May 2009 Archives

If you all thought "uiiiiiish!" Daigo* was bad, let me introduce you to - IKKO.

*I was pleasantly surprised to see most of you think of the Street Fighter player Daigo first and foremost. I was also happy to see that entering in "Daigo" in YouTube returned more results of him than the Japanese rocker Daigo. Maybe the world isn't as hopeless as I feared...

In the words of Austin Powers, that's a man, baby!

I guess you would call IKKO the RuPaul of Japan. S/he rose to fame for being beautiful (????) and an expert on fashion and makeup. So many young Japanese girls follow IKKO's advice on how to do their makeup and look beautiful. ...Just think about that for a moment, let it roll around in your heads - Japanese girls turning to a cross-dresser dude on how to look pretty. ...Yup.

So IKKO will point out some beauty or health care product that s/he uses, and Japanese girls will FLOCK to go and buy it. Gotta love the group mentality, huh? I remember thinking, after seeing s/he endorse some beauty product on TV once, "I wish IKKO would endorse negro penis or something, have Japanese girls flocking to me in the hundreds of thousands."

And y'know...you really must be careful about what you wish for.

The building where I work isn't a dedicated office building. Its got convention halls and a shopping center and stores and restaurants and all that stuff. So on Saturdays, it can get pretty lively with people coming here for events or just to shop or whatever.

One particular Saturday*, I went downstairs to grab lunch when, without even really giving it a second thought, I walked right past a 30-year old woman dressed up as Yuna from Final Fantasy X. It literally took a while to register, like at first I just walked by her and thought "Oh, that's Yuna" and didn't pay it any mind. Only a few steps later did I have to stop and think, "Hey, waitaminute. Why is a 30-year old woman dressed up like a video game character here in the middle of this shopping/convention/whatever the hell this is complex?" The fact that I was originally unphased by this worries me greatly. Have I become desensitized? Oh God...

*Yes, I do work some Saturdays. Sucks, but it can't be helped I guess. I am becoming Japanese.

As I progressed further, I found that Yuna wasn't the only one. I'd walked straight into a cosplay convention. Or, more accurately, the convention itself would be held downstairs, but the cosplayers were out and about, putting the finishing touches on their costumes, enjoying the nice weather, or posing for numerous pictures.

Japan has gone to the pigs.

There's an outbreak of swine flu here in the Kansai region, specifically Osaka and Kobe. I know, I'm supposed to call it H1N1 or whatever, but that name sucks. Swine flu it is! What, are we expected to be politically correct to pigs now? Fuck that nonsense.

Anyway, pig AIDS. Some school kids have gotten it and have been passing it around like Mariah Carey at a rapper's convention, so now everyone here has gone bat-shit insane over fears of getting the pig AIDS and dying. I'm not really surprised that its spread so quickly in the schools, I think I mentioned way back when that schools are little incubation houses for whatever Virus of the Moment is popular. If you work in a school and some sort of cold or flu breaks, you might as well pencil in your sick days in your calendar.

So I got dragged to a fashion show.

You may be thinking, for someone who hates shopping such as myself, a fashion show must be like walking straight into the lowermost depths of hell itself. And you would be absolutely right. It was like everything I hate about shopping, gathered into one place, super-sized, and then extra-concentrated for good measure. Being forced to watch Japanese TV for a week while Kathy Bates takes a sledgehammer to my feet would have been a far more enjoyable experience. Even if Ms. Bates were naked.

So then, why would I go to a fashion show? I'm married, and sometimes that means doing things you just don't want to do. ...A lot of the time, actually.

Some of you may be thinking "C'mon, it couldn't have been that bad? A venue with dozens of hot models and you couldn't get at least a little enjoyment out of that?" My brother-in-law asked me the same thing. I'll tell you what I told him - yeah, there are hot models there. So what? Its not like any of them are going to jump off the stage and say "Oh Az, I can't control myself in your incredibly sexy presence...I need you to take me backstage and ravage me right now!" And even in the extremely unlikely event that that actually happened, I was going with my wife, so there'd be nothing I could do about it anyway. If I want to ogle hot women, I may as well just stay at home and surf some internet porn, which would be far more productive.

The bro-in-law was a bit surprised by my answer. "So you're telling me," he continues, "if Ebi-chan was there, and she took off her bra and threw it at you and you caught it, you wouldn't be excited about that?" Why would I be? My wife has a million bras laying around at home. What am I going to do with Ebi-chan's bra? Its probably only an A-cup anyway. He was surprised at this answer as well, saying, "Well, if I was there I'd be excited." I then offered my ticket to him, which he quickly refused. Hypocrite! Charlatan!