It seems as if golfer Michelle Wie is finally growing up.

To try to earn her 2009 LPGA Tour card, Wie has entered the first stage of tour qualifying next week at Mission Hills Country Club.

Score this as a first step in the direction Wie should have been following all along.

Time will tell whether this is a genuine epiphany or just another one of those phony self-discovery stunts that are so popular these days.

In any event, let’s just hope we don’t get any more of this:

After turning pro the week of her 16th birthday, Wie has stuck to a game plan that she said was always her design, even though her parents appeared to be behind the wheel far more often than she was. And along the way, Wie drove very far off track.

In her first full year as a pro, she held at least a share of the lead in three majors in 2006. Then after she injured her wrists, Wie’s fortunes changed, her game faltered, her missteps increased and her image started taking hits.

And the fact remains that Wie hasn’t won any kind of tournament since the U.S. Women’s Public Links Championship, when she was all of 13.

Almost from that moment, her peers and others have suggested that Wie learn how to win against female players, instead of constantly loading up her playing schedule against the male pros, experiences that gained her almost nothing except more notoriety. Most of that negative, by the way.

Good luck, Michelle.

Via The Marmot’s Hole

Blaine Harden of the Washington Post penned a thought-provoking article about modern Japanese women that touches on many topics which have been raised here on Japundit. It asks why women are postponing or even eschewing marriage and children; a trend which I, too, have seen. Off the top of my head, I can name about 10 single Japanese women friends in their mid-to-late thirties; far fewer than the number who are married.

Takako Katayama has not closed the door on marriage and children. When she meets girlfriends for dinner, they ask each other, “Where are the good guys?” But she refuses to settle for a man who works long hours, declines to share in child-rearing and sees marriage mainly as a way to acquire lifetime live-in help.

“I want a mature, equal-partner kind of marriage,” she said. “Anyway, there are complete lives without a baby.”

Therein lies a dismal prognosis for Japan and for many of the other prosperous nations of East Asia. In numbers that alarm their governments, Asian women are delaying marriage and postponing childbirth. In Japan, the percentage of women who remain single into their 30s has more than doubled since 1980.

“We need to organize our society so that women and families will be able to raise children while working,” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in an interview in May. “I think we still lack adequate efforts on that front.”

This year, Fukuda’s government is pushing a “work-life balance” program that addresses the country’s famously punishing work ethic. It pressures companies to shoo workers (primarily men) out of the office at night. The intent is to improve the quality of family life and, in the process, make more babies.

The stakes are high here in the world’s second-largest economy, which now has the world’s highest proportion of people over 65 and lowest proportion of children under 15. According to a recent forecast, population loss will strip Japan of 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.

We all have heard of how foot binding was (and apparently still is in some areas) practiced in China, but these are the first photos I have ever seen of this gruesome practice.

More here.

AskMen.com writes in to alert us to the results of their survey Top 10: Japanese Models, which focuses on Japanese “gravure idols.”

Other AskMen.com links that may be of interest are their Top 10: Playboy Japan Centerfolds and their Celebrity Profiles.

A longtime Japundit reader alerted me to an important beauty treatment now available at New York’s Shizuka salon, a place I went to once in search of a Japanese-style manicure.

a high-end Japanese spa in midtown, has just introduced a new “Geisha Facial,” which promises to cleanse, brighten, and exfoliate a patron’s face—thanks to a secret ingredient: bird poop. For centuries in Japan, both Kabuki actors and geishas used uguisu no fun, or nightingale droppings, to clean off their thick white makeup and soothe their faces; apparently, guanine, found in the droppings, helped their complexions.

Hopefully the bird droppings are not collected from the upper reaches of Hokkaido.

Vanity, after all, can make you sick.

Spam emailers have discovered that eating seaweed can miraculously rid women between the ages of 25 and 54 of the roll of fat around their middlesection.

Just take a couple of sea-weed tablets every day, and perhaps you too will see your weight plummet, so you too can join the ranks of women who enjoy the lowest rate of obesity in the world!

Personally, I’ll stick to weekly misoshiru and some nice sunomono with wakame.

Uguisu photo via.

Being a healthy male, I’m naturally fascinated with the opposite sex, and I find the subject of Japanese females to be an especially complex and interesting one.

Over the years I’ve known many Japanese females, from students I taught English to, to girls I dated, and of course my wife, and while each of them is unique, I have noticed some patterns.

Japanese females are often very concerned with how they appear to others, wanting to be chanto shiteru (roughly translatable “doing things properly, as they should be done”) in all things, and when it comes time to, say, split a lunch bill, out come the calculators so they can accurately compute the amount that each person must pay.

Often, Japanese girls feel the need to cultivate a certain kawaii character about themselves, and it’s not that difficult to find a girl in her high teens or twenties who thinks its cute to hold her coat sleeves in her hands to make herself look “super deformed,” to refer to herself in the third person or to spontaneously channel a “catgirl” without warning.

While there are exceptions, most Japanese girls are extremely slender, and I’ve known grown women here who, when visiting the U.S., need to shop at Gap Kids if they want to find their size.

Thanks to eating rice three times a day, Japanese females are constipated more often than not, and spend great quantities of money on exotic Chinese herbal remedies, when all they need to do is eat a little less rice.

I could go on, but I wouln’t want to ruin the mystique of Japanese women for anyone, and besides, they confuse me, too.

May Day in Kyoto not only involves a parade honoring International Worker’s Day, but also marks the opening of verandas in restaurants in Pontocho along the Kamogawa River.

A pair of maiko (apprentice geisha) shoes at the entrance of a Pontocho restaurant.

The restaurant where I ate had a little screen separating our area from the veranda next door. When I looked over, I spotted a camera crew setting up equipment. A little later, it became clear why the cameras were there.

A little breeze hit the screen, and in the opening, I could see a smiling maiko.

I’m pretty sure this was some kind of news crew documenting the start of the May and the opening of the verandas, which will be accessible till September 30th.

May is also the start of the Pontocho geiko dances at the Kaburencho.

Someone managed to catch a snippet of the dances last year, and upload it onto Youtube.

We also enjoyed some tea, made by a maiko.

Caught a special on TV on Tuesday about The Candies, which was a female super group in Japan in the 1970s, and it reminded me of a time when girl groups in Japan were more than just the music.

I’m currently in love with this watch by LA based designer Tokidoki. The designer, Simone Legno, is actually from Italy, but with a keen eye, and a sense of humor (not to mention a Japanese girlfriend), he’s created a world of charming characters that remind one of the playful sensibility pervading the world of anime. No wonder he has a devoted cult following.

This summer is supposed to see the launch of several new Tokidoki products, including a special bag for Sportsac and a collaboration with Onitsuka Tiger. I’m really curious to see what the items will look like!

Mainichi Wai Wai has a report from a Japanese weekly magazine about a woman who has been arrrested for attempted murder of her future father-in-law over a misperception of his views on her upcoming marriage to his son.

[The woman] admits to the allegations, saying she attacked the old man during a drunken fit because she thought he was going to speak out against her plans to marry his son.

“Both my fiance’s parents had told me off before about how bad my housework was, so I figured they were opposed to our marriage,” [she] told the police.

Unfortunately for the suspect, though, she’d got it wrong.

“There was never anything like that,” says [the] victim, who sustained serious stab wounds but is expected to make a full recovery.