I saw that super-cute Japanse idol/actress/singer Yuko Ogura (age 24) has been awarded the prestigious (?) First Gravure Idol Award from Sankei Newspaper’s entertainment website “ZAKZAK.” Yukorin, who was the girl dressed as a baby seal in the Youtube video with a polar bear you may have seen, got the award for being pretty much the single most popular bikini idol in Japan over the past eight years, and for breaking the iron-clad rule that a cute idol had to be, well, chesty in order to make it in Japan’s cut-throat gravure idol world. (The term gravure comes from the word photogravure, a process for printing glossy magazines, but has come to mean sexy girls in bikinis in Japan — no, I don’t know what the heck is up with this word, either.) The Japanese are quite amorous of giving awards, and there seems to be no end to the prizes that can be given each year: popular idol/actress Yumiko Shaku recently won the “E-Line Award” from the Japan Association of Orthodontics for having the best facal profile, which includes a beautiful nose, jaw and chin. Literary awards are also rampant, and there are frankly so many — the Yomiuri Prize, the Osaka Women’s Literature Award, the Saitama Sports Literature Award — that they all become kind of meaningles.
