get less than the boys, you get no vacation, no respect, little money, for equitable work...
So you dress like a member of Malice Mizer nee--- an 18th century Victorian goth princess, or staple teddybears to your clothes and you hang out down town until you are 18, at 18 maybe you get a job, yet you keep living with your parents--- living the expendable income life of the freeter.
I really don't care if people pick up or put down what they think Japanese culture is---* I really don't care for Gwen's version of white appropriation of foreign culture either. What can you say about a woman who pays four American Asians to pretend to be ignorant of the English language and surround her all the time, as what she calls her "imaginary friends"... Whomever said it, said it best when they said, "Gwen Steffani is what WHITE is...".
This is the first that I've seen it directly, but Gwen being the cultural Envoy to Japan is like Amos and Andy hosting Black History Month on BET.
*(ed: honestly, I think, more often than not, each interpretation of Japanese culture outside of Japan tends to be a diluted and misguided attempt to fit a cultural stereotype into a mold that validates the co-opter, rather than something that reflects and amplifies the original meaning... but hey, that's me. Besides, it works both ways.)