Diving into the 2024 JC & JK Buzzword Award nominations for trendy Japanese slang and more [Video]

We take a closer look at some of the entries selected by Gen Z and Gen Alpha Japanese schoolgirls and suddenly feel very old.

Schoolgirls move the world–or at the very least, our language. Every year since 2017, Japanese marketing company AMF has released JC & JK Buzzword Awards to follow how young women are using and shaping the Japanese language. While there are other yearly buzzword-type rankings in Japan, AMF is uniquely a firm that markets to Generation Z (those born in the mid-to-late 1990s through early 2010s) members of society and researches their consumption of various media.

The 50 nominations for this year’s Buzzword Awards were selected by an AMF research team of about 100 JC (short for joshichuu, “female junior high school student”) and JK (short for joshiko, “female high school student”) who fit into either Gen Z or the next youngest Gen Alpha (those born in the early 2010s through mid-2020s). The terms …