Giant Pander

I am planning to stay away from poker today until I finish my reading and preparation for giving the limit games another try. So instead, let's do something to try to please the other section of my limited audience.

Tamao Satoh / 佐藤珠緒 (a.k.a. "The Rose Lady")



I did a quick Google search for her name in Japanese, and found some interesting items.

First off, she has a homepage and even a blog, although it is in Japanese and doesn't seem to be updated terribly frequently. Sadly, there is nothing there from her appearance in the WSOP. Another section of the site has a note from her manager that she's going to the WSOP, but there is no followup about how she did. Pity.

It seems that she first got started on tv in a Power Rangers-type show, Chouriki Sentai Oh-Ranger. She was, in fact, Oh-Pink.

She also appeared in an old favorite tv show of mine, MiniSkirt Police. This was a late-night show that flirted with the risque without actually showing much. It had a bunch of leggy Japanese girls in bright blue pleather police woman uniforms with super short skirts who would run around and do silly things. As you can imagine, I was rather fond of this show when I first saw it, but it went away for a while and when it came back, it was heavily sponsored by a pachinko company and had a lot more pachinko action, a lot less titillation, and seemed to be trying to appeal to a more family audience. Naturally, I soon lost interest.

I have no idea if she was on the show during the glory days or not.

She's done a couple of photo collection books, which you can even find on Amazon.com Japan. (Like, here for example.) Also a dvd or two, which I am guessing are more of her doing various poses in bathing suits.

I begin to form a theory, in the back of my mind, that just maybe she might have convinced Tom McEvoy to select her to go to the WSOP by leaving some samples of her work lying around his dressing room before the show.



Eventually, she made the jump to doing more mainstream tv shows as a "talent", but there seem to be a lot of web sites out there that were dedicated to her works as an "idol". this one has a few images and a lot of links to other fan sites, but a lot of the links were giving me 404 errors when I tried them. This page is still active and has a fairly nice image gallery with what I assume are scans from her photo books.

There you go, Stonz. It's, like, Christmas in July, eh.