Misia - Everything (cover)

First Japanese cover song!

Practice & live show Asagaya

Two new videos of my time in Japan. I practiced with Satoshi Munechika to play at his live show and I must say it was the best moment of my life! I was so happy to sing for Japanese people and I want to thank Satoshi for making my dream come true!!

Melody music video!!

Video blog Feb 16, 17 & 18 | 2012

Trip schedule Japan!!

THIS IS MY FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/himeno16

I received my trip schedule today from Mochan and I am getting more and more excited every day!

I am still looking for a place to sleep for the last three days, so if you have time and space to host me, let me know!

You can find the original trip on Mochan his blog,

Mochan Blog Lleonie Japan trip 2012

I added my arrival to the schedule

Lleonie in Japan 2012

*Trip schedule

Feb 16 : 11:30u my flight to Japan from Schiphol Amsterdam 

(I will make a stop at Russia)

Feb 17 : 11:40u arrival at Narita airport 

(hope to arrive at 14:00u at Tokyo, hostel New Koyo)
(meeting with Yoshihiro Shiramizu @ Akihabara)

Feb 18 : TOKYO sightseeing
(meeting with Satoshi Munechika 19:00u @ Shinjuku)
(meeting with Kei Kinoshita)

Feb 19 : TOKYO sightseeing

(meeting with Jeroen en Noriko 12:00u)

Feb 20 : TOKYO sightseeing
(Sleep at Capsule hotel Asukasa Riverside)
(Go to Tsukiji Market with Lars Zwaanenburg)
(practice with Satoshi for 11 march, 19u Shinjuku south exit)

Feb 21 : TOKYO sightseeing

(meeting for dinner with Yuki, Shibuya)

Feb 22 : TOKYO sightseeing

(surfing @ Christopher Lindstrom his place)

Feb 23 : Go to SHIZUOKA

(Mochan his place)

 Feb 24 : Mt.Fuji sightseeing

Feb 25 : NAGOYA sightseeing & Party

Feb 26 : NAGOYA sightseeing

Feb 27 : Ninja village

Feb 28 : NARA sightseeing

Feb 29 : AMA NO HASHIDATE

Mar 01 : KINOSAKI ONSEN

Mar 02 : KYOTO sightseeing

Mar 03 : KYOTO sightseeing

Mar 04 : OSAKA sightseeing
Mar 05 : KOBE sightseeing

Mar 06 : HIMEJI  sightseeing

Mar 07 : HIMEJI party

Mar 08 : Go to SHIZUOKA(my place)

Mar 09 : KAMAKURA sightseeing

Mar 10 : SAITAMA sightseeing

Mar 11 : TOKYO sightseeing

(Live show Satoshi
We will play Melody at his live show!
3/11(SUN)
PLACE:ASAGAYA NEXT SUNDAY
OPEN/START　18:45/18:50
ADV/DOOR￥2500＋D/￥2800＋D
http://nextsunday.jp/)

Mar 12 : TOKYO sightseeing
(Meeting for lunch at Jiyugaoka? with Aleksandr Drozd)
(meeting for dinner with Keiichiro Nemoto shinjyuku east police station)

Mar 13 : TOKYO sightseeing  

(meeting for lunch with Lie??)

Mar 14 : TOKYO sightseeing
(meet for dinner with Mizuki 19:00u Akihabara SHOWA DORI EXIT)

Mar 15 : 13:05 my flight back to the Netherlands from Narita airport

*The places to visit

Shizuoka (Host / Mochan)

Mt.Fuji viewing

Nara (Host / Dessy)

Nara Deer Park

Nara is the oldest capital city

Kyoto (Host / George)

Kinkaku-ji temple

Maiko / Geisha

Osaka (Host /  Shenglian)

Down town area of Osaka

Kyotango (Host / JJ)

Ama-no-Hashidate (Natural bay bridge)

Nagoya (Host / Nico & Nika)

Nagoya is the 3rd biggest city

Himeji (Host / Adam & Shinobu)

Himeji castle

Video blog number 2!

OMG time is flying by and I am getting more and more nervous everyday! Please enjoy my second video and my third will be there before I go to Japan and I hope the fourth one will be from the airplane!

First video blog!

Here is my first video blog about Japan! I am pretty new to the video editing so I hope I will do better after more video's.





If you want to know more about:

Spirited Away

Casshern

Namie Amuro

Japan plan is done!

I will be going on a trip with Mochan, an activity organizer from Couchsurfing.org. I will be staying in Tokyo for one week and after that I will see much more of Japan together with Mochan and his friends! He is organizing some concerts for me and he wants to film me singing in different places in Japan, so I am very excited about all that!!

He told me some places he wanted to visit with me so I made a print screen of the google maps route of every place. I will see much of Japan :D

I am so EXCITED I just needed to share this with you guys :)

Lleonie - メロディー (melody) Second Japanese Song! (included my first as well)

I did record the first one so I will be looking for that recording for you, for now please enjoy my second song. Leave feedback on youtube, facebook or blogspot.



