InsaneJournal

Current mood:

awake

(re)CLAIMS: hide Matsumoto, Vicky Zhao Wei, Ken Miyake, Yoshiki Hayashi, Tatsuya Ueda, Junichi Okada
Name: Maia
How did you find out about this comm? it's my baby XP
Your timezone: Philippines (GMT+8), though I'll be moving to EST soon. XP
Character and their IJ: hide Matsumoto - honey__blade, Vicky Zhao Wei - la_ballerine, Ken Miyake - sooper_midget, Yoshiki Hayashi - harisen_of_doom, Tatsuya Ueda - princeofdreams, Junichi Okada - _mr_kryptonyt_
What nationality are they? all are Japanese, except Vicky who's Chinese
Are they an actor, model, musician or athlete? hide and Yoshiki are both musicians (X Japan, solo), Ken and Junichi are actors and musicians (V6), Tatsuya is a musician (KAT-TUN), Vicky is a model, actress and musician (solo)
What is your character doing in LA? What's a bit of their history? What do they want to do?

hide Matsumoto, a 27-year-old struggling musician, hails all the way from Aichi. He came to America when he was 18, immersed in drugs and alcohol and sex but with an insane talent in music. He decided the best place for him to stay was in LA where he rented a small apartment space for a while. On most days, he can be found in different street corners along Rodeo Drive or elsewhere, sometimes playing outside Universal Studios or in livehouses in the downtown area - specifically outside Mann's Chinese Theatre. He has a soft spot for animals, most especially cats and ferrets and he believes music is all he needs to stay sane.

A heavy drinker, chain-smoker and drug addict, hide got out of rehab, having checked himself in about more than five times in the span of time he'd been living in America. Thankfully, he'd decided to stop the drugs - though he remains a habitual smoker (he just can't really quit) and a bit of a drinker.

At first glance, people would think hide was just another crazy guy with wild pink hair who said whatever was on his mind and loved making people laugh, but in truth, he was often quite the lonely person and craved intimacy - something attributed to being an orphan all his life and being shunned by most of his foster families as a "bad kid". He had, in the past, been quite the antisocial child, often seen dragging a second-hand guitar and old rock magazine issues with which he practiced songs. The attitude he had back then caused him to be isolated by the other children and even in school, he'd never fraternized with anyone. It wasn't until he'd decided he was going to be a rock star at all costs did his personality dramatically change.

hide was often brought back by his foster parents, often with complaints about how he was a problematic child who could not excel at anything and that caused hide to further shut the world out. His history remains untraceable, as hide's mother was a prostitute who died giving birth to him and his father was never identified. Sadly, there weren't a lot of parents willing to adopt a child with that kind of history and hide was abandoned outside the orphanage that would become his home for the next 15 years of his life.

After the orphanage decided to throw him out when he was 15, hide ran away to Tokyo where he fell into the influence of drugs. Yet he remained determined to become a damn good musician, working in bars and lying about his age so he could save money and get a visa and leave his old life. Two and a half years of saving every penny, working desperately day and night and studying English from the one old textbook he had paid off and hide was able to board a plane to Los Angeles.

Always thinking he could live the single life forever, hide had never counted on his life being thrown completely upside-down when he met a painfully shy young man who was his namesake online and finding out he worked in a music store. Befriending him hadn't been easy, especially since Hyde (as he called himself) was carrying a secret that weighed him down and was hesitant to open up about it. One kiss was all it took to change everything and soon enough, he found himself attracted to the other man, though hide openly denied it and often slept with other people on the side to prove that his relationship with Hyde was really just another "friends with benefits" thing.

However, the arrival of Sumire, his eight-year-old daughter proved to be just one of the turning points of his life. She'd stolen her uncle's credit card to book herself a ticket to LA to find him. Unbeknown to hide, her mother found out and made several attempts to get her back AND win his affections again. It was only then that he realized exactly how much Hyde meant to him when he saw how the other had willingly taken care of Sumire and was prepared to help him protect his daughter. After being thrown in jail and having his life threatened, hide moved in with Hyde, officially entering a committed relationship and leaving his bachelor life behind.

The couple adopted Sumire, hide proposed, and they're now getting ready to adopt another child in addition to their family of one daughter, a ferret named Draco, and a Siamese kitten named Tofu.

++

Born and raised in San Francisco, Vicky Zhao Wei has been dancing ever since she was 4. Her father left her mother, Lisa, when she was pregnant with Vicky and never dared to make an appearance their lives. As a child, Vicky was painfully shy and quiet, always staying in a corner of the room or distancing herself from other children. In an effort to improve her self-confidence, Lisa enrolled her daughter in ballet classes - something that quickly developed into a passion and soon enough, Vicky was offered a scholarship to the San Francisco Ballet when she turned 18.

