LLP » girls

The Upskirt Judo Guy

reesan — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 11:12:09 +0000

“O-Nep!” was a late night comedy show by the Japanese comedy trio Neptune featuring Taizo Harada, Ken Horiuchi (aka Horiken) and Jun Nagura. The trio name comes from the Kinnikuman character, Neptuneman. The show had a segment called “Your wish will be fulfilled! The travelling Nepu throw” which I like to affectionately refer to as “The Upskirt Judo Guy” because that just about sums it up.

The way that the segment broke down was Taizo Harada would dress in wrestling gear usually in a public location with a lot of young, female spectators. He would run into the crowd, grab a mini-skirt wearing female, and perform a tomoe-nage judo throw, flipping the girl over his head and onto a wrestling mat, exposing her underwear with a cameraman conveniently poised to zoom in on the girls panchira. If by an unfortunate accident there was no glimpse of underwear for the audience to view, not to worry. In this rare instance they send another from the trio who pries the girls legs until satisfactory exposure has been achieved for the camera.

Refer to the following embedded video for a few highlights of the show. This show was apparently taken off air because one of the girls that the The Upskirt Judo Guy flipped wasn’t wearing any underwear. The second embedded video shows the footage of this incident.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qvnn63s-0s

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU8_Yid1D2s

LLP.

What Mario Isn’t Telling You…

reesan — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 11:19:36 +0000

Do you remember the Friends episode where Joey Tribbiani poses for a health poster, but later finds out he’s become the V.D. poster boy?

VD, you never know you might have it.

Well, Japan’s largest adult video (AV) studio, Soft On Demand (SOD) (yeah, I know, the studio name is a story unto itself – I mean, if you are a porn subscriber then the name of the studio isn’t very inspiring), has been running their own campaign against sexually transmitted disease called “STOP! STD”.

The “STOP! STD” campaign is to bring attention to the rise of STDs in Japan and to increase the use of condoms. It features JAV stars like Nana Natsume, Saori Hara and Sasa Handa on large billboards sub-titled “STOP! STD”.

Some images from the campaign are below, but I really wonder what the actual message is supposed to be. Is it:

An appeal from the porn star to protect her from contracting an STD
The porn star has an STD but she is making an appeal for you to save yourself!
A general public awareness message that assumes that porn stars are the most qualified to deliver

For the conspiracists out there, do you think that because the “STOP! STD” sub-title is in English and “STD” is not common Japanese vernacular, it is a message for dirty gaijin’s to stop embellishing in perverted sexual practices?

Nana Natsume 「夏目ナナ」

Saori Hara 「原紗央莉」

Sasa Handa 「範田紗々」

Image source: I Rub Your Brog

Soft On Demand: Does the logo imply “Soft-on On-demand” or “Soft-porn On-demand”? If I was in the market for their product, based purely on their name, I would be wondering.

For more safe sex education campaigning in Asia check out Taiwan’s safe sex education poster.

LLP.

Hamedori

reesan — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 09:39:06 +0000

An interesting promotional display for the Japanese movie ‘Hamedori’ (ハメどり). Hamedori is a Japanese term describing filming or photography of sexual activity from a first-person point of view.

LLP.

Top 15 Japanese Beer Girls

reesan — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 06:21:18 +0000

Each year in Japan major brewers of beer select a Beer Campaign Girl who are supposed to reflect the image of the beer. Advertising beer in Japan, it seems, must follow the fundamental marketing requirement – the 3 b’s – Beers, Bikinis and Beaches.

In the spirit of the Hot Fun In the Summertime! Japan Blog Matsuri hosted by our main man Locohama following is a top 15 collection of bikini-clad Beer Campaign Girl’s from various breweries over the years. Kanpai!

1. Minami Otomo 「大友みなみ」

Minami Otomo is the 2004 Sapporo Beer Campaign Girl. You can see my reflection just under the beer.

2. Haruka Igawa 「井川遥」

Haruka Igawa is the 2000 Asahi Super Dry Beer Campaign Girl.

3. Ryoko Yonekura 「米倉亮子」

Ryoko Yonekura is the 1996 Kirin Beer Campaign Girl.

4. Kanako Kuroha 「黒羽加夏奈子」

Kanako Kuroha is the 2000 Suntory Magnum Dry Campaign Girl.

