Men, Manliness, and Being Springtime Fresh
In one of my high school classes, my students are working in groups to make a commercial in English. They got to choose their own groups, so as you can probably guess, they parted like the red sea, leaving me with three groups of girls and two groups of boys. I have no problem with this... I'll let them do whatever they want so long as it will get a little work out of them.
The Japanese concept of masculine and feminine, as you probably know, is not nearly so strict as the Western concept. Many of my boys, much to my amusement, are the most adorable little peacocks I've ever met and have elaborate hairstyles that probably take even longer to preen in the mornings than most of the girls'. Thus, it is unsurprising that one of the groups of boys chose to advertise a popular brand of hair wax, Gatsby.
In today's class, their assignment was to come up with a catch phrase for their commercial. The Gatsby group seemed to be having trouble with this, and for inspiration they pulled out a jar of the hair wax and were passing it around. The JTE and I walked over to help, and she suddenly remembered that I had mentioned before that in America we distinguish between "girly" and "manly" scents in our body products, so the boys asked me to smell the jar of wax they were passing around. Much to their surprise, I wrinkled my nose, because the last thing I was expecting to smell was mangoes!
They asked what was wrong, and I said I thought it smelled a little girly. Then, as if by magic, all twelve boys in the class produced their own jar of hair gel or wax more or less out of thin air. I really don't know where all of the jars came from, but the next thing I knew, they were all asking me to sniff their hair products and tell them if I thought the smell was manly. Almost all of them smelled like fruit or flowers, with the exception of the two that smelled like Elmer's glue.
Only one passed the gaijin test, as they had decided to call it. And for today, the boy wearing that hair wax is King of HR12.
The Japanese concept of masculine and feminine, as you probably know, is not nearly so strict as the Western concept. Many of my boys, much to my amusement, are the most adorable little peacocks I've ever met and have elaborate hairstyles that probably take even longer to preen in the mornings than most of the girls'. Thus, it is unsurprising that one of the groups of boys chose to advertise a popular brand of hair wax, Gatsby.
In today's class, their assignment was to come up with a catch phrase for their commercial. The Gatsby group seemed to be having trouble with this, and for inspiration they pulled out a jar of the hair wax and were passing it around. The JTE and I walked over to help, and she suddenly remembered that I had mentioned before that in America we distinguish between "girly" and "manly" scents in our body products, so the boys asked me to smell the jar of wax they were passing around. Much to their surprise, I wrinkled my nose, because the last thing I was expecting to smell was mangoes!
They asked what was wrong, and I said I thought it smelled a little girly. Then, as if by magic, all twelve boys in the class produced their own jar of hair gel or wax more or less out of thin air. I really don't know where all of the jars came from, but the next thing I knew, they were all asking me to sniff their hair products and tell them if I thought the smell was manly. Almost all of them smelled like fruit or flowers, with the exception of the two that smelled like Elmer's glue.
Only one passed the gaijin test, as they had decided to call it. And for today, the boy wearing that hair wax is King of HR12.