FuckYeahBlondKoreans: “Because they are even hotter when they go blond” A collection of blond (mostly male) Korean pop stars, including plenty of Jaejoong (aka, Tohoshinki’s Jejung or ジェジュン) and G-Dragon.
Shibuya-Nights: Blog by young European woman chronicling sexual adventures with gyaruo, hosts, yakuza, and many more.
What are your favorite Asia blogs?
CNNGo has a fun interview with Numata Manabu, a Tokyo photographer who has been creating commercial and artistic images of male hosts for five years. I love these group portraits. Numata-san wants the viewer to see the hosts as individuals, and believes that many are smart and hard-working.
Numata-san also describes a progression in male hosts’ visual style, from old-school enka, to Kimutaku look-alikes, other popular Johnny’s boys, gyaruo and visual-kei. I think the kimono look is extra-festive!
Today is Seijin no hi, Coming of Age Day, on which Japan celebrates those who have turned 20 this past year. Lots of super garish kimonos for the girls, and more sober kimonos for the gyaruo peacocks who mix tradition with huge fried hair.
The image above is courtesy of Julie in Japan, one of my favorite foreign bloggers in Japan. Why are Canadians so cool?! Julie is the perfect blogger: original, prolific, fun, and incredibly sweet disposition.
Last year my post did not include any original images or even found ones of young male fashion outlaws. I’ll be trolling Nakano today hoping to find some good snaps with the new camera.
Dear readers, please send me or link to any good images you create or find!!
One of my absolute favorite Japanese blogs is Love Hotel Japan, which is one filthy story after the next about a Swedish young woman who enjoys lots of Japanese men and tells!
This week she reveals more details than most people would need to know about her new gyaruo boyfriend: a guy who wears heavy foundation & eyebrow pencil, spends an hour and a half flat-ironing his hair, and enjoys wearing pink Panther undies, blowing bubbles inside the love hotel room, and using pink egg vibrators on himself.
The detail is stunning and over-the-top. As a bonus, she provides a link to a gyaruo blog (not her boyfriend’s).
Reading a 1960s literary book by last century’s most celebrated Japanese to English translator, I was struck by his use of charmingly out-dated English. Famous North American translator describes how famous Japanese Meiji writer turned his attention from geishas to “slatterns.” The setting was the start of the 20th century, and the fiction writer was making the impossible biological transition from young man to middle age.
The context made clear that the “slattern,” lacking the art of the geisha, was a barely obscured word for prostitute. What a now quaint word to denote lack of sophistication, slovenly hair and costume, and inadequate hygiene.
With this delicious new word in mind, what did I see in the JR Metro but white plastic heart-shaped high heels? Yes, the heel itself was in the shape of a valentine’s day heart with the point serving as the base of the heel. Below is the closest approximation I could find on Google images. And, trust me, somehow the white plastic was even more slattern-ish than the lucite model.
My only question is why, even in Tokyo on a hot evening, can men not signal slattern-iciousness the way ladies can and often do? Step it up, herbivores-ladies danshi-gyaruo-otomen!
Tokyo Moe 