Teenage Wasteland

Mai

and Rika squat on a Shibuya street corner crawling with drunks and hustlers. Dressed almost identically in tight tees and pants, the girls—who say they're 18 but look 14—touch up their lipstick as they draw leers from the men stumbling by. Mai pulls out her bleating cell phone and checks the number on the screen. "My mom," she tells Rika, tucking the phone back in a Starbucks tote bag without answering. Rika nods. Mai tosses her long hair and declares: "Tonight's an all-nighter."

The Shibuya district of Tokyo is a teen mecca by day, by night a neon-signed playground of drinking holes and sex clubs for adult men looking for a good time. Mai and Rika hang here round the clock, part of a new fad sweeping up very young Japanese girls. It's called puchi iede, or "petite runaway." Home is what they're running from. Shibuya, with its 24-7 excitements and black-lit havens, is freedom central. "Petite" refers not to the size of the runaway, though many are mere wisps on the cusp of puberty, but to the short time the girls stay away from home: typically a few days, or until they need clean underwear.

It's a new form of rebellion for a generation increasingly cut off from its parents. Teens rightly see that hard work doesn't spell success anymore—their dutiful parents are facing the gloomiest economic times since World War II—so what's the point? Why not go out and play—for several days and nights at a time? But running away to Shibuya or other metropolitan party hubs can be anything but a harmless lark. Some young runaways have been murdered. The lure of prostitution, to earn spending money or just to find a warm place to sleep, is hard to avoid considering the vast network of predators trained to sweep young girls off the streets and into the simmering sex industry. Authorities are waking up to the problem, though they're stumped on how to attack it. And for proudly middle-class Japan, a larger question looms: What kind of generation spends its formative years—and gets its kicks—lurking in alleys among drunks and pimps or sponging off licentious men as old as their fathers?

The kids themselves hit the road for reasons ranging from chasing down a beloved pop act to escaping an abusive home. Michiko and Yuko, who are slurping a 1 a.m. dinner of curry-flavored instant noodles on a street corner, are a couple of 17-year-olds who met on a weeklong pursuit of their favorite boy band, Glay clones called Due le Quartz. Parked nearby are their miniature suitcases, one a faux Burberry, the other girlishly pink with a strawberry pattern. Michiko has taken off from her suburban Tokyo home before, but this is a first for Yuko, who rode the rails in from northern Niigata prefecture. "My parents said no, so I just packed a bag and left," she says. (Like most of the two dozen runaways TIME spoke to, the girls requested their last names be withheld.)

Earlier in the week, Michiko and Yuko had about $200 each saved up from convenience-store jobs. The first nights they slept and showered at $10-an-hour hotels—"just us, no men," says Michiko—but tickets to the band's gigs have eaten up the rest. "Plus, we buy the members gifts," says Michiko. "You know, so they notice us and maybe let us ... you know ... " Yuko giggles. (They've heard of groupies who have partied with the band.) Passing men notice them, and the girls know they can always use them for a free meal or a bed. But they settle in a manga kissa, a brightly lit café lined with shelves of comic books and crowded with other teens, curling up until morning, when they'll hop a train to the next stop on the boy band's tour.

They're not real runaways, the girls insist, because they intend to go home sooner or later—and they have cell phones. "Our parents can reach us anytime," Yuko argues. "They know where we are, sort of." Amazingly, the police use the same measure to define a runaway—if your parents can contact you, you're not really missing. Which explains why the official numbers of Tokyo runaways—though up 15% over the past five years—remain relatively low. Of the 1.4 million minors in the metropolis, about 2,000 were taken into custody as runaways last year.

Runaways are apprehended only if they commit, or seem likely to commit, a crime. The police department's own data state that runaways aged 14 and under have swelled to 33% of the total, and girls have become the majority. Yet in Shibuya, uniformed officers manning a centrally located police box rarely glance at the obviously underage, mostly female children streaming past long after midnight. "I don't have any reason to come into contact with them," says an officer, who declines to give his name. Michiko says when she's in a strange city she often asks policemen for directions to the nearest hot-sheet hotel. None ever asks where she's from or what she's up to.

Following a spate of sensational news reports on Tokyo runaways earlier this fall, the police belatedly took to the streets. In a highly publicized runaway sweep, 450 officers fanned out over 10 days in mid-September. They found, in all of Tokyo, just 64. By contrast, a reporter in the course of a few hours can find at least half a dozen.