Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

This too cute movie clip was bumming around Youtube. It’s from the movie Chik yeung tin si or So Close in English, starring Karen Mok, Shu Qi, and Zhao Wei.

IBDM gives the movie 6.7 (which isn’t bad) and the video has 133,006 views on YouTube. You can buy So Close on Amazon for $21 if you wanna watch it too.

Unfortunate is online fortune cookies. Social cookies!! It’s really cute, especially since you get to vote on the best and worst fortunate in their hall of fame, which currently are:

The best fortunates

• Help! I’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory!
• If you can do the robot, you can sneak into robot dance clubs.

The most unfortunate fortunes

• Your food was poisoned.
• George Bush is still president.

The Chinese is always a bit wrong, but they assure me they’re working on it. They get data from CEDict, which is potentially flawed as it is user-editable. One funny Chinese bug right now is that the pinyin “chuzu qiche” comes up way more frequently than it should, sometimes in hilarious contexts.

Any movie with Jason Statham and Jet Li facing off as adversaries must be worth watching. War, a movie about “FBI agent Jack Crawford (Jason Statham) who becomes obsessed with revenge after his partner Tom Wynne (Terry Chen) and family are killed apparently by the infamous and elusive assassin Rogue (Jet Li). His world unravels into a vortex of guilt and betrayal.”

It also stars Steph Song who has a change of adding a bit of romance to an otherwise formulaic (BUT OMG JET LI) action movie.

The new style in Japan called “bon-kyu-bon” means “big-small-big” and trails the Western obsession with buxom girls, small waists, and big hips. You just have to hear the Commodores sing “36-24-36, what a winning hand!” in their hit disco song Brick House to realize this isn’t anything new. It’s not often that you see Japanese fashion on Digg, but with the mostly male geek crowd there are plenty of Japanophiles.

This wouldn’t fly in the US, but in Japan everything is game

Apparently the new trend is driven by better, calorie-rich Western nutrition:

Today, the average Japanese woman’s hips, at 35 inches, are around an inch wider than those of women a generation older. Women in their 20s wear a bra at least two sizes larger than that of their mothers, according to Wacoal. Waist size, meanwhile, has gotten slightly smaller, accentuating many young women’s curves. The average 20-year-old is also nearly three inches taller than she was in 1950, according to government statistics, and the average foot has grown by nearly a quarter of an inch.

The Star wants to indicate that Koda Kumi is to blame for the “show it all off” trend:

The cleavage craze took off in 2003, when a young pop star named Kumi Koda appeared in ads around Tokyo wearing a barely-there metallic bra and not much else. In one image, she wore coconut shells over her chest. Then, two years later, she performed at the televised Japan Record Awards wearing thin tape-like gold satin straps over her breasts that revealed nearly everything when she danced. The 24-year-old star has become the champion of a new “If you’ve got it, flaunt it” attitude among young Japanese women.

You can check out these photos of singer Koda Kumi yourself if you get bored. I really like her. As for the style, if I were a girl I’d probably try it; since I’m not and have to wear a suit most of the time, I will never have the opportunity… and it’s getting so hot here!

The guy has so many names: Jung Ji-Hoon and 鄭智薰. I didn’t particularly like it, but some might.