Pictured with fellow beef-cake Seto Daiya, Kosuke Hagino just won the 400 meter individual medley at the Pan Pacific competition. Love that the reporters are already hyping Japan’s swimming dreams for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
Good luck in 2014, Club Distance hosts! I hope that more money translates into BIGGER hair. Let’s pray together.
I have not posted for a week to pay respect to the thousands of dead and displaced by the unimaginable earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Frankly I wondered whether this blog’s frivolity and frequent lack of taste is appropriate during this stressful period of intense sadness and nuclear meltdown panic.
From today I will resume this blog to show that we are still alive, creative and observant here in Tokyo. I was inspired by my blogging sensei Bangin, who insists he will continue to try to make others happy through his blog. Even in the worst of times, there is plenty of moe to share, plenty of male fashion to ponder, and plenty of hope that Japan will rebuild.
Can you outdance Kylie?
Alas, dear readers, this is my final Seijin no Hi photo. Perhaps the culmination of all the other photos. For reasons not made clear to this foreigner, the joyous 20 year olds are posing with one of them in the air with his legs spread wide. A particularly fetching boy seems to be reaching his hand towards legs-spread-wide’s groin.
I can only imagine how much more fun happened after they got drunker. There’s something practically Muslim about how almost all Japanese socializing is same sex. I love it!
Soon there was a horde of hot young 20 year olds combining traditional dress with big fried hair and excess testosterone. It didn’t take long for them to start falling all over each other, lit cigarettes in hand. I hope that they needed to pose for me, as much as I enjoyed their antics. I especially like how you can see inside the fallen boy’s skirt, I mean, “hakama” (袴).
This photo series is indebted to the chubby guy with the pink kimono who noticed my not subtle lurking and photographing. He called his friends for a huge yankii group pose on this important day that celebrates youths’ new ability to drink, smoke, get married, and other fun stuff.
Check out Danny Choo’s website for professional photos and more attention on the ladies. I focused strictly on the urban yankii male. It’s easy to be sex-specific in Japan because so many adults and teens socialize almost entirely with members of the same sex.
My first observation is that only the most bad-ass men are wearing kimonos, hakama, and haori. Many of their peers are wearing cheap suits, and spending all their vanity on their glorious hair: dyed, permed, back-combed, gelled, sprayed, and sculpted. Basically a junior salaryman look with extra attention on hair and eyebrows.
The next posts will focus more on rough-housing, misplaced energy, and male intimacy.
I apologize to my readers for so many sad and fugly pots. It’s time to turn your attention back to the Japanese islands, and images of hope, freedom and male vanity. On Monday’s Coming of Age (成人の日, Seijin no hi) holiday, I hit the Nakano yankii jackpot.
The location is the plaza and musical clock in front of Nakano Sun Plaza, the same site where this blog’s header image was taken three years ago. Despite the dwilndling numbers of young Japanese, these boys were very excited to pose and rough-house for the “gaijin.” I was quickly joined in the photo pool by three hot yankii 20 year old girls.
I’ll post more images over the next few days . .
I love this photo of Betty Ford getting ready to check out of the White House.
Enough already about politics, global financial disaster and this so-called hope. Let’s focus on domesticity, first ladies, and the first kids in the White House. Sasha and Malia are super-cute, and the most photogenic since John-John and Caroline.
The New York Times also helpfully reminds us that at 12:32 pm on January 20, 2009, Laura and George Bush will lift off from the Capitol by helicopter. Good riddance!
And good luck with rehab, Laura. Give Betty a call. You deserve better!!
Tokyo Moe 