A hairline as beautiful as the snowline
Feb. 22nd, 2009 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThis is perhaps the most important blog entry you will read all year. With today's entry, things really come to a head. No, it's not about fictitious capital and its role in the current financial meltdown. It's bigger than that. It's about Aoi Yu's hairline.
Aoi Yu -- and I might as well admit she's my favourite celebrity right now -- has an irregular hairline. I consider it a "beauty point", and today I want to investigate the Japanese terminology for hairline shapes. In English, of course, we have terms like "widow's peak" -- Stephin Merritt made me sing about one in the poignant As You Turn To Go.
I turned, of course, to Hisae to ask what Aoi Yu's beautifully broken hairline might be called, and the first word she came up with was fujibitai: Fuji forehead (from Fuji and hitai, forehead).
I was immediately delighted, imagining that the hairline was being compared with the irregular, ever-changing snowline around the summit of Mount Fuji. So poetic! But it turned out that fujibitai, although it does refer to Mount Fuji, is more about finding an upside-down picture of the volcano in the kind of hairstyle I'd describe as a "Dracula peak" -- the kind seen in these pictures, the first of which shows Hara Setsuko, a favourite actress of Ozu:
Geishas are supposed to have a fujibitai, and a wig is often worn to provide the pointy peak. When you get married in traditional Japanese style you're also supposed to wear a fujibitai wig, and there are web pages that tell you exactly how far the peak should ride above your eyebrows.
But we were barking up the wrong volcano. Aoi Yu's hair is not peaked but downy, and the word in Japanese for that is ubuge. The best place to see her ubuge hair in motion is the series Osen, where Yu plays the quirky manageress of a slow food restaurant, wearing traditional clothes and pinned hairstyles all the way through.
Watching Osen, I found myself as fascinated by Yu's hair as the plot. I was tempted to freeze the frame and make a diagram of the three distinct types of hairline Yu has. See if you can spot them in this photo:
The three zones I see there:
1. Widely-spaced normal head hair, set quite far back on the skull, creating that distinctive bulge on Yu's forehead.
2. A downy zone of baby hair, again adding a babyish quality. Technically, I think this is called lanugo hair, and forms part of the pelage.
3. Stray strands of 1, hanging down loose over the forehead, but widely-spaced enough to leave, around them, some of the baby lanugo visible. These strands add a lot of charm, and might be more visible at the end of the day, when a formal, flat hairstyle is starting to come undone, or when the wind is blowing.
Here are some people with bun-pinned, downy hair who aren't Aoi Yu (the one on the right is a friend, Berlin-based musician Midori Hirano):
There are some photos of Aoi Yu in which this beauty point -- her downy or ubuge hair -- falls just on the wrong side of the line, and she looks a bit gappy or even receding:
But 90% of the time her dynamic and irregular hairline is an imperfection that improves on perfection, the kind of quirky and humanising "beauty point" that sets Aoi Yu apart from thousands of other beautiful women and makes her completely irresistible. Who cares if the whole banking system falls into the sea, as long as there are still women in the world with hairlines as beautiful as the snowline on Mount Fuji?
Aoi Yu -- and I might as well admit she's my favourite celebrity right now -- has an irregular hairline. I consider it a "beauty point", and today I want to investigate the Japanese terminology for hairline shapes. In English, of course, we have terms like "widow's peak" -- Stephin Merritt made me sing about one in the poignant As You Turn To Go.
I turned, of course, to Hisae to ask what Aoi Yu's beautifully broken hairline might be called, and the first word she came up with was fujibitai: Fuji forehead (from Fuji and hitai, forehead).
I was immediately delighted, imagining that the hairline was being compared with the irregular, ever-changing snowline around the summit of Mount Fuji. So poetic! But it turned out that fujibitai, although it does refer to Mount Fuji, is more about finding an upside-down picture of the volcano in the kind of hairstyle I'd describe as a "Dracula peak" -- the kind seen in these pictures, the first of which shows Hara Setsuko, a favourite actress of Ozu:
Geishas are supposed to have a fujibitai, and a wig is often worn to provide the pointy peak. When you get married in traditional Japanese style you're also supposed to wear a fujibitai wig, and there are web pages that tell you exactly how far the peak should ride above your eyebrows.
But we were barking up the wrong volcano. Aoi Yu's hair is not peaked but downy, and the word in Japanese for that is ubuge. The best place to see her ubuge hair in motion is the series Osen, where Yu plays the quirky manageress of a slow food restaurant, wearing traditional clothes and pinned hairstyles all the way through.
Watching Osen, I found myself as fascinated by Yu's hair as the plot. I was tempted to freeze the frame and make a diagram of the three distinct types of hairline Yu has. See if you can spot them in this photo:
The three zones I see there:
1. Widely-spaced normal head hair, set quite far back on the skull, creating that distinctive bulge on Yu's forehead.
2. A downy zone of baby hair, again adding a babyish quality. Technically, I think this is called lanugo hair, and forms part of the pelage.
3. Stray strands of 1, hanging down loose over the forehead, but widely-spaced enough to leave, around them, some of the baby lanugo visible. These strands add a lot of charm, and might be more visible at the end of the day, when a formal, flat hairstyle is starting to come undone, or when the wind is blowing.
