Unsolicited Advice

One of the more interesting things about body language is that it's only partially cultural. And it's the weirdest things that turn out to be learned. Ever see a girl run in anime and think, God that's weird, it must be some sort of visual shorthand for something, or just the way the running motion is traditionally stylized. And it even looks like evidence that Hitomi in Tenkuu no Escaflowne -- a young woman who's unusually gender-neutral in most things in an anime that's infamous for, among other things, being one of the few to straddle the genre line between 'boy's cartoon with giant robots in' and 'girl's cartoon with melodrama and romance' -- moves like Westerners would expect when she's practicing on the school athletic track, but does the weird arm wave thing when she has an emotional epiphany later and sprints for her romantic foil at the end. Nope. Japanese girls really do run like that. Not all of them, because human variation wi...

Whilst I have been following people like Gackt for years and years, and am not always much for the new visual kei acts, a few of them are indeed interesting. One of these is exist†trace. The whole visual kei thing, as a coherent style, started out in the early 1980s in what were essentially heavy metal bands trying specifically to be outrageous. If you look at pictures of early X Japan, one of the first acts in the genre, their style can probably be best described as ' kabuki punk '. (Those are all guys, by the way. Androgyny has become a very big intentional part of the look in more recent times, but the Japanese standard of male beauty has always involved some amount of effeminate prettiness -- in Genji Monogatari , a serial romance novel from about a thousand years ago, one of the running jokes is basically that in a room full of stunning court women, Prince Genji is still  the prettiest of them all.) One of the most consistent things is that all of the early bands wer...