5. Misaki Ito 「伊東美咲」

Misaki Ito is the 1999 Asahi Beer Image Girl. In the video below Misaki Ito is caught reading her lines from the back of the prop that she is holding.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoI2D4FBPc0

6. Akiko Kotani 「小谷亜希子」

Akiko Kotani is the 2000 Suntory Malt’s Beer Campaign Girl.

7. Yuko Mano 「眞野裕子」

Yuko Mano is the 2000 Sapporo Beer Campaign Girl.

8. Eri Murakami 「村上恵梨」

Eri Murakami is the 2003 Sapporo Beer Campaign Girl.

9. Mayuko Saito 「斉藤繭子」

Mayuko Saito is the 1999 Suntory Malt’s Campaign Girl.

10. Saori Degawa 「出川沙織」

Saori Degawa is the 2001 Asahi Beer Image Girl.

11. Miho Nishimura 「西村美保」

Miho Nishimura is the 2002 Kirin Beer Campaign Girl.

12. Takako Misaki 「岬たか子」

Takako Misaki is the 2001 Kirin Beer Campaign Girl.

13. Mie Nanamori 「七森美江」

Mie Nanamori is the 1997 Suntory Malt’s Beer Campaign Girl.

14. Shiho Harada 「原田梓帆」

Shiho Harada is the 2000 Kirin Beer Campaign Girl.

15. Arine Yano 「矢野アリーネ」

Arine Yano is the 2002 Asahi Super Dry Beer Image Girl.

The last video here is a Japanese television show that rates the best Japanese beers. Each beer that is reviewed is taste-tested by a girl in a bikini. I guess that the bikini symbolises stature in the beer connoisseur world.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjTqgVCgKiI

LLP.

Shūkan Asahi and the Mankini

reesan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:41:32 +0000

The Japanese weekly rag Shūkan Asahi (週刊朝日), a popular general-interest magazine, weighs in on the Borat mankini being a hit in Japan with the full-page advertisement below. The Shūkan Asahi has been published since 1922 by The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s leading newspapers.

The format of the publication usually combines soft news like scandals and affairs, some international rumours and relations, an occasional golf tip, a few comics that are a little erotic in nature and swimsuit models (usually on the front and back of the mag). The publication is generally targeted to Japanese salarymen.

As you can see in the image below provided by nateola from PinkNihon, it is full of high-quality content. This particular image is an advertisement that promotes a Japanese Adult Video (JAV) about a promiscuous orgy with the tagline “Sex–it’s supposed to be raunchy”. Here is the NSFW link to the vid イグイグ大乱交 (don’t click if you are easily offended).

Do you find it bizarre that, in Japan, these types of full-page advertisements appear in popular mainstream publications? I mean, are we too prudish in the West?

LLP.

Borat’s Mankini Swimsuit A Hit In Japan

reesan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:42:04 +0000

Who would have thought? After the mocumentary “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan!” you would be forgiven to think that only the most hardened Borat fans would be seen in a mankini.

The Borat Mankini - verrry niize!

Thanks to Sacha Baron Cohen this particular piece of fashion has caught on in Japan, well, at least to a few lovely ladies. And as Borat would say it is ‘verrry niize, I liiikke!’

The Borat Mankini in Japan

And whilst we are on the subject of weird and wonderful swimwear in Japan, here are a couple more.

The Nip

The caption is inspired by the Seinfeld episode where Elaine is nicknamed ‘The Nip’ after she accidentally exposes a nipple on a Christmas card photo taken by Kramer.

The Landing Strip

Secure the cabin, we are getting ready to land. A swimsuit held together by dental floss.

For more mankini in Japan check out Shūkan Asahi and the Mankini or check out Japan’s very own character of the Borat genre Hard Gay.

LLP.

Letters from Naoko Iijima

reesan — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:12:42 +0000

Even though I check my letterbox daily for a letter from Naoko Iijima I don’t actually have any yet. I just thought that the title sounded cool, a play on words from the movie Letters from Iwo Jima directed by Clint Eastwood and starring the legendary Ken Watanabe.

The last time I tweaked a movie title for an article heading I managed to pick up the scraps of the internet traffic looking for The Deer Hunter. Talk about Search Engine Optimisation. That’s me, aficionado of all things SEO.

Anyways, in the spirit of Letters from Iwo Jima, I would like to ‘raise a flag’ for my first love of Japan, Naoko Iijima. But first, a bit of background…

My first exposure to Japanese cinematography was the 1999 movie Messengers. It is a movie about a turf war between the bicycle messengers and motorbike messengers as they tear through the streets of Tokyo.

