Right now it’s Japanese ‘Halloween’ …Obon when the spirits of ancestors are supposed to revisit the living and it’s a vacation time during the Dog Days of August.
Even though the weather is hellishly hot, some Japanese don’t like to go in the water during Obon/Halloween out a fear of having the confused deceased drag them under by their ankles. This equates to fewer people at the beach except for foolhardy foreigners like me (and none of my ancestors would be stupid enough to hanging out at tepid bath water beach in Tokyo laden with stinging jellyfish in this Hades).
Sadly Japanese folks don’t dress up for Obon, but here is a great photoset on Flickr of super-tacky Japanese costumes for cheap Cosplay by goemon.
And although it’s not Japonesque at all, I like this cleavage as a “costume” from Subgenius.com.
Note many of the other photos in this Subgenius slideshow are NSFW such as the next photo in this series: naked sushi.
More on naked sushi–nyotaimori [女体盛り] .
This week the major Japanese magazine, DIAMOND, ran a cover story entitled:
Sweet beer lovers increase while the young who cannot drink beer also increases (August 07, 2008 DIAMOND Online).
The cover story goes on to say that the number of younger people who dislike the bitter taste of beer is growing and various mixed drinks and cocktail are now favored company parties (much to dismay of their older Japanese supervisors).
For example, a craft beer company of Kanagawa just west of Tokyo have put on the market a “sweets beer” last year. Both a “sweet vanilla stout” with the sweet fragrance of vanilla bean, two kinds of “the muscovado suite stout”—a raw brown-sugar black beer made of Okinawa sugar cane, which is pictured above on the right.
Also check out the previous 3Yen reports about milk beer in Got Bilk? and the weird story about, Pea in my beer.
First there was the popular ’80s TV show, Abunai Deka (Dangerous Detectives), about two Yokohama cops that wanted to be Dirty Harry in Japan, cleaning up the streets in a sometimes humorous manner that could only take place in the earlier carefree days before the bubble collapsed economy…
Now we get the Dangerous Sisters, that is the Abunai Kano Sisters, those two scandal-laced, silicon-pumped, famous-for-being-famous, media celebs, the Kano Sisters, who are now becoming anime characters to showcase their mental prowess….
http://kanosisters.net
In Japan they are best known for being known and their over-the-top plastic surgery, but no telling how America will react. The Abunai Kano Sisters must be planning to survive on rich otaku in Japan and the US, because on the engrished version of their site, and they are expecting a lot of sales for the otaku to benefit from their sleazy pre-order, group buying, and “Gathering” pricing schemes.
Will the Abunai Kano Sisters be a smash like Puffy AmiYumi and bring bukkake and engrish to America, or if they’ll crash the way Pink Lady did in the States? And will they do their interviews in engrish? Either way, some people just have more money than they know what to do with.
—special by the 3Yen’s correspondent-at-large, ‘Den4′—
In the great past, Americans were noted for their originality and adventuous spirit, to stride forth into the unknown…to where no man or woman has gone before……
Now we have merely copycats, where an original idea has been lost on the range where the deer and the antelope used to play (as well as the rabbits)…..
It is a sad state that Cosplay has now become Copyplay.….
U.S. cosplay cafe draws on growing interest in latest Japanese trends
japantoday.com / 8 August 2008 / LOS ANGELES —Once considered somewhat of a fringe movement reserved for nerdy comic book fanatics, anime culture has definitely found a place in the United States over the years. Ask any one of the thousands of fans who recently attended the Anime Expo in Los Angeles, and you might conclude that it was a cultural cornerstone. Drawing from that evolving popularity, Royal/T maid cafe, shop and art space debuts the cosplay restaurant idea to American audiences hungry for a taste of the latest in Japanese trends.
Launched during the spring of this year, Royal/T in Culver City offers not only the maid cafe experience made popular in Tokyo’s Akihabara district...more…
The Queen of the Tetsuo (model railway enthusiasts)
Click to view.
The Queen smashes a lovingly-made Japanese railroad diorama she curses a model enthusiast who made it. This is yet another “Akiba” otaku fetish (Akihabara, otaku-town in Tokyo) from a DVD called “Crash by Venus” for Japanese model train crush fetishists by Gagon Productions. In the DVD series, giant Japanese girls crush all sorts of otaku junk like model trains.
Weird Japanese Factiod of the Day….
“The United Arab Emirates is the biggest export destination of Japanese chewing gum products.”
—ResearchandMarkets.com Aug. 03, 2008–Analysis of Chewing Gum Market
Additional photos via vintage Japanese Chewing Gum wrappers.
Yesterday I wrote about how Japanese sure do love their face masks, and today I was amused to find on the Rinkya Blog these Disney-themed Lilo & Stitch Sick Masks.
Rinkya Blog….In Japan, when one is sick or during flu season, it is common to see them with these masks on to prevent illness spreading (whether it actually works or not is another story) ….more…
At this afternoon’s neighborhood festival, I bumped into many cute Japanese girls dressed yukata (casual cotton kimono) like this photo of a girl in retro indigo that I snapped on-the-fly with my cell phone. It’s a common sight at fireworks displays, festivals, and summer events to see normally-dressed-to-the-teeth-in-high-fashion young woman wearing traditional yukata.
Recently I have been seeing a lot of retro-looking yukata on the streets like the above photo, and I have been wondering where the hell people are getting the fabrics from the 1920s and 30s for them.
Well, yesterday I figured it out. I was at UNiQLO, Japan’s version of the Gap, and I snapped this picture of full-drag, retro, yukata set priced under $29, which is a hell a lot less than the regular price of a kimono that starts at $1000.
The photo above shows a women’s yukata set called the “Waterdrop” offered by UNIQLO (which is the charmingly rational way Japanese refer to polka dots) by the renowned Japanese artist, Junichi Nakahara.
It turns out that these yukata sets were designed Junichi Nakahara (1913 - 1988) who was a fashion illustrator and print maker. In the 1920s and 1930s his fashion illustrations of young girls with big eyes were groundbreaking, and today he is considered a forerunner of the manga style of art!
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Click to view.