Thanks to Job Vlak



Thanks to Tim Schuurman en Tollak

Hatsune Miku - Vocaloid

In the future we don't need singers anymore, you will have a hologram of a singer and a program singing the lines for you. Where to expect this? In Japan ofcourse, Hatsune Miku is a performing hologram and very popular.

Watch this video first and than see how kids react to her performance. In the next video you will get an explanation about how they made her and the music.

Hatsune Miku - World is mine



Kids react to - Hatsune Miku

I AM GOING!!

A few weeks ago I finally bought my ticket to Tokyo, I am so excited!! I want to do my graduation project there with a research, a research about the differences between western and eastern pop culture. But thats not all, I will be making two songs before I go, one ballad and one up-tempo song in the hope to share my music with the Japanese people and getting their feedback. Ruben Wijga decided to help me with the songs, so I am very thankfull for his help.

Next thing is I have been contacting a lot of people in Tokyo through the couchsurfing website to see if they wanted to either have a chat with me, show me around or make music with me!! So far so good since a lot of people already responded to my message and would like to meet up with me in february!!

I am getting more and more excited as time passes by and I find myself with my head in Japan and not being able to concentrate well on my work, lets hope this will get better ;)

A Japanese organisator on te couchsurfing website asked me to cancel my room and come tour with him through all of Japan and make it a music tour with more people, but I am not sure whether I want to do that or not, at least not for all the time I am there (because I want to meet all the people I contacted).

What would you do if you were me? (keep in mind that I will be renting a room for a month)

A creative way of peeling a tangerine

For those of you that want to be creative in other ways, try this!

Kirsten Dunst in Akihabara

Kirsten Dunst starred as a Cosplay girl in a music video singing a song called Turning Japanese. The video was produced by artist Takashi Murakami, and directed by McG who also directed Terminator Salvation. Cosplay is short for costume play, and it’s huge in Japan.

The music video screened at a London show last fall called Pop Life: Art in a Material World.



I really don't know what to think of this but I like her in the Cosplay outfit :p

This is the original song,

Audition Websites

I met this woman of coachsurfing.org and she gave me a couple of websites were I can apply myself for an audition with a record label! I'm very excited about this (even though I cant read it, I hope a translation will get me somewhere) and I hope I can apply myself soon and be sure to get a ticket to Japan, so I will have to work hard! Especially since my laptop was stolen last week and I bought a new one of the money that was for the ticket to Japan... So I'm going to work even harder to get enough money again!

Sony music audition
http://www.sonymusicaudition.com/

Avex audition
http://avex-audition.jp/pc/index.html

Universal music audition
http://www.universal-music.co.jp/scoutjaws/

Victor music audition
http://www.jvcmusic.co.jp/audition/vma/

EMI music Japan audition
http://www.great-hunting.com/playersbank/

If someone wants to help me translate the website, or help me with applying that would be awesome!

Extreme Japan

Wikipedia on Burusera
 
Burusera (ブルセラ) is a Japanese word coined by combining burumā (ブルマー?), meaning bloomers as in bottoms of gym suits, and sērā-fuku (セーラー服?), meaning sailor suit, the traditional Japanese school uniforms for schoolgirls.

Buru-sera vending machine

They sell higher with picture

Burusera shops

Burusera shops sell used girls' gym suits, as well as school uniforms including Catholic school uniforms. They also sell other goods procured from schoolgirls, e.g. undergarments, school mizugi (スクール水着?) for physical education, socks, stationery, sanitary napkins, tampons, saliva, urine and others.





The clothes are often accompanied by ostensibly genuine photos of the girls wearing them. The clients are men who smell or otherwise experience the panties for sexual stimulation. Vending machines were once used to sell packaged used panties.

Schoolgirls used to openly participate in the sale of their used panties, either through burusera shops or using mobile phone sites to sell directly to clients. When laws banning the purchase of used underwear from minors were introduced in Tokyo in 2004 it was reported that some underage girls were instead allowing their clients (called kagaseya (嗅がせ屋?) or sniffers) to sniff their underwear from directly between their legs. Others chose to sell photos of themselves, throwing in the used panties for free.

In August 1994, a burusera shop manager who made a schoolgirl sell her used underwear was arrested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department on suspicion of violation of article 34 of the Child Welfare Act and article 175 of the Criminal Code. The Police exposed the company and the owner under suspicion of violation of the Secondhand Articles Dealer Act which bans the purchase of secondhand goods without authorization.[1]

Child pornography laws imposed legal control over the burusera industry in 1999.[2] However, burusera goods in themselves are not child pornography, and selling burusera goods are an easy way for schoolgirls to gain extra income. This has been viewed with suspicion as child sexual abuse.[3]

Prefectures in Japan began enforcing regulations in 2004 that restricted purchases and sales of used underwear, saliva, urine, and feces of people under 18.[4] Existing burusera shops stock burusera goods from women at least 18 years old — most of them are alumnae of high schools.

