Word of the movement spreads

Here's an article from J@pan Inc magazine. which actually mentions the FTG4 movement:

• "Harajuku Girls Co-opted"
  

And what is probably yet another sign that online Wikipedia-style sites are to be taken with a grain of salt, a mention of FTG4 from Answers.com:

• "Harajuku Girls"
  

In response to comments (especially about money)

I've been staying out of the flame wars in the comments sections for a couple reasons: 1) I don't want to come down as the author of this blog with some sort of "official" position on the whole matter as opposed to letting people discuss it on their own, and 2) I actually over-set my spam filters so that I didn't even know people were posting comments for the last few months. (Oops.) Anyway, I'll try to keep better tabs on what's going on here, although it's been mostly spam lately.

Speaking of, I've activated the "word verification" feature for comments which should hopefully keep the non-human spambots out of here.

Finally, the question came up a couple of times regarding the money from t-shirt and coffee mug sales. First of all, there were never any sales because cafepress.com pulled the items. Secondly, the prices were set to exactly equal cafepress.com's costs for making them. In other words, no one would have made any money on the sales. (Well, no one except for cafepress.com, of course.) If anyone has any suggestions about a similar site where I could take the t-shirt design, I would either set the price to equal the cost again (i.e. no profits) or I might consider setting a price to generate modest profits which would go to a charity of some kind. But this was never about making money, nor will it ever be.

The fight continues

It's been a while since I've updated this blog, and I guess I secretly hoped that maybe Gwen would tire of this whole harajuku thing and the G4 would have faded away into history as a weird cultural footnote.

Silly me — it would seem that this debate is alive as ever (thanks for staying vigilant, angryasianman):

• "New doubt: Is Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku obsession offensive?," Boston Herald
• "Harajuku Girls," Margaret Cho's blog
• "Margaret Cho's not laughing about Gwen's Harajuku Girls," Popwatch blog, Entertainment Weekly

For freedom!