★ Ren & Hiroki - Best Friends Forever れん&ひろき、ベストフレンドほど仲良し ★

The funniest duo in Japan is back and ready to eat a box of Swedish chocolate!! =D

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you might recognize these two. 
Otherwise you can read about the first time I met them here.  

Ren & Hiroki knows everything about the concrete jungles of Tokyo.
You don't decide when to meet them, they just appear at random places when
you're bored making life much more fun! XD

Here I'm standing next to a soda machine waiting for the train to take me to Harajuku,
where I was going to meet a half-philippine gyaru named Hitomi.

With Hitomi. She's a member of the gyaru-circle Jewel and were hanging out with a member from
the gyaru-circle Logos today in Harajuku. 

Far from all gyaru are members of gyaru-circles anymore,
but there's still many around arranging events and dancing Para-Para.

Hitomi is in the bottom left corner of the Purikura photo to ther right, together with some other Jewel-members.

 

She was kinda hard to recognize because every time you meet her she have a new hair style.

I met Hitomi for the first time at club Atom's Renewal Party a couple of months ago, through our common friend Amikoro to the left. I love Hitomi's pose and nails!

She's not only great at setting up her hair, she also decorates her nails in really cool ways. One of her nail decorations to ther right.

But her friend Amikoro is even more extreme. Just look at the nails above that Amikoro decorated!! :O

I gave Hitomi an "Absolut Svensk"-shirt. Now she has officially been "Swedified" like so many others. ;)

Then I went to the shopping center LaForét to look at their latest fashion. Always entertaining! XD

Looking forward to see someone wearing this mask! :P

More inspiring outfits...

This hat is just too much hahaha!! But people do wear these kind of stuff in Japan.

Like this couple that Said photographed for our street snap web site TokyoFaces a while ago.

Most of their clothes and accessories were homemade but they had definitley bought the shoes at
that store.

On my way home I saw two people looking like EGG-models outside this store on Takeshita street.

But when I came closer I saw that it was Ren & Hiroki. Even better than EGG-models!!^^
We were both so suprised and happy to meet again! =)

They had just been buying the purple belts they're wearing to match eachother and now they were getting customized friendship bracelets.

They were waiting for an old lady in the store to write their names on bracelets like this. They were
so nice and complimented her a lot on how great she was at writing their names on the bracelets.

Me: -"What have you two been up to lately?"

Hiroki: -"Oh just the same old. Nothing exciting has happend." (sad face)

Me: -"Do you like chocolate?"

Ren & Hiroki: -"Yeah we love chocolate!!"

Me: -"I was recently in Sweden. You can have this chocolate box as a souvenir if you want."

Ren & Hiroki: -"Wooow!! Can we really have this!?? Thanks Rikku!!

Hiroki: -"Who were you here to meet?"

Me: -"A gyaru friend."

Hiroki: -"Hahaha Rikku has become a gyaru!!"

-"I saw a foreign gyaru-circle on Kawaii TV. They were really cute.
Everytime we see foreigners we think that it might be your friends."

 

Ren making a funny face as usual! ;D

Ren: -"Have you talked to Akkiina since last time we met?"

Me: -"Yeah I met him at a EGG Youth Party. He was very nice but super shy and started laughing like a girl when I talked to him."

Ren: -"Hahah yeah Akkiina is gay."

With Bataason, Akkiina and Gakkii before a EGG Youth Party in 2010.

Me: -"Let's take a picture together."

Ren: -"How?"

*I ask a person that walks by to take our picture.*

-"Ah, Sasu Ga Rikku!!" = "Ah, that's so typical Rikku!!"

Then we decide to walk to Shibuya to take some Purikura, and on the way Ren and Hiroki tries all the Swedish "Paradis"-chocolate resulting in the funniest video so far on this blog!!^^
 


I wish I knew how to subtitle videos. Here's a summary of what happens:

Ren and Hiroki realizes I'm filming a video and not just taking a picture and starts laughing! XD

Hiroki takes a photo of the chocolate for his blog while Ren stares at it with extremley high expectations.

Ren takes a bite of the chocolate and thinks it tastes way too good...

...So he goes into some kind of trance and his eyes almost starts rolling around! XD

Hiroki's favourite chocolate inside the box of chocolate was the "Triple Nut" that he's pointing at. 

