The eyelid crease of the beholder

I've always been fascinated by cultural differences in ideals of female beauty. Did you ever stop to notice the eyelid crease above your eye? Some Asians are born with that and some aren't. While in Japan I learned that this crease is considered beautiful. The models in all the advertisements have them. In the cosmetic aisles at drugstores I saw tools for painting on this crease with a pencil. In magazines I also saw advertisements for eyelid crease surgery. It's funny that something so important to many Japanese girls, many American girls have never even thought about.

I am firmly convinced that no matter what a girl may look like, some culture somewhere in some time period would consider her drop-dead gorgeous. I have proof: for one day, I became Japan's Next Top Model.

While walking on campus at Nanzan one day, I got a call from a Japanese friend. She told me that a friend of a friend was majoring in fashion and needed a gaijin model for a school project, and if I would do her a favor by volunteering.
She wants me?? I thought to myself.

Me?

As in me?


Well, okay. Caucasian volunteers aren't exactly common here, so she must be desperate, I thought. My friend's friend took me to meet the girl studying fashion, Rei. During the train ride there she was on the phone with Rei, saying, "Oh yes, I'm bringing model-san right now." It was really weird hearing myself referred to that way, and I started to get really nervous, hoping my looks wouldn't disappoint. I was just in my jeans, t-shirt, converse, and heavy backpack.

Rei met us at the station with two of her fashion classmates. One was dressed like a bag lady, the other had unnaturally tan skin and long blonde curls. Rei wore jeans, a white blouse, and a vest. The three of them exchanged glances.
"SHE'S SO CUTE!!" They exclaimed.
"Isn't she?" My friend's friend said proudly. "Just like a real model!" They seriously went on like that for five minutes.

Meanwhile I stood there thinking "I love this country."

I got to see the inside of the Mode Gakuen design school, which by later this year will move into a shiny, brand-new, spiral-shaped skyscraper. Rei brought me into a classroom which was strewn with clothing, fashion magazines, and makeup kits. Other students there were applying the finishing touches to their own models. I saw one other caucasian model there, a tall French girl with bright red hair, who I thought looked much more like a model than I did.


Rei's project was to design a magazine cover. Her theme was "fall fashion: play with color." She dressed me up in this absolutely ridiculous outfit: black heels, purple tights, a red minidress, a purple turtleneck, a blue belt, a blue scarf, a green beret, and blue nail polish. I looked like an oompa-loompa princess. I had to stifle laughter when I saw myself in the mirror.

"Okay, let's go to the photoshoot location!" She announced.
"Great! Where is it?" I asked.
"In a park about 15 minutes away from here."

Outside????

I turned heads the moment, and I mean the moment I stepped out of the building. I was a living, walking blob of color-saturated gaijin, an oompa-loompa princess walking through the middle of downtown Nagoya. Moreover, Rei got us slightly lost on the way there, so probably a couple hundred people saw me and tried to pretend they weren't staring.

When we got to the park, a professional photographer was waiting with his assistant who had a large suitcase of equipment. Rei posed me by a tree, arranged my clothing, and told me to give a "cute little smile." As the photographer started snapping pictures, it wasn't hard at all to smile because we were starting to attract a crowd. People strolling around the park stopped to watch the "photoshoot" and many of them whipped out their cameras or cell phones and started to take pictures of the scene. I tried not to laugh as I imagined strangers with photos of a very silly-looking me on their cameras.

It was the most awkward, bizarre, and totally fun day I have ever had in my life- totally worth skipping two classes for. Now that I'm back in America, I'm sure I'll never have a day like that again.

About once a day someone asks me why I decided to major in Japanese. I'll rattle off my memorized response about how I love foreign languages, and Japanese people, and I've always had an interest in Asian cultures, blah blah blah. But that's not the real reason.

The real reason is because the Japanese think I'm a model.

Mwahaha.

For a faithful reader

A terrible scan of the result of having nothing to do on a Saturday evening:

My date with an old Japanese guy

Just to warn you, my blogs aren't going in my chronological order anymore, because I'm just writing about memories as they come to me.

