My middle sister and I (I’ve got two) see each other once or twice a year at best. When we do, shopping is definitely high on our list of things to do, especially because my sister is really into fashion. She’s going to fashion school right now, so she can get into the industry, but even before that she used to know which fabrics, colors and cuts looked good on people, as opposed to on mannequins. I like to look good, but I don’t have her eye, so she basically helps me dress.

The last time I was in the U.S., we spent some time together in Las Vegas where I had a business trip. After several hours of helping me shop, we ended up at the Hardrock Hotel after dinner, where she was on the hunt for a pink or red Ed Hardy baseball cap. She swore that these caps were all the rage, and you couldn’t find them anywhere. Well, it turned out that Hardrock had a store with a huge Ed Hardy corner and tons of these caps. Ed Hardy was apparently a famous tattoo artist and the cap featured some of his work, including several that said things like “Love Kills Slowly”. Let’s just say they left an impression.

The only drawback was that it cost $77, but my sister swore up and down again that it was worth it. She encouraged me to buy one too, arguing that it would make me one of the coolest people in Tokyo and I might even be ahead of the trend. In truth, I figure she was hoping that she would end up with it especially after we agreed that she would buy it off of me for $50 if I didn’t wear it by mid-spring.  

I don’t know how but she convinced me, so I’m now the proud (?) owner of a brown Ed Hardy baseball cap. I haven’t worn it yet because I’m not quite sure what the right situation is to wear a hat like that.

Everyone knows Japanese people can get pretty crazy about expensive European and U.S. brands like Chanel, Prada, Gucci and yes, even Coach. It’s ridiculous enough that they’re willing to shell out $300 for a Hermes mobile phone charm or $80 for a Coach key chain, but it’s even funnier when you see them go crazy over supposed foreign brands that you never hear about in whatever country it purportedly comes from.

Samantha Thavasa is one that comes to mind. She has more stores than Furla in Japan that sell handbags and accessories, and they’re very expensive. Samantha Thavasa is advertised as a NY brand. The funny thing is it’s impossible to find much information about her stuff online in English.

There must be an industry that creates brands just for Japan. I wonder what they really think of Japanese consumers.

We’ve had a number of houseguests passing through, and it’s been interesting to see what they pick up about the country. One such thoughtful observation by a guest from Italy was that Japanese women have funny looking knees. And it’s totally true.

Obviously not all of them but a lot of them have knees that turn in when they walk although they’re inevitably also wearing really uncomfortable looking shoes with high heels. Some of these women have never learned that wearing stilettos is only sexy if you can manage to walk normally in them. They’ve also never learned that wearing spikey heels looks really ridiculous on a steep path in the mountains or at a park full of deer even if it is paved.

I know I can’t. That’s why I stick to Munros and Clarks.

Last Saturday night — or rather early morning — I got a call from my sister. She was calling from the Kate Spade sample sale, which I have been waiting for all year. She had taken my order earlier in the week, but she called me to find out if I wanted a red suede bag that she picked up and everyone was ready to pounce on the minute she put it down.

Of course I said yes. I also had her pick up a green purse I had originally asked her to find. I can’t wait to see them.

(PMK might give you a different story since he got woken up for nothing though he has a much happier wife)

Last week, I had dinner with three high school students for a story on mobile phone accessories. As long as I had their attention, I decided to ask about the do-it-yourself piercings since they all had pierced ears. Here’s a rundown of the conversation:

Me: So I’ve noticed that a lot of accessory stores sell ear piercing kits. Do people actually do it themselves?
Girl 1: Yup. Of course.
Girl 2: We did these (pointing to her ears) together one day after school. We helped each other.
Me: What happens to the blood?
Girl 3: There’s no blood at all.
Me: Does it hurt?
Girl 2: Nope.
Me: How do you get them to be symmetrical if you do them yourself?
Girl 1: That never occurred to us. I think we just pierced our ears without thinking about that. I think it turned out okay.

Apprarently some kids, pierce their own lips, noses or belly buttons. I also learned that if you purchase these kits and go to a doctor, they will do the piercing for you free of charge. That’s why none of the stores offer to do piercings for you.

This may actually not be as stupid a setup as I first thought. After all, the people that do piercings for $10 at malls in the U.S. arent’t exactly experts either. When I had my ears pierced, the woman screwed up on my second ear and pierced it at an angle, so I have to poke my earring in and dig around a little bit on that ear to find the back of the hole.

My brother-in-law and his girlfriend have been in town for the past week visiting us. We’ve been taking them all over Tokyo and the Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe) area, visiting shrines, temples, hot springs, and of course, shopping districts.

In the course of those shopping excursions, my brother-in-law’s girlfriend and I have noticed a fairly common product in cheap accessory stores — do-it-yourself piercing kits.

It’s essentially a cheap piece of plastic with a needle. You put your ear lobe between a space between the plastic and the needle, push a button and boom, you’ve punched a hole in your ear. Not sure what they’re supposed to do about the blood that you’d think would ensue.

No wonder we never see stores that do piercings. Does everyone do them by themselves? If someone knows, please tell me.

So I think my taste might be changing — or rather starting to be tainted by the awful girly Japanese taste — and I’m absolutely terrified.

I went out shopping with a girlfriend from work last weekend and I found myself picking up things (think Laura Ashley-ish pouches and other knick-knacks) that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have liked six months ago. Fortuately I’m not so far gone that I actually purchased them, but the entire episode still scares me.

It’s all the more scary, because I’ve actually started to think the way Japanese women wear jeans or pants is cute — they wear a mini skirt or dress over their pants, or they turn up the bottom of their pant legs so it looks like they have huge cuffs. Now I don’t think the look works for everyone. Like anything, they look best on slim women because a stout person with pants and a skirt just makes them look bigger.

