Free the Gwenihana Four!

OC Weekly's Vickie Chang talks "yellow fever"

2006-11-02T14:16:00.000-08:00

Check out Vickie Chang's piece on "yellow fever" which even touches on dear Gwen's own case of the hots for harajuku.

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/news/yellow-fever/26126

Word of the movement spreads

2005-11-03T14:25:00.000-08:00

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)

2005-11-03T14:11:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-03T09:39:00.000-08:00

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!

No more FTG4 t-shirts and mugs

2005-04-23T00:08:00.000-07:00

CafePress.com has informed me that my FTG4 design is in violation of their Content Usage Policy (aka CUP — surprisingly, this catchy acronym hasn't spread like wildfire). I quote them here:

We recently learned that your CafePress.com account contains material which may not be in compliance with our policies. Specifically, designing, manufacturing, marketing and/or selling products that may infringe the rights of a third party, including, copyrights (e.g., an image of a television cartoon character), trademarks (e.g., the logo of a company), "rights in gross" (e.g., the exclusive right of the U.S. Olympic Committee to use the "Olympic Rings"), and rights of privacy and publicity (e.g., a photo of a celebrity) are prohibited.

Now if I were a more combative type, I might try and argue the point with them. After all, while the FTG4 design is based on a copyrighted photograph, I believe it's sufficiently "interpreted" to qualify as fair use and is therefore a First Amendment–protected expression of artistic and social commentary. But hey, they have a business to run, and if they want to reserve the right to refuse service on the basis of a possible lawsuit, I'll let it slide for now.

I'll try to come up with a less-infringing but no less compelling image to put on t-shirts and mugs. In the meantime, you can still download posters from the links on the right.

Some obvious advice for blog visitors

2005-04-23T00:03:00.000-07:00

Blog veterans out there will no doubt cluck their tongues at my ignorance, but in an effort to publicize this blog, I've searched for other blogs referring to the G4 and posted comments with a link to this blog if I was able to do so.

However, I also included an undisguised email address when asked. Whoops...I've since been deluged with literally thousands of junk mails as spammers have taken my personal domain name and used it to generate a flood of spams to other domains. Of course, when those domains kick back error messages, they all come back to me as if I sent them. It's taken some serious tweaking of my ISP's content filters to effectively deal with the deluge.

Lesson learned: No email addresses in blog comments!

A quick update

2005-04-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who's posted comments here — both positive and negative. I will endeavor to answer many if not all comments sometime soon.

Angry Asian Man joins the cause

2005-04-15T12:47:00.000-07:00

The Gwenihana Four make the pages of Angry Asian Man's blog. As it was AAM who first brought the G4's plight to our attention, we're happy to have his support.

Welcome...

2005-04-14T15:03:00.000-07:00

This is a blog to promote awareness of the "Gwenihana Four," the four pseudo-harajuku girls currently serving an unspecified term in the custody of pop singer Gwen Stefani. Please consider buying a t-shirt to show your support for the cause. For freedom!