“Bagelheads“! Yikes, we manufactured a Japanese fad!

“Bagelheads” is just a name that was made up to joke about this body modification, but the mainstream press took the name as real, as you can see from the reports below.

Bagelheads the latest fad for Japanese teens: Mom hopes it stays in Japan
New Jersey On-Line — by Fiona Charles — Thursday July 02, 2009, 8:50 PM
Japanese teens are shooting silicone in their head to morph their faces. They call themselves bagelheads.
Have you seen the latest fad for teens in Japan? They are called bagelheads. Teens in Japan are injecting themselves with saline, which causes bumps in their heads.
The lumps and bumps created by the saline can be shaped and molded. The teens are calling themselves bagelheads. The disfigurement only last 24 hours. I have a hard time looking at these teens, and I just hope it stays in Japan and doesn’t make it’s way over to the States.

New ‘Bagel Head’ Fad Is Crazy!
RantRave - July 2
OK, Japan, we get it. You’re the king of weird.
A new “beauty” fad in Tokyo clubs has teens injecting themselves with bags of saline, disfiguring their heads! They call themselves “Bagel Heads” or “bagelheads.” ….more...

A quick Google search for the joke name “bagelheads” or “bagelhead” written in Japanese katakana results in zero hits:

“Bagelheads” is a great joke name for this 4-person “Japanese” trend, but both the Western mainstream press and the blogsphere is picking it up and reporting this fake tread as real, sheesh.

In addition, both of the reports express the facetious hope that this “Japanese” trend remains in Japan, even though it originated in the West, ha, ha.

Not unlike the new film “UP” …Here’s the traditional Japanese answer.

What you are looking at is an odd twist to “Tanabata“ the Japanese star festival (ripped off from the Chinese star festival, Qi X) when Japanese write their wishes, sometimes in the form of poetry, on “tanzaku”, small pieces of paper, and hang them on large displays of bamboo fronds. The bamboo and decorations are often set afloat on a river or burned after the festival, but in this case they get UP.

Mishima stuff to be auctioned
July 2, 2009 - StraitsTimes.com
TOKYO - A Japanese bookseller will on Sunday auction off letters and photos of the nationalist author and poet Yukio Mishima, famous for his writings and his public samurai-style suicide in 1970…
….The 1967 and 1970 letters, addressed to his American friend Jan von Adlmann, an art museum director, hint at a possibly intimate relationship between them…
…Mishima in both letters spoke of Saint Sebastian, a third-century Roman martyr and an oft cited symbolic figure of homosexuality…Mishima enclosed black-and-white photos showing himself posing naked as Saint Sebastian, with his wrists tied up over his head and bleeding with arrows piercing his body…more...

Although the news reports about this don’t make it clear, the photo above of Mishima as Saint Sebastian seems to be, “One of the photos was made public for the first time,” according to antiquarian bookseller Shigeru Natsume, who went on to say that, “I suppose it was not allowed to be published as it shows his naked lower body, although Mishima seemed to have liked it better.”

That photo is certainly more-over-the-top than the “standard” Saint Sebastian photo that Mishima’s estate had released years ago (below).

Todaiji temple in Nara Japan busts Buddha’s big bulging balls.

Japan firm recalls Buddha figure ‘with bulge’
AFP News, June 25, 2009 …
A Japanese company has reportedly agreed with an ancient temple that it would withdraw a controversial plastic figurine — a seated, grinning Buddha with a bulge between its legs… made and sold the golden-robed “Marimokkori” character around Todaiji with a tag that carried a drawing of the temple’s World Heritage-listed Great Buddha Hall.…more…

The banned balls bite the dust as the “Marimokkori” character after a request from the World Heritage temple. As you might remember, the 3Yen has previously covered the popular Marimo balls in our report, Captain Hard-on of Hokkaido.

It’s hard to understand why in the first place they gave a big bulbous bulge to the Buddha statue. The Marimokkori character originated in far north of Japan on Hokkaido island and the Todaiji temple is in the middle of Japan on the main island.
The distance and relationship is like the National Cathedral in Washington DC selling nude versions of New York’s Statue of Liberty in its souvenir gift shop.

Samm Bennett’s video for his cover version of Leonard Cohen’s, “Hallelujah,” using Tokyo photos he has posted on the flickr.

Over on boing-boing they posted the video below of the remix classic Katamari tracks for upcoming PS3 ‘tribute’ release Katamari Forever.
I remixed that remix and put it into MP3 format (2.5MB, 1.0min) for you to listen/download.

koji suzuki ‘drop’ - toilet paper novel from japanese cult author
newsbizarre.com — 2009 May 27
A Japanese author famous for his horror stories, including cult Japanese and eventually Hollywood film The Ring, has bizarrely produced a novel to be printed on rolls of toilet paper by manufacturer, Hayashi Paper…
…. is appropriately set in a public restroom. The Drop toilet paper novella takes up about three feet or 90 centimeters of a toilet roll. Koji Suzuki’s "Drop" can be read in just a few minutes, according to manufacturer Hayashi Paper....more…

Hayashi promotes the toilet paper, which will sell for 210 yen or US$2.20 a roll, as "a horror experience in the toilet."
Yep, this Japan toilet tale is named “Drop”—just like the plop of poop. And just like Koji Suzuki’s famous novel/film “RIng” the title is actually English transliterated into the Japanese katakana syllabary as shown below.

The puerile joke here is that the traditional Japanese outhouse (plenty of which still exist within hi-tech Tokyo) is called a botton benjo, literally “dropping poop place” (ボットン便所).

“l like Public Bath.”
–Shonan Knife

Seen cruising the downtown streets in Tokyo today…

Somebody must have an unnatural fixation on “Pichon-kun” the mascot of Daikin Industries’ air-conditioners.

Check out the official website and the youtube below.

Oops/Update:
That “Somebody” is Daikin Industries. I just read at watch.impress.co.jp (machine translation) that this car is a Toyota, the “iQ” (Wikipedia). The Toyota IQ did have beaucoup Bondo® body work.

Daikin Industries are using the car as part of its tenth anniversary commemorative campaign of the debut of their Pichon-kun character. The campaign period from May 7 to August 31, three of these cars will be exhibited all over Tokyo.
See many more photos and read more at watch.impress.co.jp (machine translation).