At first glance, it sounds like a recipe for failure: take one of your idol singers whose career has been languishing since her partner was kicked out for being a bad girl, team her up with a bikini model and a professional eater, dress them all up in Gal styles, and have them do para-para moves as they sing their dance tunes.

Okay, maybe it was a recipe for failure, because in the middle of the hype leading up to their first single, lead singer Nozomi Tsuji abruptly dropped out. Why? She’d been knocked up by Ultraman (more precisely, the latest actor to take on the role).

The powers that be quickly replaced her with one of their best-known idol’s little sister, who’s certainly appealing, but lacks the desperately hungry fanbase that Tsuji provided. Result: the one-hit wonder Gyaruru.

Mildly amusing, but the real draw for me is that bikini idol Ami Tokito is a curvy meganekko…

more...

…they turn up in the oddest places.

(via Japundit)

The word for the day is 頭皮. Why? Because that’s the stumper that Kakitorikun threw at me today. [yes, this means that I’m still working though the 3rd grade vocabulary drills; work, WoW, and other study methods have slowed down, but not eliminated, my progress…]

The hint was: 「あたまをおおうあたまのかわ」, which at least confirmed that it was a literal combination of the two characters meaning “head” and “skin”, unlike the same lesson’s 皮肉. I’m not sure how you get “sarcasm” out of skin+meat, but at least the word is in my dictionaries.

頭皮 is not. It’s not in my WordTank (not even in the J-J section), it’s not in my printed dictionaries (not even The Compact Nelson), nothing. Edict and its derivatives are the only things that list it. So, here we have a word that’s common enough to put into children’s training software, but too rare to be worth mentioning in an electronic dictionary intended for native speakers. I’m not surprised that my student J-E dictionaries don’t have it, but Nelson’s usually pretty good.

Oh, the other study method that’s taking up some of my time? I’m watching Sentou no Musume during my daily workout. Lots of rapid casual speech with no subtitles, but the story is straightforward, the comedy is largely visual, and the acting is, um, “accessible”.

[Update: while I was in Kinokuniya tonight, I looked up 頭皮 in several printed J-J dictionaries. It wasn’t in any of them, and while I did find it in a few E-J dictionaries, it wasn’t in the matching J-E section.]

[Update: Kanji Sonomama has it.]

Kei Yasuda, former member of Morning Musume:

[Update: Her talents are not suited to certain other genres. Oof.]

[Update: replaced the defunct youtube link]

I’m still plugging away at my kanji study, mostly using Kakitorikun for the DS. Since it’s intended for Japanese children, I’ve gotten used to looking up vocabulary related to baseball, school life, and traditional culture, but I still run into trouble occasionally. Sometimes I stop and figure these oddballs out right away, but this one sat on a post-it note for a week before I finally got back to it:

Hint：む色半とう明の細長いちいさなさかな。
Ｑ：白魚。
Ａ：◯◯◯◯

The answer is しらうお. I knew the answer had to be a kind of fish, and I knew it was a long, thin, small fish, but even if I had correctly parsed mushoku-hantoumei as “colorless, half-transparent”, I wouldn’t have known which fish, because I don’t know anything about Japanese fish. Not even the ones you find in sushi bars.

Some dolt is spamming Japanese-study forums with a link to their online test site, emanabu (no link from me!). The sample tests are riddled with errors, and many of the sentences are just painful. I particularly liked the question where they thought “amari samuku arimasen” meant the same thing as “totemo atsui desu”.

Tokyo Times reports that facial hair is getting popular in Japan, leading wig companies to branch out:

If this catches on, perhaps they’ll add a line of merkins.

While browsing the newly-updated iTunes store, I stumbled across the following podcast: 女の子の写真スライドショー/Japanese Cute Girl Slide Show. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Of course, you could download the same photos at higher resolution from someplace like Zorpia, and you wouldn’t be limited to this person’s taste in music and girls. But then it wouldn’t auto-download a new one to your iPod every week, which I guess counts as a feature.