No excuse whatsoever

I am in shock... why? Because I have just witnessed the most appalling hair crime imaginable... allow me to set the scene...

This afternoon I went bowling with my fiance's brother, who is in town for O-bon. Afterwards, he invited me back to the family house for dinner. As is usual in such a situation, dinner wouldn't be ready for a good 2 and half more hours, so I lounged and read some Time magazines, whilst he watched the baseball. The mum and dad then appeared and announced that we were going out to eat, which was fine by me.

We went to a family style diner that served Japanese style hamburgers (no bun, on a plate with rice, soup and lots of sauce). My fiance was working, so it was just me, the brother and the parents. I always feel a little conspicuous on such occasions, as I always eat really quickly and don't subscribe to the Japanese tradition of exclaiming "oiishii!" between every other mouthful. Were I to eat at a natural pace, I would be finished long before Mr and Mrs slurped the onions from their soup, and I would have to sit there like a foreign lemon for the remainder of the meal.

Anyway, I paced my eating, which was strangely difficult, and took a lot of time glancing around the room.

And then I saw them. The family that hair forgot. Or rather, the three young boys that hair forgot. Below is a rather shite sketch of the hair that the three were sporting... crew cut all over, spare the long fringe and unforgivable mullet at the back.

Alas, this was not merely the mother giving in to their kids' pleadings for such abominable hair... the mother in question was of the fashion-victim type (Louis Vuitton handbags in full view, and designer cigarettes) and the boys' hair was dyed and streaked.

They paid a lot of money for that hair in a salon. Three times.

Cruelty! Abuse! Outrage! Those poor boys will look back through the digital photos of 2005 and grimmace. How could you, they will wail. How indeed. The youngest boy was probably no more than 3 years old, which, in my admittedly sometimes conservative opinion, is far too young to have dyed hair, especially as it serves no purpose other than to bolster the shallow ego of a bandwagon mum.

The gruesome fringed mullet is not the hair of young Japanese boys. It is the hair of stamp collecting German twenty-somethings from the mid-80s, or rat-thin homebrewers from the trailer parks of South Carolina.

(it was so bad that I found that my artistic skills had deserted me... honestly, I can draw...)