The star in question is called Hiromix, and she is without question the fashion flavor of the month. Her image adorns billboards all over Tokyo (pouting down from beneath a parasol in the J-Wave poster) and she appears on late night TV. In February, Studio Voice, the magazine for lovers of hip eye-candy, devoted 50 pages to her in its "We Love Hiromix" special issue.

On the face of it, Hiromix has a lot in common with the idols of previous generations--youth (aged 19, she left school last year), a catchy handle (derived from her real name, Hiromi Tonegawa), and a tendency to strip to her undies in front of photographers (recent sessions include a shoot with the noted "hair nude" specialist, Nobuyoshi Araki). But Hiromix is no pop star or TV tarento. Instead of cavorting in front of the camera, she has made her reputation behind it--as the country's first teenage photographer idol.

In person, young Hiromi is unassuming, inquisitive and intelligent, the exact opposite of the strutting, self-obsessed bimbo of her self-portraits. "I never thought it would turn out like this," she says, vigilantly squired at all times by the man behind the voice on the cellular phone--Koji Yoshida, the freelance editor credited for her success. After a thoroughly ordinary childhood in Tokyo (her father is a chef), Hiromix entered, and won, the Canon New Photo Generation Prize. The Japanese photo establishment and principally, Studio Voice, Yoshida's frequent employer, had found its new genius.

"Not the kind of contrived photography that excuses itself with theoretical presense [sic]," the magazine eulogized. "It's the yearning to look at an image and experience that feeling of falling in love for the first time."

If this is hard to understand, the mystery deepens when you see the photographs. The pictures that scooped the Canon were snapshots, taken with Hiromix's trademark Big Mini--a popular foolproof pocket camera--then printed at a one-hour lab and enlarged on a convenience store copier. The snaps take us into a young woman's world: stuffed animals, out-of-focus cats, vinyl boots, lipstick, sheer stockings, her girlfriends preening in bedroom mirrors and Hiromix herself, often in underwear, winking. Some of them display a mildly erotic sub-Madonna frisson (unlike the big M, though, Hiromix sensibly retains her underwear when she walks in the park). Others--like the blurred close up of cheese crackers and Pocky chocolate sticks--are harder to get excited about.

At our interview, it is Yoshida who is taking care of the photos. "These are her latest," he says, taking out some service-size prints of more cats and blurry flowers.

"I want people to enter my pictures when they see them," says Hiromix. "The more the better." But is there more to Hiromix beyond the lure of her simplicity--the suggestion that anyone with a point-and-shoot camera could be discovered and live out a Hiromix fantasy? "I don't think I like the idea that anyone can take them," she says, after some consideration. "I prefer to think this is something only I can do, this is my private world." Yoshida is more circumspect: "If you mean she's just a trend, that's not the case," he declares, although it is Yoshida who is cited by the magazine Nikkei Trendy as the man who led Hiromix through Tokyo's sinewy art world and into poster and CD cover deals, her own CD-ROM and a soon-to-be-released T-shirt line.

How is a teenage girl able to impress her vision on an entire city--and why does the media seem so willing to see in her the future of Japanese photography? "Young women are very powerful," says Yoshida. "In fact, they are the leaders of this society--the media and business carefully watch everything they do." Perhaps we should ask another question: who is leading these leaders?