Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Ren & Hiroki れん&ひろき

I had just been to the "Singing Ice Cream Bar" in Shinjuku station
when I came out and saw two extremeley cool people.
新宿駅に出た時、二人のマジでカッコイイ男性が見た。

I wondered what they were doing there since Shinjuku/Kabukichou
mostly is a hang-out for Hosts. Host = Person that's supposed to look like
a dream guy and get payed for having fake relations.
But these two guys were Gyaru-O. Gyaru-O means Gyaru-Otoko. Gyaru-Male.


I started talking to them and they were really nice and asked me where I 
was from and so on. I told them I had a blog named "Agepoyo" and they 
got so suprised and happy that a foreigner knew that word.
They told me their names were Hiroki(to the left) and Ren(to the right) .

I told Ren that he looks a bit like the famous Men's Egg Youth-model Akkiina. (in the middle of the picture) 
Men's Egg Youth = The Gyaru Magazine for young males.

Maybe especially because their hair styles are a bit similar.

Ren liked being compared to Akkiina and was quiet a little bit but then asked:
"Who is cooler, me or Akkiina!!??"

I told him that he is even cooler than Akkiina and then we went to take some Purikura.

  These guys know their Purikura good. That's for sure.
  Three things were very important for them.
  1. To look tanned.
  2. To have big eyes.
  3. To have volume in the hair. That seems to be the meaning of all gyarus life btw...;D

  And of course they know the one Purikura photo machine in Shinjuku that
  could do that best. 
  Before we started it was time for "setto suru", setting of Hair style, which is
  a very important part of doing Purikura.

  My hair wasn't very styled at that time but that was no problem because
  Hiroki was carrying a gigantic hair spray can with him.
That was the first time I saw the hair spray VO5, but definitely not the last. It's the best hair spray I have ever tried, make the hair hard as stone and a gyaru could simply not survive without it.

  I felt like such a beginner taking Purikura photos with them!
  In less than a second they had picked what modes and frames
  they wanted and started posing.

  Text from photo: なかよし= Nakayoshi = Good Relation

   3人のBlog見てね = San nin no Blog mite ne = Look at our Blogs

  新宿でキャッチ = Shinjuku de Kyatchi = Catchy in Shinjuku
  With "catchy" they are referring to a conversation we had earlier.
  Everytime they go to Shinjuku the hosts try to make them into hosts.
   So they mean that the hosts are trying to "Catch them"
  That's what they mean with "Catchy".

  
 



After taking the photos it was time to edit them.
Here is a short video from that:
























The conversation in the middle of the video goes like this:

Hiroki: -This might be the first time we take a picture with a foreigner??
 
Me: -The first time? Really??

Hiroki: -Yes it's the first time.


Then we took some regular photos outside the Game Center where the Purikura machines are.
Ren seemed to be totally devastated when he saw the photo and said:

-"That doesn't look like me, right!!???"

...

-"I have no volume in my hair!!!!"

So funny personality...!! =D

Hiroki said that many people think he's a philipino because his eyes are so big for being Japanese.
He is working at 6th floor in Shibuya 109-2
Shibuya 109 is the department store for Gyaru girls and 109-2 is the deparment store for Gyaru men.


While we were taking photos Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean and The Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland came walking down the street...
Ren just stood there staring and whispered: -"I want a picture with them..."

    So I asked them to take a picture with us. After we took the picture Ren and
  Hiroki was overjoyed and asked me how I could dare to ask people like that.

  Hiroki: -If we ever asked anybody to take a picture with us, they would
                just ignore us.

  Me: -Eeh... what!? You look like models, I think everybody wants a
           picture with you! 

  Then they said that they wanted to put this picture on their wall at home.
   And I just thought "Why did I have to stick my tongue out and look like an
   idiot on the picture they gonna hang on their wall..."  (>_<)

  Later Ren told me he works with making McDonalds bread.
  So if you ever wondered who makes the bread to your hamburgers...
  Now you know!!!


  Ren and Hiroki had to go meet a Mixi-friend, which seemed to send very fun
  messages to Ren because he laughed hysterically everytime he got one.
  Mixi is the "Facebook" Japanese people use.


 
On my way home I saw plastic manatees in different colors everywhere.
If you look at the signs it says: "NO BASE OKINAWA".
They want the American armies out of their Island Okinawa.

