Before we could explore Japanese culture, however, we had to deal with some standard, show-opening bickering. Ann and Eva welcomed us to the hour with a heated discussion about makeup. Eva claimed that she doesn't often wear cosmetics - a statement that Ann felt was highly suspect. "You DO wear makeup!" she balked with such intensity you would think they were discussing Roe v. Wade. There's been a lot of anti-Eva sentiment from Ann recently, and I think we can chalk that up to Eva being the only girl left with two different vowels in her name ("and sometimes Y" is unacceptable to Yaya).

Anyway, the girls learned that they would be partaking in Japanese street fashion, thus prompting Yaya to do a little hip-hop dance. Uh, Yaya, I don't think they meant that sort of "street." Last time I checked, Japan wasn't known for its contributions to the Vibe Music Awards (and Planet Asia doesn't count). Nevertheless, the Fabulous Foursome headed on over to a spunky expert on street fashion who schooled them in the Lolita aspirations of every Japanese hipster. When the models weren't pretending to understand what the lady was saying, they were appreciating this whole new fashion world. Ann was impressed with the woman's "Mr. Potato Head Hat" while Yaya remained impressed with Yaya. The expert then had the models piece together an ensemble, and frankly, I was shocked that Yaya didn't try to work a dashiki into the mix.

After this crash course in crazy non-Western (and therefore bad and scary) fashion, the women were then handed down their first mission. They were given 20,000 yen to buy an ensemble from four different stores and model it at the Milk Showroom at 6 pm promptly. Oh, and because the producers need to pay the bills, they were given T-Mobile Sidekicks to help them navigate the mean streets of Tokyo. Amazingly enough, they were not contacted by Snoop Dogg or Big Boi or Paris Hilton or Molly Shannon (who according to the commercials, all call each other whenever they want to know what a pat of butter is or when to add fabric softener).

Around this time, the show jumped into Amazing Race mode as a the screen split into quarters and a digital clock showed us how much time was left in the mission. Eva had immense difficulty with the street signs, registering disbelief that "a lot of the characters were written in Japanese!" Well, that's a shocker! I fully expected Hebrew! Eventually Eva began pestering the local population for assitance, and when she was shunned, she simply yelled out: "Speak English, people!" And yet, even though she demanded it, no one became suddenly fluent in English. I guess maybe she thought they were speaking Japanese as a joke?