The mirror

The other day I was in a coffee shop with a friend when a young woman came in, sat down at a table near us, and opened her bag. She was wearing so much makeup she didn't look human. Her face was a perfect, rather grotesque, mask, and her hair was dyed a sort of brown-orange and teased and moussed into what I think of as bath cleaner style.

From her bag she took a mirror. This was not the sort of mirror you imagine someone taking out of their bag. It was probably a bit bigger than a standard business letter, and it had a stand. She stood the mirror on the table, took out her mobile phone, and called someone. Then she chatted on the phone, loudly, while watching herself in the mirror.

She acted as though this was a perfectly normal thing to do.

And perhaps it is becoming normal. When I first came to Japan you would sometimes see women applying lipstick in public, discreetly. Then it became acceptable, suddenly, to apply makeup in public perfectly openly, and within a couple of years the trains were full of women applying their makeup on their way to work. They have full makeup kits in their bags, and mirrors. Then guys started carrying mirrors as well, so they could check that every strand of hair was in the right 'disheveled' place. I know this, because in my classes, if I get something in my eye I can ask the nearest student, male or female, if they have a mirror, and they always do. They're pretty big mirrors, too, probably to accommodate the big hair. I always find this a little disconcerting. The mirror in my bag is the one inside my contact lens case, and it is only big enough for one eye at a time.

But the woman in the cafe had a REALLY big mirror.

I have seen women with mirrors at cafe tables before, applying makeup. I find it rather revolting, actually. When I am relaxing with a coffee I do not want to feel as if I am in someone's bathroom. But that was the first time I have seen someone using a mirror just to look at herself in public. She didn't even pretend to apply or fix makeup, or check her hair. She just positioned the mirror so she could gaze at herself comfortably and chatted on the phone for a while. Then she put the phone down and drank her coffee. She never took her eyes off herself. The wall behind her was mirrored as well, so she might have been seeing herself endlessly reflected, although I'm not sure because I couldn't see if the angle was right for that.

My friend said it was not the first time she'd seen that sort of behaviour recently, but she thought it was fairly new. Is it the next big thing, I wonder? Will coffee shops here soon be full of young people staring at themselves? Is it only in Japan, or is it happening elsewhere as well?

The whole thing – the excessive makeup, the obsession with everything about the 'look' being perfect, the unwillingness to go out in public with no makeup at all (many women are like that, here) – seems to me to indicate something deeper than just vanity or narcissism. It seems to me that the whole idea of 'image' here has become so distortedly overblown it has become more important than anything else, so that if a person does not feel that they are being seen (or at least that their image is being seen) they do not feel real, somehow.

And what better way to ensure being seen than by looking at yourself?