When I first arrived in Tokyo, my friend Pearl was actually gone for a few days, and so her mom met me. I had met her mom once when Pearl and I were roommates in the U.S. Having a daughter my age, Pearl's mom treated me as her own daughter, and took it upon herself to take very good care of me, and made sure I was well-fed, well-rested, and well-entertained. She was eager to make sure I wasn't bored in their little apartment, and was always offering to take me anywhere I wanted. I think she was surprised when I said that actually, I was really tired and just wanted to sleep.
One day Pearl's mom had to spend the day at work, and so she arranged for a friend of their family, Mr. Sakamoto, to take me around Tokyo.
"Have you known Mr. Sakamoto for a long time?" I asked.
"Oh yes Kelley, he's a very good man. I wouldn't hand you over to anyone who wasn't completely trustworthy!" She said.
Mr. Sakamoto was fifty-nine years old, and about an inch shorter than I am. Although I soon found out that he spoke pretty good English, he seemed relieved that I could speak Japanese. He said that we were going to go to some museums and stuff. So I'm going to spend the day running around Tokyo with this old guy.


Okay. Sho ga nai.

I believe the first place we went to was called Asakusa. It was very very crowded. There was a very large temple, where a long street of market stalls sold touristy stuff, "Ichiban" t-shirts, cheap kimonos, daruma, paper fans, and the like. I wish I had had more time to look through them, but it wasn't long before it became apparent that Mr. Sakamoto had ADHD. He zipped around from place to place, briefly stopping to explain interesting points to me before rushing off to the next one. It reminded me of the way I have to run in order to keep up with my Dad while grocery shopping.

The guy had boundless energy. I was really glad that I had decided to drink coffee that morning. Mr. Sakamoto paid for our food and for our train tickets. I was relieved when we stopped to have chicken katsu. Over lunch Mr. Sakamoto told me that his hobby is mountain climbing. He has climbed Mt. Everest twice, once when he was twenty years old and once when he was forty, and he intends to do so again when he turns sixty. He was eager to practice his English with me, and constantly apologized for his supposedly poor pronunciation and grammar, explaining that he had only learned English from tapes. His English was quite understandable though, and he had a great sense of humor.

When we emerged from a subway exit, I saw this building and couldn't help but point and laugh:

Mr. Sakamoto laughed too and said in English, "Looks like sit!" (That's exactly what he said.) That made me laugh even more because it does indeed look like sit, doesn't it?

After a whirlwind tour of Akihabara, and electronics district, we went to the Edo Museum, which was extremely interesting. It covered the history of Tokyo from its beginnings to the modern age. There were many beautiful models of the way the city used to be arranged and the palaces that used to exist there. They even had a small model of a kabuki stage, with mechanical dolls moving around on it so you could see how trapdoors and revolving stages were used during kabuki performances.

If you're wondering what that balloon thing is, that is a replica of a fire balloon. During WWII, the Japanese designed these balloons with bombs hanging from them to float in an airstream from Japan to America. Yes, they were attempting to bomb America. According to Wikipedia:

"From late 1944 until early 1945, the Japanese launched over 9,000 of these fire balloons, of which 300 were found or observed in the U.S. Despite the high hopes of their designers, the balloons were relatively ineffective as weapons, causing only six deaths and a small amount of damage, and they survive in memory mostly as an ingenious and dangerous curiosity."

The WWII section of the museum was especially fascinating. Below were some pictures I took for my grandpa, a machine gun from a B29 plane.

After that he took me to another outdoor museum which isn't really interesting enough to write about. At a cafe afterwards I ordered another coffee.

At the end of the day, Mr. Sakamoto and I met his wife and Pearl's mom at a restaurant. "This restaurant is known for it's local specialties," Mr. Sakamoto said. Since we were near the bay, I knew what that meant: more mystery seafood. Hooray. At the restaurant we sat on the tatami-mat floor, putting our legs in a hole beneath the table. The table was more of a cooking surface, and the center heated up to cook okonamiyaki on. (They're kind of like pancakes.) The dynamics between Mr. Sakamoto and his wife were interesting. He teased her a lot about bullying him around, but she just rolled her eyes and laughed. As an appetizer they set before me a cup of umeboshi (pickled plum) sake and a small bowl of translucent, worm-like fish, their little black eyeballs staring up at me blankly.

My favorite.



Actually the sake was quite tasty. I knew this meal wasn't cheap, and that is was local delicacies, so as usual I struggled through the various slices of raw who-knows-what. Observing that I wasn't exactly scarfing down food, the Sakamotos felt sorry for me and surprised me by ordering a large ice cream sundae. It was delicious, and I felt bad that I hadn't managed to be more grateful for the food.

So that was my day, pretty much.