Nevertheless, this is a big change in my stance on this type of fashion, because I used to look down on it. I swear I will kill myself if I start filling up my dresser with clothes with lots of lace, ribbons and embroidery.

My favorite discount drugstore chain in Japan is Matsumoto Kiyoshi. An interesting characteristic about the store chain is that items are priced differently depending on the location, so you have to do your research to know where to purchase what.

Anyway, I found myself at Matsu Kiyo in Umeda in Osaka, which my mom swears has the cheapest prices overall among Matsu Kiyo stores nationwide. I spent 45 minutes there last weekend finding birthday present items for my sister and examining items that I’ve never seen in any of their Tokyo locations.

Some of the more interesting ones: a glue-type thing that helps shape your eyes to create an ephicanthal fold (which makes you look “cuter”), lip cream made of uric acid (supposed to make your lips soft, but as PMK says, “Why not pee on your lips if that’s the case?”), a powder that helps you get rid of panty outlines on your skin (a must-have pre-sex item?), and a powder that makes your nipples pink (hence the title of this blog item).

Don’t worry M, I didn’t get you any of them… though I was tempted to get you the lip cream.

A common observation by visiting foreigners is that Japanese women are always so perfectly coiffed, dressed and made up. This is true. They are extremely fashion conscious — though sometimes it’s a very skewed sense of fashion (e.g. skirt over jeans, polka dots on polka dots, clashing patterns, Wicked Witch of the West type color combinations).

My point, however, is not about their sense of fashion. It’s that some of them only care about looking beautiful for whoever they’re seeing because I see women doing their make up all the time on trains. And I’m not talking about a quick application of lipstick or a powdering of the nose. I’m talking about eyeliner, eyeshadow, mascara, and blush. The works. I once saw a woman spend 20 minutes on the train doing her make up.

She might have gotten on the train as a hag (ok, I’m exaggerating here) but she got off perfectly made up.

My morning routine lately consists of something that is extremely depressing — I stick a soft Dr. Scholls pad on a corn that seems to be making its home quite comfortably (painfully for me) on the small toe of my right foot. Since there are only 12 in a package, I go through more than 2 packages a month.

It doesn’t seem to matter that I stick to wearing two pairs of very basic, boring shoes, one in black (I recommend Sudini) and the other in brown (bought in Japan with cushioning for about $150). Which is a very sad thing in and of itself for a shoe lover like me. Now, I don’t claim to walk up a hill to the train station both ways, but I am out and about most days at work, visiting offices and rushing to and from press conferences. If this were the U.S., I would get regular pedicures. But in Japan, at 8,000 yen a pop, that’s not a practical option. If I could wear sandals to work, summer would also be something to look forward to, but I’d be surprised if I can do that in a fairly conservative office.

All this basically means that I brought a dozen shoes to Tokyo and I can wear about a quarter of them on a regular basis (including my two pairs of sneakers). How I long for my previous car-centric life in Chicago! Stepping in and out of a car everywhere I go seems like such a luxury! Thank god for the pair of very cool and comfortable pair of black platform flip-flops that my sister sent me a few weeks ago.

I bet you anything that Dr. Scholls makes a killing in this country. Or women, who jam their feet in tiny, high-heeled shoes, have really ugly feet and they hide it.

That’s how many I counted when I went to Shibuya this afternoon, not including all the Burberrys, Pradas, Guccis and other insanely expensive bags I saw. And I was only counting for about an hour total. The most popular Louis Vitton was a model called Speedy 25 that goes for about $495 on eLuxury. This probably means some of the bags were purchased for twice that much in Japan. Ok, some might have been fakes, but I’m pretty confident that most were genuine.

Awhile ago, I went out with a group of friends — one of them was carrying a Speedy 25. After the evening was over, this same friend couldn’t stop being envious that another one of our friends could afford to take a cab home. Is it just me who thinks something is wrong with this picture?

Even further back during our Chicago days, we once hosted an old Japanese friend of mine for about 10 days. We went out of our way for her — taking her out for dinners, arranging a trip to New York, etc — but she never once offered to take us out during her stay. Not even for coffee or lunch. I wouldn’t have thought twice about any of this had she not gone to Ferragamo as soon as she arrived and bought a $700 bag for herself and a $200 tie for her boyfriend.

The scary thing is I think there are a lot of people like her.

(A Thai friend of mine told me recently that, in Thailand, women can rent brand name purses like Louis Vittons and Guccis)

Your guess is as good as mine, but they don’t. Especially bikini lines. I can tell you this first-hand because I looked the last time I went to the hot springs. Actually, I was surprised to see that a couple women did, but most don’t, which is pretty amusing when you consider that Japanese women tend to be very self-conscious about body hair everywhere else. Some of them shave their eyebrows off so they can pencil them in (not sure why this is more desirable, but they do). Some hair salons (the really Japanese ones) have been known to offer to shave your facial hair. Eew. Some women trim their bikini lines by shaving before they wear bathing suits, but in general, they don’t seem to care. In the words of my aesthetician, “It makes you feel sorry for their men.”

Anyway, after three months in Japan and having combed through tons of Web sites on laser hair removal (the preferred method in Japan), I finally found a really great place called Boudoir, run by an Australian named Marilyn. The place is awesome. It’s expensive, but I’ve gotten the best wax I’ve ever had there. They use a rose-colored soft wax that hardens on your skin. They peel it right off of you and it’s fairly painless as far as waxes go. According to Marilyn, Australia has some of the best trained beauty professionals. Who knew.