Here are some people with bun-pinned, downy hair who aren't Aoi Yu (the one on the right is a friend, Berlin-based musician Midori Hirano):
There are some photos of Aoi Yu in which this beauty point -- her downy or ubuge hair -- falls just on the wrong side of the line, and she looks a bit gappy or even receding:
But 90% of the time her dynamic and irregular hairline is an imperfection that improves on perfection, the kind of quirky and humanising "beauty point" that sets Aoi Yu apart from thousands of other beautiful women and makes her completely irresistible. Who cares if the whole banking system falls into the sea, as long as there are still women in the world with hairlines as beautiful as the snowline on Mount Fuji?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 10:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 10:20 pm (UTC)Also: You're friends with Midori Hirano? I slowly get the feeling my entire music library/taste revolves around you in some way.
-r
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 10:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-21 11:59 pm (UTC)"beauty point"
Date: 2009-02-22 01:12 am (UTC)That little dot is that cat's charm point. Apparently.
Re: "beauty point"
Date: 2009-02-22 01:46 am (UTC)Re: "beauty point"
Date: 2009-02-22 02:28 am (UTC)www.flickr.com/photos/perkypat/93642535 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/perkypat/93642535/)
Re: "beauty point"
Date: 2009-02-22 02:35 am (UTC)what's the charm point here? the fujibitai or the koala nose??
I found this googling "チャームポイント"
Date: 2009-02-22 02:37 am (UTC)Re: I found this googling "チャームポイント"
Date: 2009-02-22 02:41 am (UTC)Re: I found this googling "チャームポイント"
Date: 2009-02-22 03:10 am (UTC)Re: I found this googling "チャームポイント"
Date: 2009-02-22 03:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 01:37 am (UTC)perfection
Date: 2009-02-22 03:19 am (UTC)that song as you turn to go is haunting.whats the instrumentation it really lends itself to the melancholic atmosphere.
by the way ahy scotish dates looming it would be great to see the joemus album performed in full(with germilin) then the whole of ping pong...what a evening that woulkd be.
Re: perfection
Date: 2009-02-22 03:24 am (UTC)I'm talking to Martin MacDonald about playing a show in Glasgow sometime later in the year -- watch this space, etc. Germlin will be based in Berlin from next month, though, so it's just as expensive to fly him into Glasgow as it is me.
Re: perfection
Date: 2009-02-22 09:42 am (UTC)This is indeed a kind of "received wisdom" - but to me doesn't stand up to a second's examination.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 03:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 11:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 05:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 05:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 04:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 08:27 am (UTC)I started reading Click Opera about one year ago, never really making the connection that it was you doing the vocals, until about two months ago, causing a great amount of excitement and subsequent pointing out to my roommate how small the internet is.
Thank you for finally bringing it up so I can tell you this mundane story.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 10:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 10:46 am (UTC)and the title reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Shigematsu's Zen Forest translations:
...eyebrows, like snowed-over banks
but now where can we find photos of the famed quatre cents coups-bitai..?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 11:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 11:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-22 01:37 pm (UTC)world view ??
Date: 2009-02-22 01:55 pm (UTC)Posted by: haha at February 15, 2008 6:26 PM | Reply"
i found this on the stereogum or something web site.iam curious if there is any truth to this at all.....thats all?
Re: world view ??
Date: 2009-02-22 02:06 pm (UTC)Re: world view ??
Date: 2009-02-22 04:42 pm (UTC)Amend, please, to:
"Momus is yet another cranky, hipper-than-thou indie guy, open-mindedly listening to tribes instead of bands."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-23 04:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-23 10:49 am (UTC)1. Take a healthy, young, successive attractive woman.
2. Posit the idea that there is something medically wrong with her, behind the facade of this success, or even staring us right in the face -- in her hairline! Gloss individuality as "poor or failing health".
3. Suggest, at least by implication, that she be taken out of the context of her success and medicated. That she shouldn't just be seen as a victim, but treated as one. Work "no obvious problem" up into "problem that often goes undiagosed".
4. Blame female victimhood on society's stereotyping of women, without seeing that your interpretation of the situation is an even more toxic piece of stereotyping. "She's a woman, she's successful, but women are victims, where's the snag?"
5. Describe any celebration of this woman as the celebration of some kind of structural cultural sickness. Might the person celebrating her also be a victim of some sort?
Luckily, there is a cure for False Sympathy Syndrome. Eat, eat, eat! Seaweeds, nuts, whole oats, root-vegetables, copious servings of leaf-herbs, and chicken-liver (even just as broth) can nurture appreciation of a person, not just a perceived "problem".
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-23 12:36 pm (UTC)aaah aaaaaah I've only watched one movie with Aoi Yu in it but she is indeed incredibly beautiful. She's like a luxurious marle grey cat - jumper turned into a person. So elegant, dainty and natural!
mmm
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-24 09:24 am (UTC)what an entry
Date: 2009-02-25 06:50 pm (UTC)how are you??? i am back to virtual world.
edine