Last night I was casting around for something to watch after the midnight changeover when Mrs J-List relinquishes the TV to me after her usual 7-hour binge of watching Korean dramas. I found All Good Things, the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, on my hard drive and decided to re-watch it. Usually, this is the cue for my wife to fall asleep on the sofa, but this time she took an interest in Star Trek, and especially Captain Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart).
“Look at the captain. He’s so handsome, with a beautiful ‘high nose.’ And he’s ‘eight heads tall.’ I wonder what our kids would look like if I’d married him instead.”
I wasn’t surprised at her reaction: I knew she had a thing for British accents, because my father was British, and she admitted that if she’d met him before me, she might have married him. And Sir Patrick is pretty hot.
The Japanese (and all Asians) have some interesting ideas about how beauty works, which can feel a little odd to us. First, for a face to be considered beautiful it should have a “high nose” (鼻が高い hana ga takai), which means a big, proud nose, which Japanese usually don’t have. The “perfect” body dimensions are 八頭身 hattou-shin or “eight heads tall” (the ratio of the head to the entire body should be 8:1). The character of Neko Musume from the new Gegege no Kitaro is often held up as an example of these perfect proportions. Eyes are classified as 一重 hitoe or “single eyelid crease” (which refers to smaller Asian-looking eyes) and 二重 futae or “double eyelid crease” eyes.
Another reason my wife fell in love with Captain Picard: his ケツあご ketsu-ago or “chin butt” (cleft chin). “Because Japanese rarely have these, we think it’s very handsome.”
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Great news: all the new anime magazines for the month are in stock and available now! As usual, most of them are loaded with awesome stuff for fans, like the great posters in the new Megami Magazine. Browse all the new anime magazines and put your order in!