All of a sudden Yukino comes up to me. Ren and Hiroki are shy, so they run 10 meters away while continue to eat the chocolate.

Hiroki: -"Do you have a girlfriend?"

Me: -"No, do you two have girlfriends?"

Ren & Hiroki: -"No." 

Me: -"Why? You could easily get girlfriends."

Hiroki: -"We don't care so much. It's just as fun to hang out with normal friends."

Ren: -"I like Rihanna."

Older Japanese people want to be as white as possible to the extent that they even have umbrellas when it's sunny. But not Ren.

He seems obsessed with getting tanned and goes to solarium one or two times a week. 
Maybe he wants to get the same skin tone as Rihanna. I'm just worried he will get skin cancer or something if he never stops. :/

When we reached Shibuya we went to "Purikura Mekka" to take Purikura but some gyaru circle Ren and Hiroki didn't want to meet were hanging outside there.

So Ren and Hiroki started discussing where they could go instead and it was so funny to listen to them. They know exactly every place where you can take Purikura, where there's rules that only let girls come in and where it's crowded certain times of the day.

  











































We took Purikura in two different machines. Here's the photos.

Ren got happy when I told him he looks like a Disney character on some of the pictures! :D

After taking the photos it was time for a classic Purikura game. You have to arrange the pieces on the screen into a complete picture.

I have seen so many people try this and fail. But when I asked Ren if he's good at this game, he was confident that he could make it. Ren and Hiroki never brag so this was going to be exciting to watch:



When it was only 10 second left Ren still wasn't done so I thought he would loose...

But one second later he's done! The Purikura machine just got p0wned!!! =D

His face after winning is priceless!! XD
Looks like he's thinking -"I told you so!!" ^^

Then we went to Shibuya 109-2 looking around and talking to the staff
there before this adventure was over and we had to go home.

I'm happy that the BFF Ren and Hiroki met eachother in this cold world, and I can't wait to meet
them again making me forget all about it!! ;D

The Secrets of Purikura... プリクラの秘密！！

Purikura is big business in Japan as you might already know. Pretty much all young Japanese people loves it and nowadays they're making new kind of machines with all kind of funny effects every month. Here is some Purikura photos together with Leon and Jenni.

Purikura = Japanese photo machines
The word Purikura is an abbreviation of the words "Print Club" which with Japanese spelling becomes "Purinto Kurabu". Japanese people loves making words short, so they put those words together with the result "PuriKura".

So why is it called "Print Club"!? I guess it's because the main thing used to be that you get the photos printed out as stickers when you're done with the photo session.

I once asked Leon how many times he have been taking Purikura photos, and he thought it was more than 700 times. So he has some experience, as well as Jenni. No wonder why they look so great at the pictures!! =)

This was at the time when Leon had just learned the expression "LOL" so he finished almost every sentence he wrote with it as you can see in the right bottom corner. XD

Japanese people use the Kanji for the word "Warau" which means "Laugh", inside of brackets to express somthing similar to "LOL". It looks like this:
(笑)

One time me and Leon had a discussion about the point of Purikura machines:

Leon: -"How come you always take pictures of everything?"

Me: -"Because everything in Japan is so interesting and different for me,
since we don't have it in Sweden. 

Doesn't Japanese people take photos when they go out? Overseas Japanese tourists are known for always taking a lot of photos, you know."

Leon: -"Japanese people usually don't bring cameras with them when going out here. I guess that's why there is Purikura-machines. Whenever you go out with your friends here, you take Purikura photos together with them to remember that time."

Leon is right about that taking Purikura photos together with friends is nice as memories. This Purikura makes me remember when Jakob and Jonathan from school, Penny that used to live in my guest house, the journalist Thomas and me ate at a nice Izakaya and then went to club Atom for example! =)

One of the fun things with purikura is that you can edit the photos and choose backgrounds. This is made possible by having the same kind of green background in the photo booth as they use when they have special effects in movies.

So what happens if you use green clothes when you take purikura!!??
I accidently used this green striped cardigan when I took purikura together with Yukino and here is
the result:

 




































What!? The stripes on my cardigan that used to be really green are now colorless! The color are so similar to the one of the Purikura booth's background so the machines thinks it should not be visible.

