Uggh…Tokyololas is in Toronto again and it is VERY cold: woke up to a lovely minus 21 (with the windchill) this morning and it felt every bit as close to Absolute Zero as it was as I walked around the corner to buy a fresh baguette at 8 this morning.

I saw a headline that promised to be an interesting read about gender and Japan, but it turned out to be a load of tripe.

Did you know that there was a “Feminist revolution transforming the country”?? (“country”, here, in case you are confused, dear reader, is Japan…) Ha ha ha…ha ha ha. That’s right, you didn’t know there was a revolution going on, did you?
It’s not that there couldn’t be a “feminist revolution”, it’s just that there isn’t.

And what is up with that so completely archaic compound noun – what exactly is a feminist revolution in 2007? Don’t get me wrong: I am a feminist and I could probably start a revolution, but didn’t that happen in the early seventies and why is it that Western feminists think they can still export the notion 30 years later and that it would be relevant (and relevant on any level in a different culture).
Anyway, what you have instead of a potentially interesting read is that some author would have you think there is a revolution going on in Japan and that you somehow didn’t notice. What it really seems to be is just her inability to think outside the culture box, the gender box, and whatever other box is boxing in her outmoded reading of Japan.

There are a few glaring howlers in the interview (has ANYONE actually spotted a yamamba on the streets of Tokyo since, I don’t know, 2002??? And, if you had, would you then actually believe anything she said in an interview with a journalist who is trying to “understand” her fashion choices?? (Yes, you know those stupid articles in the Daily Yomiuri, written by some oji-san journalist with big square glasses and a bad haircut about how “Japanese youth” are going to hell in a handbasket and how those “strange looking” girls in Shibuya are responsible for the destruction of 2000 years of traditional Japaese culture…). It’s true the author claims to have read the article/seen a yamamba a few years back, but that right there is an indicator of just how out of the loop she is because the book probably should have been written 3 years ago (even though there was no “feminist revolution” happening then either).
Anyway, in one sentence, the author claims to have found the yamamba’s comments (which she read in the newspaper) an indication that “something really interesting was going on” and, then, two sentences later, that she wanted to “look beyond the shop-happy girls in Omotesando, the yamamba girls in Roppongi, the street-fashion girls in Harajuku, and find three-dimensional women doing interesting and pioneering things.”

Whatever…snooze, snooze, snooze: wake me up when “The Revolution” is over…(and don’t believe anything you read in a social commentary piece in a Japanese newspaper)!

Read the “Kickboxing Geishas” interview here…why not? (Yep, that’s the name of the book – ’nuff said…).

I wrote a long reply in the comments section, so am keeping this brief today – I’m all typed out…

Today was a beautiful January day: sunny, a crisp blue sky, and probably about 12 C (but felt more like 18 in the heat of the afternoon sun). I went down to Kamakura with KB, and we then walked to Enoshima (about a 7km walk along the seashore). The highlight was the FANTASTIC sunset, with a view of Fuji in a reddish-orange sky.

KB has written in more detail about this walk before (when we did it in April) and I got a great shot of Mt. Fuji that April day. Today, however, was a much different Mt. Fuji.

Here are a few shots:

Everyone waiting for the sun to drop…(with a lot of serious equipment)…

Enoshima:

The final shot…