pira

Due to requests in Dreamland ~ I stripped the boys down for a comparision of body types.

I was not willing to fight with the Omega's shoes again though. I doubt they add more than a few mm to his height, but I will say that Omega feet are about the same size as those of the Obitsu ~ so no his feet do not extend to the ends of these boots.

Because Dude was wearing the least amount of clothing he got volunteered to represent the Obitsu boys. Monk was very pleased with himself and glad to be rid of Omegaman's company for a while.


( Buff about buff O-boys in the buff )

...from Liza Dalby's season diary East Wind Melts the Snow ~ the author in her essay #44 - Swallows Leave, muses on the how cultural interpretation is relative, illustrating the point with a description of when she taught a Japanese and a Chinese-American child actor how to appear to play the shamisen properly for the filming of Memoirs of a Geisha. She was impressed by the differences in the way the children learned; the former through careful watching and imitation and the latter by intense questioning. Both gleened the same knowledge but did so in a completely different fashion.

She then moved onto the Americanization of the film's depiction of Geisha beauty and my jaw dropped to the page....

....At every point where Japanese ideals of traditional feminine beauty (which geisha surely exemplify) clashed with Western ideas of what makes a woman alluring, the Western aesthetic prevailed. Memoires of a Geisha is a romantic story about a legendary attractive woman. When you read the novel, you can imagine the heroines' appearance in a way that makes her beautiful to you, but on the screen someone has to make a choice as to how she will look. At the very least, she has to look beautiful to the director and producers.

Like it or not, true geisha may be fascinating and exotic to non-Japanese, but they are not felt to be truly alluring. Their make-up is too starkly white and mask-like for Western tastes, so it was toned down to a light pale. The geisha style of partially filling in the lip line with red, or the custom of painting only the lower lip for new apprentices, just looked weird to American eyes......Thus the film geisha all wear full mouths of lipstick. A geisha's elaborately pomaded hairsyle is, along with her kimono and make-up, what proclaims her profession in Japan. The distinctive heavy, wide wings of oiled hair curving off the sides of the face were also nixed as unsexy. Hair may be worn up for some scenes, but to really look alluring to Western eyes it must be worn down and loose. And so, on the screen it is. Even when the hair is done up, true geisha styles are shunned in favor of ear-baring, pulled-back chignons gathered into elaborate looped excrescences at the crown. The end result is that, to Japanese eyes, they don't look like geisha at all.


....I remember reading the book and being not particularly thrilled when I heard that it was to be brought to the big screen. I was justified in my apprehension, for when I was at a theatre with my Middling child and happened upon the movie poster of the up and coming film, I visibly cringed and she asked me why.

"The face...the lips, the hair, the...oh its' all wrong", I wailed. The character has grey eyes yes, but everything else is just incorrect. I suspected that it was going to be a cultural massacare...and indeed it was painfully Hollywoodized. I gritted my teeth through the whole viewing when I was dragged to it ~ the hubber sitting beside me, totally flumuxed that I wasn't having the time of my life and then having to listen to me rant all the way home....

ANYway ~ I thought that was just me being a silly. Then I read the above, by a noted American anthopologist of Japanese culture and have to say it just makes me feel like I wasn't TOTALLY full of pony pucks back when I was ranting my head off >D and I gleefully pumped my fist, basking in the glow of momentmentary sense of superiority as I hissed *YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!! I-WAS-RIGHT!*