Vicky decided to move to LA to strike it out on her own, though she continued to shuttle back and forth by bus to SF every Fridays to visit her mother and still attend rehearsals at the SFB. She would often stay there until Sundays before heading back to LA to work, never caring about the 8-hour trip back and forth from LA to SF, as she always lived for the stage and for ballet. Her passion is not only limited to ballet though... she also immerses herself in jazz dance, modern, hip-hop, ballroom and traditional Chinese dance and treats dancing like it is the very air she breathes. Sometimes, she jams with street dancers, sometimes she hits clubs to let out steam - bringing a fake ID along with her (up until she hit 21, of course).

No matter how many times dancing injured her, Vicky refused to give up her passion. She had often expressed that she would rather die than be deprived of dancing and even if she lost more than her legs, it would never stop her from trying. She had previously dislocated her foot and lost the ACL in her right knee - both of them requiring tremendous physical therapy and nearly ending her career. She bounced back from both and refused to quit.

Offstage, Vicky remains the same quiet and sweet girl she was as a child and while most people will tell her she's pretty, she has bouts of insecurity and she has a difficulty expressing how she feels until she's onstage where she channels all her anger, her pain and her happiness. This is all because of her family history, as she was an illegitimate child and the reason why her mother was struck out of the family will.

In an effort to help her mother, Vicky allowed her aunts to set her up for an arranged marriage and kept it a secret from her mother. She had a promise to fulfill as soon as she was of legal age - that which was to marry a wealthy businessman to strengthen business ties of two highly-traditional families. The friends she had come to cherish in LA as her second family were quick to disapprove of the deal and crashed her wedding before she could say "I do."

In the aftermath of the incident, Lisa moved to Los Angeles with her daughter, determined to make a life for the both of them without the pressure of her family. They moved to a bigger apartment that one of Vicky's 'brothers' gave to her, opening their doors occasionally for any of Vicky's friends. And Vicky continues to dance at the Anaheim Ballet, like she truly wanted and comes home to a loving mother and two delightful cats named Noodles and Chow-chow.

Nowadays, she works part-time as a waitress at a Chinese restaurant in downtown LA and in her spare time, she watches DVDs in her apartment or takes a drive in her little Mazda all the way down to Santa Monica Beach or Venice Beach where she jogs or just sits on the hood of her car to watch the sunset.

She is also set to travel to Paris on a fellowship to the Paris Opera Ballet - which has been her biggest dream.

++

With a face like Ken's, it had always been a source of puzzlement for his peers that he could never really score a girlfriend. The problem was that Ken - now 29-years-old - never grew up (or even grew very tall, for that matter). His voice is still as squeaky as that of when he was a 10-year-old boy back in Japan and he only grew up to a mere 5'5" - even short for Asian men standards. As a result, finding romance has been...well, quite a challenge to say the least.

It never bothered him as much though. Ken always had a zest for life and loved the simple things. He found a job as an assistant mechanic in a nearby garage and also has a part-time job as a driver for a student carpool. (He was also, at one point in time, a part-time babysitter at his sister's daycare center.) One thing that he will absolutely NOT do, however, is SING. Ken is a horrible singer and he's even more embarrassed of his voice when he giggles because he sounds too girly. Women tend to find it adorable but in the end, they treat him like a little kid and up until recently, he had somewhat resigned himself to his fate of being a bachelor for life.

In some bizarre twist of Fate, he somehow ended up fixing the car of the woman of his (and every other man's) dreams and a friendship blossomed from that fateful encounter. In the course of his friendship with her, Ken realized that all she wanted was to experience the things she had been missing out as her career path had taken off from back when she was a child and she had never had the luxury of experiencing normal, everyday things. As Ken tried to bring some normality into her life, he realized that he had started to develop feelings for her and during one slightly awkward moment at a dinner date, he confessed.

And as of today, he couldn't be happier, as they have been going steady for some time. He's even stopped pinching himself and knows none of this is a dream.

Ken loves his girlfriend, dogs, fixing anything that's broken, cotton candy and spicy chicken wings. He also has a sister named Kimika who's not quite as vertically-challenged as he is.

++

36-year-old Hayashi Yoshiki aka 'The Harisen' is a - if not the most - feared and respected professor of the Piano Division at the UCLA Conservatory of Music and a retired concert pianist and orchestra conductor. Originally from Chiba, Japan, Yoshiki grew up surrounded by music - his father was a First Chair cellist until his untimely death in an airplane crash, his mother played the viola and his younger brother, Kouki, was and still is a classical guitarist based in Spain.

With their parents being classical musicians, it was expected that the two brothers would be immersed in that same world. At an early age, Yoshiki showed great interest for the piano and later making his national debut at 13 - a true child prodigy. Travelling to Russia and Europe to learn from the greatest maestros in both piano and conducting, Yoshiki was known for being a true perfectionist, obsessed only with music. However, playing for audiences soon became a bore for him and he decided on a more challenging vocation: teaching.

