Land of the Rising Hair

Recently, I stumbled upon this picture online:

This image pretty clearly sums up all that I knew about Japanese people before 6 months ago. Sure, I'd taken several years of Japanese language and culture classes, but that really only gave me an insight into the inner workings of one Japanese guy, and my final evaluation of Hara-sensei (adorable) didn't really tell me much about the average Japanese person (for one thing, he was mostly bald). I'd played many, many years of video games, though (you know, in case you couldn't tell from the rest of the blog). In the end, I really didn't think that Final Fantasy VIII -- a game that featured slaying monsters by summoning other monsters and a spiky-haired douche with a gun-sword or possibly (sword-gun) -- would be what would give me an accurate portrayal of the modern Japanese person.

But oh, was I wrong.

So very wrong.

My school doesn't have mandatory uniforms (in contrast, Jenn's school mandates both uniforms and black hair), which means two things: 1. my male students don't flirt with death by exposure due to little shorts the way most schools mandate (my female students, naturally, take those risks by wearing tiny skirts), and 2. I get to see the ridiculous things that pass for high fashion over here.

Any given student in any given hallway in any given inner-city school in Japan. And you thought the baggy pants were bad.

I do wish that my students would pay half as much attention to class as they do to their hair. But weirdest of all, it's mostly the boys who put this much effort into their perfectly-coiffed, totally immoble hairdos; the girls color their hair, but that seems to be the extent of it for them. Of course, they make up for it by spending 30% of their waking life putting on makeup.

More on youth culture and boys doing things that would get them beaten up in the U.S. later.