Messengers

This movie had some sentimental value to me as in a few scenes they rode down a street in Hatsudai that I lived in. Also, I fell in love with Naoko Iijima, the main actress in the movie. Here is a trailer for Messengers:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TVGMP5Rmyo

After I met my lovely wife zoomz I asked her politely if I could lay down a ground rule and she said okay. Thus, I told her that although we had an exclusive relationship, if I was ever propositioned by Naoko Iijima then Naoko Iijima had priority. zoomz agreed to my delusion.

I was rating myself at a 10 million-to-1 chance. The point being is that there was a chance, however slight. Then in 2001 Naoko Iijima announced that she was divorcing her husband (the lead singer of the J-Pop-rock band Tube, Maeda Nobuteru) after 3 years of marriage. My chances for an indiscretion had now effectively doubled, I now put my odds at 5 million-to-1.

Naoko, if you are reading this, me and you, one night, I have permission.

No shrine would be complete without some vital statistics about Naoko Iijima.

Naoko Iijima

Naoko Iijima (飯島直子) is a Japanese actress, born on February 29, 1968 in Yokohama, Japan. That’s right, a leap day baby.

Naoko Iijima

She is a talented actress who has starred in j-dramas such as ‘Wedding Planner’, ‘Bus Stop’, and ‘Otousan’.

Naoko Iijima

In 1994 she appeared in Georgia Coffee advertising.

Naoko Iijima

Apparently she is also a talented vocalist and was a member of the B’z cover group W-NAO.

Naoko Iijima

And finally, I leave you with this video. The showering assassin.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUmidFDbBjs

LLP.

Heartland

reesan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:52:23 +0000

Following is an article that I liked about Heartland at Roppongi Hills. The article is from The Times and I have reproduced it below. Source article can be found here.

Japanese say goodbye to Western playboys

The party is over for the cash-flashing traders who once propped up Tokyo’s Heartland bar – and for the Japanese women hoping to bag themselves a banker.

Haruna Hiraki pokes at the melting ice cubes with a perfect fingernail and frowns. She has never had to make a ginger ale last this long. It is 9.30pm, she is in an outfit that cost two months’ salary and nobody has yet bought her a proper drink.

“Another 10 minutes, then we’ll go?” pleads her friend Etsuko Shirasu, 25, from across the bar table.

“Waste of time. I told you this place was finished. Lehman, Goldman: they’ve all been sacked or gone back to America,” says Haruna, 25.

It is Thursday night and Roppongi romance – or at least, the calculated brand of romance that used to be the currency in this Tokyo bar – is at death’s door. Heartland, with its low lights and brushed-steel tables, has made its name as a favourite with the financial great and good and the occasional Japanese celebrity. In the warm months drinkers spill out on to the street. However, the bar that once boomed with British brokers, Australian traders, American hedge-fund managers and those Japanese women who would love them has fallen eerily silent. More damningly, says Heartland veteran and former Roppongi barmaid Eriko Masabuchi, it has gone “image down”.

The well-rehearsed choreography of girls coming in from the suburbs in their finery, tasting the good life, then snagging an investment banker to prolong the party, is yesterday’s dance. An entire segment of downtown Tokyo, which rose to fame and fortune with the 2003-07 bull market, has now been spectacularly snuffed out by the crash.

From the moment it opened in 2003 until just a few weeks ago, Heartland used to be the throbbing soul of the huge, glittering Roppongi Hills development. Everything that the investment banks, luxury apartments and high-end boutiques represented was nightly squeezed into that small space in one corner of the complex boisterous with money and ambition.

In its prime, the 54 storeys of the Roppongi Hills office tower were a focal point for much that was positive about Japan: it was the spiritual home of Japan’s kachigumi – society’s “winners”. By 9.50pm, back at Heartland, two foreign men in suits have finally made a move. Haruna and Etsuko clutch new vodka tonics, but are sipping quickly: the suits worn by the men who bought the drinks don’t fit right and the ties are domestic, they could even be polyester. The would-be wooers stumble on the question of what it is they actually do “in banking” and are quickly sized up as frauds, or possibly IT consultants.

The girls make excuses and head to the station for the hour-long ride back to Kawasaki: they understand economics enough to know that they will probably never find the banker ready to induct them to the “Hills Tribe” of well-dressed women living and shopping around Roppongi Hills.

