Yamashita Tomohisa: 0409 Vol. 78
0409
Vol. 78 "color"
"Every person has a certain color about them. You can tell if a child's gonna grow up to be a troublemaker just by looking at them!" Yamapi explains after the photo shoot. He tells us his favorite colors and scenery for this month's keyword, "color".
So many of my favorite places remind me of a certain color. There's the sky and sea of Hawaii, which I love, the bright red sunset I saw at Okinawa, the rich green color of nature... From my house you can see some beautiful night views of Tokyo, and in the summer, I love to see the vivid colors of fireworks against the night sky. In winter, the pure white world of the ski slopes is a beautiful sight.
I'm not picky about the color of my personal items, but now that I think about it, I have a lot of red accessories. The penlights for my concert were red too. To me, red is a powerful color, one that gives you energy. When I was a kid, my favorite Power Ranger was the red one. Sometimes I tried to say I liked the black one or that the silver one was cool, but I really liked the red one. My favorite Kamen Rider was the BLACK series. I want to be a Kamen Rider!! Even now! (Laughs.) No matter how old a boy gets, he always wants to be the hero. We look up to them. If I had played a hero on one of these shows, the little boy from today's photo shoot would have been so excited to see me! (Laughs.) I'd like to play a hero one day, because you can inspire little kids to achieve their dreams, which is such a great thing. I mean, it was a big influence for me when I was a kid.
Ever since I was little, I've never really liked to draw pictures. During the summer, I had to keep an illustrated journal for school, but I only remember drawing clouds and rain. I would write, "It rained today" and draw an umbrella, or something like that. Instead of drawing pictures, I liked looking at picture books about space and dinosaurs. I wonder why. There's no way I would have understood space at a young age like that, but for some reason, I loved books about space, and I wanted to become an astronaut. It makes me think that the human race must have come from space or something. With dinosaurs too, I think I liked to use my imagination more than anything. Other boys liked bugs, but I guess they were too real for me to develop an interest. I realize now how much of a daydreamer I was.
When I was young, I liked red and blue and hated pink, because I was a boy. I still don't really like pink and I don't own any clothes in that color. I don't usually wear pink in performances, either. It's probably because there's a long-standing idea that pink is a girly color. They say that girls like guys who wear pink, but that's because girls like pink, not the guy. I never really liked brown either, but I've since stopped being picky with colors. I wear gold or silver accessories depending on the season. When it seems like everyone is wearing gold, that's when I'll set it aside and wear silver for a while.
My room has white walls and dark brown wood floors. It has a woodsy feel to it, but if you saw it you'd definitely think that I don't care about color at all. It's a problem. When I was busy with work, I would just come home and sleep, so I didn't care about how it looked, but now that I have a little free time, I want to add some things to it and be a little more picky about how it looks. For starters, I want to put in a bunch of speakers and a sound system so I can enjoy watching movies even more.
Lately I've ended up watching movies late into the night. Depending on the director's angles and use of light and color, the world can look completely different. I like action movies like X-MEN and comedies more than movies like Black Swan, which I recently watched. Horror movies and thrillers leave emotional damage, but happy endings are much more fun.
The sexiest part of a woman? Of course her breasts. (Laughs.) I mean, I'm a guy! My eyes naturally go in that direction. There are girls who act embarrassed or offended when guys look at their chest, but if they're gonna react that way, they shouldn't be wearing such revealing clothes in the first place! I also think high heels, or a woman who walks gracefully, are sexy. I wouldn't say I ever tried to act sexy, but since I was little I always wanted to look cool in front of girls I liked, or girls I wanted to talk to. [T/N: The Japanese word for 'sexy' (iroppoi) has the word 'color' in it.]
I like girls who are tanned really dark as well as girls with light skin. Is that wrong? (Laughs.) I'm not allowed to tan when I'm in the middle of shooting, so I haven't been tan for about 2 years. This summer I plan to go out to the beach and soak up the sun as much as I want.
[Seventeen, September 2011 / translation by amapi - Please credit if using/quoting]
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As always, thank you to watchful21 and kyara for the scan. You can tell this issue was 100% written by Pi. Let's see... His natural dislike for drawing pictures, evident each month when NEWS has to draw something in magazines. He mentioned his love for space (and movies) in recent nikki entries. He also mentioned watching movies late at night and that he watched a ballet-related movie. And there's this old video of him with Toma and HaseJun where they ask him what he finds sexy on a girl, and he says the same thing. (It was a personality test, and the result was that he was a momma's boy.) He also has written a lot about getting dark this summer.
I thought it was interesting that Yamashita-pinku dislikes pink so much. But that was an image forced on him by his company. Oh well, he survived and now he gets to make his own choices. I also love that he loves tan girls, because in Japan, its fashionable to be "white". It's not healthy to tan a lot, but it's also not healthy to stay inside all summer just to stay pale. Hopefully he inspires more girls to be comfortable in their skin.
I'm still working on back issues until Vol. 71, and I'm not going to do all of the older ones I mentioned last time, but think I will go ahead and retranslate 7, 12, 14, 21, and 22, because it sounds like they're not easy to access anymore.
Thanks for waiting, thanks for reading, and thanks for commenting!
-Amanda