Turn on the television or flip through any popular magazine, and you're sure to come across gyarumama (gal mamas) -- teenage moms with tanned skin, trendy clothes and towering platform shoes.
The media hype has focused on the superficial aspects of the phenomenon, namely the incongruity of teenagers with dyed hair and miniskirts pushing babies in strollers around the streets of Shibuya.
However, the emergence of the gyarumama highlights the fact that a growing number of young women in Japan are no longer willing to sacrifice their identity and individuality in order to conform to societal expectations of how a "good" mother should look and behave.
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