Aliens with blue-eyes invade the streets of Tokyo!
With the extra-long Golden Week holiday, performance artists like the “Medaman-Medaman” eyeballs are cruising the pavement of the Ginza and Koen-dori districts.
Try finding the alien invasion on the live webcams of Koen-dori in trendy-to-tears Shibuya.
UPDATE
POOP-DE-DO0!
—FECAL FACIAL IS LATEST WACKY SKIN TREATMENT—
April 29, 2008 — New York Post….just $216, Shizuka Bernstein will slather your face in feces for a full 50 minutes - what she calls the “Geisha Facial” - at her Midtown spa, Shizuka New York. The ancient Japanese cleanser - geisha and kabuki dancers have been using the bird poop to wash off their heavy white makeup…more…
Let’s white happy!
While I’m in the drug store in Japan, I always find aisles devoted solely to skin whitening products. And my favorite traditional Japanese product for skin whitening is uguisu no fun aka swallow nightingale droppings. Being Bihaku ) or a ‘white beauty’ is hot shit here in Japan.
In a machine translation of the product description ofuguisu-no-fun, the cosmetics company uguisunofun.com says to whiten your skin you should take from 0.5 to 1.0 grams (about 1/3 of teaspoon) of the bird poop powder and mix it with soap in your palm and wash your face in the regular manner. Product No. 151 Container (26 g), price: 1,029 yen.
As Japanese love to quote the old Chinese saying: “Being white can cover/compensate for three times of ugliness. ” In the past months that I’ve spent in the hospital, the Japanese student nurses lube me up with NIVEA Whitening Body Lotion after my sponge bath and I always teased them I might disappear into the sheets.
For some women, it’s beauty and the bleach
Concord Monitor—-
….Take a daylight drive through Asian immigrant enclaves such as Monterey Park and Irvine, and you’ll see women trying to shield themselves with umbrellas - even for the short dash from a parking lot into a supermarket.While driving, many wear special “UV gloves”- which look like the long gloves worn with ball gowns - to protect their forearms, and don wraparound visors that resemble welder’s masks….There are doctors who, for about $1,000, will use an electrical field to deliver vitamins, moisturizers and bleaching agents to a woman’s face in a procedure known as a “mesofacial.” Whitening products have been a mainstay in Asia for decades, but cosmetics-industry officials said they have emerged as a hot seller in the United States …..….more….
Typical Japanese bihaku ads for skin whitening products (mostly fraudulent and ineffective like my hospital’s Whitening Body Lotion).
Here a bit of Japanese charm stemming from their old saying, “Crying babies grow fast.” Last Sunday, Tokyo’s Sensoji Temple held this traditional event with a long history, Konaki Sumo (baby-crying bout)—also called Nakizumo (sumo of tears).
Isn’t child abuse fun?
Babies face off in ‘crying sumo’ contest
Mainichi Daily News - 2008 April 28–….In crying sumo the babies are held up by amateur sumo wrestlers in a ring, and the baby who cries first is the winner. If both babies cry, then the one that cries loudest wins. …more...
I just noticed the Kyodo News on their “live” news ticker is bemoaning that the number of ALIEN sumo wrestlers in the top rank of wresters is now 16—the most in the history of sumo.
You gotta feel sorry for the Japanese. They just simply are too small to succeed in their own national sport, sumo. However, foreign-born sumo wrestlers from the United States are no longer doing very well in Japanese sumo either. Sumo is like boxing, you have to “stay hungry” and be willing to suffer. Basically competitive athletes from a comfortable, middle-class background ( whether they are Japanese or American) don’t succeed in fighting sports.
Nowadays it’s young, hungry guys from Russia and other former communist countries who are providing the majority of the new foreign sumo wrestlers. They’re the only athletes who are motivated and “hungry” enough to succeed in rising from the lower ranks of sumo (where the pay is low and the life is not fun because of the strict–some say torturous–discipline/abuse).
Here’s my new favorite website….
*M*i*r*r*o*r* *W*o*r*l*d*
Photographs Of Unknown Origin
Let’s hope they keep up the quality and randomness.
See also: myspace.com/WelcomeToMirrorworld
One of the sadly-soon-to-be-gone-but-delightfully-tacky sights of Osaka Japan is the robot manikin “Cui-daore Taro”—a mechanical drum-playing clown on front an 8-story ramen shop [Wiki].