He entered the UCLA Conservatory of Music and quickly earned both the admiration and open fear of his students and fellow faculty members for his strict and almost barbaric methods of teaching and for the giant harisen (Japanese paper fan) he carried around with him - that object becoming the instrument in which he instilled discipline on his students whom he often dubs as uncoordinated and sloppy. Although he commits random acts of violence on his students, Yoshiki gets away with it because the entire College knows he is the best at what he does and losing him would be a great blow to their institution.

Up until a certain time, Yoshiki had lived alone in his mansion along Beverly Hills with a cat named Miyu and a dotty housekeeper named Hannah. Now, he divides his time with his husband (the man he'd fallen in love with years ago when he watched the Junior Competitions in Vienna) at the mansion, and their nearby beachfront home. And sometimes, their vacation home in Austria.

He is a guest conductor for the LA Philharmonic where his husband is the First Chair violinist.

++

Born in Tuscany, Ueda Tatsuya is the 24-year-old only son of an oil magnate and a corporate lawyer. Throughout his childhood, Tatsuya was shuttled from one country to the next, immersing himself in the culture and becoming fluent in several languages. As soon as Tatsuya learned to talk, his father wasted no time in hiring private tutors to train him so that Tatsuya would someday take over the family's billion-dollar petroleum business.

Since his parents were never around, Tatsuya grew up raised by a nanny, a butler and an army of servants who all catered to his whim - succeeding in spoiling him of course. However bitchy and imperious he is on the outside, the truth is, Tatsuya was always very lonely. Even so, his bitchiness has resulted in people either loathing him or steering clear of him. Those who were generally with him only clung to him because of his influence and his wealth since, not only do they have a globally-successful petroleum business but they also own several international private schools.

One secret that has yet to be divulged to the public and the business circles is that Tatsuya is dyslexic. When he was younger, he was left-handed and wrote in reverse. Feeling that this would be an embarrassment, his parents pressured him to beat it and Tatsuya did so by forcing himself to become right-handed. What his parents refuse to accept is that he still has dyslexia - especially when he reads. He always got confused with note-reading when he was forced to take classical guitar lessons and relied on mirroring his teacher's fingers and deceiving his teacher into thinking he could read.

Because of this, he remains distanced - something misinterpreted by everyone as his ego being out of control. While he appears cold and distant on the outside, those who have really taken the time to know him see that it's all an act and underneath that mask, Tatsuya deeply cares about everything he holds dear - something he had proven by attempting to throw away his bachelor life and try to arrange a marriage so their company wouldn't crumble with the economic recession and he would be able to save the people employed under them and allow them to keep their jobs.

Tatsuya doesn't have many hobbies aside from classical guitar which is his only comfort when he's home alone. Currently, he's majoring in Economics at UCLA (and skipping classes most of the time because he can). He can also be seen hanging out at Synchronicity, the club where his boyfriend works and is still working on finding better friends and learning to live a little.

++

27-year-old Okada Junichi aspired nothing more than to dance since he was a child. Born to immigrant parents in New Jersey, Junichi had a very delicate constitution when he was younger and that forced his parents to move to a warmer state. As he grew older, he was able to convince his parents to enroll him in ballet and swimming to improve the condition of his weak lungs and somehow, he succeeded. Nowadays, he dances as one of the principal soloists at the Anaheim Ballet Theatre - the prince who lifts his partners to sit on his shoulders and has every aspiring ballerina dreaming of being the next one to dance at his side.

Lately, the only girl he deems worthy is Vicky Zhao - not just because of her technique, but because outside of the theatre, she is the only friend he has. You see, Junichi has a secret that everyone knows: he services rich, older women in order to get the money he needs to go to Russia to study under the ballet greats. There's a website that he runs where he gets quite a number of hits and he's often contacted by older women to romance them for a night or two while their husbands are away.

Ever since his parents were taken from him in a tragic car crash when he was 18, Junichi had been trying to make ends meet and at the same time, not give up on his dream. Hence he decided to go into this sort of business. He doesn't exactly like it, but he doesn't exactly hate it because well, aside from sex, there are other perks to the job.

His only best friend is Vicky, though he has been trying to make friends with the other people she hangs out with. He's still mostly quiet and keeps to himself, though he no longer has to deal with people insulting him as he now also teaches Jazz and Pop dance for UCLA dance majors needing supplementary classes.

In his spare time, he reads a lot and sometimes goes for walks on the beach by himself. He likes flying kites and maguro sushi. He has just received a letter from the Russian Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg and will be studying the Vaganova method of teaching.

Preferred RP style: paragraph over IJ

Extra info in case you forgot anything: First six of the muses I'm keeping. XP I've edited their bios since they've been around for a while... 8D;;