“I think Heartland and the stock markets are the same thing,” says Masabuchi, drawing a downward spiral in the air, “so it is not surprising that the bar has had a kind of ‘shock’ of its own. Bankers have always gone to certain bars in Japan, but the ones around Roppongi Hills are different – they became part of Japanese culture as much as expat culture.”

It is the speed of Heartland’s decline as a matchmaker between raw aspiration and raw wealth that shocks regulars at the famous bar.

In a country that measures social patterns by the decade and century, it is unprecedented to see one shatter so quickly. “There are two things happening in this bar now, and neither of them is good,” says Noel, 38, a fund manager with offices near by and an apartment even closer. “First, from our point of view, the girls have got the message that Wall Street capitalism is in trouble and the sharper ones are just not bothering to turn up. But worse is that they don’t trust us any more. We’ve still got the nice suits and the job in finance – just about – but these chicks are smart. They know we don’t carry the financial guarantees we used to.”

The Roppongi Hills developer, billionaire property tycoon Minoru Mori, made sure that the place was stocked with tenants who would fit his image of a social and economic dynamo for new Japan. For a while the strategy worked. After gloomy years of enforced satisfaction with middle-class mediocrity, a new class of Tokyoite had emerged: young Japanese found it desirable to stand out as men and women motivated by money. Hills Tribe members were interviewed by the Japanese media as the “girl in the street”; their opinion was seen to matter.

While Japan is at pains to think of itself as one huge middle class, many of the girls who shark at Roppongi Hills have jobs in nail salons that may be reasonably paid, but they still live at home. Foreign men – either for a short fling or something longer – are seen as a treat because of the money, but also because there is a view (however misguided) that Western men treat women better.

Mariko Bando, president of Showa Women’s University, is one of Japan’s authorities on gender issues. “Roppongi Hills came to represent the widening gap between rich and poor in Japan,” she says. “The men who worked there – partic-

ularly the foreign bankers – presented so much more than ordinary Japanese salary men could offer. Japan has had a phenomenon like this before, but the last time was the 1980s bubble, when foreigners arrived in large numbers.” It is not simply a matter of “gold digging”, she says, but about finding a more attractive style of relationship.

“Of course, the interest of Japanese women in those financial businesses and the men who work there will decline, but I think that foreign men will still appeal – even the poor ones. What the Hills experience did was to show the disadvantage that Japanese men have compared with foreign men in the eyes of Japanese women. Japanese men are spoilt too much by their mothers and are just not kind enough to their women.”

Peter, 36, a former sales trader at a large US investment bank, believes that the women of Heartland have developed a sixth sense for layoffs. “The five-year reign of the Roppongi Hills scene bred a pretty canny strain of Japanese woman. I fell in love with at least one of them. It is scary to see how quickly they’ve disappeared from the bars. And they started disappearing early: these girls are a market indicator to which we should all pay attention.”

In the area’s winding streets, high-end pawn shops tell their own stories of sudden downturn and furtive liquidation. Investment bankers – especially the Japanese working for US firms – have taken to nipping out at lunchtime to ditch the trinkets bought in the boom. One pawn shop, L’Ecrin, has a speciality in buying Jane Birkin edition Hermès bags from the nouveau destitute of the Hills Tribe.

Taeko Hiroguchi, 33, regards herself as one of its princesses, but even she can see that the good times have stopped. “I’ve found three boyfriends in Heartland: two Lehman and one from Morgan Stanley,” she says. “I even lived with one of them for a while and helped him spend his 2005 bonus. These Bulgari earrings were a present from him. Even if we were still going out, there would be no bonus this year though, right?”

When she first moved into the apartment of her Lehman sales trader boyfriend, her friends, still living in single-room studios on the outskirts of Tokyo, were green with envy. “I’d invent excuses for them to come and visit just so I could show them the apartment and take them to coffee shops they would never normally go to,” she says. “Suddenly, this autumn, it all just stopped. In my mind I’m still a member of the Hills Tribe, I just don’t have the money to behave like one.” Roppongi Hills was about more than just foreign money. Japanese wealth was created and destroyed there too. In 2006 two Japanese entrepreneurs were convicted of insider dealing and rumours of a “curse” began to circulate.

“Maybe Lehman was the final victim,” says Etsuko, before hopping on the southbound train to the suburbs. “I’ll just go out in Kawasaki from now on. No rich princes to buy me champagne, but at least I can afford the first drink there on my own.”

LLP.