Girls, Be Like White Aprons, by Yukio Mishima
"I would like for the clean spirit of order, for dazzlingly white aprons, to ever be the symbol of your living."
Girls1, Be Like White Aprons
Yukio Mishima
Various critiques have been made of postwar schoolgirls, but the one thing that I consider progress is that schoolgirls have ceased to be sentimental. Recently male students are much more sentimental, weepy and quick to turn to suicide, but that is because the pressure of living and society more broadly bears on them to such an extent. The recent insolent cheerfulness of schoolgirls may partly come from the fact that they feel this pressure of living and society only indirectly. But that does not either seem to mean that this cheerfulness arises, like sentimentality, from a place unrelated to living. The cheerful ladies are quite rational, and possess discernment concerning reliable plans for living. In some ways, dazzlingly white aprons would suit them surprisingly well.