June 14th, 2008 trolling for truth?

suzuki emi - popular model, started out modelling for schoolgirl magazine seventeen, scarily thin, cute (but not really the kind of girls i like, which is irrelevant).

born in shangha… wait, kyoto? half chinese and japanese… but her management agency page says nothing about this? yet everyone on the net insists she has chinese blood. surely she must if wikipedia says so…

see, even the overseas chinese page says the same thing
and what’s more, we will assimilate you!

suzuki’s management agency, stardust, has never dismissed or confirmed the rumours: that she was born originally with a chinese name in shanghai, attended school there until the age of twelve when she moved to japan, naturalized her citizenship to japanese, and supposedly gained the name ’suzuki emi’ and absorbed the japanese language within a year. hey, even if the latter were true, that’s damn impressive for anybody.

the english wikipedia article cites its original source as this japanese page, which states the “facts” but hasn’t any forwarding proof. the site, yamaguchi.net, is a ‘knowledge base’, sort of like a wiki, but with a more organised structure, and only the site owners can edit articles…

but of course anyone can edit a wikipedia entry. the japanese suzuki emi wikipedia entry is sick of being changed constantly, that it now states at the top that only the name ’suzuki emi’ can be used, and only the birthplace of kyoto, japan is to be stated as her birthplace. but in the past history of the notes, a user with a very chinese handle of ’sizhao’ keeps insisting that she’s ‘not born in kyoto, but shanghai’ and so on. but that doesn’t appear in the current version of the notes section, since deleted. thank goodness for a logged history of everything on wikis.

but if she can speak chinese, does that reveal a possible chinese bloodline? in an episode of long love letter, suzuki teaches her classmates a few words in mandarin. her pronnunciation isn’t bad, but not perfect either (scroll towards the end of the clip) …

japanese fans say that her parents were only working in china. some other rumours say suzuki is full blood chinese, and the kyoto birthplace is just a coverup, which one might do if they want to be accepted into japanese society. the cynical side of me says that chinese people like to claim everybody as their own, especially the good looking ones, and start funny falsehoods (but did they really start this one, or merely jump on the bandwagon?). but showbiz in japan has a funny way of suddenly revealing their secret ethnicity, like wada akiko being forced to admit she was of korean origin after being ‘outed’ by a magazine.

the internet: a place where a bunch of people can post unsubstantiated things, and this makes them facts, obviously. and then after which you can have a jolly old time slagging off each other as to who is right, racist, or a shithead on whether suzuki emi is chinese, japanese or both, in youtube or a forum until the cows come home.