There's no explaining any of this.
Apparently the beer vending machines are becoming a problem since there's no age restriction on them. They sometimes ask for ids but it's easy to fake them for a machine. I went to Japan with a school group and a guy in our group bought beer by accident because it had a big apple on the front of it. He didn't complain though.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
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9 comments:
The last one is just plain badass.
Wow..
Okay...some of these actually make a certain amount of sense. First one is 'shopped (the lighting doesn't match), but still creepy as hell. The "NAKED Daihatsu" thing...well, there are some English-speaking manufacturers who find it funny to sell products that have English text on them to Japanese stores, but have the text be clearly offensive if you actually know more than a modest amount of English. Such as selling fitted T's for teenage girls that have the C-word printed in cheerful puffy letters, only said teenage girls will happily wear them because it's popular to have English text on your clothing (our fault, not theirs). The square watermelons, well, when you don't have enough fridge space to feed a single person for more than a couple days, products that neatly fill that space are more desirable than ones that waste it. The pic below the "eggman" is an odd piece of clothing. See, it's become more and more popular amongst girls to have lower and lower waistlines on jeans, to the point that their underpants (usually thongs) stick up higher than the waistline. Someone else came up with the idea of selling jeans that incorporate that look, without actually having you show off your dainties. You are not seeing panties sticking up above the waistline of the jeans, but jeans that are shaped to look like a pair of panties sticking up above the waistline. The girls right underneath that pic are probably part of a weird sort of girls-only gang. They come up with some typically freakish look that helps to distinguish them, as a group, from the crowd and then dress like that as often as possible. A few years later, a different look will be popular, and those girls will probably be too old to fit in. These particular girls appear to be from the time when they all tried to look black. And the last pic...well, they did recently complete work on a lifesize statue of a Gundam mecha (and I believe they've started work on a second one somewhere else), which is probably what that is.
First one is not a shop. The lighting matches. Here are other angles. http://www.buzzfeed.com/savage/japanese-schoolgirl-upskirt-giant-1g6
People are too quick to say that the lighting doesn't make sense on things.
Also- yes that is the giant gundam light-up statue. It's the same image that they show on adult swim.
I didn't read the rest of the essay. Clearly, there are explanations for these things, but they're not good ones.
Oh- I did see that you mentioned square watermelons. People with tiny fridges generally don't spend a lot of time buying fruit that can cost 8 times as much as regular fruit. Square watermelons generally run around 80 dollars, where as regular ones are 10-ish.
So, there are clearly explainations, but there are no good ones. Most of them end up being "why the hell not?"
Okay. in response to anonymous's comment above, The girls with the dark makeup and the bright eye makeup are called "Ganguro" girls. It's not a gang. It's a specific style of dress and makeup. I don't know why they do this, other than they think it's cool. But yeah. There are ganguro guys too.
They're certainly interesting pictures, but I've seen very similar things in the US and UK. I can only imagine the reactions most people would have to out of context pictures from a renaissance faire or SF convention!
Seeing different cultural viewpoints is really cool sometimes.
GANGURO. THAT'S IT. I forgot the word for them. It was driving me nuts. Yeah, the boys look a lot creepier.
They're kinda like the lsd version of long island guidos. Big hair, too much fake tan, the hottest clothes, although these guys look less bitchy.
Anonymous Wall of Text, 5/5, walls cannot attack...
How does the lighting not match in the first one? The sun is coming from the left and the light on the statue is coming from the left. If any of them are photoshopped, my guess would have the ski jumping sumo wrestler. And that isn't because I can particularly tell if there is anything wrong with the picture, but because I have such disbelief...
If you follow one of the links on the site, you can find the India version. I am sure there is a photoshopped picture on that one, microsoft technical support guy!
@Zelik:
It's fake as a 3 dollar bill, and has been identified as such for a few years on Gizmodo and other places. First of all, note that in the primary pic, there is bright light all over the "giant" girl, but no direct sunlight anywhere to be seen on any of the other forward-facing surfaces. Not even the tall building behind the train. Better yet, here's the Google streetview of that specific location:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=akihabara+tokyo+japan&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=52.77044,68.115234&ie=UTF8&ll=35.698671,139.77128&spn=0.001669,0.002079&z=19&layer=c&cbll=35.698844,139.771292&panoid=SVEpOB1u_KtSGS3pAJhMDw&cbp=12,155.9206454793639,,0,-8.061415328114245
Note the lack of giant girl in that pic. So, either it was constructed and subsequently destroyed before that GSV pic was taken, or it was 'shopped.
As for the watermelons, _all_ fruit costs an arm and a leg in Japan. For them, square watermelons make sense, especially since they pack better for importing, or they can be grown in stacks. For us, they're expensive curiosities.
@Baka:
It's not a gang-gang, like the Crips or Bloods, but it is a large group of girls who hang out in public areas all dressed in a similar style, only the styles change regularly as new hordes of teenagers "expire" and come up with new crazy ways to try to continue presenting a youthful appearance. And yes, I know exactly how stupid that sounds, but this is a country where women are seen to be past their prime if they haven't managed to get married before they turn 25, and salarymen get turned on by imagery depicting young schoolgirls (hence the train pic).
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