So if you weared clothes with exactly the same green color as the background I guess you would become invisible! Gotta try that some time! :D

I finally realize why green clothes aren't popular in Japan! ;)

Since that Purikura session was ruined we had to take new photos.
Useless green cardigan!! ;D Luckily it's cheap, just 400 yen.

I love Yukino's hat! It's a bit similar to the black one I have, but bigger.

Wearing that hat is almost like a whole outfit! Imagine how comfortable to wake up in the morning and only need to put on a hat before going to work or school! XD

  






































You might have noticed that people often look really good at Purikura photos like Mathilda and Shun in this photo. But it is actually possible to fail... Just look at me on this photo with dry lips and blemishes all over my face... :(

That was before I learned the secrets of Purikura! ;D

So what are the secrets!!?? :O

 

Well, if you're the whitest, most pale guy alive like me and not born with perfect skin
there is solutions in Japan... ;)

Many Gyaru-O use foundation and make-up made for men. The Men's EGG-model Ayumu doesn't only have his own clothing and fragrance brand, he also has a make-up brand.

Since "Make-up" sounds a bit girly, they call it "Men's Maintenance" instead.

There is sometimes detailed tutorials in the Men's EGG magazines for putting on facial masks and
doing make-up.

I've heard from people that for girls in Japan it's even an unwritten rule to always have make-up on when they leave the house which sounds crazy, so I guess it's no wonder that people like to wear those "hospital-masks" instead as a reader mentioned in a comment.

And then there's the eye enlargement effect...
Japan might be the most techinacally advanced country in the world. Some of Japan's professors works with rocket science or trying to cure cancer, but there's no doubt about that they put their best men on the task to make people's eyes look bigger! ;D

One of the most popular Purikura machines ever is the "Honey Heart Haafu Kao".
"Haafu Kao" = "Half Face" which means that your face will look half foreign if you
take photos with this machine.

According to the machine, this is the natural eye-size. Level 1.

But this machine will give you the perfect eye-size. Level 3!! So sick...

But that's not all, it will also change the volume of your lips, your noseline and your cheaks...
I don't know if this eliminates the demand for plastic surgery or only promotes it!?

"Half-Purikura" with Kenichi and Lloyd.

Afterwards you can put on all kinds of eye shadow, color contact lenses and lipstick. So you can go
into the Purikura booth looking like crap and still look like a super model on the photos! Almost... ;D

In this machine you can also put special stamps from Russia, UK, France, Netherlands and even Sweden! :D

I put one of the most common Swedish souvenirs the "Dalahäst" in the left corner. ^_^

  



























When I did this with Yulia that's partly Russian and partly Japanese she put one of those Russian wooden dolls at her side and I stick with the Swedish "Dalahäst"...

The first time we took Purikura together we didn't really know how to act when the photos were taken. So this time we looked at all the example pictures on the machines and practiced different poses for half an hour before starting. That actually made it even more fun!

After taking the Purikura photos Yulia said that she thought there should be cameras with the same functions as Purikura machines.

I guess it's hard for a personal digital camera to achieve as great light as it is in the Purikura booths. The Purikura booths are almost like small modeling studios when you think about it, with light reflectors all over the place.

But recently I heard that many upcoming cameras in Japan will have something called "Purikura functions". So maybe Yulia's wish will come true after all! =)

One of the funniest Purikura-memories gotta be when Erik to the right in this picture, who's a member of the band Wild Flowers, was here for a while to visit his Japanese girlfriend.

Erik thought that everybody always looks so happy and cool on the Purikura pictures
so he wanted to see if it's even possible to look bored and angry in Purikura! ^^

Erik proved that it's possible to look very bored and angry on Purikura haha!! :D

As you can see in this video he was really happy when the results came!! He has been living in Hollywood for too long now so he has really catched up that American movie star accent! ;)



However, if you really wanna become good at something you better study how the professionals do it!!

The EGG Youth-models Masshu and Akkiina sure know how to take a cool Purikura photo!

Their model colleagues Shouya and Naokyun are no beginners either!

It's pretty nice to take Purikura together with friends but after all it's much more fun to do it alone! ;D

I guess I'm just one of many poor souls that has become a Purikura addict. If I don't get my daily doze of Purikura it will start to itch, and I won't be able to think about anything but that! ;)

My friends has even started to call me FurePuri. "FurePuri" is an abbreviation of my name Fredrik which becomes Furederikku in Japanese, and then Purikura. XD