Who are those red-dressed people?

September 13, 2010 2:00 AM

Ok, so I stumbled upon this youtube video (might be NSFW, or at least raise eyebrows depending on your work environment) through some social site (reddit?). It left me with some questions.

1) What exactly am I looking at? The last few seconds make it seem like a clip from a comedy show (and yes, I know, there are... some hints... before that), but is it a parody? Just a one-off joke?

2) The music itself is actually quite nice, in a ringtone-y kind of way; is there more like this out there, or are there some keywords I could search for ("non-traditional music on traditional instruments" or something like that) or bands that specialize in that sort of hing?

Thanks in advance!

posted by PontifexPrimus to society & culture (4 answers total)

During the first few seconds, the title of the song shows up, 世界に一つだけの花 (japanese wiki link), which is a song by the band SMAP (wiki). Or, at least, I think this is a cover of that song by some band called 女子十二楽坊 (twelve girls band) (wiki). There's an album cover here of the album from which that cover is from.

Anyway the other descriptor that shows up when the video is playing is ツヨシ十二楽坊 or twelve tsuyoshi band, where the letters for "girls" (女子) from that cover band got replaced with "Tsuyoshi" (ツヨシ). I think that Tsuyoshi is Tsuyoshi Kusanagi from SMAP itself.

So what happened is, and I am totally guessing here, it looks like someone took a music video of that cover by that twelve girls band and digitally replaced the faces with the face of Tsuyoshi, who was in the band that originally wrote the music to that song. I cannot speculate as to why silly japanese people do silly japanese video edits, so that's about as far as I can answer this question. (Oh, and here is the original version of the song if you want to listen to it with some terrible lyrics (YMMV) for some reason.)
posted by yeoz at 2:43 AM on September 13, 2010

http://kaelus.blogspace.fr/852466/Tsuyoshi-Juni-Gakubou-un-Girls-Band-bien-particulier/

("tsuyoshi juni gakubou" is at the bottom of the video). It looks as if it is a parody of this group (and it also looks to me as if all the "girls" are the same man in drag).
posted by nja at 2:43 AM on September 13, 2010

As an additional factoid, Tsuyoshi Kusanagi is known for a bizarre, inebriated spree in April, 2009, during which he removed his clothes in a municipal park and danced with drunken abandon, only to be arrested and have a shadow cast on his career for awhile.

He may have resurrected his image, and it's doubtful that the video relates directly to the 2009 incident. But many Japanese people, when they hear his name, will recount the arrest and the tabloid coverage it entailed.
posted by Gordion Knott at 4:17 AM on September 13, 2010

Great answers, thank you! That helped a lot - I'll be sure to check this out.

I really love the internet sometimes; first, for spreading stuff like this video and then for making it possible to find out more without looking like a crazy person ("Hey you, you look Asian! Watch this Japanese video of a guy dressed up like a woman playing classical Chinese instruments and tell me what you know about that!").
posted by PontifexPrimus at 4:24 AM on September 13, 2010 [1 favorite]