    I also saw The Mad Hatter taking a break in Kabukichou. Disscussing hats perharps.


 
   The next day I thought it was all just a dream.
 

    夢かな?

12 comments:

  1. I just adore your blog!
    Please keep doing like that!!
    Hiroki and Ren are really really cool! Specially Hiroki!
    It's so nice you could take purikura together and talk!
    I can't wait for the next post!
    You can explain passed events you went, or your meeting with Akkiina. By the way I can't find Akkiina's blog, can you tell me the url please?

    Good joob with this blog!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you so much Kami!!
    I'm really happy to hear that!^^
    I will do my best! =)

    Akkiinas blog adress is:
    http://blog.crooz.jp/akinarixxx/

    ReplyDelete
  3. awwwwww so cool!!!!!Looks like so much FUN!!!!! *3*

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Kinda similar"? They both have the only hairstyle available to gyaru-o. The same hairstyle, in fact, that every single 'fashionable' male in Japan has.
    ...(Except Visual Kei, obviously)...

    At first I thought your English was a bit weird. Then I realised the parts I reacted to were the ones where you obviously thought in Japanese first. :p

    You're very outgoing, aren't you...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wrong Jack! Jack Shepard is the guy from Lost, Jack Sparrow is the guy in Pirates ;D

    ReplyDelete
  6. Martin: ah!! Thanks for correcting that, I watched way too much Lost (>_<)


    Joel: Well thats true even though its some different variations in that hairstyle. I guess what I thought made them look extra similar was that they both has a dark hair color underneath and then a light one on top.

    Oh hahah, yeah I didn't think about it! ^^
    The quotes I wrote sounds a bit Google Translate...

    ReplyDelete
  7. I really like the way you wrote about your day, there was a lot of nice details and information! Especially I liked how you translated what was written on the puri. I always wrote なかよし on my puri, but I didn't know what it meant till now XD

    Your photos are very cool!

    ReplyDelete
  8. It's really, really hard to translate japanese. To get all the information across you have to make the sentence really long and awkward. You can also translate it conceptually, but you lose tonnes of subtext. This is true for most translations, but the further apart the languages, the more so it becomes.
    Transcribing speech also has the effect of making it sound pretty stupid, so when speech is transcribed and then translated to a language from the other end of the earth, it would take quite a linguistic genius to make it sound natural. :p

    A few variations, yes. Enough to make these guys look exceptionally similar, as you pointed out. XP

    ReplyDelete
  9. haha, I just found your blog and I just love this post~! lol, they must enjoy being *internet-famous* now. <3
    I really would love to live in Tokyo one day (it's probably expensive tho, plus I'm just starting to learn Japanese xD;)
    I don't know if you've written about this, but how did you start learning Japanese? I'm taking classes at a university, but I know most bloggers self-study ^^
    k I'm gonna go read more of your awesome posts nao xD

    ReplyDelete
  10. SaraMari:
    Thank you!! Ah, then I will continue to translate what's written on the Purikura pictures.

    Joel:
    Yeah it's hard to translate Japanese, that's for sure!!

    happyholic:
    Thanks a lot for all your kind words!!! =)
    Hahaha yeah I wonder if they know how many people that know about them now...

    They know that they're in my blog, but since almost all Gyaru people just use their Japanese cell phone all the time with a special internet that can't enter this site for example, I'm not sure if they've seen this.:/

    I started learning Japanese by just looking at YouTube videos about Japanese and watching Anime. Then I took some classes in a school, bought a lot of books and now I have been studying one year at a school in Tokyo called KAI.

    Homepage:
    http://www.kaij.jp/e/

    My favorite web site for learning Japanese is:
    http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/

    Really cool that you take classes at University and I hope you can live in Japan one day if you want that!!^^
    The rent here is very expensive but food isn't that expensive compared to Europe at least.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hajimemashite
    Watashi no namae wa Abenk desu
    Watashi wa Indoneshia jin desu
    Watashi wa ANDALAS UNIVERSITY kara kimashita
    Douzo yoroshiku onegai shimasu

    ReplyDelete
  12. Very good blog post. I definitely appreciate this website.
    Stick with it!
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    ReplyDelete