Sumimasen Gyaru-son!

Tokyo has a lot of “Maid Cafes”, especially around the Otaku district of Akihabara in the Akihabara Electric Town (Akihabara Denki Ga). These Maid Cafes usually have cute girls dressed in lolita-style maid outfits, and serve the customers with drinks and food. If you pay a little extra, they will even play games with you, such as Connect 4 or draughts etc. These cafes have been the province of young male otaku until now…

The Otome Road (Maiden Road) in Ikebukuro district is becoming the yaoi answer to Akihabara’s otaku centre. Yaoi is a genre of manga popular with girls that focuses on homosexual love between men and is often sexually explicit. Yaoi as a term more used in English speaking countries, as the term “BL” (or Boys Love) is used more in Japan. A restraurant has opened on Otome Road called Lily Rose, which is a BL restaurant. The restaurant’s waiters are all really attractive young men in the BL style. Well, they’re really young women, dressed as young BL guys, with male names like Kaisuke-kun (kun being a honorific like san, but reserved for younger males you’re very familiar with). Generally in BL stories, you have “seme” and “uke”. Just like in martial arts where seme “attacks” and uke “receives”. This term has been used in terms of sexual relationships for a long time, and is in no way pejorative. Seme is generally more a traditional “masculine” role, being restrained, strong and protective – whereas uke would be more andryogenous or girlish in looks and behaviour. The waiters are called “gyaru-son”, which is another great portmanteau-type Japanese joke. Gyaru means “gal” as in a trendy young Japanese girl, with the word “son”, making a play on “garcon” – French for boy.

You might think it’s a little strange for girls to come to a restaurant staffed by girls to see guys – but one patron likes it: “Because the staff are really women, I can eat without fear of a man trying to pick me up, allowing me to take in the beauty of the ‘men’ around me as I enjoy my food.”

It’s just another reason why Japan is the most fantastic country on earth (^ ^)

Popteen, J-English & Engrish

[You'll need Japanese characters installed to see the kana in this post]

Using katakana, which is one of the Japanese syllabaries, you can make approximations of English words and phrases so that they can be read by Japanese speakers. For example, there is a new Hollywood film released over here at the moment, called “Rashitsu Yuawa 3″ – spelled in kana as; “ラシツ ユアワ 3″. Can you guess what the film (or ‘firumu’) is? Yup, it’s “Rush Hour 3″. So rather than picking the Japanese for rush hour, or a phrase for a busy time when people are travelling, it’s translated directly into J-English.

I really like this way of writing foreign words and phrases. If you’re a westerner and you know somebody that writes Japanese, then they’ll probably use these characters to write your name, such as the name ベン or ベンジセミン, for example.

I’ve noticed only a couple of translations the other way around, and one of them is the doujinshi (fan manga); Megatokyo. Megatokyo uses some kana in it’s logo, which are: メガトーキヨー. This looks to me, as very very much a beginner to kana, as: “me ga to ki yo”. However, Tokyo is usually spelled using kanji as: 東京 – which I understand to be the two syllables: “to” and “kyo”. So メガトーキヨー, or “me-ga to-ki-yo”, seems to me to be an Engrish way of pronouncing Tokyo, but from the perspective of an English speaker, rather than a native Japanese speaker.

Disclaimer: I have the Japanese reading, writing and speaking skills of an average 2 year old child at the moment, so most probably this is all wrong – as the geek I am; I’m enjoying attempting to decipher Japanese though (^ ^)

There is a hugely popular magazine here called Popteen, which is one of Asia’s bestselling teen magazines, covering fashion tips, love and advice for teen girls. The magazine has quite a unique approach as the models themselves are readers of the magazine. Readers are encouraged to register on the site, and add a portfolio, which may get them featured as a magazine model. It’s quite a nice business model, and helped in no small part by the Internet now. The magazine features “Gal Samurai” manga, which is the story about Ran Kirishima, a junior in the Maizono High School, and a “gal” who likes to hang out in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. When her parents experienced marital trouble, they left Ran in the care of her grandparents in the countryside. It was there that her grandfather, a martial arts master, began training her as a martial artist – and from whom she inherited her martial arts skills. Ran is a fashionably high school student who fights for justice, and looks fantastic while doing it.

Popteen also has a US/English site now, and I read today that Gal Samurai will be published in English too. I’m going to see if I can get hold of a copy of the Japanese manga, but the English version is probably easier for me to read at the moment.

You can visit Popteen’s US site here, for an English version.

Shibuya and Bins

Today I’ve been in Shibuya; teen paradise in Tokyo. The area is packed with shops and food places, along with a Mandrake (pronounced man-dala-K) anime/manga/stuff shop. It’s packed solid – and I mean *solid* with manga and anime, and has some really rare toys and fantastic cosplay outfits. There is a larger store elsewhere in the city, but this one is almost just as large, and it really is large. I’m used to shops with a small manga section – even shops selling comics and manga, but this is something else! Unfortunately I can’t read Japanese yet, so there’s little point in buying a lot, and it’s hard to work out where things are when you can’t work out how it’s alphabetised. Still, it’s brilliant to experience it, walking down loads of flights of stairs deep into the ground decorated to look like a cave or something, and then arriving in a manga mecca!

There are a lot of teen fashion shops in the area, and interestingly lots of the people that work in the shops were asked to work there as they were regular customers, and displayed a flair for predicting – and even starting – fashions. Some of these fashions last only a couple of weeks, but with plenty of money to bankroll them, quick imports from China, and the desire to be at the cutting edge; there’s always a way.

In Shibuya is a really quirky shop called ranKing ranQueen – a pun on the word “ranking”, which is the “rankings” of popular things. So you can go and buy that week’s most popular diet products, cosmetics, drinks, perfume, CD’s, magazines etc. It’s a really interesting insight into the Japanese zeitgeist. There is also the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing Hachiko (named after a famous dog that would arrive at the station each day to meet his master from work), with huge number of people crossing the road every 3 minutes, as the green walk sign appears. It’s really interesting to stand there and see the waves of people cross the road, stop, slowly build up again, then cross the road again.

All over Tokyo there is one thing that you’ll notice, and I noticed it instantly when I arrived; that it’s so clean. There is no litter anywhere. The most peculiar thing though is that there are no waste bins….at all…anywhere…whatsoever. There are dedicated smoking areas outside, so that people don’t get burned by cigarettes in the packed streets etc, but this is the only place you can find to put a cigarette end. There are some nice signs around the areas too, extolling the care needed with cigarettes. Some even have haiku-like poetry, such as:

The fire disappears beneath his shoe.
Unfortunately, the butt still remains.

Today I found a band I really like called マキシマム ザ ホルモン – which means; Makishimamu Za Horumon (Maximum the Hormone) – they have a bunch of YouTube video too, including the What’s Up People video. The album is ぶっ生き返す (Buiikikaesu)