Here, you get one just for being a nice person, bill:
She has a line of hats she "pushes" (oops, sorry no pun intended), which she is doing here, above...and which I think are going to have sales plummet.
Posted on 08/21/2009 12:56:22 AM PDT by AmericanInTokyo
Japanese Pop Idol Recast as Junkie
Earthquakes, tsunami tidal waves, typhoons, floods and landslides kept Japanese news gatherers busy over the Obon week when Japanese traditionally return home to pay respects to departed relatives who return briefly from the spirit world. It wasn't, however, any act of God that shocked the nation but alleged drug use by singer Noriko Sakai.
Manufactured pop idols cranked out by Japan's powerful production companies have dominated Japan's music charts for decades. Sakai, who debuted at 15 in 1987 with squeaky voice, clean-cut image and cute nickname, Nori-P, was one of the most successful winning a big following at home and as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong. At 38, acting rather than singing was sustaining her celebrity, but her whiter than white reputation that corporations including Toyota Motor tapped to sell their products remained unsullied. Sponsors are now queuing up to dump her.
Sakai's fall began when police stopped her husband Yuchi Takaso in Tokyo on Aug. 3. Found with an illegal stimulant hidden in his underpants the ex-surfer phoned his wife and asked her to come down. The officers rummaging through his clothes weren't wooed by her celebrity status and instead asked her for a urine sample too.
Promising to visit the local police station, Sakai however went on the run for a week with her 10-year old son. Police in the meantime searched her Tokyo apartment where they found less than one thousandth of a gram of "white powder" in her bedroom. Though tiny it was enough for an arrest warrant and plenty to give Japan its juiciest celebrity scandal this year.
Camera crews jostled outside police cells and TV shows trotted out commentators and drug experts who quickly demonized the Japanese idol. A recent tattoo on her ankle was, they insisted, a sign of her drug addiction. Among young Japanese body art is common, but to older Japanese tattooing is still strongly associated with Yakuza criminal gangs. Some even suggested changes in hairstyle were a result of her dabbling in drugs, a bright red streak in her fringe being the most diabolical of her recent hair salon choices.
For Japan's police it was a gift. Criticized as bunglers in recent years Sakai's high profile arrest allowed Japan&'s men in blue to look tough on drug crime. The girl next door lured into the evils of drug use was perhaps too good to miss. Yet the image of a demon junky is probably no closer to the real Sakai than was the idol. After two decades of airtight marketing its impossible to tell because little is known beyond her constructed persona.
With no apparent evidence that Sakai snorted amphetamines or any other drug and with such a miniscule amount of white powder found in her bedroom prosecutors in the end may just let her go and let the media finish her off. Yet in choosing to demonize her Japan is missing the chance to take a deeper and more honest look at drug use.
Though discussed little in public, estimates put Japan's regular drug users in the millions. Amphetamine crystals, known locally as shabu shabu is common, but cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana and other narcotics are readily available despite stiff penalties. Japan doesn't differentiate between soft and hard drugs.
Official statistics also ignore people who imbibe an array of hallucinogens and other concoctions sold legally online and in the streets as new chemical formulas outpace laws meant to control drug use. Information about drug use is almost none existent and ignorance as a result is rife.
Sakai is unlikely to educate her fellow Japanese. The singer, whose most famous song is "Blue Bunny"; reportedly told police she got her drugs from a foreigner. True or not, blaming it on a faceless 'gaijin' is one way to keep the scandal from spreading to friends and associates. Unfortunately it reinforces a delusion that drug abuse is a foreign scourge and not something homegrown.
Those English tack on lines are really starting to annoy me.
You’d think that by now they could at least make them gramatically correct.
Ah well...
Nihon wa Nihon desu...
I can think of a puzzled if not terrified Japanese traveler taking a “wrong offramp” in San Francisco/East Bay or Detroit, and feeling “America is weird”. ;-) Actually, weird is a little bit everywhere when you think about it.
Hint: They are not “English”, nor were or are or will they ever be, intended to be “English”.
I’d be terrified, myself. No time to be puzzled.
I guess you’re right. :)
I have problems with that paragraph. They are NOT readily available in anything like the sense they are available in America or any other European country.
If you go out looking for them, you can probably find them, but drug users in Japan are almost a completely separate community -- restricted to the entertainment community and the Yakuza set.
I wouldn't have the foggiest idea who to talk to or where to go, myself.
But then, maybe I am just too old and straighlaced for that crap these days.
(He said, sipping his first scotch and water of the weekend.)
Having had the experience of trying to explain various bits about American culture to Japanese, I believe that Japanese are generally puzzled by our country.
So there might be some inaccuracies in that article. Yes.
By the way, believe it or not, the US State Department actually has a "Travelers Advisory" out for Roppongi. Shame it came to that. Ah, the good old years before the riff-raff came in. Fortunately they are being shown the door these days.
Here, you get one just for being a nice person, bill:
She has a line of hats she "pushes" (oops, sorry no pun intended), which she is doing here, above...and which I think are going to have sales plummet.
Look at what they do in Singapore for chewing gum or chucking a cigarette but...or spray painting grafitti for that matter!
You might as well just fill up the thread with various images of her. No sense wasting the space.
If they instituted those same policies stateside there would be more people inside prison than out.
No kidding. Where else can you buy whiskey from vending machines on the street?
It’s not though. It is completely different than America in so many ways that is is virtually impossible to explain to someone who has never lived here.
Her CDs will be back on the shelves in a week or so. I do not think this is going to kill her career although she is probably going to have to publically apologize to her fans and express sincere remorse.
I am SAFE in Tokyo. There is nowhere in this city that I would fear to walk at night. Or, if there are, they are so far off the beaten path of normal life I could probably never find them anyhow.
Japan is... Japan.
Yep. This low crime business ‘aint all its cracked up to be anyways, know what I’m saying? Give me the feeling of wondering if I will be shot down in the middle of the night at a 7-Eleven in a bad part of town just trying to get emergency baby formula ANYDAY.
If anything, if I were her relatives, I would put her on suicide watch once released. She already threatened it the first day of her going missing...as intimated to her mother in law or grandmother by phone, I forget which one.
Game shows. But I love the country anyway.
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