Old people are always complaining about the fashion and style of younger people. I guess I’m slowly becoming one of those old people, since such fashions and styles are increasingly annoying me. OK, that’s a lie – things like that have always annoyed me, but I didn’t have a reason to blog about them much before. I walk down the street and think to myself how mind-numbingly awful that girl’s hat is, how gyaru yamanba fashion needs to stay dead, how ugly girls with a lot of make-up and fake tans are still ugly, and how men shouldn’t ever wear pants that tight. I guess a lot of this has to do with me being in Japan, where fashion seems to be multiplied by a factor of 100, usually for the worse.

You may have heard me mention Chickenheads in the past, which is the term* for the young Japanese/Asian hairstyle that is so popular these days. It’s easily recognizable by its volume, usually brown or orange color, resemblance to a cartoon character’s hair, and the DB-ish life form hanging under it. The officially documented scientific makeup of a Chickenhead hairstyle is 15% hair, 75% hair wax or spray, and the remaining 10% being a combination of cigarette smoke, sweat, tears, small woodland creatures, and man-juice. I did a Google Image Search for “asian hairstyle” and found some examples on the first page. Rather than pollute my server with more Chickenhead pictures than absolutely necessary, here’s a link to another blog with a whole bunch of them. And here’s another page with even sadder examples.

The Chickenhead style is often used in conjunction with the Asian mullet and/or long, pointy haircicles down the side disguised as sideburns, even though upon closer inspection it’s obvious that they’re not connected to the sides of the face. I didn’t have a name for these dangling scrotums of hair, but let’s call them fakeburns from now on.

This was actually supposed to be just a quick picture post, but I got on a bit of a rant. Today I’m here to show you a picture of a slightly more rare Japanese hairstyle, called the mane or Lion-O**. It’s a distant cousin of the Chickenhead, a more horrible and evolved form. It requires many more years of hair-growing and about 20 times the amount of bad dye and product to correctly form this forest of follicles. As the name(s) imply, it can look like a lion’s mane, surrounding the entire head and even flowing down the back, as seen in today’s ridiculous example that I saw at Tsudanuma station:

* I might have created this term. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. Please spread.
** Usage copyright 2008 TheLeong.com