"Why do you wear such high boots?" I asked teenager Naho Ichihashi through an interpreter. We had come across Naho clumping awkwardly out of the Shibuya subway station in Tokyo wearing nine-inch-high platform soles, the biggest we had seen in this district of Tokyo, where the latest in Japan's youth fashion is on display. "To make me taller," she replied.
Well I suppose it was a stupid question. They certainly did that for her, but not much else. "I trip quite frequently," she admitted. "Just this morning I fell down the stairs." Two deaths and hundreds of injuries have been blamed on the boots since they became the rage last year. Try driving in them.
Practicality is not a major consideration in Japanese fashion. Many young people dye their hair blonde but the result is a profusion of brick-red and orange heads. "I bleached my hair a lot before colouring it but I can't get it white," said near-blonde Aki Matsumura (20) in the D'Rompa fashion shop, where kids were browsing among racks of orange, brick-red, blonde and brunette wigs and hair attachments.
She said her parents were shocked when she and her brother first dyed their hair, "but they got used to it, and when my brother decided to go back to his natural black hair they asked him, `What's wrong?' "
Most of the female teenagers who trip and shuffle around Shibuya in platform boots also wear knee socks, miniskirts and wigs. The more daring have white lipstick and eyeliner, pierced lips, and faces darkened by sun-tanning machines. They like to perform synchronised parapara dancing to Eurobeat music in the fashion stores watched by youths who dye their hair to achieve a sun-bleached look.
The young people also like to frequent 7-11 stores, to use the Internet screens, new "1,000 yen" shops - where every item, from make-up to watches, costs 1,000 yen (75p) - and fast-food outlets, to eat hamburgers and milkshakes.
Many of the kids who hang around Shibuya are unemployed, working part time when they need money. They are at the forefront of a youth revolution in Japan against the conformity of life as "salary men" or "office ladies" - though many limit their defiance to the streets and will change into regular clothes and shoes before returning home.
The most essential accessory of the revolution is a mobile telephone. Every teenager, it seems, has the very latest J-phone handset.
Every mobile telephone has a virtual pet in a corner of the display screen. "You can see it's like a living creature, it changes expression when it wants to," said salesman Hiromitsu Ishiguro at a store selling little silver handsets for about £40 each, "or a friend can call and make it smile or turn its back."
People sending email to each other on personal computers can also enlist the services of digital pets like Momo, a pink teddy bear with round eyes, one of eight "PostPet" animal characters introduced by Sony to "take" and "deliver" emails on screen.
Art, we know, imitates life, and some of the virtual pets are so realistic they seem alive. In a Surabaya store specialising in Pokemon toys I came across Seaman, a weird digital fish with a human face swimming around a TV-size screen.
As the creature develops into a fish-person it starts talking, first in a baby voice, then like a grown-up, saying things like "What's up?" and "Well if you've got problems, so have I." It remembers - thanks to the Dreamcast software - what it has been told, and gets petulant if "mistreated".
Mr Shibazuki turned up the heat in the virtual tank to show how it reacted. Fishman glared out and said, "Hey, it's getting hot in here." He made the screen dark. "Turn the light back on," Seaman snapped. "What happens if you just ignore it?" I asked Mr Shibazuki. "It dies," he replied. Ask a stupid question.