Offers flood in for Osaka restaurant’s popular Cui-daore Taro mascot
Mainichi Daily News
OSAKA — An Osaka restaurant that is closing down in July is being flooded with offers to buy and rent its popular mascot, it has been learned. The Cui-daore restaurant in the Dotonbori district of Osaka’s Chuo-ku has reportedly received over 100 offers from across Japan for its mascot Cui-daore Taro, a drum-beating robot doll dressed in a striped clown suit with a pointed hat…more…
Photo thanks to thaths’ flickr
Kyodo News photo - Apr. 12, 2008
The Japanese press calling this an “entertainers’ procession” is just a bit ingenuous. At least the Mainichi Daily News gets closer to the truth by explaining that these entertainers were Oiran “high-class” (expensive) “courtesans” (prostitutes).
Mainichi Daily News - AP Photo - April 12, 2008 –A participant (right) dressed as an Oiran, or high-class courtesan in the Edo period (1600-1868), marches during the annual Oiran festival in Tokyo’s Asakusa shopping district…
The-other-side-of-the-coin would be…
That similarities could be found between the ancient Greek hetaera, the Japanese Oiran, and Babylonian Nadītu–all complex figures that are perhaps in an intermediate position between prostitutes and entertainers.
Often mistaken* for baby Buddha, 
Osaka has a full-blown shrine built for its faux-Kwepie god, a commercial, copyrighted, Kewpie-like Billiken© doll and the locals have been seriously praying to it since 1912.
Since Billiken© was created and copyrighted in 1908, the Tsutenkaku Tower Corporation who owns the Billiken© Shrine put on a birthday party complete with a mega-creapy mascot god as you can see below in the screenshot from NHK public TV: Billiken’s 100th birthday celebrated at landmark tower in Osaka (Mainichi News, March 31, 2008).
Holy Action Figures
–via the WFMU blog
Kachina Spirits top
Holy Action Figures bottom
The idea for juxtaposition of Hopi Kachina Dolls in Phoenix, Arizona and Japanese Action Toys in a museum in Tokyo came from Benjamen Walker in the WFMU blog. However, I doubt if the original author, Mr. Walker, knows how close these “Holy Action Figures” are to the “truth” in Japan.
For example, at the Godzilla statue in Ginza there are always Shinto-eque offerings of sake, called “omiki.” left for the Godzilla spirit…Yeah! A drunk Godzilla Spirit–that’s what Tokyo needs!
Today, the mega-popular website Boing-Boing just discovered the “Video of creepy eyelid-poking beauty tip” that has been the all-time favorite of readers here on the 3Yen since 2005*, Japanese Makeup Lesson in Eye Torture.
A common sight in Japan are women (and men) blithely toweling on makeup* as they barrel along riding on Japanese commuter trains. However, for some strange reason I never see them do this eyeball forking, hee, hee.
The most popular plastic surgery procedure for Japanese and Asians the so-called “double eyelid” surgery to make slanted eyes rounder. Continuing on the same vein that I mentioned in Vibrator glasses for a “taller” nose to raise the bridge of the nose, here’s a “Makeup Lesson” for eye gluing and taping to simulate round eyes. See it as makeup lesson as a video and here as still pictures in plain HTML as shown below
Via Weekly Teinou * Woman which means this BoinBoing news item has been floating around the Japanese blogosphere since 2004.
Here are some more horrific pictures of this meaningless “beauty” procedure.
And for more fun with eyeballs, check out my previous reports:
–Japanese eye torture on the train
–Kinky ‘lash bar’ in Tokyo
–Hello Kitty eyeballs
This Japanese burka is almost as funny as my previous post about the YouTube video[1] : “Burqa Blue.” boomp3.com
Gunma gal unveils Islam-inspired anti-pollen veil
Mainichi, March 27, 2008
SHINTO, Gunma — A retailer here has started selling Islam-inspired veils aimed at preventing pollen from giving people hay fever. Ai Kobayashi, the proprietor of the Chikyu-ya store in Shinto, started making and selling the 100 percent silk hoods, inspired by the burqa veils worn by many women in Islamic countries. “I wanted to have a fashionable approach to fighting off pollen,” said Kobayashi, who suffers from hay fever brought about by cedar pollen herself…more…
Click for full original.
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