Japan for the uninvited

Enjo kosai (Compensated dating)

Enjo kosai is one of Japanese society’s most infamous phenomenon: schoolgirls dating older men for money. Although many encounters don’t involve sex, this prostitution of Japan’s youth has been cause for serious concern.

Telephone Clubs

Enjo kosai emerged towards the end of Japan’s 1980s economic boom. Young, middle-class girls had become used to an expensive lifestyle, funded by their prosperous fathers, but the economy was starting to fall apart. With their families unable to fulfil these materialistic needs, but discouraging them from taking part-time jobs, many girls looked elsewhere.

When you’re a middle-aged man, it isn’t easy to pick up schoolgirls. Where do you meet them? You’d look ridiculous if you started hanging around outside high-schools or purikura, and you’d soon get pestered by the police. “Telephone clubs” sprung up to solve this problem. These are places where men pay for a girl’s mobile phone number. Apart from that, all negotiations are between the schoolgirl and the dirty old man.

The internet has made telephone clubs largely redundant. Safer and cheaper, it also allows men to contact a greater number and wider range of girls. All he has to do is put an ad (“40,000 yen for dinner and sex”) on the message board with his contact details, and he can choose the most alluring response that rolls in.

Bura-Sera

These sugar daddies are usually middle-aged, married men with children of their own. Why do they pay so much, and take such great risks, to have sex with young girls? Many describe this craving as “tamaranai”, an “uncontrollable attraction”, which hardly seems to excuse the fact that they’re exploiting girls their daughter’s age.

“Lorikon” (Lolita complex) and “bura-sera” (the erotic fascination with schoolgirls) are crucial aspects of modern Japanese sexuality. The ubiquitous sailor-suit school uniform is as important a feature of Japanese pornography as breast implants are in Western filth. Bura-sera also drives the thriving trade in used panties.

Kogals

This widespread sexual fetish is exploited by the “kogals”, young Japanese women who wear school uniforms, loose socks, and heavy make-up as a fashion statement. Many of these girls finished high school years ago, but enjoy the attention the outfits get from men.

It’s easy to understand why middle-aged men want to have sex with young girls. But why do the girls do it?

Japan has always been a country where external appearances are important. Traditionally, social prestige has been held in material symbols (samurai’s swords and hairstyles, exclusive aristocratic colours), and nothing has changed. The rabid desire for flashy designer clothes, born during the economic “miracle”, hasn’t been stemmed by economic problems.

It’s not all about money and fancy clothes. Japanese children lead a restrictive life at home and school, so enjo kosai could be seen as a sexual rite of passage for curious young women.

There will be more later, for those of you who liked it :p

8 songs about Japan (Dutch paper article)

Thanks to Hugomatic Intergalactic

A Gaijin Musician in Japan

A blog post from a foreign musician trying to make music in Japan, this post gives us a nice inside look of the music industry in Japan. 

http://nitrogenandneon.blogspot.com/2010/08/gaijin-musician-in-japan.html

This guy is funny as well, trying to get a Japanese womens cell phone number by freestyling on the street



Another nice blog about a student living in Japan
http://gaijinnosekai.wordpress.com/


American girl who learned herself to speak Japanese, very popular on youtube with Japanese people.

http://www.youtube.com/user/kerokerorin813

Related Projects

I went to the Jrock Con (Japanese Rock Convention) in 2007 in Tivoli Utrecht, it wasn't really my music but I did enjoy the bands and the audience. I was a bunch of people that love Japanese Popculture so you could feel the resemblance. Here is some info and pictures of that event: http://www.jrocknl.org/2007/index.html

There was a Dutch band that makes Japanese rock music and I was inspired to use some Japanese words in my songs. So first I started with one line, and in a second song I used three Japanese lines and now I wrote a Japanese song and I'm busy writing another. There is not much material from Dokumi, they don't seem very active on the internet, but you can check out their Myspace. http://www.myspace.com/dokumi

The singer of Dokumi is called Nana and has a project of her own as well, Nagisabox. This is acoustic Japanese music, I think this comes really close to what I am doing so I am going to contact them and maybe we can help each other or share our passion for writing Japanese music. (and I want to know how they write their songs, I mean translate the lyrics ;) I think I want to make a video for my first Japanese song and translate the lyrics to English as well.



The guitarist of Dokumi has his own project as well, but he is looking for a vocalist so I should contact him and maybe we can work together. http://www.myspace.com/mugenjouproject
If anyone knows more related projects, please let me know.

Gaijin Invasion

This is from a show called Adam and Joe go Tokyo, they wrote a song with all the Japanese words they know and played it on the street. Someone from a Japanese tv channel spotted them and offered them a chance to play on the Japanese tv Show. It's a great example for me, I should try something funny to get attention when I am in Tokyo.



Here is the video of when they are on the show, lucky for us there are subs!



I am trying to get my hands on the complete show of Adam and Joe go Tokyo, I think it will be good research material.

This video is very funny as well