kabe-don
Male customers can receive same-sex kabe-don with romantic ear-whispering from the staff member of their choice this Valentine’s Day.
As clean, punctual, and safe as Japan’s trains may be, riding them during rush hour usually isn’t a particularly pleasant experience, when passengers are packed in at extremely close proximity to one another. In their search for anything to make the experience a little more tolerable, some people will latch onto any positive they can find, such as a mere hint of romance in a chance encounter with an attractive fellow commuter.
This week, one woman’s heart skipped a beat as she found herself the sudden, if unintentional, recipient of a kabe-don on her morning ride to work. But while she could easily tell the man bracing himself with one arm against the wall behind her was a handsome stranger, she didn’t know that his full description should also include “prone to fantasies of ridiculous violence.”
Are you still using kabe-don to show your love, tough guy? If so, you’re clearly behind the times! Who even does kabe-don anymore? No one, that’s who!
Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it looks like the Internet has found the next hot way for tough guys to show their love: Sode-kuru! What is sode-kuru and how can you use it to win the heart of your crush? Read on to find out!
Unless you’ve been living in a (wall-less?) cave for the past year, you are likely familiar with the infamous “kabe-don“. This anime and manga sensation, which involves a (usually male) character playfully “pinning” the object of his affection to a wall by placing his hands either side of her with a thump, or “don”, has been all the rage online in Japan. But it also caused many to wonder, “Does that really happen?” and more to the point, “Would that actually work without getting head-butted or jabbed in the ribs?”
It’s a staple in Japanese entertainment, so kabe-don must have worked out for someone out there, but would this sort of thing work on foreign women? Well, wonder no more, as the following video sets out to find out just that.
“Kabe-don” ranked among Japan’s top anime buzzwords of 2014. Facing a woman with her back on the wall, the man places his hand on the wall beside her with a “don!” (the Japanese sound routinely used to represent something hitting a hard surface), with his face close to hers. This situation common in girls’ comics is also frequently seen in TV dramas and movies, and many young women who watch this scene dream of finding themselves in a similar situation with the object of their affections.
But is the ago-kui set to be 2015’s kabe-don and among its most-used phrases?
Are you still caught up in the kabe-don craze? We’ve even seen some variations to the wall-pounding approach, but it’s time to change it up for the next manga inspired photo trend – ago-kui!
Japanese Twitter users have shifted their attention to another heart throbbing situation that often comes up in manga and anime, the act of gently tilting another person’s head upwards by their chin. Similar to when kabe-don was trending, Twitter users started posting images of themselves getting caught up in an ago-kui situation, but they soon realized, it looks way cuter when ago-kui is done to their pets! More cuteness ahead!
One of the biggest buzzwords of the year in Japan has been kabe-don. A staple of girls’ comics in Japan for years, kabe-don, literally “wall-pound,” has traditionally been the domain of guys clumsily expressing their feelings while leaning against the wall and fencing in the object of their amour with their outstretched arm.
We live in an age of increasing gender equality, though. Today, woman govern nations, helm corporations, and are highly capable of wreaking terrible violence upon their targets with their bare hands. As such, it’s only natural to assume that women are gradually shattering the barriers that have made the world of kabe-don practitioners a boys’ club until now, and as proof, we present these 10 videos of women flipping the script and showing off their kabe-don skills.
With the aggressive pick-up tactics of Julien “the most hated man in the world” Blanc all over the news this week, it only makes sense that we here at RocketNews24 do our part in educating readers about self-defense. And being as this is Japan, we thought we should start with a method for dealing with that particularly Japanese act of violence-infused wooing: the kabe-don.
Between turning 40 and a host of confusion of what exactly she is, Hello Kitty has had quite a year. But we have news for the gijinka that’s going to make it a lot worse: Her boyfriend (catfriend? ginjinkafriend?) is out kabe-donning it up with any random stranger that walks by!
That’s right the once-lovable Daniel can now be found at Sanrio’s Puroland assuming the kabe-don position for anyone to waltz over and lock eyes with. This is the kind of betrayal that we doubt Hello Kitty will take in stride. And it’s not like she doesn’t know a crap ton of superpowered badasses!
Where will it end? It seems like the Japanese internet still can’t get enough of the kabe-don phenomenon.
Over the past year, we’ve seen the trend evolve from the romantic aspirations of high school girls everywhere to incredibly intense displays of affection. This time, we’re proud to bring you 12 more glorious tweets of the kabe-don in action–and don’t think that humans are the only ones ‘walling’ it up!
We previously introduced Kabe-don, the romantic wall pound that has sent Japanese girls swooning. For guys that want to show off their tough love, this is the way to do it. In fact, it became so popular in Japan that even cats were found to have jumped on the Kabe-don bandwagon. Nevertheless, this writer has never experienced Kabe-don nor seen anyone actually do it. If you also long for a Kabe-don moment yourself, there is now a cafe in Harajuku, Tokyo that helps you do just that! The catch is, the Prince Charming of your Kabe-don is in fact a…life-sized figure.
Do you still remember what kabe-don is? A couple of months back, the Japanese cyberspace was abuzz with the trending word “kabe-don”, which basically describes the situation of one person pounding their hand(s) on a wall and entrapping the another between themselves and said wall. A pretty convenient word, I would say, as you can see the number of words I just used to describe that scene otherwise.
Almost three months down the road since that much-talked-about Cup Noodle commercial aired in Japan, the buzzword has yet to show signs of fading into the abyss of the Internet in the fashion that most trending topics tend to. Instead, after seeing improvised versions such as mata-don, here comes an intensified version: KABE-ZUBO. Read on to see what it looks like!
A sneaky Twitter user snapped this shot of a kabe-don in action right in the middle of the world’s busiest train station. Always eager for a bit of 2-D romance come to life, netizens were looking forward images of a cute female station attendant blushing in her uniform while being thoroughly kabe-donned by a towering, masculine passenger… Unfortunately that’s not quite what they got.
Now that you’ve been acquainted with kabe-don, the most talked about romantic situation in Japan at the moment, and the ways to fend off unwanted kabe-don, here’s the latest variation to the wall-pounding approach – mata-don.
“Mata” refers to the crotch, and similar to kabe-don, mata-don involves one person sandwiching another between themselves and a wall, but this time with an additional move of putting their knee or foot between the other’s thighs. We can already imagine some guys cringing at this nerve-wracking pose. If your heart is still feeling fine, read on to get a glimpse of what mata-don commonly looks like!
As we’ve talked about before, kabe-don is the trendy new way for Japanese bad boys to soft sexually assault their crush. It consists of a guy approaching a girl he (presumably) has a thing for, who is ideally leaning against a wall, then suddenly smacking the wall with their palm and getting in reaaaaalllly close so the girl can smell his garlic breath.
Oddly enough, a lot of Japanese girls go absolutely wild for the idea of the kabe-don, in the same way guys love the idea of owning a Weird Science-esque sexbot; It’s sexy and cool on paper, frightening and creepy in real life.
Luckily for any girls who find themselves the unwilling recipient of an ill-advised kabe-don, someone has created an illustrated self-defense guide:
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